The CEO of a startup I helped form recently wrote a bio of me for our website, describing me as an” SEO Guru”. I quickly asked him to change it to “Online Marketing Veteran” because the reputation of our industry has been so besmirched by the get rich quick hucksters who run pyramid schemes and multi-level marketing scams that are designed to prey on the hopes and dreams of desperate people who have been left behind by the new economy.

Their million dollar launches profit from exploiting the weak and the innocent and once you pay them the money they even tell you how to do the same. I won’t name name (I leave that to the Salty Droid and his Kajabi Scam Review), and I won’t say this syndicate is committing fraud (until they are convicted), I hope everyone in our industry who is committed to adding value remembers to take a stand and use your knowledge and your backlinks for good instead of evil.

Meanwhile, I will use my time and effort on little things, like the movement to Vote No On Prop 19. Not because pot is bad or evil or because I want to regulate what people put in their bodies. Hell, I am a libertarian on social issues: it is none of the governments business (ironic how many libertarians want to arrest people for drugs and regulate morality). My concern is that California’s marijuana prohibition provides jobs for hundreds of thousands of people and keeps them from doing something terrible — Like becoming affiliate marketers.

Tired of choosing between the lessor of two evils? Here is something Republicans and Democrats can agree on

CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart and was originally foisted upon the citizens of the internet by Carnegie Mellon in response to a call by Yahoo to develop a system to keep computer generated Spam out of email and comments. While effective, the solution was a failure from the beginning because it placed the burden of proof on the user, a burden that has become increasingly difficult every day.

• CAPTCHA suck time and money; each day human are forced to solve 200 million Re-Captcha’s plus countless other puzzle. Do the math and CAPTCHAs waste about $12 Billion of human productivity every year.
• It really sucks that the hackers have gotten so good at solving them that CAPTCHA is now more of an obstacle for legitimate users than for dedicated hackers.
• It really, really sucks that you can outsource Mechanical Turks solutions via a CAPTCHA farm in China or the Philippines for about $.02 each.
• CAPTCHA really, really, really sucks because it is an obstacle for conversion, with some estimates showing that as many as 25% of people fail the first attempt at solving it and between 3% and 10% of your potential customers simply give up.

The only thing that sucks worse than CAPTCHA and ReCaptcha is not having one to protect your site from the inevitable onslaught of Spam and bot users being held at bay by this brittle defense.

There is hope, however, as Pramana introduced two new products today that are designed to help webmasters in their battle against blight. The first is call bot alert, which allows webmasters to quantify bot activity much the same way analytics lets you quantify human activity. The second is Bot Block, a true CAPTCHA alternative that is invisible and doesn’t require your users to do anything.

BotBlock™ is the first and only real-time weapon that keeps the bots out, but lets all of your real customers in. It integrates directly into your web pages. It invisibly analyzes and interrogates each interaction, and makes a reliable, real-time determination between human and bot.
Once detected, you can deal with an automated process as you please. You can block them outright. Give them a 404 that the page doesn’t exist. You can shut them down. We provide you the control to deal with them the most effective way for your web property.

The battle is far from over, but perhaps today will mark the turning point in the war between humans and bots.