thomped

IMG_4113, originally uploaded by jazio.

A day kayaking the Hudson near West Point.

From $30+ million to this. No surprises here.

I thought things had gone quite well for Bolt (which would ultimately be good for me). Today I see this on Valleywag: bolt.com is now a member of the advertising hall of shame. And they have some (not-so-good/related) company.

Bolt (gofish too?) has taken the path of least resistance and has chosen to buy uniques in a most shady way. There were many schemes to acquire traffic that were offered up when I was there. Some were straightforward (widgets, new tools, viral programs, site acquisitions, etc.), others involved some less desirable techniques (things that involved email, traffic attribution), and others were just totally disagreeable (site popups via ads/spyware). This final category simply drove me insane. This trickery was meant to present an aura of success to initially unsavvy potential advertising partners (and ultimately investors). By initially, I simply mean until Bolt stuck its head out as a destination, no one was really looking at the details.

I guess the sale to gofish hasn’t changed much at Bolt. I clicked over to the research Nick refers to, and Bolt (with others) has settled nicely into using spyware products to inflate traffic. I remember having numerous arguments about this method of getting credit for eyes — It is the kind of last ditch effort a company makes when it lacks what is necessary to build a product or brand. What other reason would lead someone to adopt the logic that popping under a site window is the same as advertising? They knowingly partnered with a spyware company that uses deceptive practices to get their software installed on the computers of less-than-savvy users. Just ads indeed!

What were the arguments for this practice? We had them too many times to count. Ultimately they boil down to this one argument: “It is just advertising.” Given a need for unique eyes (to get more advertising $), it is an easy way to get eyeballs.

Bollox.

See it in action: this is a link to the bolt specific screenshots. And another site, Roo.TV, which has connections to Bolt.

This bullshit sucked in ‘99. It sucks more now.

With Imus out, Nike sticks their shoe in the door:

Opportunities are everywhere.

if you are:

a senior/lead java developer — 6+ years experience building/architecting high traffic, high availability sites; live or will move to NYC; 2+ years leading a development team

java developer — 4+ years experience building web applications

php developer — 4+ years experience building web applications

interface developer — CSS/JavaScript, etc.; 4+ years experience

… leave a comment with contact info. There are several positions that need to be filled. Not much detail attached to this list. That will be provided should you express interest.

But I am sure Henry James would have loved Jane Austen for her intellect too.