I was just walking back from the bank in my neighborhood and all of a sudden I hear this car behind me that starts speeding up. As it would have it, the person then crashed into another car that was exiting out of the parkway in-front of me. It looked like one of the car was a Porsche too.

As one of the people that witnessed the whole ordeal, I provided my contact information incase the two needed some kind of testimony should the situation require it. That’s going to be one ugly expense for either parties though.

I was just thinking on how while the situation seems like it was created as a result of the guy suddenly beginning to speed up and driving pretty fast, in a residential zone too might I add, at the same time law wise the person who was exiting out of the parking lot may lose due to a technicality as I guess when you are in that position you have to make sure it is absolutely clear before trying to exit.

I was kind of surprised at how calm the two were too when they confronted each other and began exchanging papers. That’s definitely one thing that would ruin a monthly budgeting plan as I’m sure someone’s insurance rates will be going up.

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Didn’t really have too much time to do any writing today as I am currently getting swamped with various tasks and opportunities. I’m normally pretty good at time management but this is an example of trying to take on too much at once in life.

Hopefully it will slow down soon.

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Looks like I am going to have a lot of fun over the next few weeks when it comes to online activities. For one thing, I got an e-mail recently that there should be some test ads showing up next week as a result of the Forbes agreement and so it will be interesting to see how that turns out.

It was interesting as the message seemed to focus on the possibilities of this great collaboration from a financial point of view when really I am kind of more excited of the opportunities it can create content/experience wise. I already some ideas in place on how if it really takes off there are great ways that I could leverage that to create better things as well to help others too.

There might be something else coming up where I’m sure all my long time readers will love. Let’s see how it goes.

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This is a continuation from that very strange e-mail request I posted last time in regards to a request I received to close down my blog for competitive commercial reasons. I have a clear idea of what went on after doing some research and thought it would be an interesting thing to blog about from a business perspective.

Earlier this month a person contacted me through this blog with the following message:

hi,
I need some small help from you regarding your blog. Please reply if you have received this message.

Thanks much!

As always, I like to help people whenever I can and sure enough I replied with a simple acknowledgment saying

Hi there,

What type of help do you need?

The person then responds with something that just left me dumbfounded which said the following:

Hi, Thanks for replying.

This is regarding www.al6400.com/blog/2008/01/28/princeton-premier/
This page comes up in top results when we search “princeton premier” in google.

Now, the princetonpremier.com guys posted an online project and I am working on that to do SEO and remove this type of results from google search. After so much of effort, I am still clueless. And they are not making the payment unless they see some result.

My request to you is please disable this blog of yours for 15 days or so. This will have some effect on the search results and I may receive my fees. You may re-enable this after that period.
Please let me know either-way. I am solely dependent on freelance projects like this and can not afford to lose payments.

Thanks much.

Shocked, I responded by saying

Hi there,

This has got to be some kind of joke correct? I am having a very hard time believing what I am reading here without some kind of authenticity verification about what you have written.

Just some quick background information for those who don’t know, I made a post about a questionable e-mail offer I received from that company which has garnered a lot of attention and considering people from that organization had a perfect opportunity to make their voices heard without bias, as it appeared that a representative of the company did make a reply initially, it just made this whole situation even more unbelievable.

I was thinking too on how even from a business perspective who goes up and asks say a competitor to shutdown for a few days? That’s like two stores competing with each other during the Christmas shopping season and asking if the owner could close his store down for awhile as they are getting too much exposure.

The guy was dead serious though and understandably he didn’t want to give out details. However, that didn’t stop me from getting to the bottom of this. After putting all the pieces together, everything pointed to the fact that the company was using some kind of outsourcing service to perform the service in question. It just so happens that I am very knowledgeable about that particular field/industry and it didn’t take me very long to find this request:

It appeared as if the company was actively seeking to hire people to push down sites such as my blog from showing up for certain keywords to avoid negative exposure of their business/product. This made me really wonder on why the organization didn’t simply reply to the concerns expressed by all those people that commented on that post instead as I’m sure this doesn’t exactly help their cause.

This incident in particular sure demonstrates the importance of making sure that you can do the job before making promises to do something huh? In this case too, it looked the buyer and the service provider didn’t do a thorough enough job in interviewing each other beforehand. So what would you do if you were running that business now?

I guess the traditional method would be that the company would come out and apologize to anyone who feels they were mislead in any way while offering people a refund if they wish to accept full responsibility of the negative publicity that has been generated. At the same time, they would then somehow publicly announce their efforts to correct things if warranted. Of course, this is assuming that they want to continue its operations.

Another thing that this incident made me think about is the power of social media nowadays where a simple opinion or perspective about an issue can manifest into something enormous. This was definitely one of those seeing something new everyday moments for me.

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Okay, the title makes it sound a bit over dramatic as I suppose it wasn’t technically a threat. But I received a very strange request where someone was apparently hired/contracted to try and compete with my blog in regards to a particular subject/topic. Now the person claimed that he tried very hard with no luck and so instead a message was sent to me requesting that I remove my blog for a certain amount of days.

The person sounded innocent enough though I guess and so I am more interested in the party that requested for such a deed. I just thought everything about it sounded like a joke at first to be honest. I won’t comment too much about it for now as I am currently investigating the details as it is better to have all the facts in place while not prematurely exposing the wrong people.

I just thought it was so weird too on how I did not start this blog with any kind of business/commercial gain in mind but rather as a way to hopefully help people while having fun. Yet as apparent, I guess you can’t avoid being targeted by some kind of business/commercial activity when you reach a certain point.

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