Abalastow Compendium
September 22nd, 2008I’m hosting an SEO competition as one of the projects in my UMN class. The students are competing against one another to get the highest Google search result for these key words:
abalastow compendium
At the moment, there are zero Google results for this set of words. I’m making this post to see how quickly it gets into Google.
September 22nd, 2008 at 10:42 pm
What are the rules? (In other words, are you restricting them from unethical behavior, or is it up to them to decide what’s allowable?)
I will accept $50 for posting these words in the title of a post on my highly popular blog. ;)
September 23rd, 2008 at 12:19 am
I just received a Facebook request from ‘Abalastow Compendium’…
September 23rd, 2008 at 12:48 am
I found it in Google. Didn’t take long!
September 23rd, 2008 at 9:13 am
That’s a great idea Dan ;-)
I wish I could be one of your student to play this game!
September 23rd, 2008 at 1:08 pm
Awesome. I’ve always wanted to play this game. Too bad I’m not a student.
Hmm… Nobody owns abalastowcompendium.com yet.
September 23rd, 2008 at 1:59 pm
Jeff, I think abalastow-compendium.com/net/org should rate better, because google might use the dash sign as a separator to identify key words! :D
September 23rd, 2008 at 3:07 pm
I’m getting a kick out of seeing people not in the class put up pages just how their pages do. So far, I’ve seen:
Jamie Thingelstad’s blog post — http://www.thingelstad.com/abalastow-compendium/
Jok created a page, and also a FQDN with the terms in the name, and then back-linked from the comments on Jamie’s blog (well played!) — http://jok.is-a-geek.net/jblog/index.php/post/2008/09/23/Abalastow-Compendium
Shopify takes the cake, though: Tobi added abalastow compendium to their home page — http://shopify.com
September 23rd, 2008 at 3:08 pm
@Jeff: according to Jamie and others, .org gets a bump over .com in google.
September 24th, 2008 at 7:37 am
I didn’t know you were going to include your friends in the competition Dan :P …and the whole time I thought I was just competing against other students. I guess this will just make things that much more interesting
September 24th, 2008 at 8:55 am
@stephen I didn’t know I was going to include my friends either! They did this without prompting. I’ll remove them from the ordering where your grades are concerned, so there’s no downside to the class.
September 24th, 2008 at 10:42 am
I don’t know if I can beat the Abalastow - compendium .com without buying a domain name myself ;-)
But still, I’m fighting ’til death!
September 24th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
I am in Dan’s class, participating in the SEO competition.
Would love it if some of you included my link on your page:
Abalastow Compendium
Thanks!
Eric Severson
September 24th, 2008 at 11:03 pm
Dear Mr. Grigsby,
Your “competition” has resulted in both unethical and dangerous behavior. One of the participants has created a website citing “abalastow compendium” as being a virus:
http://sites.google.com/site/abalastowcompendiumfacts/Home/
The test for “being infected” is the presence of the file svchost.exe in the Task Manager list of processes. This file is always present; therefore anyone who checks will see that they are indeed infected. The reader is informed that there is no fix for this infection yet; and led to believe that he or she is vulnerable to something, although that something is never specified.
We have already been getting inquiries from concerned computer users.
Starting rumors on the internet is easy. Remedying them and their impact is well nigh impossible.
If nothing else, the site needs to correct this false information so anyone who arrives will get the actual information.
Although I am sure the competition was well-intended, it was not well thought out. At the very least, every participant should have had the requirement that they run their strategies by you first.
This is not funny. Creating fear in people who trust a professional looking website is abusive.
The world is full of computer novices, from 3 years old past 90 years old. Perhaps your competitors think that ignorance justifies being taken advantage of. They should remember this the next time they visit a garage or call a plumber or talk to a doctor or ask for technical assistance.
September 25th, 2008 at 12:37 am
Wow I’m impressed by the turnaround, that site hasn’t even been showing up on google for an entire day!
@Jok: thankfully I still haven’t had to spend a penny to compete with anyone either … google [free domain name registration]
Just out of curiosity, I was wondering what web etiquette has to say about posting a link/advertisement to your personal site to someone’s blog comments?
September 25th, 2008 at 2:35 am
@Michael Carroll
If someone is doing that to try and get higher search results that’s pretty crazy, especially because the negative feedback they might receive for doing it (and as they have).
But there’s a reason for not having strategies run by our instructor. This is business, everything goes. You don’t learn things like this by holding someone’s hand. If someone did something you don’t like, you should talk to them directly.
I think it was only a matter of time before someone took offense. I’ve seen competitions like this before, and inevitably someone hates it.
September 25th, 2008 at 9:30 am
So, anything goes?
I wish I had known that when I had the web site closed. I could just as easily have done it through the Department of Homeland Security.
It was my choice to interpret the act as a prank rather than an act of internet terrorism. It was my choice to handle the matter based on my interpretation.
You, Kyle, have been watching too much television. Or to be more specific, you have been believing in the reality of those reality shows you watch.
Reality television is a controlled environment. Donald Trump is not going to risk going bankrupt, no television company is going to risk a death on their cooking competitions.
Even countries engaged in war usually manage to avoid an “anything goes” policy; and ones that don’t have identified themselves as terrorists.
Anything goes? What an interesting self-serving concept, especially one to rise out of the classroom.
I wonder to what extent you truly believe that.
would you be interested in a conversation regarding this? I find that most terrorist personalities prefer anonymity. Which of the four Kyle’s with listed numbers in the Maryland area are you? Are you the professor at John Hopkins? Unlikely, although the other three are a wee bit old for the likes of such rationalizations.
What are the parameters of “anything goes.” Where does it end? Do you think it applies only to the instigator? Or does it apply to everyone in the game, even the victims?
Why would someone who believes in “anything goes” even bother taking a course in anything except how to use weapons and hide one’s identity? Certainly, there is more money to be made at a faster rate in the domain of organized crime?
“But that isn’t what I meant.” I wonder if that would be your response. But how could you not mean that? Once all rules are suspended, what rules are left? How do you draw a line? Who gets to draw the line?
No course in anything that has an impact on human life is complete without discussing the ethical consequences related to that impact.
Please don’t tell me this is only a course. You have already implied that the course imposes no boundaries. The people who have called in, in panic about their virus-ridden computers, are not members of the class nor (to the best of my knowledge) even members of the university. They are, in the purest sense of the phrase, innocent victims.
This is could well be an endless discussion. Either you get it or you don’t. Perhaps a phone conversation would be more persuasive; or perhaps someone out there who agrees with me might live close enough to visit and discuss this with you in person.
Whatever. After all, anything goes.
September 25th, 2008 at 10:08 am
Inciting terrorism, Dan. You should be ashamed.
Ashamed at bringing out the wackos.
September 25th, 2008 at 10:28 am
Actually, I am interested in Dan’s response. Given his background, he should have encountered these issues before.
Most business people (and definitely those in the legal profession) avoid questions about moral ambiguity — preferring to point to a set of codified standards (”I didn’t break any rules”) rather than try to deal with something more “abstract”.
The avoidance doesn’t make the problem go away, however.
So, Dan, what is your response?
p.s. Sorry about getting Maryland from Minnesota. Shows what happens when you’re up all night dealing with real issues and real problems.
September 25th, 2008 at 10:33 am
Back on track here…
Check out the new wiki site. I thought it was kind of a cool idea, I tried to create a forum for some useful content rather than just an empty page. Dan, how about one more link, to the TRUE abalastow compendium:
Abalastow Compendium
Anyway, it would be cool to have a classroom discussion (even if it’s brief) about what we’ve seen in this comment thread.
Dan S
September 25th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
@stephen: No web etiquette, I give possibility to comment back on http://jok.is-a-geek.net/jblog/ .
And I would find completely normal that my tentatives to improve my URL’s pagerank being moderated and trashed by other competitors ;-)
For the moment I’m having lot of fun at this game, but I’m running out of new ideas …
Good Game for all the players. Continue like this !
September 25th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
By the way, is this site closed?
September 25th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
Just for the sake of one upping Dan S, the TRUE TRUE Abalastow Compendium: Abalastow Compendium
This assignment has thus far been really interesting and taken some unexpected turns. I’m looking forward to see where it goes!
September 25th, 2008 at 3:40 pm
I think this competition may need a bit more definition. Particularly I wonder how the final judging will occcur, I realize grading will not be completely based upon page rank, but something should be done to moderate the large swings I am seeing in the results. Perhaps time will settle them, or maybe some sort of averaging system over the last couple days/hours would work.
My site is at:
Abalastow Compendium
Mitch Pemberton
September 25th, 2008 at 11:41 pm
This competition is going to be a fun ride! I am looking forward to working on this throughout the semester. We will see if the .edu domain adds significant weight to my page rank. Did I mention I am highly competitive?!? The site is still a work in progress, but I thought it would be wise to get it out before the weekend.
September 26th, 2008 at 10:25 am
Dan has kindly explained that site filter blocks posts with too many links (which was the basis of my inquiry yesterday). so you will need to insert your own www and a dot before each of the links below
=====================
A good reading list for the basis of classroom discussion:
research.utoronto.ca/ethics/eh_when_gsg.html
aare.edu.au/ethics/ethcfull.htm
What I am trying to do is not to chide but to raise the consciousness of all the participants. Situational ethics is simply not appropriate.
If you read even a little bit of any of the articles linked above, you will see that it is not necessary to notify all subjects of an experiment in advance. However, there are clear caveats about when this is acceptable.
So far I have seen only two of the competitive sites. One was anything but acceptable: it generated fear as the basis for making the visitor act; and it did not remove that fear by anything that the visitor was led to.
The other site is more innocuous. It promises to be a compendium of information about job seeking, interviews, etc. While this site might generate enthusiasm, it really promises very little and does little harm. On the other hand, were visitors actually allowed to publicize their experiences, they would be unknowing exposing themselves but for no quid pro quo, which would violate most ethical standards, especially considering the low public value of the experiment. What is someone were to actually reveal why an interview went badly, have they read by a potential employer, and fail to acquire a job as a result of that exposure?
I know it’s easy for people to discount anything that goes against their own immediate self-interest; and that appears to be an ever-increasing problem in our society. What I was hoping was that the participants here and certainly the teacher would have sufficient enlightened self-interest to consider the comments I have offered and to respond to them thoughtfully and with intelligence.
September 26th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
This is a great idea! I wish I had this project when I was in school.
September 26th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
In Soviet Russia, search engines optimize you!
Couldn’t resist, really. I find this a very interesting competition–especially the “start a virus rumor” tactic. I tend to agree with Michael that using svchost.exe is over the top, but wow Michael, you’re going a little overboard, what with the threatening to report to the DHS and associating this student with “terrorist personalities”. Without going into the ethics question, because I agree with you, I would really urge you to go read up on terrorism and what it the DHS actually does. Then chill out a little bit and realize that being civil and open here provides Dan’s student with a most-excellent learning opportunity.
Michael, your latest post gets close, but if you have seen only two sites from this competition, you haven’t looked. Google turns up 269 results for me right now.
Dan: Chuck Swanson in the Department of Computer Science might make a good guest-lecture/discussion participant on the topic of ethical behavior in your course. It might also be worth pondering what the U’s academic policies have to say with regard to ethical behavior in a situation like this.
I’d write more, but I have to go abalastowe my compendia.
-jth
September 26th, 2008 at 11:45 pm
John, tone is hard to convey through blog-boards. Even reductio ad absurdum can be taken seriously when it is intended to make a point.
The point in this case was to K Cunningham’s rather naive (at least I hope it’s origins are in naivete; humor would even have been better; but when it comes to profit, few capitalists have a sense of humor) statement that “this is business, anything goes.”
I wanted to show the true implications of that loosely bandied phrase “anything goes.”
Keep in mind, that there are those out there (and perhaps many here) who would consider doing that (complaining to the DHS) an appropriate response.
Frightening. About equally frightening to the idea that ‘in business, anything goes.”
And that should be the basis of a good discussion. If nothing goes, you don’t have competition. And it anything goes, ultimately you have a public with no faith left in corporate policies.
Oops, perhaps that last sentence shouldn’t be conditional. Welcome to a reality in which anything has been going.