Traffic exchanges a waste of time - No way!

If one takes as a point of departure that traffic exchanges are not a viable means of getting trgeted traffic to your site but are a means of building a list of emails of possible clients for your service or your product then I believe that you are on the right lines. This is a means which does work for traffic exchanges and of course the better your splash page, the more traffic exchanges you are visible on, the greater exposure you will have and the greater the number of emails you will collect over time.
What I have seen as a result of traffic exchanges is that some of them use the emails really aggressively to bombard you every day with "exciting new offers". This I find overdone and ultimately inflationary with the result that I personally see such emails psychologically as spam and pay no attention to them.
I believe th proper way to open doors is to do so carefully in terms of sending non-commercial, serious emails to your sign-ups and definitely not on a daily basis.

Blame our spelling on spellcheck

Excellent point that I never thought of made by Cara Powers. She comments:
"I blame it on spellcheck. I almost never look anything up anymore. I don't even think about spelling when I type. I just give it a go and watch for the little red underline."
. Yes, Cara you are right, I forgot completely about spellcheck as I never use it but basically you do not need to be able to spell. The software will do it for you. So things would seem to point to the fact that our ability to spell may be rendered redundant by the Internet. This may be true when writing online but what happens when you have to write a letter, fill in a form when there is no computer available? Or do you think we will reach the situation where all our written communication is done online or by computer and spelling should no longer be our concern? Could happen but ....
I firmly believe that language is closely connected to our culture and is in fact to some degree a mirror of our culture. An inability to spell also indicates that we are losing the connection to where words come from. It is interesting to note, for example, that 51 802 words in the English language are derived from the Greek language. I firmly believe we should never lose interest in the roots of our language - ultimately we will become all the poorer for this.

Mr Google I cannot spell

Off topic again but a story which I think is one which may have some truth and which I find of interest - and from a source which is not a sensationalist one - the Economist. It claims in this week's edition that google, sites like facebook and twitter are having a disastrous effect upon the spelling ability of our children. This set me thinking and basically I came to the conclusion that I have never seen as many misspellings in my life as on the Internet. I have been made consciously aware over the past years that the average level of spelling on the Net is poor. But is this the fault of the Internet? I believe not.
While I do agree that if you are confronted constantly with bad spelling then you will never learn how to spell a word properly if 9 times out of ten you see it misspelt. But I do not believe that it is at fault, I think we must look first and foremost at our school systems. I came from the old system where every night in elementary school I had to learn to spell 20 words. This is a exercise which I think today has vanished from the school curriculum.
Of course, to be fair they are individuals who would also claim that many of us learn visually and that if we are constantly confronted with a common mispelling we will assume eventually that this is the correct spelling. I have no argument to counter this as I do believe that we all learn in very different ways. Yet the social networking sites I visit are mainly populated by adults like myself and they did not learn to spell or misspell only through their use of the Internet in the past ten years.

A millionaire overnight - and we still believe it?

Why as reasonably intelligent beings do many of us still fall for the soft sell of the promise of buying something on the Internet and start earning a five figure salary overnight. It does not happen in the real economy, does it? So why do so many of us still swallow this hype in our inboxes and, in addition, since it is a limited special offer, it is best to buy immediately to secure our position.
I mean, let's face it. If some guy were earning a 5 figure sum, he's going to show me how to do it for $47 just because I am a nice guy.
As a serious internet user, I believe we are prey to falling victim to too much extremely well written hype. But all things said and done, why then do they need to show us their testimonials, why do they show us copies of their paypal or clickbank accounts. Answer, they want to sell or, saying it another way, they want me to buy. And I have done a lot of this in the past. It is all - without exception - a lot of money-grabbing crap that I fell for.
Let us get a grip on ourselves and start deleting our membership to these guys and deleting our subscriptions to their convincing scam newsletters. They ar enot going to make us any richer, for sure. Always just ask yourself one question, why am I being offered this? Why does someone promise me a fortune in weekly income, and not just do it himself and stop dragging as many customers as he can like me into a $47 dollar sale......and another disappointment?