Philip Nicosia

It seems that not a day goes by when I don’t get an email telling me I’ve won a lottery that I haven’t even entered. How lucky am I?

Of course these are all scams and all there after is your money. Below is the latest one I got.

“Dear Beneficiary,

We happily notify you of the draw of the Email Lottery Ballot - World Gaming Board Sweepstakes program held on the 1st of Aug, 2006. Your email address attached to our Lottery payment order, had the following particulars:(i) Ticket Nr. DZNL 492 - 714 - 027 / 2006; (ii) Lucky Nrs. 09, 22, 36, 61, 63, 79, 84; (iii) Reference Nr. NUWL / DZNL / 48326MST; (iv) Batch Nr.:DTOW 1396 62U7A; which consequently won you this lottery in the 1st category. You have therefore been approved to claim a total sum of One Million Euro only, in cash credited to your File Reference number as quoted above. This is from a total cash prize of Fifty Million Euro only, shared amongst the fifty winners in this category.

All participants were selected randomly from the internet through the computer draw system, extracted from over 140 countries that are listed, online. Microsoft Corporation, to encourage some individuals with websites and email addresses promoted this lottery which takes place at this time, of every three years.

The payment authority of your prize - One Million Euro only - already paid and insured in your name with our Paying bank will be issued to effect immediate/swift transfer in the mode you will prefer and nominate, upon satisfactory report on your identity verification and validation recommendation by our Claims Department.

We are proud to inform you that, over 200 million Euro are won annually in more than 140 countries worldwide, as a result of our promotional programmes.

Due to the mixup of certain names, you are advised to keep your winning information confidential until your claim has been processed and your money paid to you. All winnings must be claimed not later than 30th of Sept, 2006. After this date, all unclaimed funds will be withdrawn.“

The sad thing is though that people do fall for these emails and can end up loosing a lot of money. If you ever get one of these emails just forward it to scams@fraudwatchinternational.com and then delete the email. 

It’s always satisfying to get search engine hits for any site but especially for a new one. Over the last couple of days I’ve noticed that Google has been sending me visitors for a variety of search terms relating to unlocking the Sony Ericsson Edge card in my Sony VGA UX180P.

I’m actually quite surprised about this as looking at the results although I am in the top 10 there are better and more informative sites there.

Still, its nice to be indexed and even nicer to get hits even if I’m not making any money from this site.

Another one of my sites is Resources.eu.com. The site is a hand edited directory for various resources that can be found on the internet.

A few years ago it seemed that Google used to list a lot of directories high in the serps so I thought I would go about making one. Quite honestly its not worth the bother. Now that the site is somewhat established it gets about 10 - 20 submissions a day which can take a lot of time to manually review. Out of these 10 - 20 submissions it isn’t unusual for only 1 or 2 to actually be approved and entered into the directory.

Anyone thinking about starting up a directory to make money with I would personally think again. Its not worth the effort.

If a had to pick my favourite gadget of all time it would have to be the Apple Newton Messagepad.  For those of you that don’t know what a Newton Messagepad is it was at the time a state of the art PDA far ahead of anything else on the market.

My first Messagepad was the MP100 which I bought way back in 1994. I used this continuously until my next purchase which was a vastly improved MP130 which came with an all important backlight so I could now use it happily in the dark.

In 1996 they then brought out the MP2000 which I immediately purchased. This again was a vast improvement over the previous the model with a speed increase from 20MHz to a whopping 162MHz. Everything on it just worked so much better and it was fast. To this day I have never come across a PDA with handwriting technology that worked as well as this did. Bearing in mind it was launched 10 years ago you can see how way ahead of its time it really was.

Sadly Apple canned Newton in 1998.

I used my MP2000 which I later sent off to Apple to be upgraded to a MP2100 right up until the day it finally died only a couple of years ago. I’ve since bought a second-hand MP2100 off Ebay for nostalgias sake but confess since I lost all the info on the one that died I have never got round to using it.

So now at home I have my collection sitting in a drawer consisting of:

1 x MP100
1 x Dead MP2000
1 x MP2100
1 x Sharp branded MP
1 x eMate 300

I wonder if they will be worth anything in time to come?

For anyone who wants to know more of the ins and outs of the Messagepad there is a good page of information here.

If you want your website to rank within the search engines one of the most important things to do is get links to your site. Without these then search engines will either not find you or think your site isn’t important enough to rank for anything worthwhile.

Once your site gets better known if its good enough it will attract links from other sites without you even asking but when your starting out it doesn’t matter how good it is if no-one can find it in the first place.

A good way to start gaining these all important links is to submit your site to as many relevant directories as possible. This needn’t cost you anything other than your time as there are literally 100’s of free web directories available and one site which lists quite a few is DirectoryList.org. There you will find plenty of directories to get you started.

If you don’t have enough time on your hands to do it then again there are plenty of places where you can find people you can pay to do it for you. One such site is RCPlinks.com which offers an affordable directory submission service.