Learning from Errors and Random Investigative Comments

So recently I have been getting phone calls from someone saying they used to work with xyz-firm but are no longer associated, along with copies of cease and desist letters they sent to xyz-firm.

When the person contacted me, telling me they were trying to help me, I told them that if there is anything they felt they could do to help me they may as well make it public. It does no good to give me half information or one perspective of a murky story that I can pass along as hearsay.

I also have been getting investigative comments about how that person and their business is associated with xyz-firm. Although the most recent one I deleted because it is off topic. I may have to look and see if there are any others that need deleted.

Taking a longer glance at the whole situation this stuff may be at least a bit of a waste of time. Ultimately there is no way to be a clearing house of information about who you can't trust and why you can't trust them. Scammers and scam systems constantly evolve to find the shortest distance between you and your money.

We all make mistakes and we all learn. I once hired an SEO firm who told me to use hidden text and other shoddy techniques (copy your home page and change the filename to these words and cross link them back and forth with invisible small text using these words in the link text). At that point I asked that person what would stop me from automating it and doing it over and over or writing a program to do it. They did not reply. At the time the company that provided shoddy services to me was ranked in paid listings and organic search results for competitive phrases.

I think when you hire people to do technical stuff in nature you should ask questions or want to know why. Things change over time and sometimes people do things because it has always been that way. As you become more successful it is even easier to get away with doing things the way you used to and living by them, even if others would see different results trying to do the same thing. And it is harder to hold the passion in a topic and think of unique and useful things to say that have not yet been said, so we all recycle.

Sometimes I don't even agree with things I said in the past. And I think it should be that way. While sometimes I am a bit more thickheaded than I would like to view myself as being, I should learn from my mistakes. If you keep learning you make more and different mistakes, but hopefully better ones.

I think the aim in saying that xyz or yqp are deceptive might be a useful public service if it is true, but ultimately it makes little sense for me to try to keep up with zpw or whatever other fictitious companies come out. If consumers are lazy and do not investigate they deserve to waste their money as I once did. Maybe ritually burning x dollars is part of the learning process.

I don't think the aim should be why you can't trust others so much as why you hopefully can trust me. I think Andrew Goodman once said something about that in SEW forums...about the value of having a voice when most people try to hide.

When you are new and nameless there is little to no reason to avoid risk - after all you have got little to lose. Some of the stuff I did in the past I probably would not do today. And some of the stuff I do today I am certain I wouldn't do tomorrow.