So I was looking through my server logs and noticed a lot of referrers coming from “p202.ezboard.com/fheartsofgold7297frm106″ and a few variations of that. I didn’t however notice this forum referring traffic on my sitemeter counters, this probably meant someone was hot-linking an image from me.

I wanted to check it out though and see what they were using so I tried visiting the url, turns out you have to register with ezboard to view their forums, not my cup of tea, but ok sure.

So I quickly ran though the registration, it asked for more info than I preferred but no big deal, then I hit submit. Here is where things got really bad, they showed me some free offers, such us info from Nokia, or Cooking tips, I of course just wanted to register as quickly as possible so I checked NO to all four offers then hit submit. But wait, a javascript notice, “Please select “Yes” to at least one of the following offers to continue”… are you kidding me? Well whatever the curiosity was killing me I selected the Nokia newsletter, and hit submit. But wait, I need to give them my birthday city and zip… Well I’m Canadian, I made up a zip and picked a state sadly they checked and the zip didn’t match the state. After that I hit the little “X” to close their tab.

They could have had me as a user, a member, I could have offered value to their forums, imagine someone who was interested in a forum but had no real drive, they wouldn’t have gone nearly as far as me (probably not ever to the registration page).

I am literally appalled by how EzBoard has chosen to do business, it is, as far as I’m concerned a money grab for web1.0, but not effective at that. Besides the forced leads generated are probably worthless to advertisers (because of the forced nature). Me (or someone else) would be much more valuable to them as a customer than not. Thank god this kind of incompetence is not tolerated on web2.0.

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Google has released their finance tools today and of course, it’s under beta (would you really trust a google product if it wasn’t under beta, its almost part of their brand now).

It is really nice looking and as are all google products quite clean. Two noteworthy features are the fact that when a quote search is done it also pulls up related blog posts and discussion.

And of course there is a whole bunch of “cool ajax” so take a look.

Business 2.0 is my favorite magazine (actually, the only one I subscribe to) and in this month’s issue they have an excellent article about “25 Startups Reinventing The Web”

Driven by ubiquitous broadband, cheap hardware, and open-source software, the Web is mutating into a radically different beast than it has been. And that is leading to the creation of entirely new kinds of companies, new business models, and oceans of new opportunity.

We are in the early stages of what might be better thought of as the Next Net. The Next Net will encompass all digital devices, from PC to cell phone to television. Its defining characteristics include the ability to interact instantaneously with any of the more than 1 billion Web users across the globe — not by, say, instant messaging, but by evolving instant-voice-messaging and instant-video-messaging apps that will make today’s e-mail and IM seem crude.

It’s a very good read at the least take a look at some of the companies on the list, they are doing some neat stuff.

web2.0, web2, web 2.0, ajax, business2, business2.0, business 2.0

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Lucky for me that’s not something I need to go over because ZDnet posted an excellent article on the subject.

Personally I use Google, but my favorite is probably Net Vibes I just haven’t got around to changing. But really I’m not to into traditional homepages, I’m actually thinking of changing my homepage to Bloglines.

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