According to Courthouse News, internet marketer Shawn Hogan - owner of the popular DigitalPoint forums - is being sued by the eBay corporation for Cookie Stuffing, along with two other men, Todd Dunning and Brian Dunning.

For those of you not familiar with what Cookie Stuffing is, it’s when a webmaster, or other person who has the capability to edit the html of a webpage, uses a delivery device (usually an image or a flash file) to drop a cookie on the computer of anyone who views the page.  The end user is unaware of the cookie having been delivered.  Then, if the person at a later time visits the site that the cookie was related to (in this case, ebay) and makes a purchase, the cookie stuffer gets an affiliate commission for that sale.  Highly Blackhat and obviously illegal.  However, people generally just get their affiliate account suspended, they don’t generally get sued!

eBay also recently deleted a whole SLEW of affiliates, sending out a form letter saying that the traffic they were sending to the eBay site was under-engaged.

Personally, I am really happy to see them taking action against cookie stuffers.  As an active (AND HAPPY!) member of the eBay affiliate program, frickin’ cookie stuffers take money straight out of my pocket.

The only thing that concerns me is that it seems the most recent mass bannings also caught a bunch of whitehats up in the nets, and it concerns me that if the large-scale bannings continue, my account may be one of the sacrificial dolphins killed in the pursuit of tuna, so to speak.

NOTE TO EBAY IF YOU’RE READING THIS - I love you, please don’t ban me!

Tags: eBay, lawsuit, Cookie Stuffing, Shawn Hogan

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OK, after having spent about 3 hours sifting spam comments from real comments, and not even being halfway done yet, you can BET that tomorrow the ReCaptcha plugin is getting installed here tomorrow!

I already have it on all of my niche blogs anyway, so why not here?

I love ReCaptcha because you are actually performing a public service every time you enter a Captcha, you are helping to digitize classic books!

Spam protection and literature preservation all tied up in one lovely Wordpress Plugin.  How aweseome is that??

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This was a thread from the awesome Warrior Forum, and I thought I’d share the gems here :). A lot of them are paraphrased, but you get the idea.

So, here we go - YOU MIGHT BE AN INTERNET MARKETER IF…

• It takes you twenty minutes to explain to people what you do for a living and they still don’t quite get it (hint from Melanie - tell them you’re a freelance writer )
• You never know what day it is without checking.
• When you wake up in the middle of the night and feel you MUST check your email on the way to the bathroom.
• When you check your Clickbank and Adsense stats before you check your email.
• You watch more YouTube videos on backlinks, conversion tracking and traffic generation than you do people getting injured.
• When you get more emails from lists you’re subscribed to than people you actually know. And by a pretty wide margin, too.
• You eat all your meals at your computer.
• When you really *DO* “Make Money While You Sleep”
• When you’re looking for the WSO section in Barnes and Noble.
• When you go to a nightclub with at least 100 hot women and you think to yourself, “If I could just get a 1% conversion rate…”
• You have an exotic parrot that’s learned to talk and it just keeps repeating “The money’s in the list, the money’s in the list,” over and over.
• You feel lost when spending more than six or so hours away from your computer.
• You have dreams about off-page optimization and latent semantic indexing.
• When you know what all of the following mean - HTML, WSO, CSS, SEO, IM, PHP, WP, PR, ROI.
• When people ask you how your Weight Loss or Dating is going, and you think they’re asking about your niches.
• When people on five continents know your name but your neighbors don’t.

HERE ARE MINE -

• When your friends tell you how “lucky” you are “not to have to work” and think you’re being petty when you try to explain that it wasn’t luck and it IS work.
• When you actually scream out loud when MyBlogLog shows you that Liz Tomey visited your blog.
• It boggles your mind to think that the population at large has NO IDEA why Google returns the results it does in the order they appear, and you find it difficult to remember when you were part of that population.
• When you only really *need* to work 3 or 4 hours a day, but you spend 4 or 5 more reading and studying because you’re obsessed!

AND LASTLY….

• When you think of all the things you “wanted to be when you grew up” as a kid, and none of them even come close to holding a candle to how amazing your life is now.

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Check out the Jing Project - you can capture photos, capture videos, and share online.  All for free!  You can send the URL of whatever you recorded straight to your list.

Good times!

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