Last week, Business Week had a great article on click fraud. The writers did a great job detailing the issues with the paid-to-click (PTA) businesses working with domain parking services to make click fraud happen. One additional angle I would have liked to see in the article is the angle on competitive click fraud. Competitive click fraud is when company A pays somebody to click on ads for company B, in order to drain company B of its resources. I am not sure if such an arrangement would even be illegal besides being difficult to prosecute.

After reading the article, I wanted to leave a comment at the BW site, but they have comment moderation turned on. So after leaving the comment I got a message saying that my comment will be reviewed by somebody in 24 hours…There isn’t much I hate more than having to wait 24 hours to get into a conversation. Anybody else had the same experience? On the other hand though, I guess BW has to be careful about the spammers. Also I guess being a established old business, they probably believe in erring on the side of caution then free flowing discussions. I am not really upset with BW as this is an issue facing most established brands…short of moderating/censoring the discussion there really isn’t a way to ensure a good quality of discussion.

Interesting article on CNET related to the issues with estate planning in the on-line world. The problem is getting messier with users moving a lot of their financial and organizational information on to the web. One of the suggestions in the article is that on-line users, add all their passwords and account information to their estate plans. This really does not work if it means that you need to update your estate plan, every time you create a new account or change a password. The problem is worse if users are trying out new sites, especially with so many cool services like GMail, GCal or stock trading companies coming on-line. What we need is a universal mechanism to store all the passwords and other on-line identities in a central location. The access to this central location is what should be passed on, in a structured manner. There are systems like Inforcards, OpenID, SXIP that provide these services…let’s just hope that these systems see strong adoption.