Useful Little Things

Status update:

• The draft version of the survey questions has been submitted to the IRB for review.
• A beta version of the site has been created and is undergoing testing.
• We’ll be meeting with someone in the OTT, soon, to formalize the research center’s status as a part of Auburn University.

I expect to launch the survey in the next week or two. Whee!

The microISV Research Alliance is officially on-line. Here you’ll find news releases for upcoming events, such as the annual Pain Point Survey. You’ll also find information about who we are and what we’re working on. We even have a news feed, so you can keep up to date without having to visit the site directly.

A comment was posted on one of my older posts about leaving GoDaddy for WebFaction.

“I have 100 domains on Godaddy and i can say that this company is very reputable.’~'”

It seemed pretty innocuous, although the domain it pointed to had no content. I was about to approve it when I decided to run a quick Google search. The search showed that this exact quote was posted to various blogs over 300 hundred times and the commenter used a different name on each site.

I’m not sure what the commenter was up to, but I can think of a few theories. First, it could be a naive person thinking they can get a little “Google goodwill” for their site with links from a bunch of comments. Not likely, since their site is missing content. Of course, maybe their going to throw up some questionable content later after the comments get approved. Second, it could be a GoDaddy fanboy, who just loves GoDaddy so much that he/she must refute our tales of woe. But, I doubt it.  Rabid fans are usually more wordy.

Needless to say, I marked it as spam and tossed it in the trash.

What are your thoughts?