The Unoriginal Muse

This will sound bitter.

About an hour ago I got an e-mail from google, telling me forthwith that they’re cancelling my acount for “click fraud” of an undefined nature. I’m now
on my third vodka. The money was helping keep the sites I run funded and alive, and now they might have to close.

I felt I should post this after having, in the past, taken part in certain threads encouraging the use of google ads to help fund groklaw.

Back then I was generally positive to the idea, though I realised that such advertisement wouldn’t work in groklaw’s particular case, because it might count as commercial activity and jeopardise groklaw’s hosting with ibiblio. Or something like that.

Well, now I’ve done a complete 180. Google are not to be trusted. They have effectively stolen nearly $200 from me, leaving very little actual recourse to redress the situation. They’ve accused me of fraud against the program without giving any details whatsoever. This sort of behaviour is, frankly, despicable. And I really needed that money thismonth, because it would have kept me from going over the overdract limit on one of my bank accounts. Now I’ll probably be fined…

I’m awaiting a response to queries regarding this, but I’m not hopeful. My advice to anyone considering google is this: don’t. Or, if you insist on using them, be prepared to loose your money in a very spactacular fashion.

When they started censoring search results at the behest of teh chinese I was fairly blasé about it. They they shut down my blog because it was flagged as a spam blog (though how my rants about the left wing [it’s a hobby ;)] and politics in general count as spam I’m not sure). Now they’ve taken my pittance away from me, and that makes it personal.

I guess the little things do count.

Now for the obligatory paranoia bit.

Recently I had an argument with someone over the best ways of running a forum. The argument became quite heated (and naturallywa s in public, which I suppose counts as a fmale war) and, I must confess, I revealed something of an unstable side that I hadn’t realised existed. But that’s for another post. The person in question also runs a forum, and when I pointed out - quite reasonably, in fact - that I had put my life in to my forum and sites, to the point of possibkly putting yself in to debt to keep them running, he retorted with his own sob story that included the little fact that his adsense account was shut down. We parted on probably less than amicable terms.

Today, just about a day and a half later, my adsense account is shut down.

Personally I find that one hell of a coincidence. The only thing that prevents me actually acting on this is the belief that this man simply wouldn’t stoop that low. I can’t believe that he would. He’s too nice. Yet the coincidence is stark and obvious…

Life sucks sometimes.