It seems if you are the daughter of a former Republican presidential candidate, you are expected to dress a certain way when even in your own home, staying in for the evening.

Megan McCain, the 24-year-old daughter of John McCain, has set off a veritable storm of controversy when she chose last night to post a picture to her Twitter account of the book she was staying in and reading for the evening.  It wasn’t the book that caused the uproar, but the fact that she was wearing a tank top.

Oh no, the horrors.

What Ms. McCain that was a perfectly innocent and fun photo led to an evening of her being called a “slut”, and in turn, her having to defend her choices of what she chooses to wear in her own home.  What follows is her responses to her followers, strong language left intact for impact (if they seem broken up, remember you are only allowed 140 characters per message, or Tweet):

so I took a fun picture not thinking anything about what I was wearing but apparently anything other than a pantsuit I am a slut, this is

why I have been considering deleting my twitter account, what once was fun now just seems like a vessel for harassment

I am going to take some more time to think about it but seriously I was just trying to be funny with the book and that I’m a dork staying in

when I am alone in my apartment, I wear tank tops and sweat pants, I had no idea this makes me a “slut”, I can’t even tell you how hurt I am

ok I am getting the fuck off twitter, promise not to delete my account until I sleep on it, thank you for the nice words supporters

I do want to apologize to anyone that was offended by my twitpic, I have clearly made a huge mistake and am sorry 2 those that are offended.

I guess I can clearly define myself as not being a prude at this point. Was the tank top tight? Yes. Is her choice to wear this in the privacy of her own home validation for calling her a “slut”? Not even close.

Yes, she opted to take a picture of herself and share it with her 60,000+ Twitter followers, but big freakin’ deal. I have a news flash for every one out there: Meghan McCain is a female and females have these things called “breasts”, and sometimes, just sometimes, they are partially visible.  Just because a woman’s breasts are visible does not instantly equate her with being a “slut,” although it would seem that some people have a hard time with this concept.

To be honest, I wasn’t even aware Ms. McCain had a Twitter account until this morning, but I’m following her now.  Why?  Because anyone who gets verbally attacked like this over something as simple as opting to wear a tank top (while staying in for a night to read a book … I can’t get over that part) deserves support.  This is the 21st century folks, not Victorian times where cloth doilies were placed around the feet of furniture because it might remind men of a woman’s bare ankle.  (Think I’m kidding?  Look it up.)  Shall we return to a time where women wore floor length skirts so men would never see something as scandalous as a woman’s foot?

Kim LaCapria over at The Inquisitr said it well:

… and here’s to hoping Meghan comes around and sees the criticism for what it really is and doesn’t quit Twitter. None of us like pantsuits, Meghan, and we need women like you to kill them good and dead for the rest of us. You can never Spanx away big tits and a curvy ass, and whole nation of voluptuous women need you to not apologize for your breasts so we don’t have to apologize for ours. Keep fighting the good fight!

True, I don’t have the “voluptuous” problem Kim mentions here, but I agree with her overall point.  They’re breasts folks, they aren’t going anywhere, stop acting so shocked when you see them.

Day 3 of “The Blogopshere vs. the FTC” brings us the full set of guidelines, and wow are they head spinning.

I really don’t want to blog daily on this whole Federal Trade Commission (FTC) guideline debacle, but it just keeps getting weirder and weirder.

First off, I finally got a link to the full 81-page document (PDF link) from Steven Hodson, and although I have only read through 51 pages thus far, this is going to be mandatory reading for every independent blogger if you want to make sure to keep yourself from getting in trouble with the FTC.  That being said, be prepared for the extreme ambiguity of the document on many fronts.

So far I have still yet to find anywhere that describes in detail how disclosures are supposed to be written.  It mentions numerous times that you must disclose if you receive a product for free and then give it a positive review (there is some implication that disclosure is not required on negative reviews), but nowhere does it say how are exactly where it is to be placed.

The document also discusses new rules for celebrity endorsements and how they are supposed to disclose their relationship with anything they speak positively of.  The problem with this is that at no time do they define what a celebrity is.  On tonight’s episode of CobWEBs, Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins and I discussed this, and technically you could call iJustine a celebrity, but that is only to a handful of people on the Internet.  Heck, there was even a time when I was working for Wizard magazine that I was being asked for my autograph on a regular basis, would that have qualified me as a celebrity?  I was a celebrity to those people, but not to the other 99.999999999% of the population of the country, but would I have qualified for the FTC celebrity rules?  Who knows, their answers are so vague.

Then to muddy the waters even further, Richard Cleland, assistant director, division of advertising practices at the FTC (and someone Rizzn has been trying to get an interview with for 3 months with no luck) spoke with FastCompany, and made some of the most mind boggling statements ever.

Heather B. Armstrong, author of parenting blog Dooce: “Eleven thousand dollars is a little crazy for a post. Maybe I’m being naïve, but I think a lot of people who are in violation [of not disclosing] just don’t know that they’re supposed to.”

Richard Cleland: “That $11,000 fine is not true. Worst-case scenario, someone receives a warning, refuses to comply, followed by a serious product defect; we would institute a proceeding with a cease-and-desist order and mandate compliance with the law…

Excuse me?  When did the FTC start writing laws?  They are a regulatory body, they are not capable of making “laws”.  Perhaps he was misquoted, but if the FTC really sees this as “law”, we’re in bigger trouble than any of us first thought.

Brian Lam, editorial director of Gizmodo: “Some colleagues of mine just reminded me of how many freelance pro journalists take junkets. In the end, I’m glad these rules are being introduced, but it’s kind of stupid to attach unethical behavior to a particular publishing medium. Look at how shitty TV journalism can be, by and large.”

RC: “It’s not the medium, it’s the message. We want to establish a self-imposed ethical standard so people are aware of the conflicts of interest…

“We want to establish a self-imposed…” um … which part of this sentence makes any sense?  How does person #2 establish SELF-IMPOSED anything on person #1?

This is what we are dealing with folks: vagueness, ambiguity and a regulatory body that seems to have no clue what its actual job is.  If you aren’t scared yet, you aren’t thinking.

Sorry folks, but this Federal Trade Commission dust up is going to be front and center at this blog for some time to come.

In all of the hoopla yesterday, Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins, Steven Hodson and myself ran into many instances of being questioned over our vehement hatred of the new guidelines, and also more examples of just how messed up this whole thing is.

“Print media is already under these rules.”

No, they aren’t.

This was the most tired argument I have seen, and it simply isn’t true.  If this was true, I want you to point out to me where movie reviewers disclose that they got into a movie for free or got sent a DVD copy of the movie for free.  We all know it happens, but have you ever seen them disclose it?  Same goes for book, movie and DVD reviews.

Now, under these new FTC rules, if I decide to review anything, and if it was sent to me for free, then I have to write a disclosure every single time I do it.  Tell me how these are the same rules traditional media has been under.

“Facebook and Twitter fall under these rules also.”

Yep, all that fun you have on social media sites?  Well, prepare yourself to always disclose your relationship for any product you speak positively of.

Caroline McCarthy of CNET spoke with a Richard Cleland, associate director for the FTC’s advertising division, and here is the scenario he set up to explain the Facebook scenario:

Here’s a sample scenario: a celebrity or other prominent figure with loads of friends on Facebook receives free hotel says [sic] from Hotel Chain X in exchange for running Hotel Chain X ads on his or her blog. If that person then signs up as a Facebook fan of Hotel Chain X–which, remember, could mean that the person’s name can show up for his or her Facebook friends alongside Hotel Chain X display ads on the social network–he or she could be held liable by the FTC.

“It would be the same thing if you were going to pay the celebrity a thousand dollars to go register as a fan,” Cleland said. “In that case, there wouldn’t be any question about it.”

And as for new media darling Twitter?

As for Twitter, the FTC isn’t letting you get a pass with the excuse that 140 characters–Twitter’s famous text limit–is simply too short. “There are ways to abbreviate a disclosure that fit within 140 characters,” Cleland said. “You may have to say a little bit of something else, but if you can’t make the disclosure, you can’t make the ad.”

So, think you will be exempt from this if you aren’t a blogger.  Too bad.  If you have any sort of relationship with a product, and you make a comment anywhere on the Web about it, you better be prepared to disclose your relationship.

“This is all about going after sploggers.”

No, it isn’t.

In a discussion between Steven Hodson and Matt Cutts of Google on The Noisy Channel, they brought up the discussion of how this will cut out bad marketing:

Steven: “No degree of FTC intervention is going to make any difference to splogs or other such garbage…”

Matt: At a respected search conference last year, I sat in the audience and watched a presenter recommend “sock puppet” marketing by coming up with fake personas to promote products. With this new guidance from the FTC (plus similar recent guidance in the UK/EU against sock puppet marketing), that sort of bad advice will be much less likely to appear at search conferences. That’s one easy counter-example.

No, Matt, it isn’t.  You are talking about advice given at a conference, big deal.  The Sock Puppet marketers will simply start hiring people from Africa and India off of GetAFreelancer or other such sites and have them do that sort of marketing far from the reach of the USA, UK or EU.

And that is one of my biggest complaints about this whole thing is that the unethical people it is supposedly targeting will just find new ways of working around it, while those of us who follow ethical blogging and online presence will be saddled with these idiotic new rules, libing under fear of some little slip up costing us a potential $11,000 fine.  Oh yeah, that makes things so much better.

“This will stop all those fake review sites.”

Are you kidding me?

Lets say that an “unethical” blogger is currently working out of the USA with their web site on servers that reside in the USA.  They want to get away from these new rules so they move their site to servers in another country, they put privacy protection on their domain name and then they sit back.

The FTC finds them lacking disclosure, they will have to get a court order to reveal the name of the person who holds the ownership of the domain.  So the FTC will have to weight taking the time to get the court order, and in some cases they will have to go through a court in another country, is it really worth all of that effort, time and taxpayer money for a possibly undisclosed material relationship?  You guessed it, I would go with “no.”  Of course, that doesn’t mean they won’t try.

All of the “bad” sites will simply move off shore to countries that don’t care about all of this hoopla, and the innocent people will yet again be left to jumping through hoops that should have never been required.

“This system is ripe for abuse.”

Yes, it is.

We have no clue what the investigation process will be like yet, but what is to stop people from reporting you for fun or revenge?  ”Oh, hey, I think so-and-so has a relationship with that company they just posted abut on Facebook.”  Oh won’t that be fun to defend yourself from false accusations?  This is why some people will be better off even disclosing when they purchased something to cut off any possible questioning to avoid any sense in impropriety.

In other words, people will be so annoyed by having to watch their behinds that they simply won’t want to talk any more.

“Aren’t you worrying about this too much?”

No, I’m not.

I have done more reading today, and the tone of the conversations have changed quite a bit in the second day.  Check out SiliconANGLE’s FTC vs. the Blogosphere Day 2 Roundup to get a better sense of what is being said everywhere.  (disclosure: I am linked to in that article and I work for SiliconANGLE … see … won’t that get annoying?)

Also make sure to check out Steven Hodson’s questions that he is still waiting for answers to:

1. Will these same ‘guidelines’ be applied against “traditional media” and if not – why not?

2. What exact form do these disclosure need to take? Per post? Per page? Per comment?

3. Is this retroactive? Does this mean that sites like Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Mashable, – well every single blog past and present will have to go through all their archives and add a disclaimer. Because we all know that posts that are even months or years old can resurface.

4.Will book publishers make signing a disclosure form a part of bloggers doing book reviews and is it really worth the effort at that point?

5. Does the country of origin of the writer matter as to whether a disclosure is included?

6. Does it matter the country of origin of where the blog served from come into play?

7 Does the country of origin of the product, service or book come into play at all?

(disclaimer: I know Steven and make fun of his Canadian citizenship on a regular basis)

The FTC has got to start defining this whole thing better, but somehow I don’t see that coming any time soon.

If you haven’t heard of Spotify yet, don’t worry, many others haven’t also. However, don’t be surprised if it doesn’t become a household name within the next few years.

Spotify is a fairly young music service that launched on Oct. 7, 2008 in Western Europe.  While it has been in its invitation only beta stage the service has stayed tied to Europe for licensing reasons, but a United States release is expected in the not too distant future.

So, why is this service a game changer?  Well, the answer is pretty simple in that with the licensing agreements the service has struck you can essentially pull up any song by any artist at any time and listen to it.  If you want a free account you will have to go through advertisements every so often, but if you have a paid account you don’t even see the ads and can enjoy endless musical selections of all your favorite performers.

Where Spotify is really set to change the game is with its just released iPhone & iPod Touch and Android applications.  The apps, just released today, is only for use by the paying customers, but one feature alone may be worth it.  I have embedded the demo video below for you to watch, but essentially you make a playlist of your favorite music, tell the Spotify app you want that playlist to be available while you have no 3G or Wi-Fi access (i.e. on an airplane), and it will save the music to your device memory so you can play all of the selected tracks while you aren’t near a connection.

Now mind you that you do not own these tracks, and they can’t be transferred off of your device, but who will ever need to buy music anymore when you can just have a monthly Spotify subscription and make a bunch of offline playlists?

While I have been a huge fan of services such as Pandora for ages, the problem is that I need to have some form of access to listen to it.  I also have no say in what songs come up on Pandora, but with Spotify I can have access to a basically limitless stream of music from just about any artist you can think of.  Once this hits the United States, you don’t think this is going to be the most talked about music service on every college and university campus?

Take a look at the video and I think you’ll quickly why this is such a huge game changer for the mobile music market, and quite possibly the music industry as a whole.

I’ve mentioned in the past that I am fascinated by Google Trends. Being able to see a snap shot of what people are looking for is like an odd little snapshot into the lies of the Internet in general.  However, sometimes you see things that just make you go, “Really?  Are you all this stupid?”

While I am never going to endorse the use of illegal torrent files, let me give you all a clue here: if you find a torrent through a public search engine such as Google, there’s a good chance that it either contains a virus or may be a trap to track your IP address.  HBO has been fairly strict about hunting down torrent users in the past, so if you’re going to use a public search to find a publicly reachable file… it kinda screams “TRAP” to me.

I know a lot of people have turned to torrents as an option for watching their favorite television shows, but do yourself a favor and at least educate yourself about general safety of their use if you’re going to do it.  And, honestly, unless it is something like True Blood, just don’t do it (even then, don’t do it), there are too many legal ways to watch TV shows on the Internet for freenow.

StumbleUpon has to be one of the oddest sources of Web traffic ever invented.

For those unfamiliar with StumbleUpon (SU), it is a social bookmarking site that allows you to recommend pages to other users by giving them a “thumbs up”.  Other users can then discover pages you favorited by “stumbling” through pages people have saved.  While it can be a powerful tool for generating traffic, I find “the StumbleUpon effect” far more powerful than “the Digg effect”.

Ever since Digg took off, people have gone nuts trying to get on the front page of the site for the crush of traffic it will bring you for the time you are on the page.  The problem is that once you scroll off the front page, you get next to no residual traffic over the following months.  With StumbleUpon, you may or may not get the initial traffic rush, but you do definitely get a long simmering source of traffic.

Back on May 8th of this year I posted an article of Who Is The Best Star Trek Captain.  While the post did get some traffic during the initial few days, it quickly died off to a trickle of as few as single-digit readers some days.  Now, on Monday, June 8th, I have no clue what happened, but you can see the traffic report from during the evening below.  (click for a larger view)

I don’t normally share my traffic numbers, but this is so odd that I just had to.  What caused this explosive upswing in traffic is beyond me, but I know for sure it all came from StumbleUpon.  This isn’t the first time I have seen this happen, but it was one of the best examples of it, and with the best graphical representation of the situation.

While I have heard other bloggers talk about this bizarre jump in traffic from SU before, no one seems to completely understand what causes it, but we all enjoy it.  This is also why I have given up even caring about Digg.  Sure it’s nice to get that big bump on the first day, butI would rather continue getting traffic long after that first day, and it also tends to be traffic that will explore your site more than the typical Digg user will.

Of course this doesn’t happen to every post that gets on to StumbleUpon, but more often than not it does.  Why the bump happens in a mystery, but not one I plan on arguing with anytime soon.

Were you aware that if you go to a search engine and search on the term “porn”, you will see… wait for it… porn? I know, I’m just as shocked as you are.

Apparently some people in the social media scene are unaware of how search engines work.  You enter a term for something that interests you, you click a button, said search engine returns those results to you.  Seems like a fairly simple concept doesn’t it?  Well, apparently this was news to MG Siegler of TechCrunch and Loic Le Meur.

These two brain trusts decided to see what would happen when they went on Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, and searched for “porn”.  Both Siegler and Le Meur were shocked at how easy it was to view porn, but at least Siegler threw in a disclaimer:

Now, to be fair, to see these results, you do have to manually override the adult filter on the video search, but that’s a whole 2 clicks and doesn’t require that you actually verify your age or anything.

Well, I hate to school a fellow blogger, but, has he actually gone to any other search engine and tried this?  Don’t worry, I saved everyone the work.

Well, would you look at that.  Not only does Bing have a filter you can easily disable without age verification, but so does Ask.com, Google.com and Yahoo.com.  Imagine that.

Now, on Yahoo I realized I was signed into my account, so I signed out just in case age was associated with my account, and I was still able to turn it off with no fuss.  I did the same test on Google and got the same results.  I don’t think I’ve ever had an account with Ask, so I didn’t even bother to look.

Look, I’m no huge fan of Microsoft, and I think the name Bing is so atrociously obvious as an attempt to make a verb out of themselves as to be insulting (i.e. instead of saying “I’ll Google that”, they want you to say “I’ll Bing that”… not happening).  However, to try to insinuate that they are somehow falling down in protecting people from porn when they implemented the exact same method as every other search engine is just low.  The only thing Microsoft did differently is that the videos auto-play when you hover your mouse over them instead of you having to actually click on them.  Wow… that’s… really a non-starter.

Since this “news” came out over the weekend, Bing has added an “Agree” button stating that you are over 18-years-old, and apparently some people are calling victory because you now have to click another button.  Wow, that’ll stop those pesky kids!  They’ll never think to lie and click the “Agree” button.  I mean, heck, that’s a whole extra click to get to the porn!  No one will do that!

Personally I think this is just another example of, ‘well, Microsoft made it, so it must be evil’ thinking that is so prevalent in the tech blogosphere, and quite frankly I find that sad.  As I said, I’m no huge fan of Microsoft, but to attack them for something that is really no different than any other search engine?  Well, I think that says more about the authors of the commentaries than it says about Bing.

Oprah, Oprah, Oprah.

As someone who stays on top of Internet trends during the day, I had no clue what was going on when all of a sudden the Google Hot Trends page was taken over with every imaginable permeation of “Oprah”, “chicken” and “KFC”.  Being a curious sort, it seems Oprah and Kentucky Fried Chicken (I bet they hate it when people still use their full name… tough) have teamed up to give away loads of their new “grilled” chicken.  Sure they claim it’s grilled, but I can’t help it if it looks like someone painted stripes on a piece of chicken.  Thanks Oprah for unleashing this on all of us!

To get your coupons, simply go to unthinkkfc.com, click the button that says “Print Coupon Now”… and then download the world’s most annoying coupon printer.  Seriously, in this day and age I have to download a specialized program to print a coupon?  Thanks KFC!  It does work, though, and I will say this may actually get me to swing by KFC for the first time in 5+ years, but we’ll see.  The coupons are printable up until 9:59 PM CST on May 6th, and they are redeemable through May 19th… except for Mother’s Day May 10th.  Can’t have you cheaping out on mom and giving her free “grilled” chicken, now can we?  (yes, yes, busy day in restaurants, I know… perhaps running this promo at a different time would have made more sense?)

Duncan Riley over at The Inquisitr makes a great point about how PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) is sure to have an aneurysm over this promotion. At publishing time they haven’t said anything yet, which says to me they are taking a hit off the crazy pipe before they come out with their rant that makes no sense to anyone but them.  At least they are always entertaining!

Enjoy your free chicken, folks!

CobWebs episode 1 is in the can!

In addition to the blog network, Steven Hodson, Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins and myself are going to do a weekly podcast where we talk about whatever is on our minds that week.  It could be mainly tech related news, or it might go in to other fields, who knows.  This first episode is dominated by tech news, and with three of us involved it ran well over an hour.  Overall I think for a first episode it went well, but then again, we are all experienced podcasters at this point.

- FriendFeed changed over to what had been their Beta look, and none of us are overly impressed with the color scheme or the functionality of the site.  Honestly it was almost like launching an entirely new service.  If anything, we think it will make this site go even more niche than it already was.

- Should employers use social media to look into potential employees?  Steven brought this one to the table from a post he did, and it brings up some really interesting questions for employers and employees alike.

- Why does the United States get all the cool stuff, and other countries get shafted?  Again, this is a Steven rant, but he brings up excellent points, especially since he lives in Canada and he can’t get even some of the same features on an iPhone that we get here.

- A general discussion about advertising and Twitter, with some focus on what works and what doesn’t.

Great first episode, and well worth a listen, although I will warn readers of my blog who are used to my “no cursing” rule on Scattercast does not apply to CobWebs!  Foul language is contained… send the kids to bed.

Oh… and some Canadians may be offended as we mock Steven.

If you want to listen in live, we will be recording these episodes on Wednesdays at 9 PM EST/8 PM CST.  You can find us on TalkShoe.

A 14-year-old New Jersey girl is facing up to 17 years in prison for posting nude photos of herself to MySpace.

According to a report from the Associated Press, a 14-year old girl posted 30 “explicit nude” photos of herself to her MySpace account for her boyfriend to see.  It is unclear how the Clifton, NJ police were alerted to the situation, but they were, and the girl has now been arrested on charges of possession of child pornography and distribution of child pornography.  If convicted, she faces up to 17 years in prison and having to register as a sex offender.

However, not everyone is in favor of such crimes being punished.  Maureen Kanka, mother of Megan Kanka for whom “Megan’s Law” is named, has taken the authorities to task for charging the girl.  “This shouldn’t fall under Megan’s Law in any way, shape or form,” said Mrs. Kanka.  She went on to say, “she should have an intervention and counseling, because the only person she exploited was herself.”

This has become an alarming trend where teens feel there is nothing wrong with sending sexual images of themselves to one another.  I wrote about a while back about a 15-year-old girl in a similar situation for “sexting” photos of herself to classmates.  She was also failing possible jail time and registering as a sex offender, but I think Mrs. Kanka has it right, these kids need counseling, not having their lives destroyed.  They are not exploiting any one else, and they aren’t harming anyone else, so really what is the point of making their lives a living hell for what is essentially a youtful indiscretion?

Wouldn’t society be better served by educating these kids about what they were doing is wrong?  What if this is a sign of a possibly deeper problem than just stupidity?  Will doing 17 years in prison really serve this girl any good?  All because she took some sexual photos of herself.  It makes no sense, and the authorities involved aren’t doing themselves any good either, it just makes me resent them.

Yes, children should be protected from sex offenders at all costs, but when the sex offender is yourself?  Well, there has to be some exceptions drawn somewhere to every rule, and I think this is one of those times.

The popular micro blogging service Twitter turned 3-years-old today.

I had no clue that today was the third anniversary of the service (I have enough trouble keeping track of my own important dates!) until I read it over at Mashable.  Considering some of the rough patches they have had with down time over the years, it is amazing that the service has grown to an estimated 6 million users.  The service seems to be growing each day, and attracting more and more mainstream attention with celebrities jumping on left and right, mentions in the media and so on. The service is everywhere these days it seems.  Even in the doctor’s office yesterday, the doctor was asking me what it was.

While I use the service on a regular basis (@seanpaune), I constantly worry for its future.  To date they have still not monetized the service in any way, and their only money seems to come out of endless rounds of venture capital financing.  With the economy in the stat it is currently, it is hard to imagine that VCs are going to continue to be so free with those dollars for much longer.  Considering the number of ways you can access Twitter (text, API calls, web interface, etc), they have to burn through an enormous amount of bandwidth, something that is never cheap.

So, three years on, where is the monetization plan, Twitter?  Why aren’t you at least doing some text ads of some type?  I think if they were tastefully done, something that would not be that difficult in my opinion, I don’t think you would run into too much user resistance to the idea.  We want Twitter to keep moving along and existing, if it means ads, it means ads, we honestly won’t be that upset with you!  Heck, I think we might all welcome it as it would mean that we can continue to enjoy your service!  And we all know what happens when we have to go without Twitter for too long…

Any business making it past its first year is always something to celebrate, but I honestly worry if Twitter will be here for number four… and number five… and so on.  Even if you don’t want to implement the plan yet, could you at least tell your user community, “Yes, we have one, and we will begin it when the time is right.”  For now, we don’t even know if a plan exists!  It’s not that we want you to spill secrets, it’s your business and you shouldn’t compromise it, but come on, just give us some sort of reassurance as to what the future is like for your service.  The community is investing a lot of time and energy into you, and I would hate to think that we are doing all of this and will wake one morning to you just not being there.

Barring all of that… HAPPY THIRD BIRTHDAY!… now go make some money!

If you’re considering using DreamHost as your web host… don’t.

Back in August of 2007, I wrote a post singing the praises of DreamHost, and how for the first time I ever I had actually stayed with a web host through an entire contract.  I was really happy with them, and I was acutally renewing my contract for another two years of service.

Well, that ended up being one of the most frustrating decisions of my life.

The Bandwagon Debacle

Previous to that post, I had written about DreamHost partnering up with Bandwagon to allow you to backup your iTunes libraries to their servers.  It seemed like a fantastic idea, and I for one couldn’t wait to give it a try once there was a version of the software for PCs.  They were even giving a free year of hosting away if you signed up for the service, that’s how into this idea DreamHost was.

Well, at some point shortly after that (I can’t find the exact date), DreamHost said this was a violation of their Terms of Service, and you would not be allowed to store your files there.    Never mind they had promoted this idea, and told all users it was okay, but they were suddenly reversing their decision, and any and all files on their servers had to be served to the web or it would be considered a violation of their ToS.

Fine, I hadn’t done the uploading yet, but I did think it was a rather poor decision on their part seeing as they had promoted it.  I had saved other files there over my time with them, always with the understanding it was allowed, but now, suddenly, it was no longer that way.  They have every right to enforce their TOS, but to get people to sign up for one thing, and then strip it away with no grandfathering of those new accounts just seemed sleazy to me.

Strike 1

The Billing Debacle

In January of 2008, DreamHost was upgrading their billing system, and somehow messed up the date, telling the system that it was in fact December of 2008.  The system kicked in automatically, and all customers were billed for 12 months of hosting in one shot.  Those who had credit and debit cards on file were automatically charged for one year of hosting.  Seeing as I had a business account with them that was nearly $100 a month, I woke up to $1200 missing from my debit account I used just for paying bills.  This completely drained my account and made several charges not go through, causing me to be overdue on some bills.

How did they handle the situation?  By writing multiple snarky blog posts about it that laughed it off in a “Oh, our bad” tone.

True, DreamHost had always had a joking tone to their blog posts, but when you’ve completely drained people’s checking accounts, caused them to miss other bills and made us jump through hoops to make sure we got our money back, now was not the time to be making jokes.  I did eventually get my money back, but not before numerous headaches and troubles.

Strike 2

The DMCA Debacle

On April 18, 2008, I posted G.I. Joe Cast Pictures from the upcoming movie.  As these had appeared on several websites, I believed them to be okay.  On April 21, 2008, I received a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) from Paramount Pictures informing me they were in violation of their copyright, and to remove the images.  Within 45 minutes of my receiving that email, I had the pictures removed from the site and server as they requested.

Feeling I had satisfied the request, I was shocked to find my site closed down by DreamHost shortly after that, and it remained closed until the next morning.  I made multiple attempts at contacting DreamHost to discover what was going on, but I had to submit them via their support desk as DreamHost refuses to supply a phone number where you can actually call them.  Yes, I could request “call backs”, which I did multiple times through out the night, but I received no calls or replies.  Never mind the fact I actually had two accounts with them, and was paying them well over $100 a month for hosting, I couldn’t get them to say so much as the word “boo” to me.

By the next morning, I still had not heard from them, and I went so far as to call the lawyer from Paramount who had sent me the DMCA.  He was very understanding of the situation, and he felt DreamHost had over reacted to their letter.  He sent them an email, which he copied me on, telling them that Paramount was satisfied with my compliance and they saw no reason for my site to be down.  Dreamhost still would not reply.

I finally got a terse email from a man in customer service telling me I could reinstate my site and they hoped I had learned my lesson.

I fired back with an admittedly angry email which resulted in me being lectured by the same DreamHost employee, and essentially telling me how I should consider myself lucky they didn’t do worse to me.  He also informed me that my “righteous indignation” was misplaced, and he hoped I had learned my lesson about respecting copyrights.

Don’t get me wrong, yes, I violated a copyright, albeit unknowingly.  That, however, does not give you the right to speak to me like a child and scold me.

Strike 3… you’re out.

A Total Lack Of Communication

I already mentioned that a DreamHost phone number is non-existent, which is bad enough, but when they won’t even reply to support requests for a simple answer as to what happened, that’s too much.  I am writing this post nearly a year after the mess because I still had data on their servers, but that is now all gone.  As I parted, I wrote them a lengthy email about why I was leaving… and not one word of response.

While my anger had cooled over the past year, and I had not planned on saying anything about them publicly, their lack of even acknowledging my complaints just fueled me up again.  If you’re looking for a host, I would recommend that you look at options other than DreamHost because, from my experience, they apparently couldn’t care less about their customers.  I pulled two hosting accounts and dozens of domain name registrations I had through them, and still not so much as a word from them.  And if they make a billing mistake, that ends up costing you money and troubles, they think it’s okay to make snarky jokes about it.  Changing TOS in mid-stream of a promotion?  No problem!  DreamHost phone number?  Oh… er… well… small problem.

I ended up moving to BlueHost, whom I have been very happy with thus far… course, complimenting hosts seems to lead to problems, so maybe I shouldn’t say I’m happy with them… -knocks on wood-

Oh, and by the way, when you leave DreamHost, they prorate what you’ve paid them and keep the unusued portion “on credit” with them should you ever choose to come back.  HA!  Oh well, there’s some money I’m not sure I would ever even want to see.

I think they may have been victims of their own success.  I think they always had some problems, but as they grew more and more, the problems with their customer service were just that more exasperated. I have no clue if they have fixed any of these problems, or their horrendous attitude, but seeing as there is still no customer service phone number, unlike pretty much every other web host in existence, I somehow doubt it.

Of course these are all just my personal experiences with them, and I am sure some people have had flawless runs with them, I just wasn’t one of them.  Based on my time with them, and how it so quickly degenerated, I wish I had thought twice before signing up with them.