Mail-order houses

Until round 1940 it was possible to buy a house by catalog. In 1908, Sears Roebuck started to offer house kits in their catalogs. The kit, which included the entire house, with numbered parts and instruction booklets, paint and nails. The first mail-order house is credited to Aladdin Company, who started offering the houses in 1906. I wonder if someone is selling house kits online these days.

Twitter Marketing Myths Exposed

You don't get instant Twitter traffic from a huge follower count unless you are a somebody and people actually read your tweets. In the short run, you get traffic from Twitter with retweets. In the long run, tweets containing your urls will help you rank your site in the SERPs.

Going on twitter and adding a ton of people (who you hope will add you back) is an idiotic strategy. You will have all of these people shitting up your stream, so you probably won't read anything they are saying. They don't read their stream, and you don't read your stream, so who exactly are you knuckleheads actually talking to?

If you don't read the people you are following, you can't build relationships. No relationships, no one is reading you, clicking links, or retweeting.

Twitter marketing takes time and work. You can't treat it like spammy fire and forget link building project if you want to get a real benefit from it. You have to put in time, work and dedication.

PayPal Bans BitTorrent Friendly VPN Provider

According to TorrentFreak, TorGuard, a company that offers VPN and proxy services, has been banned from using the payment processor because of "its affiliation with BitTorrent". Thousands of dollars belonging to the company have been frozen.

In response to new Internet surveillance initiatives there is a growing interest in privacy enhancing services such as VPNs and proxies. TorGuard is one of the many companies catering to this demand. As the name suggests, TorGuard has several plans specifically targeted at BitTorrent users who prefer to hide their IP-addresses from the rest of the world.

Being a BitTorrent-friendly VPN appeals to a wide audience. However, the company has also learned that it has a downside. Without prior warning or detailed explanation, PayPal decided to ban TorGuard for promoting their services to BitTorrent users.

The following email was sent by PayPal:

When we reviewed your account, we noticed that your activity violates some of the agreements you have with us. Because of this, we've limited your accounts and can no longer offer our services to you. You'll still be able to log in to view your transaction history, but you won't be able to send or receive money.

Apparently, PayPal is going down the same route as Apple, where everything related to BitTorrent is simply a no-go. Over the past years the payment processor has already thrown out many cyberlockers and BitTorrent trackers that linked to infringing content, but to our knowledge this is the first time that a VPN service has been banned.

Despite the setback, business continues as usual for TorGuard and TorGuard's owner Jason commented:

Those who are serious about private payment solutions should consider one of the many alternatives like Prepaid VISA cards, OKPAY, Bitcoins, and other ewallet services.