I was reading an interesting piece on IOL Technology this morning about a new dating concept – only those hot enough can join. Trying to make membership clubs selective and elite. I haven’t seen too many selective members clubs on the net to date, but have a feeling that is about to change…
Anyway, the URL was HotEnough.org, but when i clicked the link, the page that came up surprised me. It looked like a spam search page, with a few external advertising links, with sections such as “adult dating” and “swinging singles”.
I was surprised that IOL would have written about a dodgy site like this, making it out to be a HOT trend site…
When I went back to IOL, I noticed the url in the article was HOTENOUGH.ORG, yet clicking the link took you to HOTENOUGH.com
I’ve noticed in the South African offline press in the last few years, a steady decrease in proof reading with spelling mistakes increasing in number, words being left out, and facts hopelessly inaccurate.
Online there is one other addition to the errors that can happen – url’s that are incorrect.
Interesting article Daniela Flores BUT – this isn’t the first time i’ve seen this, and the average person out there won’t realise the link leads to the wrong URL. They’ll see a tacky looking site, click a few links and maybe make the site owner a bit of cash, and get a bad impression of IOL as the dot com IOL speaks about is definately not dot hot enough.
The site IOL sent visitors to – www.hotenough.com
The site IOL were talking about – www.hotenough.org
Here’s a challenge to IOL – Lets see how long it takes you to correct the link!!!!
IOL published the article “Hot or not? New dating site for the sexy only” by
Daniela Flores on the 22 March 2007 at 08h17.
Eric Edelstein picked up the error on the 23 March at 09h52.
Date and time Eric was informed or noticed the site had been corrected: STILL WAITING
March 23, 2007 at 11:02 am
[23 March, 11:00am] Link still incorrect.
[23 March, 11:02am] Mailed IOL Technology.
March 23, 2007 at 11:24 am
Thanks Tyler – I was going to mail IOL myself, but wanted to see how quickly blogging can fix a problem, without me contacting the company direct. That was quick! Now lets see if IOL is as efficient as you…
March 23, 2007 at 11:29 am
This reminds me of a story i heard a few weeks ago, where a business man wanted to contact someone they didn’t know…to discuss a potential deal.
So he set up a site called “CallmeNameofPerson.com” (can’t remember who the person was they wanted to call)
Within a few days, the person had heard about the site, and called them, and from what I remember, they actually did some work together….
March 24, 2007 at 10:33 pm
[23 March, 12:02pm] Received confirmation that the error has been fixed.
Eric, it took just over 2 hours for blogging to affect the change. You say blogging didn’t really because I emailed them, however if you didn’t blog about it I wouldn’t have.. therefore blogging did in fact make the difference.