Dominic “The Hodge” Hodgson

this post has some swearing, spelling and grammar mistakes.. if the first one bothers you then please don’t read this post, if the latter two bother youcorn  then please don’t read this blog..

To celebrate the end of BarCampLeeds08 and the start of our week in wales, Heather and I decided to have Sunday lunch at Weatherspoons, a usual haunt of ours… launch went fine and we decided to have a walk to the bus stop further away since it was a nice night (and lets face it… I could do with the exercise)..

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Afternoon all, I just wanted to take a bit of time to post that fact that two weeks ago I left my position at Stickyeyes after two days of unemployement, I become employed at a company called Yardmist, owners of cheap suites and bigbathroomshop.com, my time will be split between working at hodgehouse, OBH and the offices in Blackburn..

I will be doing what I’m pretty good at (I like to think) which is handle the SEO, PPC and Affiliate’s for BigBathroomShop.com, The affiliate program is due to go live in a week or so, so I’ll be hitting some of you up about joining us :).

Sit back kids this ones gonna be a long one,

About 8 months ago at barcamp Leeds 2007, I talked to Manoj for a short period of time, we spoke about getting him on northcast and edocrs current status, I mentioned that i noticed edocr.co.uk was available and he should buy it before someone does and tries to sell him it for a lot of money, we laughed….

8 months later I was looking at the edocr site as I was considering writing about it for news.northhub.co.uk, feeling in a funny mood I tried edocr.co.uk again and realised it STILL wasn’t registered (8 months), I registred it and for a bit of fun placed an homage to manoj (note I used text and photos that were written from / by manoj), I also placed a link to his facebook fan page and a HUGE link to the edocr website incase anyone got there by mistake…

Afterwards I thought that it looked a little ananomus and dodgey and it really should show who did it so that Manoj could contact me and get the domain.. I placed some images refering back to the convrersation we had (a lot of money) and a joke price of an iPhone, I also placed a picture of me and a link to my website to make it easyier to contact…

the aim was to get a couple of people to visit the website click through to edocr and the refer logs will show edocr.co.uk, Manoj see’s the link and sends me an email, job done…after all we are all friends here in the north.

So tonight I met Manoj at the geek girl dinner… well I say met him I honestly didnt get a chance to speak because I was videoing the whole thing for Gem, I was trying to get to him and talk about it because I honestly didnt know if he knew or not and to be honest the joke was getting a little thin..

Anyway… whilst getting on the train home from Manchester I recieve an email from some bloke with a double barrel name subject edocr.co.uk, I knew what this was and to be honest my heart sank…

The email that was sent to me says I carn’t tell anyone the contents of the document, which is bollocks but I carn’t be arsed with any more legal mumbo jumbo so I’ll just skip to the juicy parts and my comment..

1) I have bought the domain name to stop edocr ltd buying it… - edocr were told to buy the domain almost a year ago but chose not to..

2) I have bought the domain to decive people trying to find edocr…. HAVE YOU SEEN THE BIG LINK TO THE MAIN EDOCR PAGE

3) I am cyber squatting this domain for profit.…. yeah because the website looks serious, I mean the buy now button is just wanting to be clicked…

So the email says I have to give the domain over free of charge within 14 days…. well fine and dandy but that gives me 13 days  to do what I want with the domain… or you can stop playing around with laywers and… I don’t know speak to me when we are in the same room, send a twitter about it, (I would say send a direct message but you followed me, I followed you and then you isntantly unfollowed me and thats not nice in my twitter book), I’m happy to give the domain back, but be fair and at least refund the registration fee (about a tenner)… (I won’t even charge for my HTML Skillz)

The truth is, I like you, I like the way your market and what your doing, I think edocr is a waste of time for you and you should move on to something that is going to work, but I think that you’ve handled this wrong….. You’ve got my phone number, email, twitter, my address, facebook, linked in and a tonne of other contact methods… Are you seriously saying that you’d rather pay a laywer a £150 an hour or whatever rate they are on to send me a prefabricated document which doesnt take into account any of the history…

Seriously thought they are lucky that I registered the domain because if it ever get popular, one of the first things a domain bot will do is buy all the free tld’s for the domain and point them to spammy pages, and they won’t have there contact details on hand  and you’d have never got it back…

So they only got my name so easy because I made it CLEAR that I registered it (put my picture at the bottom of the page… *sigh*, I’m worn out, today was my last day at my current job and this email really has brought me down…

When most people want SEO its because they are seeing some search traffic and want more, a lot of clients will do a one keyword search for a product or service and want to be number one for that “shoes” for example, that’s all well and good but in a world where places like Amazon are selling almost everything (and I mean everything (nsfw)) its hard for your smaller niche store to even get a chance at the top ten of a major search engine.

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