You might wonder why I'm posting this link. I'm a computer nerd, not an animator. If I saw some kid making a flipbook animation, I'd probably say "Hey, why don't you take your borderline obsessive tendencies and put them to service changing the world: become a computer programmer!" But even with all my biases, I concede that animating is a big step up from get-rich-quick schemes.
Sorry, that transition probably didn't help explain things. Let me begin again.
I'm not just a computer nerd, I'm a blogger. Every so often I get mail from webspammers who want me to link to their sites. Web search engines like Google think of these links as little endorsements. If many reputable sites link to www.example.com, then www.example.com is probably pretty excellent and should appear at the top of Google's search results for... uhm, for whatever www.example.com is about. Webspammers run crappy sites, but want these "endorsements."
Thus, when I got mail from a "freelance writer" who wanted to pay me for the privilege of writing an article for my blog, I had a guess of what was going on. But I wasn't sure. (Webspammers don't write "I'm an evil spammer! Please link to my casino site!" Too bad, it would make them simpler to deal with.)
She wrote:
My name is Anna and I am a freelance writer looking to post paid articles on great sites like yours. Does lahosken.san-francisco.ca.us/new/labels/puzzlehunts.html ever accept any guest posts and if so what do you charge? I would be willing to pay you premium prices for the chance to write for you.I wrote:
I gladly accept relevant posts. You might be the first person who has ever offered, so I haven't figured out a policy. How does it usually work? Can I see some articles that you've already written? That would probably clarify a lot.
She wrote:
thanks for the reply. So right now I have a bunch of articles I am trying to post on .ca websites like yours. The articles are related to tech and some education. I would be able to send you a post and pay you to edit and publish it. Because this is part of a big project I could only pay you $45 to edit and publish. Let me know if you are interested.I told her to go ahead and send me the post. Soon, she sent me an article about corporate training; unsurprisingly, at the bottom of the article was a link to a site selling corporate training. That site hoped to rank well in searches by corporate HR folks trying to find training for their companies' employees. They hoped to rank well, not through reputation, but through the "endorsements" of bloggers taking $45 apiece to post articles linking to their site.
So I reported the training site to Google's spam report tool and went on with my life.
Wha? You want to know what this has to do with inspiring animators? Right, right. I'm getting to that. A few days later, I got more mail from "Anna":
please do not publish my post. It has been to long and I need it up asap. I will be sending the post somewhere else so please do not post so you are not penalized for duplicate content. I am sorry we couldnt work something out, but id interested let me know and perhaps we can start over.
Aha, so some other blogger had decided to work with the webspammer, to take money to post the fake "endorsement" link. Sure enough, this morning when I Google a phrase from that article, I find www dot animatorlettersproject dot com. Despite the domain name, this site was not about animator letters. This site was pretty awful: links to multi-level-marketing schemes; randomly-generated "articles" full of non-sequiturs and english buzzwords; typical fake-site awfulness. Except the name: animatorlettersproject. That didn't sound like a name that some website selling fake endorsements to webspammers would choose. It sounded kind of familiar.
Googling for "Animator Letters Project" showed the spammy site... and right beneath it in the search results, showed www.theanimatorlettersproject.com. The second site had inspiring correspondence from famous animators. Why didn't it rank first in the Google search? Because of legit endorsements that had gone bad. A while back, Willie Downs had set up his inspiring site at www dot animatorlettersproject dot com, but his ownership lapsed: he changed banks, which broke the automatic payment renewals for the animatorlettersproject domain; by the time he noticed the problem, he'd lost the domain and someone else had bought it. Where "someone else" was, alas, some jerk selling multi-level-marketing advice, "endorsements," and so on. But all of these famous animators still have links pointing to the old site, so it's still heavily "endorsed."
So I'm linking to the new site: The Animator Letters Project is pretty cool. Hopefully more folks will link to the new site, and eventually young animators who search for inspiration will find it. (Well, I guess inspiration to run a multi-level-marketing con game is inspiration of a sort, but really, kids, you could put your talents to better use.)
