Customer Reviews

How To Make a Fortune on the Internet: New, Completely Updated Edition of the Book That Started It All!, A

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

Are you looking for a sure way to get your internet account terminated and to be hated by countless others? This is the book for you! Martha Siegel herself invented SPAM along with fellow attorney and husband Larry Canter. Folks there are legitimate ways of making money without making enemies and this is NOT one of them. SPAM is SPAM and this is basically just a manual on how to do it. Save yourself the money and bad karma. Singularly probably the biggest piece of dribbling garbage ever printed by HarperCollins. In fact it's a shame that Amazon does not allow zero stars or even negative ones, this one would easily earn them.

Read this book if you want to learn how to be a totally unethical jerk who steals bandwidth, disk space, and other resources for your own benefit at the expense of all other Internet users.

Martha Siegel and her (ex-?)husband Larry Canter invented the practice of spamming for profit. Please don't support them with book royalties.

The definitive guide to having your Internet Account terminated --- from the original masters of spam and slime.

No self-respecting Internet businessman would be caught dead reading this book, let alone following its advice.

Highly recommended...as cat box lining. ;)

This book was written by one of the first persons to advertise on the Internet, Martha Siegel, a lawyer.

The book is problematic in many ways :

* Ms. Siegel intentionally misleads the readers.

This starts with claims that Netiquette is one of the major reasons that cause people to oppose spammed advertisements via UseNet & email - this is just one reason, and hardly the most important one.

It continues with calculations of how much it costs to advertise on various medias in comparison to advertisements via email & UseNet.

This is misleading - *the* major reason for people opposing advertisement via email and UseNet is that the advertiser pays only part (half, at most) of the bill. When one sends an email, the recipient pays for it (directly or via the ISP bill) by paying for the communication lines.

So her calculations show how much the 'advertiser' has to pay, ignoring how much every person who reads the advertisement has to pay. Ms Siegel should know forcing people to pay for the advertisement borders with theft.

E.g. If I recieve an email, I pay to my ISP a monthly bill to cover the price of the lines that connect the mail server to the Internet's backbone, and the more email customers recieve the bigger and more expensive those lines will have to be.

Ms. Martha says that if the fact that an email address is made public (e.g. by virtue of it being used on a web page) it's implicitly permissable to send anything to it - why else would it be public ? That's as true as saying that if you have a fence around your house, it's permissable to put advertisements on it - why else would it's outer side be accessible to the public ?

She also ignores certain aspects of UseNet, e.g. she says that a newsgroup's name defines what may be or may not be posted to it, while in reality many newsgroups have a charter that declares the rules for the newsgroup, e.g. if advertisements may be sent to it - ISPs will many times decide whether or not to carry a newsgroup based on it's charter and usage against the charter is similar to tresspassing.

* Ms Siegel shows a lot of disrespect to people.

This starts with name-calling people who object her ways of advertising on the Internet (they're all 'old timers', 'small factions', etc), refering to Internet know-hows as "geeks" and saying many - if not most - are frauds (which is an ugly generalization), to refering to refer to certain acts crimes and their doers criminals even though they were NOT convicted for those dids in court - and as a lawyer she should know better.

* Large parts of the book are not relevant to it's title.

E.g. the "Crimes in Cyberspace" chapter is all about throwing mud on people and the "What it means to be a pioneer" is all about glorifying herself. I understand that she wants to pat her ego and belittle the Internet know-hows, but two whole chapters is exaggerated, especially her technical advise (some of which outdated by more than one would expect from the book's publishing date) show that she is of mediocre Internet skills.

All in all, this book does a miserable job of helping people to make money on the Internet, is highly unethical, and spends far too much time on presenting her inner drama of her greatness vs the know-hows pettiness.

I had the unfortunate experience of being on the receiving end of many complaints when Canter and Siegel first burst onto the spamming scene in 1994, so I know a lot about the problems their marketing activities caused. This book gives lots of tips on how to follow in their footsteps to seek fame (well, infamy) and fortune on the Internet, but a much more informative lesson can be drawn by looking at where these morally bankrupt business ideas landed them. Both Canter and Siegel lost their licenses to practice law in Florida after a particularly nasty dispute over some missing client funds. Eventually Canter was disbarred in Tennessee for email related misbehavior, and shortly thereafter, their marriage broke up, according to several news accounts.

Many commentators have noted that the moral and ethical problems that marked their careers are a prerequisite to engaging in the destructive practices of email spamming that they advocate in this book. While there may be a chicken-and-egg quality to the question of "does being a bad person make you into a spammer" vs. "does being a spammer make you a bad person," at the end of the day, spamming is morally repugnant, ethically suspect, and now illegal to one extent or another in more than 30 states and more than a dozen countries around the world. Maybe you *can* make some money doing it, but you can also make money engaged in many other illegal and unethical activities. It's not a question of "can," rather it's a question of "should."

According to recent news reports, Ms. Siegel reportedly passed away several years ago and Canter is employed writing software manuals. I own a copy of their book, not as a useful how-to guide, but as a reminder that some opportunities come at too high of a price.

Laurence Canter is on the Blacklist of Internet Advertisers for a reason; his actions have been atrocious, and now he is trying to make money from the REAL suckers... people who buy this book. If you really want to learn about marketing, there are much better choices listed at Amazon. This book will teach you only to get your account revoked or sift through lots of flame mail, so any increase in genuine interest is not worth the added expense and frustration

This is a terrible book that will do nothing other than make your target markets furious with you.

Thank you.

Since the authors themselves were unable to make a fortune on the Internet, and indeed, one got disbarred partially because of their vandalism of Usenet, I think you can guess this book isn't worth the paper it's printed on.

P.

The advice that Siegel and Canter dispense in this book is worse than useless. It will almost certainly get your Internet account cancelled if you tried to follow their instructions. There is such a thing as legitimate methods of conducting business on the Internet. Business-2-business sites and e-commerce sites are good examples of this. But the "send unsolicited bulk emails" and "spam thousands of Usenet newsgroups" strategies that this book teaches are not only ineffective (it has been estimated that over 95% of spammers lose money in the long run), but unethical. UCE and spam take advantage of the Tragedy of the Commons: UCE and spam are not free-speech issues. Siegel and Canter should be ashamed.

Anyone who believes that Ms. Siegel's book is the
solution for an Internet marketing strategy has
not learned the lessons of history. She made her
fortune offering what are already freely available
services to internationals desiring temporary USA
visas. And she did it on the basis of nothing more
than spam.

Can you honestly think that you will have the same
results she has had by employing the same technique?
Are you prepared to have your plug pulled by a
number of service providers, and to be despised by
Internet-savvy users all over the world? If the
answer to these questions is yes, then by all means
read her book -- but don't try doing business with me.

If you would rather use the Internet for the long term
-- and you should because it'll be here -- then find a
way to make it a part (not the whole, not even the
biggest part) of an overall business strategy that
puts customers and potential customers first.