« Download organizer - marketer’s version | Home | Don’t P.S. Me Off »
Leave my ginger snaps alone!
By barney | October 7, 2007
I like ginger snaps … one of my favourite cookies. And useful as well, if you’re prone to motion sickness - they really do help quell queasiness from riding in cars, trains, planes, boats.
I’m not personally subject to that particular ailment, but I try to have at least a small bag of ginger snaps along when I go sailing … it’s been of benefit to my fellow travelers on more than one occasion <grin />. (And I go sailing whenever possible, out on Corpus Christi Bay … usually with three or four passengers and at least one other sailor. More about that another time.) So I find ginger snaps to be useful as well as fun cookies. I like cookies.
I go sailing on the internet a lot, as well. You may think of it as an information highway, but I tend to think of it as a sea of knowledge, information, and files.
Oh, yeah … files! Amongst my other bad habits is an addiction to downloading … stuff! Sometimes it’s free, other times a payment is required. Usually, when there is payment involved, there’s a bonus included - not always, but much of the time.
You know the drill … someone sends you an email pitching a particular product and offering you a bonus set of items if you buy that product via the link they provide. With a popular product, it’s often fun, as well as practical, to shop around to see who offers the best bonus <chortle />.
But there’s frequently a catch, one that I find particularly egregious. The purveyor of the bonus wants you to clear your cookies before using the link.
Nope! Ain’t gonna do it <snarl />!
Cookies have gotten a lot of bad press, but they are very useful little files. They can store a lot of information that is useful to you when you visit different web sites. Yeah, some web sites misuse ‘em, store data that you don’t really want available, but for the most part those sites are the exception.
As an example of cookie utility, if you’re on a web site that lets you reconfigure the site to your liking, a cookie is most useful. It can store the choices you make for colors, fonts, menus, … you name it. The next time you visit that site, all your choices are implemented as soon as you get to the site without any further action on your part. That’s nice. And they may be used to store site access logins. That’s also nice.
But some marketers want you to erase those configurations just so they can see if you bought a package using their link. They don’t care about your personal configurations, they just care about their commission.
If they really cared, they could tell you which cookie(s) to delete and tell you how to identify each cookie … it’s not rocket science, after all … it’s just web code … and a cookie is just a text file. However, I’ve yet to see one do that … they just say clear you cookies.
I won’t do it. I’ll find some other marketer to buy from, or I’ll just forget about the product.
I like my cookies.
I use my cookies.
Leave ‘em alone!
[Posted 2006-09-04, Moved 2007-10-07]
- 30[%] -
Topics: Marketing |
Comments
You must be logged in to post a comment.