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Well that was good for a laugh and a wry smile... it's suddenly been discovered that a lot of the biggest e-commerce sites on the web today have been engaged in some very sneaky cross-sale shenanigans and now they've been caught out everyone is running for cover.

Of course they're innocent, just ask them and they'll tell you ... they let people know that the cross-sale was going to happen ... it's all there in the terms of service where everyone could read it. Of course the terms of service were written in a font size that was hard to read and so full of words that most people would never bother to read it. Even if they did it would have been hard to realize that the free stuff they were being offered really came at a rate of $9.95 a month ... conveniently charged to their credit card.

And what did anyone who hit the 'accept' button actually get for their money? Well they didn't get much and more often than not they didn't even get the free stuff that they were being offered ... but they sure did get hit with that $9.95 charge every month until they canceled it.

Of course most people didn't cancel it because it was so small that those people who do bother to check their credit card statement didn't really notice it. Now though this evil cross-sale scam has been brought out into the light of day and the wicked e-commerce sites have been exposed and lots of people are going to be checking their statements to see if they've been hit with that charge too. But maybe not all the culprits in this scam have been revealed.

Have we seen anyone suggesting that the credit card companies deserve some of the blame here? Shouldn't they be held accountable here too?

After all they've been collecting the money on behalf of the cross-sale people and they've been taking their percentage of ever dollar they've collected. They've also taken a very firm stand against cross-sales in adult so why didn't they do anything about it when it was mainstream businesses that were doing the scamming?

It does make you wonder.

Google wants to accelerate the Web
So Google wants a faster Web experience for everyone ... maybe they think that every webpage should look like their search engine interface.

Seriously though, they do have a point and these days few sites seem to bother about optimizing their images ... and even their coding ... to ensure that their webpages have a quick loading time. Instead they seem to think that every person with an Internet connection has one that will download the entire Library of Congress in the blink of an eye so they post images with huge file sizes and code that is bloated and full of errors.

But that might all change soon if Matt Cutts really did mean what he said when he suggested that Google is about to add an extra dimension to their algorithm and take loading speed into account. While I've got no problem with Google doing something like that I do wonder just how they are going to go about measuring the download speed of a website.

Are they going to measure the download speed of sites hosted in a foreign country from some point in America? Are they going to send out spiders from data centers in every country to measure the download speed of sites that might be focused on a country but not actually hosted in that country?

I've noticed that a lot of Americans have been running around in every decreasing circles really stressing about download times for them but I think that there's a bigger picture here. If their sites suck at speed now what are they going to be like if Google is measuring the speed of their sites from some place on the other side of the planet?

There's no doubt that if you've become a little lazy over the last few years, and have been posting bigger and bigger images and creating code full of errors simply because you think that speed isn't so important now that a lot of people are on broadband, it might be a good idea to start checking your sites but the full story isn't out yet.

When more details begin to surface then it might be time to think about moving your local sites to hosts located within your own country but I wouldn't rush to do it just yet. If site loading speed is going to be measured from individual countries and you do decide to move your sites to a local host be sure to check your country's laws regarding adult sites.

I live in Australia where the laws don't prevent me from running adult sites but they certainly do prevent me from hosting them here and the penalties for breaking those laws are quite severe. It may be that the laws in your country ... if you live outside of the United States ... are similar so be sure to check before you surrender to that need for speed.

And with that, I'm off to spend some time building yet another online shop for a client.