Teaching English in Korea - ESL blog: Only in it for the money?

May 13, 2004

Only in it for the money?

The web site marksesl.com sent me an e-mail the other day requesting a reciprocal link with ESL go. Now I'm not suggesting you visit markesl, but if you do you'll a ton of advertisements (annoying pop up ads included) and a ton of links. Here's what they promised for my site if I linked to them:

* Properly categorized in its own section.
* Reviewed for possible improvement of its description.
* A big "Wow" image will be added.
....
If you link to me from your main page, I will add an "A" in
front of your site's name so as to alphabetize your site at the top of
its list.

So basically, you've got a site that has nothing but ads and links. And the links aren't based on sending people to quality sites, the links are to any garbage site willing to link back. The "wow" image goes to any site that links back, not to a site that's actually good. I wish this guy would go get a job and not earn his money by putting a ton of ads on a links site that doesn't even link to the best ESL sites.

This site actually competes with ESL go for search engine traffic! Maybe some day search engines will be able to tell the difference between teachers who build web sites to help people (me) and teachers who build web sites to display as many ads as possible (Mark's ESL).

Posted by James Trotta at May 13, 2004 1:24 PM

Comments

I hope I am not bothering anyone here, but I have a request. I am working on my final thesis and it will be based on the study of communities of practice used to hel teacher to keep in touch with each others. Unfortunately it looks like that for a beginner as I am it is pretty hard to find information on what I am looking for.
I would really appreciate if anyone could give me information about this topic. Links to communities or something like this. I am pretty familiar with the British council website but after that one i cannot find anything. It is not necessary that the site is directed strictly to English teachers, but since I am in this blog I suppose that the English field is well known. I thank you all in advance for your kind help. Thank you.

Posted by: Grado zero at May 13, 2004 4:05 PM

No bother. I would try http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/~tesl-l/ (an e-mail list) and the message boards at www.developingteachers.com or eslcafe.com.

Posted by: James Trotta at May 14, 2004 5:10 AM

Thank you very much, you don't know how much this means to me.
Anway I will follow this blog too.
My best regards

Posted by: Grado Zero at May 14, 2004 7:19 AM

James,

I think you're doing a lot of good things with your sites, and I would agree with you that it isn't in anyone's real interest (except Mark's, of course) for this site to not put up the best links, but it would seem the "purity" or your intentions are compromised when you have links on your own site like http://www.essaytown.com -- which seems to be essentially a plagarism outfit. Am I wrong about this?

Posted by: Tom at May 23, 2004 5:02 PM

You are not wrong when you say my intentions are not pure; speaking ill of the competition will probably never be seen as pure.

I would say that there are important differences:

1. I don't pretend that essytown.com is better than other sites just because they link back to me. If you look at www.eslgo.com/slinks.html the sites on top are the ones I think can really help learners a lot. I don't make decisions based on whether they link from their index page or some other page.

2. Links to other sites is a very small aspect of my site. Maybe 10 pages out a few hundred are for links to toher sites. Mostly I design pages to help students and teachers as best I can. markesl seems to only provide links to other sites (and ads of course. Lots of ads).

Posted by: James Trotta at May 25, 2004 6:43 AM