I’m reading Robert Scoble as I often do first think in the morning and he mentions Blogwerx Sentinel which is an application that monitors splogs to see who is copying your blog content without you knowing. It sounded interesting so I signed up.
And a few seconds later I get this email:
Dave Cross,
Thank you for registering with Sentinel.
Please keep the following for your records.
Username: dave@dave.org.uk
Password: [removed]You can log in by going to:
http://www.blogwerx.com/sentinel
Thanks again!
The BlogWerx Team
(The password wasn’t blanked out in the original version).
So that’s strike one. They don’t understand basic password handling.
I reply to this mail pointing out their errors. The mail comes from newaccounts@blogwerx.com. But my reply bounces back. That address doesn’t exist.
So that’s strike two. They don’t understand basic bulk email rules either.
Oh, and when I logged in, their site used Apache basic authentication. How retro is that?
And none of the useful looking links on their site (info, help, contact us) do anything. I’ve even tried in IE.
They might have a great product, but all this niggling errors don’t sell it well.
Update: Looking at this site more closely, it’s so badly developed that I’m becoming convinced that it’s a scam. It must just be there to collect bloggers email addresses.
Update: A review of the site by someone who has had exactly the same experience as me. And the screenshot has exactly the same data in it as the one I’ve been looking at all day (only the feed address is different). So I’m pretty much convinced that this site isn’t actually doing anything and that Scoble has been scammed.
Hello and this is Tony Moura from Iwerx. First off I would understand that the site and Sentinel looks like it is just collecting emails. I assure you it isnt. We understand that there are issues and ones that must be corrected ASAP.By no means is Sentinel perfect and we understood that. As a small 3 person company and the accelerated time we had to get to Demo did cause some issues for us and for that we apologize to the blogger community and are working through the issues.The core functionality of Sentinel is there. The searching, the matching etc. Some of the bells and whistles are there and will be fully completed within a very short amount of time. I should have also placed somewhere within the site that by registering, its the free version and the amount of time for an email from Sentinel would be 2 weeks.Once again, Sentinel is by no means perfect. We will work with the blogging community to evolve Sentinel as needed.If anyone has any further questions or comments please feel free to contact me.tony(at)iwerx.comTony MouraIwerx