I just read a sales page for an information product
Read more on I Use Aggressive Hype & Obnoxious Tactics To Fool People…
I have long been a supporter of MyBlogLog and in many ways it was the many articles I wrote about how they could improve their site that led me to doing some limited consulting with Blogcatalog.
Could social news aggregators such as Digg, Techmeme & Technorati be sued for copyright infringement because the frequently used lead for a story often encompasses the core story?
Larger concerns will no doubt have their own team of lawyers, but do bloggers need Blogging Insurance?
The idea of specific insurance policies for bloggers, as a form of liability insurance to cover defamation cases has been around for some time.
It seems even Jason Calacanis at one time was thinking of entering the market
Clearly, his minions out there are rallying behind him [...] They are trying to live off the company and raise their blog ranking. It's really disgusting.Mr Cook, what is really disgusting is that a failed startup, ePerks, is now trying to somehow recover some or all of their initial investment by taking an innocent blogger to court. The article also elaborates not only on the legal threat to Vlad, but also to Trace at Broker Science, who has already made his response.
He suggested that those taking part might be doing this for some alternative motive, purely for links.
For years I have been paying sales tax (VAT) on purchases I make online through services such as Clickbank. It is inconvenient but it is much easier for Clickbank to work this way then to have to monitor the location of a seller and buyer.
The general rules in the US, as far as I can determine is that if you have a business presence in a state, you have to pay tax there. This applies if you own your own servers in the sate, or if you have employees.
Thus it might be beneficial for me, living in Europe to only
Today is RSS Awareness Day, and as a solid 40% of my RSS subscribers use Google Reader, I thought I would take this opportunity to reach out to the Google Reader team.
I am someone who loves using RSS, but at the same time as a business owner I find RSS is not living up to its current billing.
Whilst I haven't mentioned RSS day before on this blog, I have known about Daniel's plans for a month, and I might have been the first one to suggest using a dedicated site to promote RSS Day. This avoids what might be looked on as purely an attempt at linkbait.
I don't spend a huge amount of time in public forums these days, but a few years ago I gained a lot of valuable knowledge from a multitude of forums, and still communicate with old friends.
Forum mergers probably happen all the time, though I can't recall one in the webmaster space before that was significant so this seems like a good excuse for YAC - "Yet another competition"
They are giving away $25,000 in prizes in a referral and participation competition and it is free to enter.
I am not entering, so please feel free to add your referral link in
All those twiterroll links are having a significant effect on the highly competitive "Jason Calacanis" SERP.
I try to avoid blogosphere discussions unless I have something substantial to add. I don't have holdings in any of the companies embroiled in the current takeover / acquisition debate, and to be perfectly honest I am not sure if any of the combined entities that eventually emerge will be able to compete with Google on their home turf.
I am however an interested observer, and I have a number of questions buzzing around in my head that remain unanswered.
This is more a collection of "what ifs" than anything else, discussion points that have no real factual basis, from someone with
The Semmys has just been officially announced, and is a new award site for the best Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing posts of the year, and is the brainchild of Matt at Small Business SEM.
The nominees this year are highly controversial, because they are inspired or originated from Matt's own reading list, and are the posts which he highlighted in his monthly roundup posts as being the most important for his clients and subscribers to read if they missed them.
I have written my first article over at our new "Team Blog" Collective Thoughts, and decided on a provocative title to start that will lead into a series of posts on various topics relating to social media marketing goals and performance metrics.
10 Reasons Why Social Media Marketing Sucks…
Don't forget to leave some feedback and comments as they will influence what order and the content covered in the followup articles.
I decided to put together a mashup so I can see the chatroom for PostieCon as well as the Live Ustream feed for my own use, but thought I would post it here on the blog for anyone to watch what is happening.
There are some great speakers scheduled, and some announcements coming later in the day.
A great feature is the ability to ask the speakers questions from the chatroom.
I wasn't able to go to Vegas for Blogworld or Postiecon, but fortunately Postiecon are on the ball and are providing a way for anyone to learn something from the expert line
Blogcatalog Members today are collectively blogging about abuse.
I thought of blogging about all kinds of abuse that affect real people day in, day out, but decided that ultimately that doesn't fit in with my audience, or really add any authority to the words I would be writing.
As it happens, today part of a 2 hour interview with me was published in the Guardian (Digg Story you know you want to). I honestly didn't expect any more words in print from the article, because it was so wide ranging, and such
Imagine WOOT but for internet marketing products - deal of the day, software of the day, game of the day… you have got the idea?
Well Jason Potash and Marc Quarles will be launching DealDotCom on Tuesday, Sept 18th
That is when the first product offers will be published.
But you get to sign up today…
Sign up?
Well yeah, it is is an affiliate run operation, so unlike those other lesser sites not only do you get to refer people to it because they get good deals, you actually make money doing it as well, on 2 tiers!
Why am I telling you?
Some news for those server geeks who pay attention to what happens on the backend of their websites, because typical servers are normally slightly more than just Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP.
The interface that most people might be familiar with for maintaining their server is Cpanel, though many will also be familiar with Plesk.
Plesk & Virtuozzo are products from SWsoft
SWsoft also purchased Ensim just 3 days ago, another popular choice for server management.
It has just been made official that SWsoft have acquired Positive Software (Psoft), who publish the H-sphere software, which provides another alternative to Plesk and Cpanel/WHM
The guys from PayPerPost might cause a lot of controversy, but there is one thing that I doubt anyone could deny, even their most harsh critics… they are smart.
They bring out interesting, useful, sometimes controversial or disruptive products, but they are certainly market leaders not the following pack.
In the case of RSSBrief, they are taking on an existing market, RSS Readers, and in many ways it seems they might also step into reputation management and RSS Search.
I have a feeling even Jason Calacanis is going to like RSSBrief because it will help him with reputation management for Mahalo… but
I honestly laughed when I saw the new "Open Social Web" Bill of Rights launched yesterday, not because it isn't to some extent a useful idea, but because of one specific term…
Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others
10 months ago I fired off a heated debate about RSS sharing, and how Google with it's easy to share feeds could be killing the future of RSS. Now I say I fired it off, but honestly it would have been a storm in a teacup without Robert Scoble taking part with one of his most
Blogcatalog have just launched an API for programmers giving extensive access to the data contained within both the user profiles and blog profiles.
The BlogCatalog REST (REpresentational State Transfer) API allows the retrieval of public user and blog data based on a set of input parameters. This page outlines the various types of requests that can be executed and provides example requests and responses.
I had a play around with it early today for the first time and a couple of bugs were cleaned up since then and I think developers will find the terms of use fairly unrestricted.
I have actually
Plagiarism is often discussed in the context of other people stealing your content, but today I am going to look at it from another perspective, ensuring that the content you create or have created for you is looked on as being unique.
A lot of the things I write go completely over the head of many of my readers, and in some ways that is actually a concious decision which certainly costs me a much higher readership.
It is a rare occurrence when Google create a product, or new feature to an existing product that isn’t very good, but now they have created… Google Crap(s)
I haven’t played around with the new Google Personalized Recommendations on Google Toolbar before today, so I thought the results would be interesting.
Read more on Google Crap(s) vs StumbleUpon – Personalized Recommendations…
The moment I heard about the new Robots-Nocontent class that can be added to content, alarm bells started ringing in my ears. Whilst this can be used in a legitimate manner, it is also possible for webmasters to heavily abuse it.
Read more on Robots-Nocontent | How To Spot Abuse By Sneaky Webmasters…
This post is entitled just One Day, not One Day Blog Silence, because some people may wish to take other actions, and possibly speak out about other causes.
For French Speakers
The following 100 sites most recently linked through to http://www.onedayblogsilence.com
I have been a little tied up this week to respond to a number of things and I have always tried to respond as quickly as possible. Please forgive me.
Bloggers often complain that another blogger has stolen their content (plagiarism) or reworked their ideas without giving credit, and on the internet among bloggers, credit isn't just mentioning their names but providing a link, preferably to the original article.
Vipul Arora wrote a story today entitled Yahoo plagiarizes content - does not give credit!!
But was it plagiarism?
Lets go into detail and see what happens, and how this all
Unless you stick terms of service directly in front of people, and make important points extremely bold, people are not going to read them.
This was the whole point of a little experiment I helped Paul with over the last week, and the results are extremely conclusive. It is partially to do with the Krak.dk story I have written about in the past, but I think the results also paint a much broader picture.
Imagine a new advertising network that offered to manage all your advertising inventory on your site and also some juicy recurring income.
Imagine they also offered a substantial bonus scheme for signing up new advertisers and affiliates, regardless of performance.
Oh and they make payments by Paypal, and allow international members. Affiliates who live in the US often overlook that many of the opportunities available to them are closed to international affiliates, and payment by check in USD is often inconvenient (hello Clickbank)
Read more on Team Link Network – Advertising Pyramid | Ponzi | Scam…
I actually applied only recently for Tino Buntie to add my name to the 2000 Bloggers collage. I thought it was a cool idea, although the SEO benefit is probably minimal simply because although massive cross-linking is happening, it could be looked on as:-
I am not sure how long this has been in the rules at Clickbank, as Clickbank currently block archive.org – that being said I am sure it would have been brought up by someone during the last few months in discussions regarding various paid review services such as PayPerPost, ReviewMe and Sponsored Reviews.
Read more on Clickbank Require Disclosure – A-List Bloggers Totally Missed the Point In December…
There is currently a case running in the Danish courts that will effectively decide the law in Denmark for linking to a page other than a home page, typically known as deep linking.
We are not talking about hot-linking, pulling an image or video off someone else’s server into the middle of your own content, but linking as you might to this blog article, using the permalink.
Read more on Can You Really Take Search Engine and Technology News Seriously?…
Twitter Nofollow – My 7 Day Ultimatum
Unlike many people in the SEO, Tech or Marketing community, I don’t write posts just for linkbait & traffic, and when I make up my mind about whether I want to continue being involved in a community, that decision is final.
Read more on Twitter Nofollow – My 7 Day Ultimatum…