Monthly Archives: June 2008

Opt-in Accelerator Warning – Security Risk – Read This First!

By Andy Beard | Published: June 23, 2008

Optin Accelerator is a massive security risk for your customers – rather than fix the security problems, the new version just adds fluff without addressing core issues.

Anyone can make a mistake, release a product without considering all the possible ramifications, but to release Opt-in Accelerator again without major changes is irresponsible.

The Irresponsible Viral Tell-A-Friend Trio

So far there have been 3 such scripts I have written about, and there is a 4th “coming soon”

  • My first coverage of Opt-in Accelerator
  • Then there was Viral Optin Generator which may well have been a private label or resale rights product
  • Viral Inviter is launching soon – last I saw of this script installed “out in the wild” it was a security risk
  • There is another one I know about, TrafficXplode 2.0 which also features the same security risks
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Blogging Insurance & Quoting the Associated Press

By Andy Beard | Published: June 21, 2008

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

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Paydirt: Blogcatalog Interviewed on Technorati Blog Advertising

By Andy Beard | Published: June 17, 2008

Technorati Blog Advertising - Technorati AdsTechnorati have now officially announced their new blog advertising platform surprisingly called Technorati Media.

It is a significant step, though not as many seem to think unusual.

Afterall, Google started as a search engine, then monetized search, and finally introduced their own publisher program Adsense.

Lots of discussion related to the often reappearing Microsoft Yahoo deal mention that display advertising is highly lucrative, and Technorati are in a prime position to serve advertising to a very specific demographic of publishers – bloggers.

Technorati know exacty what bloggers are talking about on a day to day basis, so in aggregate they can offer publishers targeted display advertising, at least in theory.

Also it is important to understand that instead of selling the vast amount of data they have, they are using it to provide an added value service.

From the official announcement:-

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WordPress.com Bugged XML Sitemaps

By Andy Beard | Published: June 17, 2008

WordPress.com has added XML sitemaps so I thought I would take a glance at their implementation.

My immediate though was to take a look at Lorelle’s sitemap.xml

  • Homepage daily priority
  • Every other page updated on a weekly basis?

That seems like a good way to tell the spiders to index your site less often than they currently do.

With Lorelle you would certainly want spiders checking the home page hourly as she is sometimes the source of breaking news.

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Eperks On Mahalo

By Andy Beard | Published: June 17, 2008

Here is a little olive branch for the guys at ePerks, an unbiased resource that could be used to present 2 sides of the current Vlad vs ePerks legal kerfuffle.

I am not going to portray Mahalo as some kind of "sacred ground", and I have been a little negative about Mahalo in the past, but it does offer ePerks the opportunity to submit links, hopefully not from anonymous sources, of people happy with their service.

Mahalo I am sure will validate links, and if they seem to be from an anonymous shill blog on WordPress.com, my hope is that they will

Posted in SEO Blog , web 2.0 | Tagged , , | Comments closed

Paid Content – A Dying Business Model?

By Andy Beard | Published: June 16, 2008

Michael Arrington in his boycott of Associated Press seemed to suggest that paid content is a dying business model.

I must admit I am not a huge fan of linking to articles from Associated Press, simply because it is extremely difficult to determine the original source when these stories “go over the wire”.

A great example of the reasons why is when I reported about the appropriated story last year from the Museum of Hoaxes – that was Associated Free Press to blame, a different organization.

Readers might also remember my run-in with The Guardian where I was a major source for an article, but didn’t receive a link. The author and editor of The Guardian explained their viewpoint in the comments, but it still wrankles a little.

That being said, there is a huge amount of PROFIT being made online in the form of online membership sites which is a paid content business model.

Highly successful examples include:-

Posted in blog monetization , blogging tips , web 2.0 | Tagged , , , | Comments closed

How To Build Profitable Minisites

By Andy Beard | Published: June 16, 2008

I tend to leave newbie internet marketing tutorials to experts, but often I say that a little tongue in cheek – the people writing the newbie tutorials are often writing them because they couldn’t do advanced stuff. (the “Advanced Whitehat SEO Debate?” )

In the case of Minisite Secrets Exposed, Michael Rasmussen does a great job of covering all the basics, and there are some quite advanced tip in there as well. This is a great alternative for bloggers who are struggling making any real money online.

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Fake Alex Goad & Craig Beckta

By Andy Beard | Published: June 16, 2008

Fake Steve Jobs is an internet phenomenen and now we have fake Jerry Yang which I am sure will be a huge success, and add valuable perspective to the internet tech news scene.

John Cow was a revelation, a wonderful parody of the (in)famous John Chow, and the legend continues with new owners of the parody site maybe providing better quality content than the original, and in a heated competition with Garry Conn.

I have known who the new “John Cow” is almost from the start, it was fairly easy for someone on a fair number of email lists to work out, and that is why they have managed to leverage so many great prizes.

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Never Underestimate The Power Of The Dark Side of Search

By Andy Beard | Published: June 15, 2008

That title might have inspired thoughs of Jedi Knights, those with ADD might have instantly warped their thought trains to Pink Floyd and “The Dark Side of The Moon”.

Both might be correct in their connections.

Just like you couldn’t see the dark side of the force, and you can’t see the dark side of the moon, you can’t actually see all of your traffic that originates from search on the internet.

This is something that Tim O’Reily seems to be forgetting.

Search is only one way to find things. It’s the most easily monetizable, so it gets the lion’s share of the attention. But take a look at (and report on) what percentage of techcrunch’s traffic comes from search. For the O’Reilly Radar blog, it’s about 35%. Significant, sure, but hardly a sign of lack of competition. If Google absorbed both Yahoo! and Microsoft, the share of our visits coming from search would still be below 40%. (That tells you what a small share of our search traffic comes from the other guys today.) And that’s just the web traffic. Count in RSS (which is much bigger than web for most blogs, including ours) and the Search share of traffic goes down to a much smaller amount. So there’s not much worry about people not being able to find information.

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ePerks – I Am Not A Minion Mr Cook

By Andy Beard | Published: June 14, 2008

In what seems to be an impartial report on the ePerks vs Vlad lawsuit, Mr Ron Cook, the lawyer representing Brabus Ventures, owners of ePerks, made the following highly controversial statements.

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.

ePerks vs Vlad

He suggested that those taking part might be doing this for some alternative motive, purely for links.

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