It looks like the annual Technorati State Of The Blogosphere is going to be lacking a lot of data this year – maybe just Gmail users, but possibly many more. Google thinks Technorati are phishing.
Why?
Jeff over at Coding Horror has just been taking a small pop at Yelp for requiring email account access to find friends
Email is the de-facto master password for a huge swath of your online identity. Tread carefully:
* As a software developer, you should never ask a user for their email credentials. It’s unethical. It’s irresponsible. It is wrong. If someone is asking you to code this, why? For what purpose?
* As a user, you should never provide your email credentials to anyone except your email service. Sites that ask you for this information are to be regarded with extreme suspicion if not outright distrust.
This is the same terrible system used by many large social networks, and 2 scripts I recently strongly advised internet marketers not to use.
Viral Inviter, with even heavier marketing and endorsements, will have a huge long-term negative effect on email marketing, with the rewards quickly being overtaken by a backlash of negative sentiment and poorer email delivery which will be universal.
Plurk which has very recently become very popular also suffers from this evil invite and finding friends method, but at least has a redeeming feature.
Another tell-a-friend like Facebook / Myspace / Linkedin etc script seems to have launched today
http://www.viraloptingenerator.com/index.php
This script is different to Optin Accelerator in a number of ways
In theory that makes it almost exactly the same as the scripts used by the big boys of Web2.0 though their servers are less likely to conk out the first time someone with 200 contacts in Gmail uses the script if you are on shared or even most reseller hosting. You would probably have
Gary Halbert has been an inspiration to online marketers
Why? First of all, it is easier to sell something to someone with money. It's an obvious fact that person has the money to buy what you're selling. If you've got a $500,000 house for sale, it doesn't matter how appealing the house is if the family you're pitching it to has a pitifully low total income.
But there's another fact you mustn't overlook
Yesterday Joost linked through to me from a guest post on Shoemoney about Wordpress SEO.
In direct referral stats it didn't cause a shockwave until I looked at the specific pageviews of the page he chose to link to, my Wordpress category.
My category pages rarely figure highly in the most viewed, so I could actually attribute the majority of the traffic to that specific landing page, even if the traffic originated from an email or RSS subscriber.
This takes me back to one of the discussions I had with Joost regarding his Google Analytics tracking from RSS Plugin
I have been quite vocal in my encouraging Aweber to add some more control to the way they handle RSS to Email, and I am glad to say they have now added some very flexible date and time based controls.
This means that they totally blow Feedburner Email subscription away as far as features are concerned.
Apart from one important aspect.
In the announcement Justin Premick mentioned
This is just one of a number of enhancements we'll be making to the Blog Broadcast tool. Stay tuned…
I probed a little deeper and we can expect
Whilst I wouldn't class myself as a fanatical tester and tracker, I do test and track extensively. Having now published this blog for close to a year, I have reached a number of conclusions.
To be fair, I reached these conclusions more than 6 months ago… but saying anything at the time really would have fallen on deaf ears. I needed to have an established audience created in a traditional way, without any "explosive" growth from gaming social media, paid advertising or leveraging existing traffic.
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
A few days ago I saw a number of my readers had grabbed an “opp” with PayPerPost to predict the acquisition they were going to announce this week, in fact today.
Read more on PayPerPost Buys Zookoda – Maybe I Got The Jump On Techcrunch…
I can only conclude that email spammers and phishers are somehow inhabitants of another planet, totally unconnected from real world issues. If name dropping one Fortune 500 company doesn’t bring results, why not drop two?
Read more on Email Phishing – Idiotic Company Matchups…
