Somewhere down the list I am also going to mention money but when you do the math, and then look at the way my bonus is structured, I will effectively be creating the closest thing to a J.O.B. I have experienced for the last 8 years.

I Have Loved The Concept Of Stompernet for 3 Years

I ate up every moment of their initial launch almost 3 years ago, it was a big deal for me, and I even toyed with the idea that I would one day be on the faculty.

If you gather together enough people who have exceptional online marketing skills, who can also teach, the chances of making a significant impact on the lives of 100s of people, potentially thousands is magnified.

At the time it was a little out of my reach and would have wiped out a large chunk of my cashflow on which I depended to keep profitable Adwords campaigns running.

However I also knew that my primary reason for joining wasn’t necessarily the training – I already had my startup germinating in my brain, and it was something that could benefit Stompernet customers.

I Am A Marketing Geek

I might not be a rocket scientist like Leslie Rohde, a scientist like Andy Ed, or even my good friend Tim Nash, and I can’t dig into patents like David Harry and Bill Slawski – but I am still a geek.

If a large chunk of the people you admire are members of a certain club, it is certainly a place you would consider joining.

Whilst Stompernet isn’t a club per se, it has become an “institution of Internet Marketing” in a remarkably short time and the people there translate geeky stuff into words and video normal people can understand.

I Am Joining Stompernet… Finally

The last time I promoted the main Stompernet course I built up a significant amount of interest, and totally threw away any chance I had of signing up a few referrals by posting just as I launched a list of the reasons why I wasn’t joining.

I still have a copy of it – I believe a few people might have mistakenly read it and though that it was in some way a negative review of Stompernet. Far from it, I hold them in great esteem.

You see I have always believed that the natural extension to Stompernet was providing state-of-the-art tools – in fact when they first launched there was some kind of syndication network available. I am not sure if that is still in there, or has morphed into something bigger and greater.

Also the FreeIQ video marketing platform in some ways encroaches into areas I want to persue.

I have always placed my startup in a “protected zone” – anything that in some way could harm it, I have avoided, and that at least in my own mind has included what could be looked on as “Foreign Intellectual Property Contamination” – I really wanted to be able to claim as much as possible that what I was creating was proprietary and 100% the fruit of my own labour.

Likewise I like to blog about things other blogs don’t – if I wrote a blog post about how to optimize the title of a blog post, people would be shocked and possibly think I out-sourced it. It is not my kind of content.

If I don’t have something original to write about, I generally don’t write anything, and it is restrictive enough having access to data from the few clients I have worked with over the last few years that could surprise people.

This time around it seems like 90% of SEOs who blog about anything the least bit interesting are now members of multiple private SEO sites. You also have people releasing SEO tools after having access to other people’s proprietary SEO tools.
To be quite honest, I think a lot of that really sucks, but I doubt the new copycats are anywhere close to the competition.
Also if tools are combined with training, and you need the tools to maintain a competitive edge, it is hard to resist.

If I had access to the Stompernet archives, I would always been concerned about whether what I blog about is in some way something I learned from them that might be considered proprietary.

Synergies

I first conceived my startup plans 4 years ago, and whilst they have mutated a fair chunk and there has been massive feature creep, the synergies with what Stompernet do are so strong, you can almost taste them.

To be honest when I first heard about the new launch, and that there would be a number of new tools introduced, whilst on one hand I thought my startup had finally been killed, on the other I was straining at the bit to see what they had come up with.
You see the SAAS I want to create are because they are what I would personally want to use. Some of the features encompass things I have blogged about, and some of the things I blog about are because I would be over the moon if someone implemented them. It would remove some of the feature creep that is weighing down any chance I have of self-funding or even Angel/VC funding, as they are looking for single solutions to problems.

e.g. I am not going to go out to create a new RSS reader and I would love an email service provider to finally provide all the features I am looking for, even if it partially limits the footprint of what I want to achieve.

In many ways the synergies are stronger than ever.

So I Asked Brad… Directly

I spelled all this out in an email to Brad, and have confirmation that there wouldn’t be a problem joining

Being a member is important, as without being a member, it is hard to compete in the pending Stomper 999 bonus battle.

Hang around… there will be something about bonuses coming up, as well as some reviews rants and unique tips

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 with full integration of the sales and support service, and impressive virtual clusters.
Here are all the facts about H-sphere

Mac owners might also be familiar with another product from SWsoft, Parallels

Whilst this consolidation might not result in separate products, it will result in a lot of shared technology and expertise that could have a major impact on the current market positions.

I don’t have access to current industry figures, but I would speculate that these mergers and acquisitions represent quite a staggering shift in market share.

My news alert from Imountain hosting stated

With all these mergers, SWSoft has just become the largest Webhosting Automation company. The only competitors left in the Linux Hosting Control Panel Market are Cpanel, DirectAdmin. This will most likely create a massive positive impact on H-Sphere. With the backing of such a large and rich company as SWSoft, H-Sphere is poised to become the market leader in fully automated hosting solutions.

Thanks to imountain hosting and Web Hosting Talk where there is plenty of discussion.

Seth Godin Speaks to Google

In this video Seth Godin is insightful, and explains to a bunch of Googlers all about Purple Cows and Flipping the Funnel on its side and embracing buzz marketing.

The concepts are sage advice, however there is one major pitfall.

If the perfect way to market a product is to flip the funnel on its side to become a megaphone, as Seth describes “The fashion permission complex”, then Google is in trouble, because they can’t currently charge for it, and they are constantly denouncing companies like PayPerPost who can make money from buzz marketing.
Google attacks PayPerPost mainly because PayPerPost potentially has the ability to disturb the link balance their algorithms place on the fabric of the internet.

The same is true for PR firms and almost all marketing, PayPerPost however in many cases is cheaper.

Matt Cutts thinks it is good value to do viral marketing, so you pay a specialist $5000 for a few hours work, and you might be lucky to get 100 links. It is not guaranteed.

With PayPerPost you pay $5000, and in general you will only get writers who have some genuine interest in your product writing about it, just like a PR firm isn’t going to persuade a blog on parenthood to write about the latest database system from Oracle. That might be a bad example, I actually know a few blogs that could do such a review justice, who occasionally talk about parenting as well.
PayPerPost delivers 200-300 people writing about your product, sometimes positive, sometimes negative, but you are guaranteed the buzz.

The biggest problem? This presentation is from February 2006 – PayPerPost didn’t even exist when this presentation was made, and Google didn’t adapt and fill the void that Seth Godin spotted, because it doesn’t fit with Google’s primary source of revenue.

Thanks for posting the timely video Jack, I had seen it before, but things didn’t connect as well as they do now in hindsight.

Robert Scoble Reinvents PageRank?

Robert Scoble posted 3 videos yesterday along with a short blog post he hopes won’t be noticed on Techmeme, so of course it will ;)

Social Graph Based Search Parts 1, 2 and 3

I couldn’t work out a way to embed each individual video, so I embedded the full channel and provided links to individual parts.

What Robert is saying is that social networks help create a web of trust in the content people refer to, and thus that will eventually play a pivotal role in how searching for content will work in the future.

He didn’t reference Del.icio.us or StumbleUpon, but those services also in some situations can provide better search results than Google.

Robert seems to be fixated by the idea that Mahalo provides a list of HDTV manufacturers on their search page, and Google doesn’t.

That fact is based upon SEO, and he seems to think the review sites and trusted vendors such as Amazon are bad results.

Robert blames this on SEOs, when in fact it is the fault quite often of the manufacturers having very hard to navigate, poorly optimized sites, that don’t attract natural linkage.

I think it is testament to Google’s algorithms that some review sites do appear above Amazon.

I disagree with Robert that the Mahalo results page is better, what is missing from the Google search is just a suggested search term “HDTV manufacturers” along with the other suggestions.
Most of the Maholo results were taken straight from the top of Google, and many of the remainder are shopping comparison sites and coupon sites = yes it is those dirty SEOs and affiliates at play again.

You still have to count how many clicks you have to perform until you get the information you are looking for, and for all but general browsing, Mahalo doesn’t offer any advantages.

There isn’t even a decent link to something explaining the difference between the various formats and technology, no links to specific self help forums etc.

The Mahalo page is so good that Yahoo doesn’t even pick up any links to it yet.

Networks of Contacts = PageRank

Networks of friends, contacts and who links to and trusts each other is effectively the same as PageRank, and that is proving to be broken and easy to manipulate.

One of the biggest problems is that “Robert Scoble” as an example might have a lot of credibility when talking about mobile phones, or camcorders, but using one of Robert’s examples a while back, he knows nothing about lawnmowers.

Techmeme overcome this by having separate indices for different topical authority, but that only works partially.
Techmeme certainly doesn’t pick up every important technology story, as an example I don’t think the SES discussion on paid links appeared on Techmeme.

Google Has It’s Failing

Google does have it’s failing, but currently Mahalo and various meme and social networks are only offering a subset of the data Google is dealing with, and Google is slowly making changes to the way it’s algorithms work.
Google does take into consideration topical authority to a certain extent – PageRank is only part of the equation, whereas that is effectively all Techmeme and Facebook could offer as an alternative to improve search.

One of the big reasons Facebook doesn’t open up is monetary, they wouldn’t be able to control search, and the income that can produce.

Rand has already responded, Duncan has already responded on Techcrunch, I am sure others will, and this is already on Techmeme.

Muhammad also has some interesting coverage, from a social network point of view, Google still has a number of its own services yet to be integrated.

David Utter on WebProNews also offers some insight into the TV factor – using Facebook takes some effort to get any kind of quality results.

It also seems that Techmeme seems to have developed some very selective results and doesn’t like me any more, or maybe I have to use specific titles for Techmeme to work correctly, something Robert in his video was suggesting isn’t the case.

Dave Winer has also rumbled and thinks Google is on the top rung and will be hard to shift.
Over a 4 year span I don’t think it would be impossible to take a chunk out of Google, as things are moving faster, but Facebook, Techmeme and certainly Mahalo are not the platforms that will do it.

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 suggested some additional changes to the terms, so I wouldn’t assume they are set in stone.

I also spotted on the forums that Blogcatalog are giving away free platinum memberships to people who use the APIs creatively.

Other Blogcatalog Changes Over The Last Week

• You can now search the forums for previous discussions before submitting a question
• There is no longer a need to provide Blogcatalog a link to identify you as the owner of your blog, this can be achieved with meta tag verification.
• You can now make modifications to your profiles without having your blog added to the moderation queue of new submissions. (improve those landing pages)
• The Blogcatalog broadcast system is now available to everyone
• Blogcatalog now create their own thumbshots for higher quality, and possibly higher reliability

Specific Dislosure – I do some consulting with Blogcatalog on a very much low key, part time basis, though I also give coverage to their competitors and try to remain impartial

Donations are going to be made (if possible) in large chunks of $100

This poll will not work correctly in feed readers and email

[poll=3]

Voting will be open until sometime during the morning of Friday 4th May (EST) – hopefully that will give the winner some nice additional beer money for the weekend.

Earnings to date for paid reviews: $30 + $75 + $98 + $130 = $333

The one review I did during April was for iBegin Source Business Information, so they are effectively sponsoring this round of donations.

I am covering the shortfall this time around as I know I have 2 reviews in the kitty to do this week.

That means the second giveaway will be for $100 this Friday

As discussed in the comments of the previous poll, I am carrying forward half the value of votes from the previous round, rounded up, so that votes from the previous round are not looked on as wasted votes, but still giving new plugins a chance.

For new nominations, please refer to the Best WordPress Plugins nominations page.

Admittedly I have been a little lax with my donations to other authors, though I have invested money in plugin development, only to publish the plugins myself under a GPL license, thus in my own way giving to the community.

What I have decided to do is to donate some of the income I receive from writing paid reviews back to the WordPress community.
I currently receive $130 for a paid review, and it is my aim to give 50% of my paid review earnings to plugin authors, probably on a monthly basis.

To ensure that credit is given where credit is due, I am only going to start the ball rolling with 2 of my own personal favourites. All other suggestions are subject to an “open mike”.

Only one suggestion per person is allowed, and you are not allowed to suggest your own plugin.
Once the list reaches 20 plugins, I will open a new post for this months voting.

Each month the list will be rolled over with new suggestions added. Though we will see how workable it is to include all the suggestions in each month’s list, I reserve the right to only include a certain number from the top of the list, or to bump plugins up the list if I personally feel they are worthy of being included sooner.

There is always a variation in how much I receive for writing a review, but my aim is to make each payout “visible” – more than just beer money, so typically around $100 seems suitable.

Technorati simply can’t cope with new forms of blogging and RSS feed generation. I am not talking about splogs, which seem to still be rampant, and reblogs, likewise, but totally legitimate alternative unique content sources that are effectively blogs.

coComment

Not too long ago, coComment introduced the ability to be able to claim your coComment feed on Technorati, and went to the trouble of creating a very integrated claim wizard.

Within a few days, the very legitimate coComment feeds full of unique content were filling up Technorati links pages. It seems Technorati swiftly took action and decided that coComments feeds were not blogs, and silently nerfed them.

coComment feeds are not splogs, they are a record of activity all over the web that contain content directly linked to individual people, and real discussions.
Technorati could use coComment as a way to filter out splogs, because blogs that don’t get comments might be a good indication of splogs and reblogs.

Twitter

Twitter allows you to post a Technorati claim. I have claimed my Twitter feed, and so have a couple of my friends. Update: Paul has written about doing so here now.

Twitter also has a blogroll of sorts. There are links on the sidebar to the people you are following which are links Technorati can see.

The result if people claim their Twitter account in Technorati and their friends do the same is clear to see.

Now what happens if you are a Twitter user like Robert Scoble with 100s, actually over 1000 followers.

Not all of Robert’s followers have claimed their feeds, and Technorati hasn’t found them all, but that won’t take long.

Technorati Can’t Cope

coComment is very legitimate user generated content – if I fed my coComment feed into a blog, it would be looked on by Technorati as legitimate, so why negate it’s effects only days after it was introduced?

Twitter is actually less legitimate than coComment – you are limited to very few characters unlike blog comments which can often be longer than many blog posts.
Twitter has a Blog Roll of sorts, that is providing cross linking, and soon Robert Scobles Twitter might enter the Technorati Top 100 – you only need 3300 blogs linking to a blog to hit the Technorati 100 currently, Robert already has 1000 followers and I am sure he will easily clock up more very quickly.
The problem for Technorati is that Robert’s Twitter feed is legitimate content on a different platform, and that people are choosing to link to him from their “Twitter Rolls”

Blog Rolls

One of the reasons blogs that are part of blog networks gain Technorati rankings fast is their sitewide links to other blogs in the network.
As I pointed out recently when defending 2000 Bloggers, there are blogs that are part of blog networks that haven’t posted for more than a year, but due to blogrolls have very high Technorati ranks, without any links from within the content.

Widgets, Plugins and Themes

Various members of the WordPress development team used to dominate the Technorati Top 100 because of the default blogroll links. Nothing wrong with the links which are well deserved, everything wrong for Technorati counting them.

Currently the best way to game Technorati is to create widgets and themes with links to the author. Technorati picks them up as links from the blog.
Some of the widgets can do this in quite a collective way, such as community blogroll widgets that add 100s of cross links to all members of the community. Then again they are only doing the same as “legitimate” blog networks.

How to Fix Technorati

Technorati have to change the way they look on links completely, and only count links within content. That may mean their spiders have to start working in a totally different way, and current link totals will twist real results for 6 months.

Technorati should be counting alternative blogging platforms such as coComment and Twitter, but again, they should only count links from within the content.

Twitter is dominating Techmeme today.

I love Pete Cashmore’s timeline of blogging, Marshall Kirkpatrick did a “sitting on the fence” roundup, (i.e. unbiased reporting), and Brian Alvey put a unique perspective on things, (he should be thinking of adding a Twitter widget to Blogsmith for a USP).

Just added a new toolbar button to my toolbar buttons site for Twitter addicts.

There has been so much talk about Freebase.com, but Twitter.com seriously should have some kind of health warning – so many people are becoming addicted.

Twitter Google Toolbar Button

The LinkedIn Fast Generator I created is proving to be one of the most successful “features” of this site, and is bringing me into contact with lots of extremely smart networkers in the LinkedIn community, and my contact list and network is growing rapidly.

• Growth is happening almost on auto-pilot, though I always have the choice of which invites I accept based on the industry someone comes from.
• I always accept invites from my blog readers if I recognise them, and the remainder I accept on a fairly adhoc basis depending on the related industry, and whether that connection will be useful sometime down the road.
• The majority of invites I receive are actually very appropriate – that would actually surprise most people because the obvious temptation when people first visit the site to see the generator is to test it out on someone, and I am the obvious target.

Most of the invites I receive are:-

• Cancelled within seconds – some people just test it out and then cancel the invite – no major harm done as clicking through from the email notifications I receive only takes me 5 seconds
• Internet Marketing Related – I have been picking up quite a few internet marketing related invites which are great – it is good to see people in internet marketing using LinkedIn
• General Marketing – I love to receive invites from various marketing professionals – marketing is very much a contacts game
• Information Technology – Probably the largest sector, I now have contacts within a multitude of web development companies and startups. I expect that list to grow rapidly
• Search Engine Optimization – I have been picking up a few invites within the SEO field
• VCs / Investment – A slow mover, but I would like to grow my contacts in this sector
• Local Connections – I really appreciate gaining local connections, you would be amazed at how useful some connection become in the not so distant future

I haven’t received any invites that I would regard as spam. Those users who were just testing and didn’t mean to invite me deleted their invite (I had 2 like that while writing this post).

LinkedIn FAST Unofficially Approved?

I have mentioned in the past that LinkedIn staff were aware of the generator and didn’t see any major problems with using it, though that was by private email. Recently that was confirmed on a LinkedIn Answers thread.

Code Improvements

Over the last few days I have been tweaking the script to generate other useful versions of the same invite code, based largely on the feedback I have received from users.

• Improved SEO – The generated links that point to a LinkedIn form now contain the rel=”nofollow” command for slightly improved SEO

Just Click to Connect

Get your own LinkedIn Fast

• HTML Text Version – The form now creates a HTML text link version which might be more suitable for some designs

LinkedIn FAST
Just Click to Connect

• Ugly Raw URL – The form now automatically generates a URL that you can use with services like TinyURL.com – This is a much better option than trying to edit a URL manually. I should note that I own a similar script to tinyURL, and could create a service similar that in some way represents what the link is for. I don’t particularly want to build up a database of 100,000 LinkedIn users, plus there are trademark issues.

http://www.linkedin.com/inviteMany?firstName.0=Andy&lastName.0=Beard&emailAddress.0=list.andy%40gmail.com&subject=Join+Me+Now!&salutation=NAME&greeting=Invite+for+you&invite=Send+Invitation%28s%29&inviteeID.0=&isMessageOptional=false&default_cell_count=1&contentTemplateID=std_inv_2e

• Custom Redirect – I have created what I feel is better for most LinkedIn users who have access to their server by FTP, which is a custom redirect. The generator now creates the code for this as well.

<html><head><meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"><meta http-equiv="REFRESH" content="0;url=http://www.linkedin.com/inviteMany?firstName.0=Andy&lastName.0=Beard&emailAddress.0=list.andy%40gmail.com&subject=Join+Me+Now!&salutation=NAME&greeting=Invite+for+you&invite=Send+Invitation%28s%29&inviteeID.0=&isMessageOptional=false&default_cell_count=1&contentTemplateID=std_inv_2e"> </head> <body> </body> </html>
In emails you can thus use a link that will look like this http://andybeard.eu/linkedin/
The same link could also be used for press releases, article marketing, inside Word or PDF documents, or in a signature on discussion forums.

Hopefully you find my LinkedIn Widget Generator easy to use.

If you have any suggestions, or require any help in implementing this code, feel free to leave a comment and don’t forget to share this with your friends and contacts.

LinkedIn Fast