(you can also get some ideas on how to launch a book and become a bestseller)

Remember I am not a lawyer, and this is a stong opinion piece.

I am trying extremely hard to create an assertion of fact dressed up as an opinion

ePerks Are Suing Vlad

I found out on Saturday from Vlad that he is being sued by ePerks.

Here are the documents served on Vlad.

Just a quick note for anyone who shares this document, it would be well worth modifying it to include some keywords in the links that Scribd inject. I should have also suggested to Vlad that it be prefaced with some links to relevant discussions.

<a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/3271851/Barabus-vs-Zablotskyy">ePerks - Brabus vs Zablotskyy</a> - <a href="http://www.scribd.com/upload">Upload a doc</a></div><div style="display:none"> Read this doc on Scribd: <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/3271851/Barabus-vs-Zablotskyy">ePerks - Brabus vs Zablotskyy</a>

It is interesting to note that for some reason Brabus are looking for punitive damages and claiming malice, and they have confined the case to the way Vlad defended his family name when he was attacked quite viciously on multiple websites suggesting he is/was a paedophile which as far as I know is untrue – Vlad has always come across as a kind and generous person.

This was particularly damaging for Vlad, he writes a pro-life blog, and is in the process of filing for adoption.

Vlad’s post in my opinion, and I have read it at least 20 times, doesn’t seem to directly accuse ePerks of anything, and would only suggest suspicion, but certainly not direct accusation, if the whole situation up until that point was taken into account.

At that time the suspicion was warranted, “Jaffar S” was using the same IP address in comments as people claiming to be ePerks employees, and others posting multiple positive comments, the same IP address range as I previously highlighted being used for ePerks shilling.

76.206.0.160 to 76.206.0.167 – I suggest anyon who has come into contact with ePerks in any way search their databases and email accounts for every IP address in that range – it may be vital evidence.

Ben Behrouzi claimed his company ePerks had nothing to do with the address range, and Vlad posted that information very clearly on his blog.
There was a little confusion though of which Ben might not be aware – though Vlad originally mentioned Texas, the IP range is actually tied to San Francisco and San Jose, where ePerks is located, and that is the area that lots of shill comments originated from as well.

As Trace points out about ePerks

Vlad made no accusations but simply presented anecdotal evidence indicating that ePerks was possibly linked to the false charges

Trace also goes into detail that the papers served on Vlad have no relationship with the previously sent Cease and Desist.

All of this is important, lets take a look at what I didn’t (deliberately) quote from the chilling effects article.

Question: If I write something defamatory, will a retraction help?

Answer: Some jurisdictions have retraction statutes that provide protection from defamation lawsuits if the publisher retracts the allegedly defamatory statement. For example, in California, a plaintiff who fails to demand a retraction of a statement made in a newspaper or radio or television broadcast, or who demands and receives a retraction, is limited to getting “special damages” — the specific monetary losses caused by the libelous speech. While few courts have addressed retraction statutes with regard to online publications, a Georgia court denied punitive damages based on the plaintiff’s failure to request a retraction for something posted on an Internet bulletin board. (See Mathis v. Cannon)

If you get a reasonable retraction request, it may help you to comply. The retraction must be “substantially as conspicuous” as the original alleged defamation.

Vlad very clearly posted the statement on his blog that Ben Behrouzi claimed the attack on Vlad’s character was nothing to do with ePerks.

ePerks – Brabus Ventures are suing Vlad under California law, and my reading of Vlad’s article on IP addresses is that that could be looked on as a very fair statement given equal weight in the public eye, even though (as far as I am aware) no request for a retraction was ever received from ePerks / Brabus Ventures.

In a similar light, ePerks at least on Vlad’s blog might be looked upon as a public figure – they paid him to write about them – one article opened Pandora’s box.

From Chilling effects

A public figure must show “actual malice” — that you published with either knowledge of falsity or in reckless disregard for the truth. This is a difficult standard for a plaintiff to meet.

How Can We Help Vlad?

Spreading the news – this affects all bloggers free speech.

Donations – Greg Swann has set up a donation fund for Vlad

Greg has created some logos / banners / badges along with donation buttons that can be easily syndicated and posted on your blog.

Support Vlad Zablotskyy’s Defense Fund
Defend your own right to free speech!

I might have arranged things and orchestrated things differently, using a dedicated site for the donations, and coordinated the release of information, but nothing can quell the desire to help Vlad in any way people can.

If you have come into contact with Vlad in the blogosphere, or support free speech, or are a parent disgusted at the way false claims can be made against people anonymously, or someone who understands how important a clean reputation is for adoption, you might want to consider a donation.

For bloggers out there, remember to use descriptive anchor text for every link

Blog Posts

I am going to start compiling blog posts of people writing about this horrible situation, especially where they add something significant to the conversation (lawyers, want a link? SEO help?)

Aaron Wall went through this in the past, and has noted that ePerks is going viral (the negative point of view)

Are eperks spammers?, by Lord Matt takes a look at “piles of poo” about ePerks, and a very clear statement of personal opinion from Matt – “I fully believe that Ben Behrouzi of Brabus Ventures (eperks) is both a spammer and an unpleasant human being”- the type of vernacular he normally reserves for the local council and utility companies.

Joe from Sellsius Real Estate is the first lawyer that I am aware to blog about this, and whilst of course this can’t be looked on as legal advice the discussion regarding the long arm of the law and personal jurisdiction in libel cases is extremely interesting.

I never thought I would see the day I would link to Ripoff Report, but someone seems to have listed a complaint about ePerks there. Please don’t add to the report unless your have a genuine complaint about their service.

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 an article gains authority by citing multiple sources.

Some things were however a little disappointing, and I thought I would cover that initially, and then add to the end some points.

The Press Doesn’t Handle Linking Well

This comes down to 3 different situations which I will cover briefly

1. Linking To Sources Where Possible

This is for a situation where someone actively played a role and was mentioned in the story. As an example they gave a short or long interview.
In the Guardian article for some reason I didn’t get a link. I am not a blackhat or bad neighbourhood, and I think I made a large contribution to the story. The few paragraphs on paper is the result of a 2 hour telephone conversation.

I know there isn’t really a legal obligation to link to me, but the contact came about because of my online presence and blogging in various ways, and how can I prove that the Andy Beard in the article was in fact me without the link? (yes I might one day like to be in Wikipedia)

2. Linking To Junk Without Nofollow

The tone of the article suggests that Danny Bradbury didn’t really approve of some of the worst MFA sites, yet they received links as a pointer so readers could see for themselves. Unfortunately, the links did not use rel=”nofollow” (known in SEO circles as a “link condom) which was introduced 2 1/2 years ago to fight comment spam, but since then is recommended by Google to use on links to untrusted sources, spam sites etc.

Those sites linked to could most likely rank better in search results now, compared to other content – it is not for me to judge whether in the eyes of the author that was his intent, but that is the effect.

3. Reusing Other People’s Content Without Link Attribution

The press sometimes also regurgitate other people’s quality content without any useful attribution, though they might rewrite the content by hand. I am not a lawyer, but in my opinion that is still stealing traffic and search results by repurposing and replacing an original work with their own.

In this particular case with the Museum of Hoaxes the museum missed out on a massive front page story on Digg, which can lead to lots of links. Social media sites want to vote on the original article, and not something which is a cut down rewritten version, but without a link, who is to know.

Invisible Links in Plain Sight

This is really a separate section of the article, but is still regarding linking. I don’t regard this as in any way abusive, it is strategic.

Whilst Matt Cutts worries about hidden links the same as or very similar to the background colour, such that they can’t actually be seen by a human, there is another kind of hidden link, or invisible link.

Here is an example taken from Dana’s excellent rules of social media, which she learnt in kindergarten.

Could you see the links? Didn’t think so… well here they are a little more visible.

The links are now underlined, but they are not hidden, so they might receive some clicks. It should be noted that many people are reading your content, especially on large blogs, in an RSS reader.
That does however depend on the source of the traffic – if traffic is from a social media site such as Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, Propeller, or Sphinn, then the visitors will see the content on the page.
You need to determine why you have the links on the page, and how you want your readers to interact with the links.

Here are some more “click happy” alternatives

The classic blue encourages readers to click, which is why it is also so highly recommended for blending Adsense to increase CTR.

Red links are becoming a lot more popular in blogging circles, popularised by Copyblogger and Problogger.

There Is No Quick Fix

The press and bloggers really need to be aware of how they link and attribute. If you are giving a link to someone, think about how that link can best benefit them.

Take another look at the article on the Guardian (and possibly give it a Digg), I have emailed them hoping they will adjust the article so that is is more link friendly and unfriendly where a link might have to have a “link condom“.

Linking Awareness is what is required to avoid linking mistakes

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 when it is finished.

The closest I have seen to RSSBrief was Myfeedz, but that didn’t quite hit the mark for me, it might be better for other people. Myfeedz really gives an overview of the whole blogosphere.

RSSBrief tries to give an overview of specific blogs, or specific blog posts, extractng core details about the content – an “executive overview” to help you determine whether the full content is relevant.

Some people might argue that that is the purpose of an opening paragraph, but opening paragraphs are either lacking in specific information, or more often than not these days, carefully crafted to entice you to read the full article.

(more after the jump)

I offer full feeds but many people don’t, and opening paragraphs might not tell you what you need to know. That is a fake “after the jump” just to prove a point.

I wonder if PayPerPost will be presenting RSSBrief which is part of their Argus platform at Techcrunch40 – maybe they will get to come face-to-face with Google – just imagine if they won the top prize and having it presented by Google and Michael Arrington.
I haven’t seen a list of people presenting published – maybe having the PPP guys there would have been just too much to handle.

As Adam Ostrow notes on Mashable:-

On the plus side, the service does seem do a fairly good job of summarizing articles, but whether that is something customers are really looking for will remain to be seen.

He also notes it is an alpha, and you can’t enter your whole reading list – there is no way to log in at all.

I love seeing projects at this early stage, because it allows you to see the potential, and possibly shape it into something more useful.

Why I See Potential In RSSBrief?

I do see a lot of potential in RSSBrief, and not because I would consider the guys at PayPerPost to be friends, and they certainly don’t pay me anything to write about them.
You could class it in some ways as being payola, they have linked to me, featured me in their marketplace etc, but they haven’t to coin a phrase ‘bought my soul”.

So the first thing I am going to do in my writeup is criticise them, and quite strongly.

Here is the link to my page on RSSBrief

http://www.rssbrief.com/feeds/24

It absolutely sucks I am page number 24 and not page number 1

Techcrunch is page number 14

This is a little tongue in cheek, but there is a serious point to it, the URLs should be based around my URL

http://www.rssbrief.com/feeds/andybeard.eu

http://www.rssbrief.com/feeds/techcrunch.com

Here is why….

Summary Feeds

RSSBrief provides 2 kinds of RSS feed

A Full Feed http://www.rssbrief.com/entries/full_xml/24
A Summary Feed http://www.rssbrief.com/entries/summaries_xml/24

I absolutely hate the full feeds option currently, because it strips out all the formatting, and possibly doesn’t count as a feed subscriber with Feedburner. Guys it is ugly, and possibly pointless.

I love the summary feed with one caveat – the useless URL

http://www.rssbrief.com/entries/summaries_xml/24

That should read

http://www.rssbrief.com/entries/summaries_xml/andybeard.eu

That summary is actually something very useful I could even use on my blog or for various mashups, but even more useful would be a way to get a summary for a specific post.

I would love to be able to pull in a summary for each post into a sidebar section automatically, or to pull in summaries in some way for additional data on category archives etc.

For effective use, all data needs to be based around the actual URLs, and not numbers.

I am not a number

RSS brief isn’t a full grown application, it is a technology demo or alpha because it is suitable to be “played around with”, and I could actually use the summary feeds as it stands to add some value.

For some of those higher output blogs such as Techcrunch or Mashable, I could imagine subscribing just to the summaries.

I really wish they would change the URLs – they might currently reflect how they are being stored in the database, but end users will get a lot more benefit if they are more user friendly.

I also hope they are going to report subscribers through to Feedburner in some way (and also with their email service Zookoda)

Hmm Zookoda – I have a feeling Zookoda is going to be integrated with the Argus backend as well. Maybe we will see PayPerPost reporting subscription numbers to Feedburner, but we will also see PayPerPost competing directly with Feedburner, now owned by Google.

When I worte about Zookoda in the past, I hinted that something of this nature might be possible.

In some ways they are now a Feedburner competitor, which might make this a little complicated. If it doesn’t happen, I expect to see PayPerPost/Zookoda move into the feed syndication and statistics business extremely quickly.

Hmm statistics…

PayPerPost have already stated that they will have some fairly advanced tracking within Argus – they really need feed readership statistics to be able to offer advertisers. They can grab some of it via Feedburner API, but can also offer their own competing platform.

PayPerPost To Directly Compete With Feedburner and Google Reader?

Thus the title of this post, it is pure speculation, but PayPerPost do have the funding to pull it off, it makes 100% business sense, they have the attention of a large blogger audience, and they will provide a feed reading experience that will be attractive not just for bloggers, but also professional businesses.
They might not be able to pull people away from Feedburner – they don’t have to, they can offer a parallel service that offers value, and will gain uptake.

As long as it could be tracked, I would add an additional feed subscription for the RSSBrief summaries, and I feel other people would as well.

Zookoda’s email offering isn’t perfect, but it is free, will offer advertising revenue in the future, and is more likely to be developed than Feedbuner’s

Despite my highlighting of Feedburner’s problems in the past, they have done nothing to rectify any of the things I highlighted that is immediately visible, even a simple thing such as adding a small text addition to outgoing emails for CAN-SPAM conformance.

Ok, so they are now Google, and Google can probably get away with a lot of things that smaller companies can’t. Who after all is going to take Google to court for a spam complaint?

Can you tell I am excited about the direction PayPerPost is taking this – their business model has always been disruption, they are going to do it again.

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 controversial headlines.
I think I had about 30 subscribers at the time.

Today Robert is championing the Bill of Rights he signed up for, but unfortunately Google Reader and Google’s recently purchased Feedburner don’t support the level of control over your feeds to allow Robert, and his friends wishes to be fulfilled, and they really only have their selves to blame, for championing Google Reader without encouraging Google to allow for self determination of what happens with the data.

RSS Sharing – Path of Discovery

I already knew that RSS could be protected using RSS Authentication, and that was something Google doesn’t support, but Bloglines does, and they block your ability to share authenticated feeds. +1 Bloglines

Open Social Web is really about applications such as Facebook, and my voyage of discovery into content access control in Facebook actually started quite by accident about a week ago.

Facebook provides a way to get your notification by RSS

The URL looks like this

http://www.facebook.com/feeds/notifications.php?id=576942190&viewer=576942190&key=10characterkey&format=rss20

Google Reader allows you to add that feed, and share it

Shared item uses javascript, though I could easily also feed it to anywhere, such as a WordPress blog

I could have also shared it in a primary shared feed totally by accident.
Now there currently isn’t any really private information in there, other than allowing others to know who my friends are, and who I am communicating with, but then you wouldn’t want to share your email headers either…

Being allowed to share data doesn’t mean it should be as easy as hitting a hotkey when reading a “river of news”

I Appologise To My Facebook Friends

I will remove the sharing in 24 hours, but I feel it is important to use real data to demonstrate this point because for some reason 99% of the tech industry just didn’t understand it 10 months ago.

Facebook & Bloglines Understand it

Facebook point to their help information on notifications

Lets take a look at what Facebook think about sharing and privacy, and why they implemented specific security measures.

Does this mean that everyone can see all my notes now?

No. Each person that can see your notes on Facebook is given a different RSS or Atom feed URL that is unique for them. Only the notes that they are allowed to see will be syndicated via that URL. If you change your privacy settings or friend links, then all the feeds will be appropriately updated.

Unfortunately those people can share those links by accident

Won’t Bloglines and other similar services make my notes content searchable by the world if my friends enter the URL for my Notes feed into those services?

Atom and RSS feeds from Facebook include the Bloglines Feed Access Control extension , and we set the access parameter to “deny” for all of our feeds. We also indicate in our robots.txt that feeds should not be visited or indexed by bots. The major aggregators and search engines (Bloglines, Technorati, Google, Yahoo!) all appear to respect these directives. If you are very concerned about the possibility of someone seeing your notes that you don’t want him or her to see, we’ve added a privacy option that you can set on your notes privacy page which will prevent any of your Notes from being syndicated in any RSS or Atom feed.

The major search engines do support Robots.txt, though I am not sure robots.txt would be sufficient to stop someone hacking.

Bloglines Feed Access Control extension was introduced last August, and it seems no one in the Technology blogging world really took an interest.
Google Reader certainly doesn’t support it as I have proven above.

People can make all this content searchable by mistake, broadcast it on Twitter etc

Doesn’t providing different URLs to every person that views my notes create inefficiency because services that do aggregation will have to retrieve and store my Notes from multiple feeds?

Yes. This is the only way that we can maintain your privacy settings on a per-viewer basis.

Facebook (and Bloglines) seem to be very keen to support privacy and choice, but Google Reader by not supporting “access:restriction relationship” seems to think privacy (and copyright) is a waste of time.

access:restriction relationship=”deny”

Feedburner is now owned by Google and you would expect them to treat all services the same, and to support initiatives that give content owners a choice in what happens to their content.

They have an interface to allow introduction of sharing control within Feedburner, but for some reason only support the blocking of sharing with a service provided by a Google competitor, Yahoo Pipes.

This adds the following code to your feed, and I currently have on my feed, though I will probably switch back.

<xhtml:meta xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" name="robots" content="noindex" /><meta xmlns="http://pipes.yahoo.com" name="pipes" content="noprocess" />

this means that it is not indexed, but all links are still followed (so links back to the feed still give me some juice), and is meant to prevent someone using your content in Yahoo Pipes.

Of course it doesn’t….

Once any content enters Google Reader, it can be tagged and filtered automatically, and Google Reader doesn’t include any of the access controls.

I have fed my protected feed into Google Reader, and then shared it
It took me 2 minutes to set that up and is realistically unblockable – any splogger using Google Reader cannot be prevented from taking your content and feeding their “Made for Adsense” sites.

Facebook Opening Up?

Actually they are already wide open, because the various feed readers other than Bloglines are not supporting their controls.
The announcement today of limited search ability doesn’t matter, someone could easily program an app that would allow people to share everything and have everything searchable, without seeking permission from those sharing.

Ownership and Control of RSS Content

10 months ago everyone seemed perfectly happy to slam me and tell me that I was wrong. The tech blogging fraternity thought at that time that once something is in RSS format, you should no longer have control of it, and have no legal right to complain about other people using it.

The more creatively and more personal RSS feeds become, the more control the owners of that content need for how that content is used, either on purpose, or by mistake.
It shouldn’t be possible to hit a hotkey and share Facebook content with 50,000 subscribers, but it is currently possible.

This is about choice, and privacy

This also isn’t the only problem with Feedburner as as I pointed out when Feedburner were purchased by Google.

Update

I have now switched to using a screenshot rather than a live Javascript feed to improve privacy a little

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

Ponn was made a very generous offer not only providing a free training seminar for PRWeb to her readers, but the people who sign up will get $200 credited to their PRWeb Account to give the service a try.

I haven’t read all the terms, but it appears you will have 45 days to use your free credit.

You will have to phone into the seminar and pay call costs, but what I normally do for seminars is use Skype, which normally always works.

This is even available to existing users of PRWeb, as long as you follow Ponn’s instructions, which are very clear as I just followed them myself and signed up.

You do have to join Ponn’s mailing list as another condition – use a real address, Ponn seems lvery nice and polite during our email conversations, and I am sure will offer some useful information in the email list.

Most of my niche websites have always been “under the radar” – I have never really wanted to promote them through press releases.

What I might do is use PRWeb to promote the No Nofolow community on Bumpzee, and the general Do Follow movement.

$200 worth of promotion is not to be sneazed at, and the training will be interesting.

Hmm, what is good link text for this to Ponn

Free PRWeb Coupon

On April 30th 2007, the Blogosphere will hold a One-Day Blog Silence in honor towards the victims of Virginia. 33 died at the US college massacre.

You can read more details on Steli’s education blog.

Steli has set up a support site for this initiative, where you can find various logos / badges / banners.

Here is an example, suitably sober and stylish

Vlad was one of the people who decided to do some experimentation with the method, and at the same time also decided to give submitting paid press releases a try.

He had some success in the past, but you know how things go – new ideas for promotion come along, and PPC advertising doesn’t require the same kind of time investment up front.

Today Vlad has written about the results he has achieved using press releases to promote a site.