But is it all just hot air?

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Jason Calacanis (here is a link to all my Jason Calacanis coverage)

Michael Gray also known as Graywolf
Brian Provost of Scoreboard Media
Allen Stern of CenterNetworks
… and some quiet blogger called Andy Beard who no one has really heard of but at least he gets everyone’s names spelled correctly ;)

Whilst throughout the podcast Graywolf was referred to as the wolf, and most of Jason Calacanis’ readers know he has been slacking a bit on his fatblogging, in some ways I can’t help thinking that at least in this episode, the real wolf was the one sitting in the chair.

I was my quiet, unassuming self especially at 1am on my “virgin” podcast, and on an international call it isn’t easy butting in on a conversation to make a point.

The domains by proxy discussion generally took over the discussion halfway through, and being a European (si3429 of 2006) I stayed out of it, and there was some great comparison of Squidoo and Mahalo.

Jason seems to think that all SEOs are out to game his service. I still think Mahalo is going to fall into a trap of always listing the same “trusted” sites such as Wikipedia, because for any term there might be 1000 credible links, and many of the SEO / Affiliate sites could easily have better information than even the original sources.

A good “white hat” , “thick” (rather than thin) Affiliate site is going to have potentially better information and links than Mahalo, and Mahalo scalability was looked at.

The last 5 minutes covers the greenhouse program and how people might attempt to game the Mahalo results.

With Mahalo having $250,000 reserved for Wikipedia donations this year from the $10 -$15 that editors can choose to give to Wikipedia instead of keeping for themselves, and the prominent position of Wikipedia links on every results page, I am sure Jason would really love those links being reciprocated (with a followable link to a fellow “trusted” Wiki).

You can probably make more money writing for PayPerPost than Mahalo, and have the chance to write better quality content.

Yes that is a referral link, and if you sign up for PayPerPost using that link, I will make as much as Jason pays for the “1 to 2″ hours he thinks it takes to write a good “Mahalo Search result”

You could also sign up for PayPerPost using the “Review My Post” button at the bottom of every one of my posts. All you then have to do is write a blog post, link through to my post in a short review, and we both make $7.50

If you love everything about Jason Calacanis, and want to rip apart everything I have said about Jason in the past in that review, you would still make $7.50

I suggested in the comments of my previous post on Mahalo that a researcher might spend a full working day in total on a search result.
For a partial search result with the Greenhouse program, I would hope for at least 4 hours of effort in evaluation and creation. If you have a search page with 20 links, surely it takes more than 3 to 6 minutes to find and evaluate each one for inclusion?
In Europe (well in the UK) that is $40 at minimum wage, but surely a good researcher is worth more than that?
Jason says he will evaluate the payments in the future, maybe he will introduce a tiered system where you can qualify for $40 to $100 per search result and bonuses over time for maintaining them.

Wikipedia is a non-profit, Mahalo is a business – outsourced workers don’t benefit from typical startup perks such as partial ownership, they deserve better compensation.

Armen has One Stupidly Simple SEO Tip to give you.

Actually I have been discussing these techniques for months giving myself all kinds of deep links from comments to highly related content. I linked to one good article from Armen’s post in the comments, and there are some free ebooks available that tell you lots and lots about linking, affiliate marketing etc.

Deep links are very important for domains with lots of content. If you can get one or 2 links to every article you write on your blog, that is going to help build up a very strong profile for the Google algorithms, and by linking through to good related content, you are much more likely to get people linking though to you, because you give them a reason to do it.

You need to leave more than “I’ve been writing about this too, here is my link”

Seriously links like that look automated, and I bet a few of the links that have been dropped on various meme sites are automated.

You are provided with a link box and that is what you should use for your links. You are not going to have perfect anchor text, but at least the links are highly relevant.

This will possibly get a little messed up by Top Commenter plugins, and definitely will cause some bugs with Avatars for MyBlogLog, but you will be providing much more useful content.

Interview With Vlad on Affiliate Marketing (includes Dofollow)

Fraser does some great podcast interviews about Affiliate Marketing and this time he interviewed Vlad. In some ways this is fun for me, because Vlad interviewed me by email recently, though not a podcast.
Vlad gives some good beginners tips for affiliate marketing and goes into detail about why he is such a strong supporter of DoFollow (and he mentions me a lot which is a good way to get links).

As I have already mentioned today, it is hard to see links to a top level domain when Technorati suggests you have had 60+ with the amount of memes going around that I didn’t actually join.
Link to some related content and it makes your link more useful, and if you link to someone’s post who has DoFollow, you are able to control the anchor text for the trackback.
Some backlinks can be quite powerful even with careful control of Google juice, and can give your link more relevance. I have some nice internal PR5 pages to link to such as my list of nofollow & dofollow plugins

Missing Out on Bumpzee Link Juice

Every part of bumpzee, unless a blog owner chooses otherwise, is followable links.

How much Link Juice are you missing out on by not joining?

The Bumpzee main community page is PR6 already and that filters down into the top communities, and through lots of smart linking.
Join some communities. Every community has a message board and if you are among the top contributors, you get a link that is most likely PR5.

With the No Nofollow community on Bumpzee already in the top 5 communities (and soon to take the 4th spot), it is guaranteed to get a good share of the link love.

I first started to watch on Sunday morning, and as was typical with my connection, even at Podtech’s lowest quality setting, it was watch 10 seconds of video, wait 30 seconds for it to cache some more.
Then for some reason the stream connection broke and didn’t restart. The payer insisted that I start watching from the beginning again – no chance.

So I opted to download the full MP4 file – the only download version available seems to be the “full quality” version, 180MB – normally that isn’t a problem but it takes a while. For some reason the download was interrupted, and it didn’t resume.

I haven’t actually watched it all yet but some interesting notes:-

How did they manage to discuss so many of the topics I have been covering without mentioning my name once?
Even the change to Jason’s own disclosure came up, and it was referred to something like “you guys” that he had made a change.

This kind of video is great because you can watch the body language.

I tend to agree with the comments on Jason’s blog about references to “most people” this and that assumptions.

Jim Kukral had some good words to say about Ted’s marketing and cool head.

I got the feeling that this interview wasn’t Pay Per Post being put on the spot, but Jason Calacanis, or at least a bit of both.

So anyway Jason, as ThisNext is so honourable and above board, how many ThisNext users who use ThisNext with affiliate links include a disclosure at the start of the review, and does ThisNext require disclosure?

Update:- whilst this initially started off as quite a short post with very little commentary, do take the time to read the comments because they contain some intense debate regarding disclosure in paid posts, advertorials and affiliate marketing

It is “down to earth” rather than full of hype (as you would expect from an Irishman), and my first impressions of it are very good (and that is not because I got a mention in the first episode).

Paul concentrates on key issues such as a followup to the krak.dk scandal, and also discussing linking and A-list bloggers.

It is actually ironic that while Robert Scoble was making a big issue about other A-lists not linking to him in regards the Intel chip news, Paul has a very hard time gaining a-list coverage of the Krak deep linking issue, despite it making the front page of Digg.

The Krak.dk scandal is actually a bigger news story than Intel’s new chips. What Krak are doing threatens the integrity of the the internet and the way linking on the internet might be abused by larger websites who offer great linkbait, and then charge you for linking to them a few years later.

I don’t know the exact terminology that press guidelines or rules use, but generally it is something like

Give corrections with equal precedence and weighting

Effectively this means:-

• If you published the story on the front-page, your correction should be on the front page as well
• If you wrote a 2000 word article lambasting someone, a 5 word retraction might not be looked on as suitable

When blogging generally it seems to be acceptable if it is a minor correction to correct the post with an update, but I suppose that also depends at least partially on the number of people who might have read the original article.

I have noticed some controversial high traffic blogs never make a correction, not even in their comments. A correction in the comments isn’t enough, because most of your readers won’t see the correction.

How about Podcasts?

Professionally produced Podcasts take a lot of editing, and are often downloaded first, and then listened to a few days later. Making a correction in the Podcast isn’t easy, and wouldn’t receive the same level of distribution.

Do it how the Pros Do It

The WordPress Podcast mentioned my Disclosure Policy Plugin in Episode 14 back in December. I was grateful for the mention, but made a comment to clarify some of the points raised in the Podcast.

They only publish the podcast approximately once a week, and had a very full schedule already planned. I honestly didn’t expect a high profile correction.

Episode 18 has just been published, and they spent half of the show dealing with listener feedback. They actually read almost all of the comment I made, word-for-word (and it was quite long), and then responded with an acknowledgement.

I think the original mention of the plugin was about 30 seconds towards the end of Episode 14, and the correction was over 3 minutes long… these guys are real pros.

It is well worth subscribing to their WordPress Podcast Feed although it is another Feedburner Feed that needs the RSS overlay fixed.

A private subscription service for text, audio and video content, even involving a paid subscription fee has been possible for more than a year, based upon RSS.

In a recent podcast Robert Scobles interviewed the Google Reader team, where they made clear that from the start, one of the primary features of Google Reader was the sharing of your private RSS feeds. This is with total disregard for the intended private use of the RSS content.

Some background

For years email marketing has been plagued by spam filters. Whilst they become more accurate in detecting spam content, and allow requested content to be delivered, to effectively use email for marketing, and in some cases even personal messages, you would have to use an email service such as Aweber or Getresponse to ensure your content was delivered.
RSS guarantees 100% deliverability, and because of the way RSS is delivered, it is possible to include rich multimedia content within the messages. Delivering HTML email currently is much harder than text, and there are multiple compatibility problems with different email clients, both offline and online.
RSS will soon become integrated within our daily working environments, as an equivalent to email within Windows Vista, and online applications such as Gmail and their Google Reader.

RSS Technology being Destroyed

(before it has a chance to succeed)

One good example is Feed Magic. I have been a supporter of Feed Magic for more than a year, I own a license for the script itself, and a subscription to the service.

I am an affiliate for the product, and if you decide to purchase their product, I will recieve compensation. But that is not the primary reason for this post.

But can I effectively use them as intended?

Increasingly the answer is an unfortunate… no!

I can’t use what I paid for effectively, and that is the primary reason for this post.

The more indiscriminate sharing of RSS is being encouraged, the less chance break-through technology (that would revolutionise the delivery of marketing messages and vital support information) has of succeeding.

The Google representitives in the podcast actively encouraged the sharing of linkblogs.

I freely admit that the potential of Feed Magic is in its future. It has so much potential.

It should be noted that the RSS options provided by Aweber and Getresponse are nowhere near as advanced as Feedmagic. You could achieve their RSS features just by feeding your own blog with the content from your autoresponder by email.

RSS is subscribing to content you want. There is no way to spam your RSS box. If you decide you don’t want the content, you can unsubscribe.

So Google in part, with their Google Reader and very clear philosophy in the design of the service, are destroying something that could defeat email spam forever… the potential of RSS.

Robert Scoble had the opportunity to discuss this situation with the Google Reader team. Notice when he commented to my post on Google Reader (I assume he read it, and my reply)

Robert is also still sharing content of his linkblog, without asking the owner of the content permission.

This is just one example of how great web 2.0 software can actually harm rather than promote.

Edit: The Feedmagic site was discontinued – some of the technology might have ended up in Nanacast.