Dear Rackspace

I am actually a fan of your new Cloud Servers service. There are some huge benefits in using your service that as both a marketing geek and affiliate I can highlight and potentially drive you a lot of business.

However today you have just introduced a payola scheme that will make every one of my clean affiliate links look like a paid link, thus I am going to have to nofollow every single link I give you, forever.

You want me to use badges like this, and in exchange will give me “Goodies” of an unspecified nature.

Powered by Rackspace Cloud Hosting

The links are visible, nothing is hidden, but all the same it is effectively a paid linking scheme.

Here is what they said in an email sent to customers

Our New “Link-To-Us” Program
We’re also launching a new “Link-To-Us” program today. In essence, customers who post new links or change their old Mosso links on their websites to our new http://www.rackspacecloud.com site will receive special goodies. The more sites you post a link on, the more great stuff you will get. How cool is that? Please check out all the links here: http://www.rackspacecloud.com/links

Thanks so much for being a part of the Rackspace family, and please keep the feedback coming so that we can continue to build the most complete and easy-to-use cloud platform on the web.

The sad thing is this would all be unnecessary if you just made some minor changes to your affiliate program.

The Rackspace Cloud Affiliate Program

As far as I am aware, the Rackspace Cloud affiliate program is effectively “customers only”, as in you have to actually create an account, but you don’t have to necessarily spend anything on their various cloud services.

That being said they have a decent Cloudfiles storage product, and their CDN is reasonably priced, offers incredible low latency, and has a strong API.

The Cloud Servers product is new, the API is still in beta, and on first glance looks to actually be more expensive than using the Slicehost sister service, but if you are looking to create a highly scalable platform, there are significant advantages.

The Mosso Cloudsites service is also highly regarded, though you have to be careful on processor cycles – for an affiliate the referral payout on Cloudsites is much more attractive, just a shame it isn’t monthly recurring.

Problems With Rackspace Cloud Referral Program

Have You Heard About The Rackspace Cloud Referral Program?

Here is how it works:
If someone you refer to Cloud Sites hosts with us for at least 31 days (past their first billing cycle), we will either credit your account $100 or cut you a check for the same (if you want the check, just sign some tax information and that’s it). For all Cloud Files and Cloud Servers referrals there is a $10 referral commission.
There is no need to register before participating, simply have any referral use the primary email address on your account as the ‘referral code’ during the sign-up process online. To give you credit, they MUST enter your email address when signing up. Questions? Don’t hesitate to give us a call anytime. 1-877-934-0409.

One of the big problems is the referral code – you have to encourage people to enter your primary email address as a coupon code.

The obvious workaround is to create a new primary email address for your Rackspace account (and display it as an image)

It would be so much easier if you could define your own coupons

The next problem is incentive – why would someone use my Rackspace referral code?

Rackspace do not currently offer their own incentive to use a coupon, so it would be down to an affiliate to offer something of significant perceived value as an added incentive.

I have something planned for that, that will only be available to people who sign up for a Rackspace Cloud account using my email as a Rackspace coupon. (note: they are still using the mosso.com domain)

I currently have no idea how to make delivery of bonuses scalable, as there doesn’t seem to be a reporting interface for affiliates in the current control panel – maybe they have a dedicated affiliate panel as well, under their original Rackspace affiliate program.

Added Friction

Rackspace might think that not running a formal affiliate system, and just using email addresses somehow removed friction from the referral process, but in many ways it adds friction for serious affiliates.

80% of new customers will be referred by only the top 20% of affiliates, it might even be 90/10 or 95/5

Not Suitable For PPC

There is no way to effectively track this affiliate program offering

• no subids
• no deep linking
• no way to export data (that I can see)
• no thought to integration marketing

Disclosure

This Rackspace marketing campaign seems totally unworkable, especially the direction disclosure is taking.

I am sure Robert Scoble will love the idea of his employers shilling for links.

Izea & PayPerPost have more transparency and better disclosure than Rackspace in this new marketing campaign.
That being said, I always wonder what benefits large blogs have when they frequently have followed links to their hosting providers. Sure they like the service, but that can’t possibly be the full monty.

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

There is currently a case running in the Danish courts that will effectively decide the law in Denmark for linking to a page other than a home page, typically known as deep linking.
We are not talking about hot-linking, pulling an image or video off someone else’s server into the middle of your own content, but linking as you might to this blog article, using the permalink.

There is a mapping company in Denmark that creates web pages based on other people’s data, such as a company address, and provides maps on how to get there.
They then bury deep within their terms and conditions a link to another page that states that they will charge you money if you link to one of their map pages without permission.

I suppose that is similar to me adding a terms and conditions page, and from that a linking page stating that anyone who links to my blog has to pay me $1000.

Sounds like a lot of money doesn’t it?

Krak.dk only charge $940

Krak.dk have been forced / encouraged by their previous outing on Digg’s front page to not charge a blogger for linking to a map, as long as they are not for profit, and providing they ask permission first. As of this writing however I am led to believe they haven’t changed their official paperwork on their site, or improved their notification on the content pages that you could be charged $1000 linking to information about themselves.

Business sites however are not in the clear, and one is currently fighting “the just cause” for the rest of internet users, but is having their plight ignored.

Paul O’Flahery recently wrote:-

The court case between Gauguin (an auctioneer house) and Krak.dk is now well underway and I’m eagerly awaiting the outcome of this. The case is getting good coverage in the Danish blogosphere (just check out Overskrift), and well it should as the outcome of this case could affect us all.

Unfortunately this hasn’t been picked up by any major Search Engine news site, or A – List Blogger.

The consequences of Krak winning this court battle, and maybe for the ruling to have a knock on effect across Europe are extremely serious, and could damage the way the internet works.

Websites would again become insular, not linking where credit is due simply because noone has time to search for hidden terms and conditions requiring you to pay $1000 just to link to a page.

I did my own analysis of all the links currently going to Krak.dk internal pages – their sugar trap will possibly net them $6m if they win.

Here is the current statement of the rules from Krak AFTER all the coverage from the last 2 weeks.

Official Krak answer:
Every blogger in the world is welcome to use deep links to Krak maps for free. But please ask us.
When it comes to commercial use, Krak has the same policy as Google and others. You cannot use our copyrighted maps without asking.
Krak alone decides whether the use is commercial or not.
In the actual case, the site by nature looks like a blog, but may in fact be a business, so we decided he had to pay.
If we were wrong, and if the blogger in question in fact is not selling anything (no animals or accessories), we will reconsider.

Best regards,

Poul Moeller
Kraks Forlag A/S

• This is more serious than a small tweak to a search engine’s algorithm
• A change in the terms for Google Adsense is insignificant compared
• The latest start-up from “Demo” is inconsequential
• Hell this is bigger news than Robert Scoble talking at a new PayPerPost gig (and for the record I respect Robert for doing so, and for his disclosure)
• And for search, no matter how important people might think Wikipedia is, I guarantee the ability to freely link to any web page is of much higher consequence.
• I am not sure how this compares with Britney Spears or Paris Hilton up the skirt pics, but imagine you couldn’t link to the site that just listed them?
• I am not sure how this compares in importance for global warming – hell if people couldn’t link to each other, maybe the internet would become less attractive, and we would all plant more trees.
• Windows Vista? Well you can always read an opinion on Paul’s blog about how his better half liked it (a non-geek)

Maybe I should spend the next hour checking every page of Paul’s blog in Denmark just in case he has a hidden charge for linking to his. I don’t have to do that because he is a normal sane person running a normal legitimate business and doesn’t need to trap people into paying him money.

Seriously, this story need some main-stream international press coverage.

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.

What would be better than Robert Scoble’s OPML file?

The Best Search Technology

Google Custom Search Engine gives great search results, and quite often gives better results than the main index.

Alister Cameron has just launched his new Scoble Search

It does give more current results on Technology news than Google might provide from the main search, though it doesn’t cover as many sources.

Robert Scoble Megite Meme

Megite have had a meme for Robert Scoble for some time, based upon the same OPML file.

It provides a great alternative to Robert’s Shared Feed from Google Reader. You don’t get Robert’s top picks, but the top picks based upon the people Robert reads. It is maybe slightly broader content, but it is automatic, and works at times that Robert is taking some time off to read his email.

Custom Google Toolbar Button

Of course it is a total coincidence that I happen to have a Google Toolbar button that points directly to Alisters custom search, and includes the Scobleizer Meme on Megite.

Robert Scoble – Custom Search | Megite Meme | Toolbar Button

But then my readers might not believe in coincidence ;)

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.

The press and “A” list bloggers have been constantly touting the use of Google Reader over the past few weeks. Overall it is a useful piece of software, and might even become my permanent rss reader in the future.

But the Google reader has major flaws, which noone is really talking about. In fact I have noticed a growing tendancy for reporting thee flaws as a cool feature, without any emphasis on the negative aspects of using these “features”.

Google Reader Flaw 1

The Google Reader doesn’t currently send readership data to services like Feedburner. If you notice your blog readership go down, it is because you have been touting Google Reader too much.

Google Reader Flaw 2

There has been a few mentions of “Linkblogs”, especially by Robert Scoble on his Scobleizer blog most recently here, but also here here and here.

Sharing a link blog privately with a few people, maybe inside a company isn’t going to have a major consequence.

But if 1000s of people subscribe to Robert Scobles linkblog this will have 2 major effects.

1. For Robert himself, his readership could go down, because people will read the main original story, not his commentary. It would be much better to refeed your linkblog somewhere, to at least monitor subscribers, and maybe monetize the feed.
2. For the original publishers, they don’t get subscribers, but they do maybe get more readers if Robert et al decide their posts are significant. You could potentially have 10000 people reading your content (full post content), and have zero subscribers to your own feed.

Google Reader Flaw 3

Link blogs again but in this case link blog abuse and splogs.

Google have taken some precautions with their linkblogs, unlike many services that offer something similar.

A search in Google for Roberts Link Blog will not find it.

Google isn’t even indexing links to Link Blogs

MSN seem to be in the same ballpark, obviously Google had a chat with them

But Google forgot to have a nice chat with Yahoo

Yahoo don’t list any information relating to the contents of the link blogs, which shows they are obeying some directive not to index the pages, such as robots.txt, though more likely something in .htaccess

Thus the shared pages in Google are not in themselves the same as other splogs that have been causing uproar recently, where websites have been taking full feeds, without permission, and monetizing them with adsense. (I don’t worry if people do that with my feeds, as long as the backlinks don’t contain “no follow”)
The major problem is that quite often thse are full content feeds, that publishers wanted read by their subscribers. Many publishers are currently trying to fight sploggers by installing plugins to their blogs, such as the Antileech plugin for wordpress.

The problem is that Antileech is now useless.

No blogger in their right mind is going to block Google from picking up their feeds to serve Google Reader users.

Each Feed can be assigned a tag automatically. The method to do it is not obvious within the interface, but it is possible.

That automatically grabbed feed quite often will have the full contents, and a plugin like Antileech isn’t going to do anything to stop it.

Once you have a feed available, preferably with full contents, it is very easy for someone to use that content on another site, sometimes without permission. There is nothing legally or ethically wrong with the tools used for this. There are plenty of reasons to use such tools ethically, and quite often the professional, designed for the purpose “splogging tools” actually do a more professional job of using and attributing your content than the simple free tools available.

One example of a simple tool is WP-Autoblog . More sophisticated tools can take a series of excerpts, automatically tag the contents based on keywords, substitute links with “deep linking” affiliate links (and yes that is ethical, because the blog ownes wants you to promote his blog and products). An example of such a tool is Blog Auto Publisher(aff). BAP isn’t a fancy tool, but it is hellish effective and can be used ethically.

Conclusions

Google Reader in itself isn’t evil. The features could quite reasonably for an ethical purpose.

I could quite easily grab all of Robert Scobles linkblog, automatically retag it all, and then feed it to a private blog for my own use, to better be able to find information on tech related subjects from a trusted source.

Something like that on a corporation intranet would be a valuable and possibly ethical use.

But in most such uses, the original author is not going to have subscribers to their feed, and is not going to know that their work is even being read.

My strongest advice is to avoid abusing this feature, and not publish the location of your linkfeed, especially on a high traffic blog.

To ensure I stay on topic, it should be noted that Google Reader is a very powerful tool for the creation of niche websites. I admit to using various tools to reuse and mix 3rd party content, including Blog Auto Publisher, but the content I use is with permission and where necessary with attribution.

Update: Some Supplementary Information

The sharing feature within Google Reader isn’t new. The big point is that until now, very few people have been sharing their feeds with others. It was introduced March 21st 2006 on the Google Reader blog.

Here is a very good technical overview of how feeds can be shared with Google Reader

Here is a nice list of tools that can be used to create splogs, but they can be used to create unique content as well, that has value to the readers of the content. We can add Google Reader to the list.