On Shoemoney, Pam takes a pop at the Ifollow Movement, the lists of links to dofollow blogs that traversed the Blogosphere 6 months ago.
Whilst I was included on some of those lists, I didn’t take an active roll, as the lists really didn’t present any value to me.

I suppose Akismet is great if you don’t care about the comments on your blog, or whether the good ones appear.

Comment moderation with Spam Karma can take time if you get a lot of comments but not much more than the time it takes to read them, and if you are using subscribe to comments, you are much less likely to be hit with a CAN SPAM complaint – I see some fairly nasty comment spam come through to my mailbox all the time from Akismet protected blogs.

I applaud Greg Boser’s efforts to create a hand picked selection of Dofollow blogs around a specific niche, though he will find many of the blogs in the Dofollow community on Bumpzee are high quality, but not all to do with online marketing (thank goodness)
There will be an OPML file available for the community very soon, I just need some time to do some testing and to give Scott some feedback.

Dofollow & Community Go Hand In Hand

If you want to be a successful blogger like Liz, note we are not talking about a successful affiliate who just happens to have a large fan base, but only earns 3% of income from blogging such as Shoemoney, then the comments you receive on your blog are as much, or even more important than the original article.

Lots depends on your business model as to whether creating a professional, positive business culture in your comment area is important to you.

As Kirk points out with some amazing comment stats Liz has been very successful in building up a community over 2 years. 50,000 real comments.

In a year I have only had just over 5000 comments, and many remark that I get a lot of comments.

Part of it Kirk attributes to subscribe to comments, it is important – I remarked a while ago to Darren at Problogger that one change he could make to his blog was to reintroduce subscribe to comments, as I would certainly participate more.

By doing so, I feel more a part of his community, I comment more frequently because I can follow the conversation that take place afterwards in response, and also link to Darren more.
It would be interesting to see if he can attribute an increase in return visitors due to subscribe to comments. Maybe there is a way with some hacking to measure that.

I would estimate that less than 2% of the comments I receive on a daily basis are people commenting purely for a search engine boost, and whilst I am a human so I can make a mistake, I would estimate that 90% of those comments don’t appear on the blog even if they sound vaguely on topic. Of the ones that do get on the blog, most have the link removed.

The same is true of deliberately self promotional comments of little value.

The best way to tell my readers you wrote about a subject, is to link to me with a trackback – I have seen up to 50 people leaving my site in the past following an early trackback with a good headline

I don’t mind good quality timely link drops. As an example Court mentioned the “real” PageRank update to me in a comment with a link to his post.

PageRank & Real Attribution

For me, attribution isn’t an after thought of a careless thanks or token gesture, I always try to give people links that will send as much traffic as possible, or be of most value to them (useful keywords).
I suppose you could look on it as the whitehat way of “selling links”

As an example, here is the link I thanked Courtney with:-

When people base their article around information obtained by others, the least they can do is try to send some traffic to the other party, otherwise the link isn’t much better than a paid link.

Sure it might fulfil legal obligations, and possibly let the search engines know the source of the content, but is that really sufficient?

Regular readers however are going to be shocked about this but in my opinion…

Shoemoney’s Disclosure Is Better Than Rand’s

I am calling it a debacle rather than a debate, because in a debate there is at least a serious attempt to do some fact gathering. Maybe there were time constraints both in the planning and the delivery, and it is good to see disclosure being discussed, but I honestly expected after the previous round of blog and counter-blog for there to be a more in-depth look.

There Are Regulations For Bloggers

Major companies such as Clickbank require disclosure. As I pointed out in that article, they link through to the FTC regulations for Word of Mouth marketing.

How anyone can debate whether affiliates need to disclose without using the phrase “Word of Mouth Marketing” is just ridiculous.
There is a big difference between a recommendation and an advert in the sidebar.

It Is Not Who You Talk About, But Also What You Don’t Talk About

Why don’t you rip apart Google on their referral units, where they effectively prevent disclosure, whilst encouraging WOMM.
I mentioned this again recently in my post regarding the Feedburner acquisition.
People don’t criticise Google because it would affect their relationship with Google.

On the other hand, bloggers seem more than happy to jump on the bandwagon for linkbait talking about services that don’t pay the bills.

No Mention of Word of Mouth Marketing Association

I have had issues with the WOMMA and disclosure in the past, but at least I acknowledge they exist.

Disclosure Policy

It isn’t hard to do – Shoemoney now effectively has a disclosure policy, Rand doesn’t. All he really needs to do now is stick a link to it in his sidebar, or even better add it in some way to his feeds using something akin to my disclosure policy feedflare, and everything is 100% above board and he can drop as many affiliate links as he likes without feeling compelled by anyone to stick a little (aff) after links which not all visitors would understand anyway.

As I noted recently, John Reese is also using disclosure for AuctionAds affiliate links, follow his lead, as John rarely puts a foot wrong.

Shilling for Google and Yahoo? Grow Some Brass Ones

Maybe not, but I think the majority of people writing about SEO and the search engines in general need to grow some brass ones, such as Jack Humphrey has just demonstrated.

In fact lots of the blogs I have been reading up until recently on a regular basis seem to take no stance on major issues, and to just ask their reader’s opinions, or link out to people supporting their opinion, without actually stating it.

Payola

I deliberately didn’t link through to any particular article when I listed 32 kinds of linking Payola. It is interesting that the podcast highlighted at least one more form, and possibly more.

I actually like Dave Naylor’s take on this

I bet if I dig deep enough into any blog a can find a link out with a motive

How critical can you be of a company with whom you have an NDA, or with whom you might like to have a special relationship with in the future?

Shoemoney Media and Mediawhiz (The parent company of Text Link Ads and ReviewMe) have released an innovative new monetization model, based upon Ebay Auctions – AuctionAds.com

Mainstream media will no doubt not even think let alone write about the 2 core advantages of this system for a large segment of the affiliate marketplace.

1. International – Even affiliates in the UK were unable to join the Ebay affiliate program in the US
2. Payment – Payment is made by Paypal rather than check, with a $10 threshold

International Affiliates

If you are an affiliate based in the US, almost all affiliate marketing doors are open. If you live anywhere else, or if your company is registered somewhere else, you ultimately always hit barriers for your participation.

Ebay International Affiliate Barriers

Here is an excerpt from the Ebay (US) Affiliates FAQ

The Ebay affiliate program is managed by Commission Junction, who provide an international affiliate management system.
Unfortunately Ebay has chosen to separate their affiliate program by territory, at least for some.
Affiliates based in the US can join the affiliate program of other counties, affiliates outside the US cannot join the US program… one day the European Union might decide that is not free trade.

Here is an excerpt from the Ebay UK Affiliate FAQ:-

It is not Commission Junctions fault, they provide an international platform, although it is confusing for affiliates to identify which affiliate programs they are entitled to join.

International Payment

With Paypal being offered there are several advantages

• Low $10 payment threshold
• No excessive charges for processing international checks
• No delays in cashflow (though it is not specified how quickly AuctionAds will pay)

This might not be a universal advantage for all affiliates, because Commission Junction do offer direct bank transfers in a number of territories. A lot will depend on how AuctionAds calculate when a payment is due.
If their system allows for them to make payments faster than Commission Junction, that is a significant advantage.

There is no need to sign up for our affiliate program because our affiliate program is built right into the ads you display! If a user clicks on the “Ads by AuctionAds” that is displayed and signs up for our service you earn a bonus 2% of all revenue generated by that user for the 6 months.

You will get paid the first of every month via Paypal. We feature a 30 day cookie on all referrals.

Ebay With TradeDoubler

I noticed that the affiliate program for Ebay.pl is actually handled via TradeDoubler – I don’t currently publish any sites in Polish, but that might be something I will look into for some of my future publishing – maybe their Ebay interface is more “International Friendly”.
I do know that the payment threshold quoted was 150 zloty – $50 USD which is far higher than the $10 Threshold offered by AuctionAds.

If TradeDoubler doesn’t provide global Geo-targetting, it would only be suitable for non-English language sites, at least compared to AuctionAds.

Other Advantages of Auction Ads

What is the advantage over CJ/eBay direct affiliation?

Easy implementation and the leverage of AuctionAds’ creative delivery of eBay’s auctions and our ability to achieve the higher performance incentive tiers with the aggregate volume of traffic to make more money than they could with their own affiliate relationship.

I have niche websites which receive 90% US traffic, but I have never been able to offer Ebay as an alternative sales channel. Whilst I have been able to use Chitika adverts, and have included affiliate links through mainly Linkshare, Ebay quite often was offering much better deals for the products my visitors wanted to buy.

Being able to offer the best deals and make money from doing so is always the best option for affiliates.

Live AuctionAds Examples

So here are some example “live” adverts – no screenhots you will have to click through if reading this in an RSS Reader.

Keyword: Blogging

Keyword: Internet Marketing

Keyword: Gardening and “Mole trap”

Feature Suggestions

• Keyword Targetting – very much like Chitika, a very specific product related keyword seems to be the best option currently. I am not actually sure it would be an advantage to offer contextual or based on several keywords. I did try comma delimited keywords and they didn’t seem to work. Maybe category + keyword would be a good alternative.
• Remove Ads By AuctionAds – if you wanted to place 3 half-banners vertically because that suited your layout, the AuctionAds link in each of them would be inappropriate. Alternatively provide multiple image alignment options – also allow the colour to be changed
• RSS Feeds – I would love to be able to use an RSS feed of the adverts, that I could then use to style in whatever way I choose.
• Direct Affiliate Link – Please provide a direct affiliate link – I missed the link in the interface which is under Account Home.
• Pay Per Click – It would be great if AuctionAds in some way to provide a bridge for international affiliates to advertise Ebay products in the US market via PPC
• auctionads_ad_client – for the tin-foil hat brigade, there needs to be a way of generating multiple values for every niche website. Maybe you can do a deal with Google Yahoo and MSN so these don’t appear in search results, but that isn’t total anonymity.
• Campaigns – Ability to create a campaign on the fly, or at least while you are creating code – this is possible using the wizard, but it seems you have 3 seperate processes currently, and it should be possible to have just one.
• Presets – the ability to save a preset for colour selection, and maybe retain a complete history of ads already created for different campaigns.
• Live Results – Currently the number of results are displayed using Ajax, it would be good to be able to preview them
• Hide Campaign ID – The ability to have none human readable campaign identification (this seems to have been added while I was writing) – I would love to be able to assign my own (as above, campaigns on-the-fly)

Take A Look For Yourself

I strongly encourage you to take a look at AuctionAds for yourself. If you are an international affiliate, it is in my opinion the best option for the Ebay affiliate program, other than features such as PPC and various RSS and API integration. If that can be added to the mix at a later date, AuctionAds as a conduit for Ebay is going to be huge.

Where is the link? At the bottom of the example ads or just click here.

Further Discussion

Actually very few sites so far have picked this up, so I will add links as I see them

Techcrunch seems to be first with the news – they are thinking about giving it a test run on their more product related sites. The advantage AuctionAds for them is that it is Geo-targetted – AuctionAds handle the backend merging of multiple affiliate programs.

Linda at 5 Star Affiliates so far has what she admits to being a short writeup, but she has spotted that sometimes the auction items are expired. She has also managed to hack an affiliate referral ID, which I will have to take a look at doing as well.

Update on AuctionAds

Darren emphasised that AuctionAds is very much a network that will work best with product focused sites. He says he has also had a chance to have a look at the backend – I am not sure that is behind the scenes of what a normal publisher sees, but Mediawhiz normally put together fairly solid services, and I am sure Shoemoney’s team have the security under control.

John Chow also did an in-depth review of of AuctionAds explaining how the payment system works for normal Ebay affiliates in great depth, and also how he intends to use the adverts on his product reviews sites.

Ajay has knocked together some code for making AuctionAds to a certain extent “contextual”, either using UTW or SimpleTags Data.
I don’t think this approach is ideal currently, because I have had a chance to exchange emails with Ddn and currently the widget uses keywords supplied randomly rather than in priority order, unlike Chitika which uses a priority scale. This is something that will be fixed in the near future.

This is important, take for instance this example (though unlikely a good example for Ebay content)

wordpress theme, wordpress, blogging

If these were used randomly, you would probably end up with more adverts which used the keyword blogging, and you might end up with Britney Spears T-shirts or other celebrity stuff. The adverts are often being optimised based on which adverts will finish soon.

If they are taken in priority order then this is ideal, and you could use

barcode number, camera model, camera manufacturer, camera type, photography

For many blogs, using a mixture of custom fields and categories might prove better for targetting, because they can be listed in a specific order. UTW allows tags to be displayed in popularity order, so maybe that could be reversed to achieve almost the same thing.

Why Nofollow Shoemoney.com?

Here is what is written in the Google webmaster guidelines:-

Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

Shoemoney recently has been been creating lots of controversial link baiting and hackbaiting content. This includes how to hack MyBlogLog, and encouraging other people to try it out for themselves.
Whilst the Google Webmaster Guidelines don’t mention hacking sites as being a bad neighbourhood, their Adsense guidelines certainly do not allow Adsense to be displayed on sites containing hacking content.

Taken from the Google Adsense Policy:-

Sites displaying Google ads may not include:
* Violent content, racial intolerance, or advocacy against any individual, group, or organization
[snip]
* Hacking/cracking content
* Deceptive or manipulative content or construction to improve your site’s search engine ranking, e.g., your site’s PageRank
[snip]
* Any other content that is illegal, promotes illegal activity, or infringes on the legal rights of others

I tend to look on the criteria for sites eligible to display Adsense as a good indication of what a “good neighbourhood” is as the webmaster guidelines are not very specific, and leave this up to the judgement of the webmaster.

I should also note that hacking material also contravenes Yahoos policies as well as I mentioned in my previous MyBlogLog post, so there is very little room for doubt.

My personal opinion (from a business standpoint, and not based upon differences in opinion) is that Shoemoney.com now contains objectionable content including information on how to hack and manipulate the data on 3rd party websites. In some ways what he has also been promoting could have been looked on as identity theft.

As such Shoemoney.com has become a “bad neighbourhood” to which I personally don’t want to link, and so I modified a plugin to save me time in deleting links from previous content and comments.

As I have the plugin, I though others should have the option of using it as well.

Plugin Name: Shoemoney nofollow
Plugin URI: http://andybeard.eu/2007/02/shoemoney-nofollow/
Description: Searches for links to shoemoney.com, and adds a rel=”nofollow” tag if necessary (based on Wikipedia Nofollow by Ken Yasumoto-Nicolson and Identify External Links by Mark Jaquith)
Author: Andy Beard
Version: 1.0
Author URI: http://andybeard.eu/
License: GPL

Download Shoemoney Nofollow for WordPress

I should note this plugin has nothing to do with disagreements with Shoemoney in the past and his invitation tactics as previously discussed. Previously I had left all links intact from my domain to his, but as he is now encouraging hacking on an almost daily basis, I had to take action.

This seems to be a growing trend, and so many bloggers are falling for the linkbait, poorly researched content, and unethical marketing practices.

Reactionary development of computer products and services can prove to be a disaster both for development cycles and the feature set of a product. An extremely careful balance has to be achieved between supporting the wishes of hardcore supporters of a product, and achieving core goals and maintaining a development schedule.

I have experienced this first hand in the computer games industry being the middleman both between publisher <> development team, and consumer <> development team. I know that I have significantly disrupted development of products in the past, and at times I even ignored or delayed passing information from a publisher or customer on to a development team simply because of the disruption it could cause. Sometimes I used a middleman, passing information onto my only superior, the company MD, and allowing him to decide whether the feedback should be passed on to the development manager or development team members.
I was also in charge of sales and marketing internationally, and even though we had a relatively small organisation, channels of communication existed to prevent disruption to the development schedules. Here is a good article on the subject.

If someone is attempting to hack your website, steal your content, or damage your business, the expected reaction shouldn’t be to pat them on the back, thank them for their help and offer them all kinds of bonuses and credibility.

In a web environment, the logical first step to people abusing your site is to block their IP – this is what various spam control systems do. How many bloggers have a terms of service stating that if you spam them with comments they will block your IP address?

It shouldn’t matter how influential a blogger thinks they are, the tail shouldn’t wag the dog.

The first sign Shoemoney received that he had been banned from MyBlogLog was a 403 Error. From the w3.org site:-

10.4.4 403 Forbidden

The server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it. Authorization will not help and the request SHOULD NOT be repeated. If the request method was not HEAD and the server wishes to make public why the request has not been fulfilled, it SHOULD describe the reason for the refusal in the entity. If the server does not wish to make this information available to the client, the status code 404 (Not Found) can be used instead.

If someone was spamming me, scraping me, or hacking me, and I could pinpoint it down to a single IP address, that is exactly what message I would give them. It doesn’t matter who the hell it is.

I doubt Shoemoney was sending signals such as:-

Hey this is Shoemoney, I am hacking your site for hackbait to get links and subscribers, but it is all harmless and not really intended to damage your business

Now on one point yesterday I was wrong, it seems that whilst an email was claimed to have been sent a month ago regarding the cookies problem with MyBlogLog (but from the French site), it might have got lost in various technical and logistics problems.

Another insight, Shoemoney had been asked specifically by the MyBlogLog team to give them a heads up before posting any more hacking MBL information.
Here is what Eric posted in a comment on Li Evans post:-

Li –

Here’s the thing. We *did* have reach out to Shoe. Every time he posted a hack we thanked him in his comments for pointing out a vulnerability.

Then a couple days before this was posted, Scott Rafer emailed him and said, basically, “dude, I understand you’re pissed at Jeremey Zawodny and so be it. But keep in mind that he’s not part of the team and it still just us five guys bangin away. We’ve had a good relationship with you and we would just appreciate a heads up before you post your next exploit.”

And then he posted this.

(I had previously omitted the previous info because I was unable to get in touch with Rafer last night to request permission to discuss his email exchange.)

OMG A Tracking Service is Tracking Clicks

Today I have read yet another piece of Hackbait on Shoemoney’s site, though admittedly by his partner in crime DDN.

He has come up with the absolute revelation that tracking programs track clicks on adverts.

He thinks it is a scandal that a Yahoo owned company can track clicks on Google adverts.

Something Stinks & It is Not MyBlogLog

Google Analytics can be used to track Yahoo clicks in exactly the same way as MyBlogLog can be used to track Adsense clicks, and people have been doing it for a long time.
Aaron Wall posted code to do this in November 2005, and it was also discussed on Digital Inspiration in December 2005.

I keep a reasonable eye on discussions regarding analytics. I have never seen anyone claim that Google shouldn’t be allowed to have tracking information on Yahoo clicks or for that matter any other monetization links.

In many ways MyBlogLog having this tracking information as part of Yahoo is a good thing.

1. Defending on Clickfraud – A Yahoo owned tracking service would be looked on as a more credible source of data than a self hosted script.
2. Personal Data – MyBlogLog probably have enough data not just to isolate the IP address, but possibly who clicked the advert – for defence of your Adsense account, surely that is an ideal scenario

You should always have some form of tracking for advertising – both Google Analytics and MyBlogLog (Yahoo) fall short in this capacity, and I hope they improve in the future making this more accessible for average users to improve their advertising returns. Microsoft are also entering this field, and I doubt very much they will prevent tracking of clicks on Yahoo or Google adverts. That would actually make their tracking system useless.

Tracking systems should track advertising… period

In many ways anyone looking to earn revenue from their blog should demand more tracking and interoperability and not less.

MyBlogLog could easily become a universal tracker for the masses, it is so easy to switch between different sites to check stats, and Google Analytics for an average user is a little confusing.

I am not in a position to prove whether Yahoo ads can be tracked with Google Analytics.

With Adsense the code can be placed on any site, so I could just stick some Adsense on this site for people to test, either with my own publisher ID or… someone elses.
I am not sure whether that works with Yahoo, they might lock advertising code to a particular domain in their beta testing, but I am not going to use someone elses Yahoo code just to prove a point.

The Danger Of Controversy

Now if your content is deliberately controversial, and especially regarding hacking, you are not just placing your MyBlogLog account in danger.

Yahoo YPN Terms

Here is a small excerpt from the YPN FAQ

We will not show results on pages that contain problematic content, including but not limited to:
[snip]
# Propaganda, potentially offensive or controversial content
# Defamatory, libelous, threatening or other material that advocates against any individual or group
[snip]
# Political, religious or charitable organizations, issues or causes
[snip]
# Hacking, surveillance, interception or de-scrambling equipment

Google Adsense Terms

Taken from the Google Adsense Policy:-

Sites displaying Google ads may not include:

* Violent content, racial intolerance, or advocacy against any individual, group, or organization
[snip]
* Hacking/cracking content
* Deceptive or manipulative content or construction to improve your site’s search engine ranking, e.g., your site’s PageRank
[snip]
* Any other content that is illegal, promotes illegal activity, or infringes on the legal rights of others

The wrong kind of linkbaiting is seriously playing with fire, though some people it seems are meant to have asbestos suits.
Whlist I don’t have YPN or Adsense on this site, I have been very careful not to link to anything that has hacking related content, and as far as I am concerned, Shoemoney is now effectively “grey boxed”, a bad neighbourhood to link to containing hacking information.

If someone wants a link condom plugin so they can make all links to Shoemoney nofollow just let me know, it would be easy to modify the Wikipedia nofollow plugin. Hmm I think Matt Cutts might even have linked to Shoemoney in the past, it wouldn’t be good to link to a hacking site.

Today for the first time I am actually ashamed of Techcrunch, Michael Gray, Lisa Barone, and Duncan Riley.

For some true reflections on MyBlogLog, which I actually feel are unbiased despite being a sister company, try a co-founder from Flickr.
I can even claim a gripe against Flickr having a 2 month old support case on commercial usage that I really should “bump” again, but that is in all honestly my own fault. If I haven’t had a response, and I still have a problem after a few weeks, I should chase it up.
Sometimes honest communication does get lost – I have at least 2 issues with Google that haven’t been responded to, one regarding use of Google CSE with Toolbar Buttons, and for some reason no response to submission of toolbar buttons I have created.

MyblogLog have responded to the adverts tracking feature.

Unfortunately Eric has succumbed to the Wolfpack of lies, and just made Shoemoney, the guy who started his MyBlogLog recruitment campaign by carefully selecting and inviting 8000 contacts as “featured user” in the MyBlogLog panel. I am sickened. Shoemoney hasn’t removed any of the previous posts. Was he threatening to expose more?

Update:

Pamela Heywood puts some nice perspective on the tracking situation after examining the Google terms of service.
I would like to point out to Tony Hung that he doesn’t have a comments policy on the Blog Herald or on Deep Jive Interests. You really shouldn’t block people from comment spamming you without some kind of ToS or policy. I wonder if he realises that it is almost impossible to use any tracking service without some conflict of interest or insecurity, and he will need something if he is going to monetize his blog. In fact I don’t personally know of any tracking service or script that doesn’t represent some risk or conflict.
Mathew Ingram has made a fairly balanced post, but I think he like others might not be aware that Shoemoney was specifically asked not to post another exploit without giving a heads up.
I would love to know what Thomas Hawk would do if someone was attacking his servers with a denial of service attack… maybe block their IP? What happens if someone was trying to hack into private data? Block their IP?
Would he send them an email first asking them to kindly notify him before revealing whatever exploit the hackers discovered.
I wonder how much it would cost to pay an East European programmer to come up with some Zooomer hacks and exploits, or maybe Indian would be slightly cheaper. It seems that as long as you are not looking to change the data on Zooomr, then any hacking is allowed, and providing information on how to change data or tools would also be within the ToS.

Unauthorized attempts to infiltrate the Web Site electronically for the purposes of changing some part of the service are actively monitored and are prohibited. This includes, but is not limited to, ‘cross-site scripting,’ ‘worms,’ ‘viruses,’ and ‘trojan horses.’

Then again maybe you don’t really need a ToS (though MBL do have one now) to prevent someone hacking you or causing disruption for your clients.

Actually, if you read the ToS from Yahoo, it looks like it is a blanket ToS that covers all Yahoo services. Obviously as most people at one time or another have established a Yahoo account, everyone has read the Yahoo ToS at least once, and would know that it covers all Yahoo services, including any new services introduced.
Thus the Yahoo ToS has been in effect since the day MBL was acquired by Yahoo. Yes I am sure they forgot to link to it, and maybe they should get you to agree to it again when you next log into MyBlogLog, just to avoid any confusion. I am sure everyone would have read the ToS if it had been linked to from the MBL page.

Realistically, no one reads terms of service completely, but most people are aware of what is looked upon as good conduct. Hacking isn’t looked on as being socially acceptable unless you are a 14 year old script kiddie.

Update 2

There seems to be some confusion regarding how visible the advertising tracking might be, and the confusion is predominately among high traffic blogs who have so many external clicks that any Adsense clicks would be right at the bottom of the list.
You have to remember that the majority of MyBlog users that everyone seems to be so worried about, and encouraging to abandon MyBlogLog are lucky to have 100 unique visitors per day, and don’t get as many external clicks. They are much more likely to see the advert clicks and rather than be worried about it, they are going to be happy, and rush off to discover they made $0.20 in their Adsense account – yes, if you are only receving one click per day you can get fairly granular about how much it was worth.

Here is a screenshot I have taken from an account that is not upgraded, and clearly displays some Adsense clicks. Just a thumbnail you can click for the full size as I wanted it to be very clear that this was a basic free account.

I did modify the image to remove data that could be used to determine CTR for the short period of time these stats were for this morning.

Update 3

Here is a write up on MyBlogLog I missed over the weekend by Rex Dixon, and he doesn’t mince his words.

Technically Speaking, Shoe screwed Shoe. If he was really concerned about security, he could have reported it to the MBL crew asap via proper channels. What is that? He could have messaged Rafer, Eric or anyone else at the MBL staff. He chose to make more money for Shoe, and for that Shoe, you got booted. Please don’t come off as the innocent and hurt entrepreneur to the world. When I worked in the IT realm, YOUR type was the most scary to deal with.

Conclusion

This is my last update on this post, but nothing is really concluded. The hacking information is still being displayed along with Digg buttons. The poorly researched tracking story is still there as well.

Lots of bloggers jumped on this hackbaiting train, with poorly researched material, and even possible conflicts of interest or lack of disclosure.

I have seen people suggest that MyBlogLog banned Shoemoney for the exposure – what a badly thought out statement. They don’t need to rush promotion or increase support or PR time. They are still working on migration to new servers, hiring a community manager, probably looking for other staff to help with the problems of a growing demanding user base.

Then there are the “unknowns” like Measuremap that Google recently purchased. I have no idea what data that service tracked regarding advertising, possibly not just Google Adsense. Measuremap has been in private beta for as long as I can remember, though Michael Arrington still uses it on Techcrunch for more than a year.

I am sure there is going to be more on Techmeme all weekend.

It would be quite easy to write similar articles about how you can exploit various monetizing services, including Adsense, either for personal gain or damaging competitors, but that wouldn’t be very smart.

The big difference? MyBlogLog doesn’t issue large checks

MyBlogLog does have a few holes – it is strange how selective Shoe is in which ones he abuses, and which he “outs” in public.

Update: Pascal has some insights into the MyBlogLog story – it seems the latest flaw that was “outed” had been known about for a while, and it is quite likely the fix just hadn’t gone live yet.

One thing that is rarely noted is that as services grow, they become bigger targets and thus testing and fixing exploits takes up more and more resources.

I have also seen in various comments people claiming that the growth of MyBlogLog has slowed down.

MyBlogLog Growth Continues

There are a couple of spikes in the graph, the first being the MBL acquisition, and the second the recent problem with invites to co-publish gaining a lot of attention, but the trend is definitely upwards.

Update 2: Li Evans has a well reasoned post on the banning. For me that is the difference between blogging about this and using it to grab attention.
I wasn’t going to link to Andy Beal, as I think he might have lost some perspective on this, however Eric from MBL made an interesting comment.

That’s like asking Google how confident they are that people can’t game AdSense. I am comfortable saying that no one has ever been able to get to your personal information and that we have instituted a major security improvement to keep people from spoofing cookies. We’re working on reducing spam as explained in our recent blog post and we’re taking steps to reduce the opportunities for clickfraud.

Are we ever going to keep people from making their avatars voluptuous women for marketing purposes? Probably not.

Are we always going to be ahead of SEO-types (sorry) who want to game the system for their own gain? Probably not.

Is this good enough to be on your site? Only you can say. But I respect your decision either way.

Here is a challenge for Shoe – take the same MBL ID exploit and apply it to Google Adsense, see what damage you can cause someone, and then write about it before telling Google.

The interview covers a fair amount topics.

There is quite a bit of discussion on monetisation as would be expected. The emphasis was that you would earn more money from blogging as being part of the community and gaining influence and “notability” than you would from any possible advertising revenue. This certainly turns the tables on what Jim Kukral was trying to demonstrate. (p.s. nice permalinks). Jason Calacanis has already given his opinion on this topic with a great counter-punch.
Matt is still thinking about ways WordPress.com users can include some form of monetisation.
Matt seems positive about MyBlogLog which is good news for possible future addoption.
I found it interesting how Shoemoney agrees with Matt about criticism. In my experience Shoe doesn’t accept criticism very well, and certainly much worse than Matt who I feel handles it fairly well.
In the interview Shoemoney states that criticism plays “a vital role”, “I never learned anything from a compliment” and “learn from criticism”.
I didn’t link through to Shoe directly because he tends to censor criticism and trackbacks.

There is a lot of talk about various kinds of blog and comment spam, and the various “scandals” regarding WordPress.org with a behind the scenes look. No mention of the WordPress.com tag system, but as I have already stated, I am not sure if that is naughty or just a smart SEO trick.

The discussion regarding why you should use a blogging platform for any kind of website I totally agree with. WordPress does 80% of the things you need for a good website for you.

WordPress 2.06 was launched just a few days ago, and now we can look forward to WordPress 2.1

But it is becoming devalued

Recently Andy Beal decided to issue a free Zune MP3 player to a member of his MyBlogLog community. I actually thought this was a good idea to encourage people to use the service, as Andy has a high readership. Thus I did link through to him in my post “MyBlogLog – Antisocial Behaviour?”.

Shoemoney in the comments challenged Andy to a contest, and I pointed out that spamming your way to a large community isn’t highly regarded. Shoe at that time had already “contacted” 5000+ people in MyBlogLog, and that number later hit 8000+ people.

Today Shoe wrote about his challenge, but seems to be claiming that any success he is going to have will be due to his female picture. There is no mention of the fact that he also contact spammed 8000 people, and if you now look at his contact profile, he has since removed 95% of those contacts to hide the evidence, so that he doesn’t look like a “contact whore” as this practice is often described.

Whether inviting to share contacts with 8000+ people is regarded as spam is subjective. Shoe obviously thinks it isn’t as in Andy’s comments he said to me.

Andy – stfu dude I never sent anyone spam messages get a fucking clue idiot. Do you look at the people I add who thank me for adding them? Do you see ONE person complain that I spammed them? I went through and hand picked contacts so what its a social environment Im not spamming messages or websites so don’t make it sound like I am.

How eloquent…

If you look at the comments on his MyBlogLog profile, that he can moderate, there was certainly some confusion from the people responding.

OliverG wrote

Hi, why do you add me as a contact? Have we met? Have we communicated? This has a touch of SPAM.

Robin Wrote

Hey, thanks for visiting my site. Love some feedback. Robin

From what I can see, Shoemoney was adding one new contact at least every 20 seconds. Did he really visit a site?

So I did see a spam complaint, and you can hardly claim to be selecting sites if you are requesting contacts that fast.
When you request a contact, emails are sent to people maybe depending on how your account is configured.

Andy Beal has responded to the challenge today.

The problem is this challenge is not about sex vs zune, but social media & incentives vs spam.

Yes I agree that sex sells on the internet, but this test isn’t a way to prove it.

If Shoe wanted to prove it, he should have sent the spam requests with his own portrait, and started a second new blog for Nicole with some low quality content, and also spammed 8000 people with that account, and see whether Nicole gained more contacts than he did.

Why Plutoed?

The American Dialect Society (ADS) has voted “plutoed” as its 2006 word of the year. The verb, meaning ” to demote or devalue someone or something”, beat “climate canary” (an organism or species whose poor health or declining numbers hint at a larger environmental catastrophe on the horizon) in a run-off vote to secure the crown, although the latter did win the “most useful” word category.

Apparently the “Word of the Year” as reported on The Register.

If this is looked on as a viable tactic for MyBlogLog, the next stage will be MyBlogLog adding scripts. Who knows, maybe such a thing exists already. Maybe that is what Shoe was using.

It would be easy to scrape every contact from MyBlogLog. You would then create an add link for each member, and automatically visit the link.

MyBlogLog would then certainly be Plutoed.