As Techcrunch now has 2 million readers, many of them corporate, you would think they would be a little more careful publishing statements that are false, misleading or could seriously damage not just a single company, but a whole growing business sector, even if they clearly hate it. Opinion is one thing – stating facts that are wrong is in a totally different territory Here is an excerpt for the recent fluff piece for Brian Solis on Techcrunch

Seems simple enough, except two things are going to prevent this from effectively promoting the sponsoring brand over time — 1) disclosures read like warning signs; 2) Google is downgrading any blog or site that actively publishes paid content.

Sarah Lacey’s recent piece was fluff as well

Google has no stated problem with paid or sponsored reviews – with Google it has always been about machine readable disclosure of paid links i.e. use some way to block the links from counting such as rel=”nofollow”, javascript, block with redirect + robots.txt etc

I stated that Brian’s article was a fluff piece, because it is very easy to research, but here are a few choice articles.

Matt Cutts Interviewed By Eric Enge

More on Matts own blog

Paid posts should not affect search engines

Two search tidbits

Official Google Statements

Information about buying and selling links that pass PageRank

Google Webmaster Guidelines

Why Fluff Piece?

You would expect Brian to have mentioned something relating to nofollow or PageRank passing links

Techcrunch Make No Mention of Nofollow or PageRank Within Their Article

Paid Links From Techcrunch

Techcrunch for as long as I can remember have sold PageRank passing links as part of their advertising packages.

It isn’t something that is mentioned within their advertising material, but being a Techcrunch sponsor of one kind or another has its benefits, and Techcrunch despite repeatedly being nudged about it whenever they mention paid reviews, has never addressed the problem.

This is search spam

Our friends at the LeWeb conference, in Paris on December 9th and 10th, are going to be giving away one ticket to the TechCrunch reader who leaves the best comment about why they want to go (and includes a contact e-mail address). We are also excited that LeWeb’s organizers are offering TechCrunch readers a <a href="http://www.lewebparis.com/techcrunch.html">20% discount </a> Thank You LeWeb

Without our sponsors TechCrunch would not be possible. Accordingly, we want to thank the following sponsors for their support.

<a href="http://www.clarion.com/us/en/top.html">Clarion</a> is a leading manufacturer of car audio and video systems, marine audio products, navigation systems, and other multimedia products.

<a href="http://www.rackSpace.com/">RackSpace</a> a provider of managed hosting solutions

<a href="http://www.mediatemple.net/">MediaTemple</a> TechCrunch’s exclusive hosting provider, and a worldwide leader in managed hosting solutions across all major platforms

<a href="http://www.ebuddy.com/">eBuddy</a> a web and mobile instant messaging client with over 18 million users.

<a href="http://www.ironscale.com/">IronScale</a> the world’s first fully automated dedicated managed hosting solution

<a href="http://www.perflect.com/">Perflect</a> the makers of PSD2HTML and other solutions to turn design documents into W3C compliant XHTML

<a href="http://www.seesmic.com/">Seesmic</a> the video micro-blogging service that powers video commenting on TechCrunch

<a href="http://www.conduit.com/">Conduit</a>, the makers of the <a href="http://techcrunch.conduit.com/">Crunchbar</a>, and other toolbars

<a href="http://www.ServePath.com/">ServePath</a> the maker of GoGrid, the world’s first multi-server control panel that allows you to deploy cloud server networks in minutes

<a href="http://www.mpronto.com/">MailPronto</a> a hosted e-mail solutions provider

TechCrunch also is happy to announce two new sponsorship opportunities. First, <a href="http://www.crunchgear.com">CrunchGear</a> is publishing a <a href="http://www.crunchgear.com/tag/300-2008/">Holiday Gear Guide</a>, which is the perfect way for your company to reach people as they research their purchases this holiday season. Second, we are now offering a full banner (468×60) on TechCrunch’s RSS feed, which has over 1.2 million subscribers. If you are interested in either of these opportunities, please e-mail <a href="mailto:dan@techcrunch.com">Dan Kimerling</a>

It makes Google look stupid

How many of these articles (Techcrunch Search) thanking sponsors use nofollowed links?

Just Advertorials?

Techcrunch coverage always concentrates on paid reviews being advertorials or purchasing opinion, thus I would like to highlight 2 of my own paid reviews which totally fly-in-the-face of that theory.

WordPress SEO Masterclass – whilst this post needs to be revamped, as many of the topics discussed have now been borrowed, or expressed inaccurately by others, it still stands as one of the most in-depth tutorials on WordPress SEO.
It has been linked to by SEO experts, syndicated, and stood the test of time for 2 years… yet it was a paid review, written as a form of consultation.

Volusion Review & Suggestions – The suggestion by Brian Solis is that paid reviews are somehow biased – in reality, paid reviews can be anything but biased, or even less biased, because a reviewer with any integrity will ensure that their review is thorough and accurate, because it will be heavily scrutinized.
In many ways that is to the detriment of the site asking to be reviewed, if their are any holes a detailed review might uncover.

Fluff reviews are in my experience are frequently caused by:-

1. Blogger receiving a press release
2. Blogger spending 30 minutes glancing at a site
3. Rewriting the press release with a few screenshots to make it look pretty
4. Offering a flimsy opinion that they can easily reverse if put on the spot

Time = money – to write detailed reviews that have real opinion and give valuable feedback from an expert, often there needs to be some level of payola.

p.s. Brain did you and Techcrunch really pay $750 for the Forrester report?
p.p.s. Does Techcrunch pay for Comscore? (I have always wondered why they predominantly quote Comscore in posts)
p.p.p.s The nofollowed home link on Techcrunch is funny

Despite the headline, this article hasn’t been primarily SEOed to rank for either Brian Solis or Techcrunch (e.g. the title is spelt wrong, first link priority, optimized meta title etc)

Update

One of the biggest problems Google faces in its battle against paid links and PageRank passing links in sponsored reviews, paid posts, or whatever methods people come up with to gain an advantage in search engine rankings is knowledge and public awareness.

The feedback I have received from Brian Solis certainly suggests he was unaware of the intricacies of the paid link situation, both the technical aspects, and the specific statements from Google.

Michael Arrington, Techcrunch editor also left a comment looking for clarification which I am including below as a reference point.

I am going to address each paragraph in turn as a separate section of this update.

just twittered this as i think it’s a debate worth having. I wish you were a little less emotional about it but your arguments are interesting.

If Google isn’t downgrading sites with paid content I didn’t know about it. Am looking into that now. IMO they should be.

On the links on TechCrunch, you make a pretty aggressive statement “Techcrunch for as long as I can remember have sold PageRank passing links as part of their advertising packages.” Please show me evidence of that.

Having a link in an ad to MediaTemple, or whoever, that links to MediaTemple, isn’t a search scam. It’s just linking to an advertiser. Now if the keyword was “hosting” or something like that I’d agree that it would be inappropriate. But its just a site name being linked to a site name. A search for Media Temple on Google that shows Media Temple’s site is a good thing, and I don’t think our ads are designed to create any deception there.

If i’m missing something please let me know. Would be happy to continue the conversation. I’m at editor at techcrunch, please email me if you follow up here so I can come back.

I really want to have a constructive conversation on this issue.

Emotional?

just twittered this as i think it’s a debate worth having. I wish you were a little less emotional about it but your arguments are interesting.

How emotional are people about the current financial crisis and losing their jobs, and ability to put food on the table?

Whilst I haven’t written any form of sponsored review for probably close to 18 months, that doesn’t mean I have abbandoned the option – I have a lot less time available to blog, and more refined goals partially enabled by the clearing up of a number of issues around the treatment of paid links, and more specifically affiliate links.

That being said, hundreds of thousands rely in part on the income they can make writing paid reviews. If inaccurate coverage of Google’s treatment of paid links is left without challenge, that could be harmful to their income.

If job losses in the Tech sector or auto industry are something people get emotional about, you can bet a reduction in income, either part or full time, is something people will get emotional about.

However in this post I am effectively just a mouthpiece for those whose voices would otherwise remain unheard.

Downgrading  Sites?

If Google isn’t downgrading sites with paid content I didn’t know about it. Am looking into that now. IMO they should be.

Google have “downgraded” sites for paid reviews purely due to PageRank passing links. Most believe the downgrading is purely cosmetic (reduction in the toolbar pagerank displayed).

I have data which strongly suggests that Google can target both whole sites and individual pages, preventing them passing on PageRank both internally and externally.

That in itself may not reduce site traffic significantly, but it can certainly unbalance efforts to control PageRank flow and indexing within a large site.

I have no data to suggest that companies buying paid reviews have seen massive downgrades in their rankings – it is hard to isolate the data if they are also undertaking other marketing efforts.

Google has mainly penalized those selling PageRank passing links in one way or another, though even 18 months after they had the first major clampdown (Oct 2007), they are still not amazingly good at detecting paid links – even with the human element of the penalty process I have seen claims of false positives, and I am sure the process is labour intensive.

Techcrunch Selling Links

On the links on TechCrunch, you make a pretty aggressive statement “Techcrunch for as long as I can remember have sold PageRank passing links as part of their advertising packages.” Please show me evidence of that.

Firstly that isn’t the statement I made, as there were words which followed.

Techcrunch for as long as I can remember have sold PageRank passing links as part of their advertising packages.

It isn’t something that is mentioned within their advertising material, but being a Techcrunch sponsor of one kind or another has its benefits, and Techcrunch despite repeatedly being nudged about it whenever they mention paid reviews, has never addressed the problem.

I need to clarify that statement as I am sure someone will try to pick holes in it.

In December 2007 for at least one post, Techcrunch did nofollow links when thanking sponsors. It was such a notable event that I blogged about it and I am pretty sure I was the first to blog about it.

It was also mentioned by Michael Gray, and both posts were linked to from the Search Engine Land 2007 Roundup on Paid Links

The Search Engine Land Roundup is a good birds-eye-view, and notable because it was written by ex-Googler Vanessa Fox – whilst she had been out of Google for a while, I am sure she still had a good measure of the “pulse”.

Whilst it is possible that Michael Arrington didn’t read any of the above, or the 10s, possibly 100s of blog comments that mentioned it on the Techcrunch blog, repeatedly, every time he attacked paid blogging services in one way or another, that is just plausable deniability.

To get some idea of how many advertisers think, you only need to read a few blog posts about buying links, and how to do it under the radar. The fact that it is under the radar doesn’t mean it isn’t buying links.

Linkfluence: How to Buy Links With Maximum Juice and Minimum Risk

How to: Buy Links Without Being Called a Spammer

8 Ways to Buy Links Without “Buying Links”

What percentage of a purchase decision, or just some purchase decisions revolves around the added benefit of links from “sponsor thanks” posts, increased chance of editorial mention (possibly just due to increased brand awareness) is impossible to quantify, but it would certainly be part of the thought process for some brands.

It would probably be exactly the same though process as people contemplating paid blog reviews with a look to gain not just increased awareness, maybe a little traffic, but also a bit of long lasting link juice.

No Anchor Text

Having a link in an ad to MediaTemple, or whoever, that links to MediaTemple, isn’t a search scam. It’s just linking to an advertiser. Now if the keyword was “hosting” or something like that I’d agree that it would be inappropriate. But its just a site name being linked to a site name. A search for Media Temple on Google that shows Media Temple’s site is a good thing, and I don’t think our ads are designed to create any deception there.

This has to be a little geeky, but the short answer – anchor text is just one of hundreds of factors

Even links without any anchor text at all have value

Here is a link to the old “Ranking Factors”  compiled 2 years ago and due for an update

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

Some SEOs would state that the proximity of words to that URL would have an effect, that the keywords in the URL have an effect, and none would argue that that link passes PageRank, various authority traits, temporal traits etc.

The link has real value.

Here is a link that possibly doesn’t have value. It is an affiliate link to Stompernet’s excellent SEO Training Course which you can get for $1, in the hope that you also remain a subscriber to their Net Effect magazine which is full of great cutting edge training.

https://stompernet.infusionsoft.com/go/S2SL/SN347

It is obviously an affiliate link, it passes through a 3rd party tracking link, it does a 302 redirect rather than 301 (not always a factor) – most of the time I “nofollow” affiliate links when I remember, though Google have stated at conferences that they don’t have a requirement to do so.

Best Practice

• In content – Use tracking links such as those provided by OpenX – the links get blocked by robots.txt, but you should always still nofollow them, or you create hanging/dangling pages
• Sidebar Advertings - Use tracking links such as those provided by OpenX – the links get blocked by robots.txt, but you should always still nofollow them, or you create hanging/dangling pages – if you are using javascript, this isn’t an issue

• The advice is exactly the same for both scenarios
• Advertisiers get traffic stats
• You get valuable business intelligence from the click tracking which has value in itself, but also for content choices.
• No problems from Google, or criticism from the blogosphere

Read Write Web currently do a pretty good job of this after I nudged them about it, and refined the system when they started using OpenX links within the content, though a few links to content still slip through, which should possibly be nofollowed.

There are big problems still within the whole paid link debate

• Unequal treatment – some blogs seem to be above the “Google law”
• Grey areas – there still isn’t an official statement I can point to from Google about Affiliate links being ok, and there are “clean” affiliate links with the tracking on the back end. What counts as paid PageRank passing links is never exactly specified, they can’t cover every form of payola.

I am quite confident if PPP bloggers had included a banner in their sidebar for every website they wrote about, even for just 1 week, Google would have still slammed them.

It will be quite time consuming going through 100s of posts adding nofollows to historical advertisers who received a link – I did publish a WordPress plugin that could have handled it, along with complete disclosure and even more advertiser exposure, all fully automatic, but I abandoned the project over a year ago – no matter what the FTC say, nothing will be done to police best practice, and bloggers are not interested in best practice.
I spent $3000 hiring a programmer to create a plugin that no one wanted.

Bonus Tips

Techcrunch have been attacking Last.fm over data sharing, but in many ways bloggers are worse.

• Subscribe to comments doesn’t comply with Can Spam
• Data sharing with 3rd party services across borders, including email address and IP (comment spam plugins)
• How many bloggers have a privacy policy? It is actually a requirement for Google, but should also cover tracking, comment spam, advertisers etc.
• Content ownership of comments?

There are all kinds of things that in many ways are much bigger issues than whatever the FTC has to say on WOMM

Update 2 – False Information Spreads By Copying Techcrunch

This is just unreal, or the negative side of extremely bad information spread virally.

Businessweek just published an article on paid reviews, quite well researched, but they stole a sub-headline from Brian Solis’ Techcrunch piece.

“Google Downgrades Paid Blog Entries”

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/may2009/tc20090518_532031.htm

Yes that is a nofollowed link to a very bad article, I really should nofollow the Techcrunch links as well, but Michael did take the time to comment and learn, and hopefully will write some kind of followup.

I must admit I am not a huge fan of linking to articles from Associated Press, simply because it is extremely difficult to determine the original source when these stories “go over the wire”.

A great example of the reasons why is when I reported about the appropriated story last year from the Museum of Hoaxes – that was Agence France-Presse to blame, a different organization.

Readers might also remember my run-in with The Guardian where I was a major source for an article, but didn’t receive a link. The author and editor of The Guardian explained their viewpoint in the comments, but it still wrankles a little.

That being said, there is a huge amount of PROFIT being made online in the form of online membership sites which is a paid content business model.

Highly successful examples include:-

• Strategic Profits – $10m+ business
• Stompernet – $25m+ business
• Success Chef (prelaunch)
• Double Your Dating – $20m+ business

I could the continue the list with the likes of Armand Morin, Mike Filsaime, Jeff Walker, Yanik Silver, John Reese, Ray Edwards, Jim Edwards, Frank Kern, Jason Postash and many many more. Among bloggers Brain Clark with Teaching Sells and Yaro Starak with Blog Mastermind immediately come to mind.

Then of course there are the mega information marketers such as Agora Publishing with multiple content channels such as Early to Rise

I should include affiliate links to all of them, but that isn’t the point – most of these guys are pulling in million dollar earnings on a yearly basis, and whilst they have diversified into physical products, exclusive coaching and seminars.

Agora might even be pulling in $1m a day by now, I don’t have recent figures.

Agora might be making more money than Facebook

Paid content certainly isn’t a dying business model

I am trying to be a responsible blogger. Over the last few days I have actually spent a considerable amount of time trying to avoid writing this post.
Most of my reviews are generally positive – if a company approaches me for a review and I feel that I have major concerns regarding their service, most often that will be expressed in email and we part ways, hopefully for the company to rectify the problems.

When I do write something negative, most often it is about specific features which if rectified, will make the product offering significantly better, or on occasion it is to offer differing opinion on a hot topic that is being extensively debated, and I will link through to differing opinion.

This is an ugly tale I don’t know every aspect, I doubt anyone does, but I have clocked up hours of research in writing this article, and it represents the truth as far as I see it.

I haven’t taken the opportunity of contacting ePerks or iHype directly – this article is not about their services, but primarily the way they have poorly handled their contact with the bloggers which has a significant bearing on how their newest offering, iHype will be accepted by the blogging community.

ePerks

Vlad is a regular reader. He was hired to write a review of ePerks on his real estate blog through Sponsored Reviews and since then he has been in a long battle of cease and desist letters and legal threats.

Whilst his original post doesn’t appear to be online any more, and I didn’t read it in the first place because I am honestly not interested in real estate in the US (and my wife would gladly tell the world how little interest I have in Poland in anything to do with the house), from what I have read in a number of references, the article was generally positive.

After Vlad published the article, he received a number of comments that were generally negative about ePerks.

What does a smart honest blogger do in such a situation? In my opinion as he has already written a largely positive review, it is well within conventional practice to publish a followup article possibly expressing the views of one or more of the comments he received on his previous post, and encourage his audience for more feedback.

That is exactly what he did, asking with Eperks is a Gem or a Scam? which he posted on August 10th.

The title and his emphasis in the post suggest that his first review was largely positive, and that the negative views had been expressed by his readers.

What followed were well over 160 comments on the post – over the last 24hrs I have read the whole thread, some parts of it multiple times.

At some point the comments turned into a running battle between a number of anonymous commenters plus one person who claims to be an employee of Eperks.

There may have actually been previous comments on the thread that Vlad determined were in some way dubious as is hinted from his comment @ 2007-10-18 02:17:54 (Vlad doesn’t have permalinks for comments)

Steve are you reading the comments or you just here to spam as were other ePerks employees?

Look ,these agents feel they were mislead, it’s not like they are buying company’s shares on Wall Street. They have purchased the service and ePerks failed to deliver. How can you blame them for criticizing ePerks?

Just a few days previously the conversation had changed from people complaining, to contemplation of action, with the entry of Sergio Gala stating that he had complained to the BBB.

Around the 30th October “inguru” showed up, along with “Benjamin” an employee of Eperks. I don’t know whether Benjamin is in actual fact Ben Behrouzi the Founder / CEO of ePerks.com

In January 2008-01-22 02:07:03 another commenter, “john” joined the conversaion and started making claims of unfair portrayal, doing “research” on Vlad and making threats.

Inman, among other top real estate blogs covered Vlad’s legal problems in March

I am not going to take a position on whether Vlad should have written the followup post, left the comments open, or continued reporting. One of the biggest dangers in interpreting events at this stage is hindsight. Another danger is for the views of your community, in the way of comments to sway your own opinion.
In many ways it is a good thing, but to an outside observer not all the information is available, as we will see…

Attack Of The Shills

Vlad aluded to various ePerks employees commenting on his blog under various different names. How could he tell?

It was actually something quite simple, IP addresses, but unfortunately those are not make public, and making IP addresses available to the public could be looked on as a privacy issue. Avinash wrote about IP address privacy concerns 6 months ago – I didn’t respond at that time but I have a very good memory.

Vlad also recently added the following statement to the top of the gem or scam post.

But lets step away from Vlad’s blog post for a while, and take a look at what has been happening on other sites. After all, there have been accusations that Vlad is in somehow biased, as are anyone offering him a shoulder to lean on.

Whilst ePerks deal with Real Estate, they also deal with car sales (no car salesman jokes please)

There was a very interesting conversation over on Yesterday’s Trucks

Here is a long screen capture of the comment thread which does have a lot of legitimate commentary from people I have seen in other discussions about ePerks. I have highlighted the comments that are of real interest.

Ray S. 11-30-2007 16:52:17 76.206.0.161
Lisa 12-27-2007 16:55:36 76.206.0.161
MARY 12-14-2007 08:47:44 76.206.0.161
benjamin 07-03-2007 12:47:12 76.206.0.166
Charles 11-30-2007 16:37:10 76.206.0.161

That is the order they are displayed in the link I used, I haven’t quite worked out how to get a threaded view, though with close examination it appears that some of the comments are replying to each other.

This is shilling of the worst kind, and it should be the BBB, WOMMA and the FTC taking a looks at ePerks, not ePerks trying to exert legal pressure on a blogger who just provided the forum where events materialized.

But It Gets Worse

Apparently Mr. Behrouzi has stated to Vlad that the IP ranges are unconnected to ePerks though the evidence, not only on the trucks site suggests otherwise.

• The IP range has been connected to email correspondence from ePerks
• The IP range has been connected to comments on Vlad’s blog
• The IP range has been connected to the fake attack on Vlad’s reputation across the internet, on social bookmarking sites, Yahoo answers, and various Wikis.

Yes, even Jaffar Sadighi maligning Vlad’s character has been linked to this IP range

Anonymous

There have been lots of anonymous comments all over the internet but the worst of all are on a WordPress.com blog that seem to have been created as an attempt at reputation management.

The post was written by someone called Michael K.

http://eperks.wordpress.com/2008/01/24/eperks-success-experience-feedback-clients/

Just the URL and Title of the post suggests that it is aimed squarely at capturing traffic from people searching for feedback. Nothing wrong with this as a tactic, but it is important to take a look at all the comments.

This is the real estate industry – the people involved in ePerks are looking for more business. The post is overtly positive as are all the comments.
For me as a marketer it looks like an absolutely ideal place to mention which area codes I might have purchased for ePerks, along with a link to my blog or website, or even just a link to a profile on ePerks.

I have lots of people involved in Real Estate who read my blog – they are certainly not shy of including links when leaving comments, and on occasion some targeted anchor text.

To have a comment thread about ePerks, with 28 comments, and only 2 of them have left a link (one to a totally off topic site might even be just a spammer), is totally absurd.

If someone from WordPress.com happens to feel like checking, without compromising anonymity of the blog author that might take a court order), there is a high chance that a large number of those comments were left from the same IP range.

It would also be interesting to check whether there is shared ownership with this blog that was previously used to attack Vlad

http://vladzablotskyy.wordpress.com/

You see at one time the blog at eperks.wordpress.com was part of the “web of destruction” being used to attack Vlad’s reputation, and the single post contained the following reference.

Whats holding me up is that there is a blog on the internet that seems to hold a great deal of negative comments. In fact I’ve noticed that anyone who leaves a positive comment is either deleted or considered an ePerks.com employee. However I have this feeling that the owner of that blog is making those comments up or they are competitors trying to give ePerks a bad name.

The reason I think this is because the site (go-beyond-mls.com) has 4 or 5 blogs just about this company. Why would any average joe write so many articles on the company if they weren’t competitors? In fact I wrote a comment on the blog and was instantly titled an ePerks employee by the owner, Vlad. This upset me greatly so I have decided to start my own blog about it that will be completely organic. I have no hidden agenda’s nor am I profiting from the traffic generated to this website.

I do not want Vlad the owner of go-beyond-mls.com to post on this blog for I feel and am almost certain that he his somehow affiliated with one of ePerks competitors. I would like to warn all that read both this blog and his that they second take all the content on that site for I believe and am almost certain it may be artificial.

Note: the internet has a long memory, and I was the one who forwarded that quote to Vlad on April 2nd by email. I am sure if legal proceedings do take place, there will be a need to access email and historical records of every website ePerks has ever been mentioned.

As mentioned in the discussion on the Gem or Scam thread, IP addresses can be faked but whilst I am not a lawyer, I doubt Vlad would have to prove that the IP addresses are genuine.

Here is a little excerpt from the defamation FAQ on Chilling Effects

Question: What defences may be available to someone who is sued for defamation?

Answer: There are ordinarily 6 possible defences available to a defendant who is sued for libel (published defamatory communication.)
1. Truth. This is a complete defence, but may be difficult to prove.
2. Fair comment on a matter of public interest. This defence applies to “opinion” only, as compared to a statement of fact. The defendant usually needs to prove that the opinion is honestly held and the comments were not motivated by actual “malice.” ( Malice means knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for the truth of falsity of the defamatory statement.)
3. Privilege. The privilege may be absolute or qualified. Privilege generally exists where the speaker or writer has a duty to communicate to a specific person or persons on a given occasion. In some cases the privilege is qualified and may be lost if the publication is unnecessarily wide or made with malice.
4. Consent. This is rarely available, as plaintiffs will not ordinarily agree to the publication of statements that they find offensive.
5. Innocent dissemination. In some cases a party who has no knowledge of the content of a defamatory statement may use this defence. For example, a mailman who delivers a sealed envelope containing a defamatory statement, is not legally liable for any damages that come about from the statement.
6. Plaintiff’s poor reputation. Defendant can mitigate (lessen) damages for a defamatory statement by proving that the plaintiff did not have a good reputation to begin with. Defendant ordinarily can prove plaintiff’s poor reputation by calling witnesses with knowledge of the plaintiff’s prior reputation relating to the defamatory content.

Lot of these defences might apply to Vlad’s case, but most interesting is consent

ePerks Paid Vlad To Write About Them

There a various banking records that ePerks through Sponsored Reviews paid him to talk about them.

Maybe the intention was only the initial brief mention, but bloggers have their own social contracts with their audience to think about, and new details emerge.
It could easily be looked at by a court that follow up posts were an extension of the first, especially as Vlad was fairly good with interlinking between posts.

This is one of the positive aspects of paid blogging, the chain of evidence created that whilst many people suggest that the payment might add bias to any potential review in favor of the person providing funds, it also might provide an additional layer of protection.

Effectively if you get slammed by a paid blogger, you asked for it whether it is the time of the initial review, or at a later date.

Vlad didn’t start the review process, ePerks engaged bloggers to write about them

It might take ePerks some time to realise this, but they have lost this battle… Q.E.D.

There has been a lot of analysis among real estate bloggers, but I feel Trace’s recent article on ePerks destroying their credibility is the most compelling, and worrying for anyone who has invested money in ePerks.

iHype

Time to about circle, it might seem that I am just waffling about ePerks, and that it has no real relationship with iHype other than the owners.

iHype is a paid blogging service, paying bloggers to write paid reviews.

Paid reviews and the companies that offer such services are a core topic of this blog though generally PayPerPost have had more to talk about than other companies.

With paid blogging services in the past, companies have had the option to request “positive tone” for reviews. That isn’t intended as controlling the “voice” of the blogger, forcing them to shill. What it does mean is that honest bloggers won’t accept writing about a company they don’t feel comfortable introducing to their audience.

Unfortunately for companies requesting this option, that isn’t the end of it.

Whilst you might in the past have been able to request only a positive tone, and it would be a little unethical to accept payment to just trash a company blogging is a conversation.

Requesting a blogger to review a company, paid or not is a little like rubbing Aladin’s lamp, uncorking a champagne bottle, or removing a thumb from a dyke holding back the floodwaters.

The truth wants to be free

A blogger can’t legitimately control the conversation (they can give it some direction, though that has repercussions) that happens around what they write. ePerks have certainly accused Vlad of trying to control the conversation through moderation of his comments, but where were the bloggers coming to the defense of ePerks? Surely the blogosphere would be buzzing with blog posts about how wonderful ePerks is from their 1000s of customers, rather than anonymous blogs created for the purpose of shilling ePerks.

Paid reviews companies receive a huge amount of criticism in the blogospere, and one of the things that impressed me the most about PayPerPost, and also competitors such as ReviewMe and Sponsored Reviews was the way that their representatives engaged the blogosphere, opened up conversation, addressed problems in the open, and eventually used that feedback to enhance or change their product offering.

Instead, the iHype founders at ePerks have been using legal threats to silence a blogger

I can’t shake the possibility that my opinion in this might be biased. Behind the scenes I have helped Vlad a little in removing some of the most disgusting attacks on his reputation on sites like Yahoo Answers.

I would have liked matters to be cleaned up in a friendly way before iHype launched, with the ePerks founders having seen the errors of their ways and what effect it might have on their future plans.

I have deliberately not linked to either ePerks.com or iHype.com, I haven’t used their logos, or screenshots of their service. I haven’t created an account with either service, or tested them in any way.

Why?

Because I don’t trust them, or the founders. They don’t deserve even that vague recognition that they are in some way a legitimate site. It is a personal opinion, I will sleep peacefully having made that decision.

As far as I am concerned, and this is personal opinion, iHype can go straight to the deadpool

Michael Arrington might have referred to Ted Murphy of PayPerPost as being “the most evil person in the room”, but ePerks and Ihype founder Ben Behrouzi certainly seems (in my personal and possibly biased opinion) to be one of the most evil people in the blogosphere.

Trace Richardson also has a followup article on iHype, with some other interesting facts.

• Get one page indexed and ranking
• Write a second post linking to the first (which will also then trackback to the second page)
• Use the same primary keyword in both posts

The second method I use, for topics that get frequent mentions, are tags.

• My post with the highest number of links on a topic will most likely rank well
• My tag page which leads to further posts on the topic will form the secondary listing

Examples Of Title Based Google Indented Listing

I have at least partially recovered my search ranking since yesterday for Players With Money, and achieved a double listing, though how effective depends on which data center you look at, and geographic location.
Players With Money is being promoted to a number of very large email lists currently, and this is bringing me search traffic – as I wrote yesterday, it is a great service, and worth checking out.

I also have a double indented listing for Stompernet Site Seer – but I am not ranking anywhere near as well for Stomper Site Seer – I have tweaked the page, and also added a tag page for that specific search term.

A search just on Site Seer does however bring the results I hoped for.

Another money terms I rank comfortably for is Social Power Linking – this new link will probably help the page which mentions the new price rank in the top spot and add a little more longevity. Jack has to settle for 3rd and 4th place for his own product, but I am sure he doesn’t mind.

Example Of Tag Based Indented Listings

I don’t want to get too graphic heavy on this page, so I will just make a quick list of a few examples

• Blogcatalog
• Dofollow
• SocialSpark

I really should get one for Blogrush and knock Tamar down a couple of spots. Since I wrote about the free traffic from Blogrush that Alex received, I have actually had one day when Blogrush combined with Traffic Jam was my highest referrer.
It is not server breaking traffic, but it is targeted, and 100+ targeted visitors is not to be sneezed at.

You would think I would actually have one for PayPerPost by now – I do have a first page ranking with a tag page, but my most linked to post used “Pay Per Post” in both the headline and title tag – that was easily fixed, and with the additional link I will probably give that post a boost up the SERPs to go knocking on the door of both Wikipedia and Techcrunch.

Techcrunch with their “Crunchbase” in many ways kill their search engine traffic, especially with the way they frequently don’t interlink between posts with keywords. Linking to yourself with keywords is just as important as to other people.
You would think that with all the times they have written about PayPerPost they would have a double listing… they don’t.

Crunchbase is slowly rising up the SERPs but are 2 listings on different domains really a good alternative to a double listing?

Old… Old… Stompernet Video

Ok, so it is not that old, it is from the launch of Stompernet Smarts

Who do you think ranks first for Stompernet Smarts? I do

This video is just 22 minutes, and Andy Jenkins shows you how to get indented listings the scientific way.

Now if Michael Arrington was a member of Stompernet, he or his web developers would know how to get double listings at the top of the search engines.
Currently his team have managed to get a single listing for Facebook… with Crunchbase… just below a 2 year old post from Mashable.

A similar query for Myspace, and both are out of the top30

Lets be a little more topical, the current Microsoft Yahoo deal – all they would probably have to do to have a double listing for a search term like “Microsoft Yahoo”, without quotes would be to do a little interlinking between these 2 posts

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/01/wow-microsoft-offers-446-billion-to-acquire-yahoo/

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/05/04/microsoft-pursues-yahoo-takeover/

Though they should also be getting these newer posts linked in

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/03/breaking-microsoft-walks/

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/18/yahoo-microsoft-back-at-the-table/

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/19/microsoft-v-yahoo-this-isnt-even-funny-any-more/

Fresh search engine results isn’t just a job for Google to handle, site owners who know what they are doing can heavily influence them too.

There are plugins which can probably do enough interlinking to make a difference, and keep the search listings current, and help these top blogs remain looking fresh in the SERPs, or it can be done manually.
Linking purely off-site to Crunchbase, and then back to newer posts isn’t going to achieve double listings.

Now Techcrunch is doing very well for itself, at the start of the year they were hovering around 600,000 subscribers, and now they are 940k+ – I am sure a huge amount of that is related to the Microsoft / Yahoo deal, and possibly Facebook.

Could they be over 1,000,000 if they had their search results current?

If you look at Google trends data, the number of people searching for “microsoft yahoo” without quotes over the last few months has been very similar, and in some cases more than the people searching for stock quotes with MSFT or YHOO in Google.

For a blog looking to sell advertising, that is an awful lot of potential subscribers left on the table, probably reading their Microsoft Yahoo news… somewhere else.

This is the kind of stuff the guys at Stompernet teach for free, you should see some case studies.

Stompernet will be reopening their doors tomorrow, and it is unlikely I will be mentioning them again. They provide great material for free, but ultimately often it seems like I am beating a dead horse.
I certainly didn’t come close to winning that MacBook Air at the weekend, though I expected as much… in fact over the course of this week I haven’t managed to encourage enough people to sign up for the various locked FREE resources to win… even a digital picture frame

What ultimately is the value of building an authority blog, and dominating search results, if you don’t at the same time leverage your traffic into a responsive email list?

Update

Yesterday Andy Jenkins released a sneak peak inside Stompernet

Now if you haven’t already, make sure you have downloaded all the free videos to your Hard Drive – they are available for download in the right hand navigation.

You never know when you might want to refer to them again – I have lots of Stomper videos recorded on DVD as well.

Also make sure you have signed up for the 100% Free Stomper Site Seer – I know for many the first version might seem a bit basic, but the guys working on it really know their stuff, and I expect it to be immense value in the future.

Links provide balance

Fred disagreed with what was written about 4 services on Techcrunch and VentureBeat, he provided some data to back that up, and clear disclosure.

Techcrunch responded, defending their writers, again fair enough.

Fred Wilson followed up with another post, linking through to the differing opinion, thus giving them equal limelight

Mathew Ingram was following the story closely, and as a professional journalist who I know links out to conflicting opinion on a frequent basis, followed up with “Bloggers Need To Try Harder”

Michael Arrington also linked through to Mathew from his post to give some additional balance.

The only negative in all this is that Fred ends up with a reputation management potential problem with a post headline on Techcrunch “Fred Wilson – Hypocritical, Wrong and Conflicted” – probably a bit uncalled for considering how this all eventually worked out.

Sadly This Isn’t Typical

I am going to start with a few choice quotes from Michael Arrington

In reference to Matt Marshall’s Like.com post on VentureBeat

that’s because he’s an old MSM, and sometimes still worries about “balanced” stories. I don’t aim for balance, I just want to be right.
Michael Arrington

Controversy in blogging pays

Joe – we’ve found that the “hits” – the blog posts that generate a lot of discussion – are the ones that drive all stats, including, indirectly, monetization. The problem is knowing what’s a hit and what isn’t before it actually happens. Given that we are all rushing into new territory, I think a little leeway is appropriate.
Michael Arrington

Some key points

• There is a financial incentive to be controversial
• There is equally a financial incentive for a story to remain controversial – linking to a differing opinion in an update? (extremely rare) or new post that links through to a strongly differing opinion (almost unheard of)

It is my belief as a blogger, the stronger opinion you have on a topic, or the more conflicts you have, the more you should try to highlight differing opinion.

One of the safety nets for a blogger are pingbacks or trackbacks – if you display them, and moderate them without concern for conflicting opinion.

Maybe it is a technical problem with Akismet, that pingbacks and trackbacks on Techcrunch rarely appear from valid blogs.
Maybe Techcrunch aren’t overly concerned with recovering pingbacks and trackbacks from the Akismet sin bin, but I have noticed trackbacks and pingbacks rarely appear on Techcrunch.
I would certainly hope that opinions the Techcrunch editors don’t agree with are in a worse case scenario just being deleted, and not actively flagged as being spam.

Techcrunch Has Pingback Code

The following code is included in each page

<link rel="pingback" href="http://www.techcrunch.com/xmlrpc.php" />

That means there is no need to include a Trackback link if you are using WordPress and sending ping notifications

So why are so few trackbacks appearing on Techcrunch, especially from what I would look on as trusted commentators such as Mathew Ingram?

Akismet relies on collective intelligence, you have to take an active role in removing legitimate trackbacks that have been wrongly detected as spam, otherwise you can silence the voice of other bloggers, not just on your own blog, but on other blogs as well.
Even if you subsequently intend to delete a pingback or trackback, you should still remove it from the spam list.

Why are people having to leave comments to say they have responded in some way to a Techcrunch post?

Cut The Ropes On Your Safety Net

Trackbacks and Pingbacks on a blog are your safety net, allowing others to find differences in opinion.

They are especially important on sites which have a very fast paced editorial process, and a reduced amount of time to followup on commentary elsewhere. I certainly wouldn’t expect Techcrunch to link through to every conflicting blog post, that would be an extreme burden on resources better spent chasing down the next great startup – I even think they are over generous placing trackbacks above the comment area.

However if Techcrunch is to provide strong opinions on various topics, which have significant influence on the opinions of their 600k+ subscribers, and where they have admitted that controversial content has a financial benefit, they should ensure pingbacks and trackbacks are appearing, if only for some level of oversight.

Unfortunately in this regard Fred’s blog has also lost a few points – he has now replaced his comment system with Disqus.

Whilst that shows comments, he no longer has those comments hosted as part of his blog, they are on a separate domain, and the process of adding Discus comments has also removed the ability to display trackbacks.

Hyde Park Corner or a Conversation?

A blog without functioning pingbacks, trackbacks and comments is a bit like shouting your head off on Hyde Park corner. Whilst there is the potential of some limited 2 way conversation, your audience loses a lot of perspective.

Update

Tony Hung’s take on this is a worthwhile read, and I do practice what I preach. Is it all just about controversy?

Engage your community. Don’t be afraid to get physical (in a metaphorical kind of way), and call people out. Don’t afraid to be negative. But be prepared to fight for your opinion.

This was previously written about by Ted Murphy of Izea, and vehemently defended by Techcrunch, so it is surprising that they have made a significant change in their stance without also making a public statement about it.

I also wrote about this situation in a previous article on paid links and the PageRank update (round 5).

Here is their previous links to sponsors post from back in November 2007

Here is Techcrunch’s most recent post thanking their sponsors in December 2007

Precautionary Or Suggested By Google?

Techcrunch was frequently being highlighted as a site that might be abusing Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, but somehow immune from a penalty, and also had a reputation for being critical of paid links in content (though one of their advertisers is Text Link Ads, and I believe they have also had advertising from sister service ReviewMe)

I can think of 3 reasons Techcrunch have made this change:-

• They have made a unilateral decision that linking to sponsors without nofollow was in some way hypocritical and frowned upon by their readers
• Precautionary based upon analysis of the Google Webmaster Guidelines
• Suggested or advised by Google

The reason Techcrunch has made a change is extremely important, because hundreds, maybe 1000s of bloggers currently link through to their sponsors on a weekly or monthly basis, effectively copying the Techcrunch model, and most do not include nofollow on the links.

I think it is also important to point out that Techcrunch hasn’t made this change retroactively. To have a clean slate they should go through all previous content and add nofollow to all links to sponsors, possibly even in editorial content.

I honestly don’t think it is the first option – Techcrunch after all are still accepting advertising dollars from Text Link Ads who offer various in-post advertising, not just sidebar linking, and unlike Izea (PayPerPost), have given no indication of supporting nofollow on the advertising links they sell.

If Google did contact Techcrunch, shouldn’t they also make an official statement on the webmaster central blog giving advice to all bloggers that this practice is looked on as paid links, and could be subject to a penalty?

Ted Murphy rightly questions Google quite openly to explain why PPP bloggers are being punished for not using nofollow on links, yet many prominent bloggers post quite blatant pagerank passing links to their advertisers every chance they get.

Not only do they mention their advertisers in “Thanks To Our Advertisers” posts, but they also name drop them every chance they get as a form of disclosure.

As an example, almost every time PayPerPost was discussed on Techcrunch , either Text Link Ads or their ReviewMe service was also mentioned but rarely other services such as Sponsored Reviews who haven’t got the same advertising budget.

Buying advertising seems to generate a lot of goodwill.

If Techcrunch regard them as advertising, what reason would they have to not include a nofollow on the links? Advertising has very little if no editorial value.

I get a penalty because I sometimes spend 10 HOURS writing a review of a company for a measly $130, but then I also get other revenue, it is more additional compensation and a discount on what I could charge for consulting for having it public, much like you can get building work cheaper if it can be a show home.

All these advertisers have done is paid Techcrunch money.

The juice Techcrunch passes might be worth 100+ paid posts.

Why Such A Strong Reaction?

So today Duncan trys to defend Techcrunch stating that the links are disclosed and they are not distorting the trust with advertorial content.

That means Techcrunch are selling pagerank

It doesn’t take any time to post a list of 8 links to advertisers. Google’s issue is with PageRank passing links. It is nothing to do with disclosure.

Wouldn’t they like to see Google make a statement of exactly why “thanking your sponsors” kind of advertising links are OK, and PPP links are not?

No, because if Google closely examined Techcrunch in the same light as paid reviews, they would probably find that these “thanking the advertisers” links are distorting their rankings more than paid reviews from D list bloggers.

Techmeme – It Seems Techcrunch Have To Link To You To Be News

The news is actually 2 days old already, and Techmeme have only picked it up because Techcrunch linked to them.

This story was news 2 days ago. My post which included a link to PayPerPost has already been linked to by both Search Engine Land and Search Engine Round Table, two of the highest authorities on these kinds of issues, but it seems Techcrunch determines whether a story is newsworthy if it is related to search engine marketing.

There seems to be a core group of “news breakers” and if they don’t link to a story, it isn’t relevant to Techmeme.

The problem is that anything related to Google is technology news, and their primary focus is their search engine and things that have an effect on it.

It seems Techmeme place a very small weighting on search marketing blogs, despite them having more historical knowledge of Google than many of the tech bloggers, and thus can provide more detail and historical context.

I suppose I should be grateful to Techmeme for linking through to a syndicated copy of my original article on WebProNews, posted a day later than the original.

(note I don’t link through to legitimately syndicated copies of my articles because of duplicate content but I am grateful for all the articles they pick up)

This Isn’t A Pop At Techcrunch

This is really Google’s fault for their unclear guidelines that even has experts scratching their heads. I have had many renowned watchers of the search marketing space state that they don’t regard the few paid reviews I write as any kind of search engine spam, and that they have value. I have had them syndicated, linked to and achieve some success on social media sites such as Sphinn.

Want an example of a paid review? How about my WordPress SEO Masterclass

That is about as close to the line of search engine spam as I have gone, and that gets me a -1 or -2 penalty on my PageRank.

Duncan, seriously Techcrunch should be in the PPP camp on this one, as Techcrunch have been a supporter of Text Link Ads (or supported by) for some time.

Plausible deniability is the term given to the creation of loose and informal chains of command in governments and other large organizations. In the case that assassinations, false flag or black ops or any other illegal or otherwise disreputable and unpopular activities become public, high-ranking officials may deny any connection to or awareness of such act, or the agents used to carry out such act.

In politics and espionage, deniability refers to the ability of a “powerful player” or actor to avoid “blowback” by secretly arranging for an action to be taken on their behalf by a third party—ostensibly unconnected with the major player.

More generally, “plausible deniability” can also apply to any act that leaves little or no evidence of wrongdoing or abuse. Examples of this are the use of electricity or pain-compliance holds as a means of torture or punishment, leaving little or no tangible signs that the abuse ever took place.

I can understand Om Malik’s reason for not attending, a bad back – nice, clear, understandable, totally excusable.

There is some doubt over Michael Arrington’s claims, for instance Wendy says she posted after confirmation with the organisers.

Michael Arrington’s specific words

I never agreed to attend the conference.

I would really appreciate it if the organizers of Blogworld would post something clearing this up.

Jim Kukral wrote

You forgot to come? At least lie to us, lol.

Digging Into The Facts

There was a little bit of a storm in a teacup just a month ago over a bit of clumsy email marketing, which also involved Techcrunch writer Duncan Riley.

Within that there was some telling evidence to this situation, at least in my mind.

This is what Duncan Riley wrote in an email to Rick Calvert that appears in a blog post on the Blogworld Expo blog (Emphasis is mine)

Sent: Tuesday, October 16, 2007 1:01 AM

Subject: Re: Come Join Us at the World’s Largest Blogging Conference

Brian
I know Michael is speaking, I write for TechCrunch. I’m not sure whether to take this as spam or not, particularly given that I’ve already discussed with the organizers the rumor that I wasn’t invited due to a sponsor. In fact the face that you’ve pulled out a random post on my personal blog makes this sound a lot like spam.

Best of luck with it.

So Duncan acknowledges that Michael Arrington is attending, and qualifies that statement by implying he know that because he is a staff writer for Techcrunch, not because of any misleading advertising material.

There is contrary evidence, Michael declining in the Facebook group but I must admit I do that almost as an automatic thing myself, often after the event. People can always change their mind.

My reading of the facts is there might have been some communication mistakes, these things happen, but with people inside Michael’s own Techcrunch organisation thinking he was attending less than a month before the event, the communication problems are certainly on both sides.

What Really Matters

I said at the start the facts don’t matter at all, but if I was attending, and even as an observer halfway around the world, I can’t believe even a comedy of errors could be maintained for so long without Michael Arrington stepping up and saying he was not attending before the event.

Even Andy Beal, who has his finger on the pulse all the time didn’t know Michael wasn’t going to be at the keynote until he didn’t appear on stage.

Michael Chose His Words Very Carefully

In the run up to Blogworld Expo, Techcrunch were gaining a lot of links and exposure, it would be impossible for anyone with any hint of reputation management and online knowledge to not notice appearing in blog posts for months before the event on an almost daily basis.

But the “I didn’t confirm” was allowed to continue, because it benefited Techcrunch, even up to the time Michael was due to appear on stage for the first time.

Now the truth is out, even more links, links are valuable, and in public relations, there is no such thing as bad press.

The Rumour Industry

Techcrunch is head of the tech industry rumour mill, and as such prints a lot of stories that may or may not be true, and sometimes they get told the information is incorrect, and sometimes misleading information is allowed to persist, because it is good for stock prices.
A good example of that in recent times is the Google Phone, which turned out to be an open operating system for mobile phone manufacturers.

I can understand the need to be the first with the big scoop, the speculation, the increased readership that drives advertising dollars.

But should those reporting use plausible deniability and let it run across the blogosphere knowing that it is totally untrue, but it is good for marketing?

If you are a product manufacturer or service provider, there is a strategic benefit to keep users or competitors in doubt… sometimes. It is not just a marketing thing to leak rumours, and the press and bloggers eat up the morsels anyway.

For a blogger or press outlet to allow news to continue to be written about them knowing it is misleading or false leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

For me, this is a thing of trust. I have lost trust in much of what Techcrunch writes, in just the same way people would lose trust of bloggers writing paid posts without some form of disclosure.

I mention paid posts for a reason, I would have loved as a blog reader to see people’s thoughts of the New Media Fundraising presentation.
That was to include David Cohen, Brad Feld, Dan Rua, and…. Michael Arrington. Dan is an investor in Izea/PayPerPost and has had multiple exchanges with Michael Arrington over PayPerPost, not just ethically, but also the financial stability of the company gaining B round investment from the same group of investors.
David Cohen, just the day before the presentation still thought Michael was attending.

I haven’t seen any reports from the session, so it is possible it didn’t even happen, or the “clash of the investors” was made less attractive.

Plausible deniability just doesn’t cut it Mr Arrington

Michael Arrington Updates

Michael Arrington has updated his post to reflect on additional attacks, and also he has managed to have a chat with Rick the organizer.

It is well worth reading, though I can now see how this happens.

From what I can see

Michael gets far too much email – only reads 10% of it. He should create a more private email for friends, and then get a PA handle the rest.
Michael doesn’t do any reputation management and states that he doesn’t read all the negative commentary – again that could be outsourced

Michael did however state in his update that:-

My response to them was “I’m attending an event this week?”

Thus he was aware before the event that he was expected to be speaking, and knew he wasn’t.

This whole issue could have been cleared up before the event and should have been.

Final Update

Rick has posted the BlogWorld Expo side of the story on their blog.

It seems to me there was a lot more communication than was suggested in the initial Crunchnotes post by Michael Arrington, and to be honest it seems that there was more than even currently included on Crunchnotes after a number of updates.

In Mike’s final update he suggests he should have claimed he had the flu, or similar.

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

Not everyone agreed with my review and there were 4 major arguments against using the service from various corners of the blogosphere.

• PayPerPost don’t provide a marketplace for their bloggers using PayPerPost direct, and that without a marketplace it would be hard for a blogger and an advertiser to connect.
• Bloggers should sell direct – supporter of this argument suggested that the 10% additional fee that PayPerPost added ontop of what a blogger receives was excessive, and it would be better to have an advertising sales page, and handle any transaction directly
• The icons provided by PayPerPost were ugly
• No High Paying Advertisers – it was believed that all PayPerPost advertisers were “low budget” and that the service wouldn’t attract major brands with deeper pockets.

$7 Million in New Funding

Companies don’t receive a second round of funding unless investors have taken a very close look at the future of a company, and their ability to meet goals and deliver based upon their business plan.

Tomorrow PayPerPost will officially announce $7M USD Series B funding led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson whose Managing Director Josh Stein joins the board, and additional participants Inflexion Partners, Village Ventures and new investor DFJ Gotham.

With Series A funding last year of $3M plus initial seed funding by the founders, that brings total investment of over $10M USD.

PayPerPost mean business and are in this for the long haul, and with that much money in the kitty, they can afford to be generous to their marketplace of bloggers.

I notice Michael Arrington has already posted his views on the new round of funding. He seems to think the fact that the same investors are involved this second time to be a sign that other investors want to keep their hands clean.
That is possible, because Michael has been giving them constant bad press, and who knows, maybe the numbers don’t add up for other investors.

An alternative could be equally well said that the current investors don’t feel the need for a lot of fresh blood on the board of directors, are happy with the ability of PayPerPost to deliver based upon their development schedule, and they don’t seem to be having problems finding bloggers or advertisers.

Michael has also got a podcast available with Ted Murphey, CEO of PayPerPost and Josh Stein, the new board member.
Update:- I should have checked out the link first – it is actually the old podcast from back in November, worth listening to if you haven’t heard it, though a lot of it is now out-of-date.

New PayPerPost Marketplace

Time for some pictures:-

The initial PayPerPost Marketplace view is unfiltered. It allows you to sort through PayPerPost’s 28000 bloggers either by price in ascending or decending order, or by “tack” which is based on the rating a blogger has received from advertisers.

It should be noted that posties (the bloggers) who have been very active in the PayPerPost system prior to the launch of PayPerPost direct are more likely to have higher quality ratings at this stage. New bloggers who have been attracted to PayPerPost because of the new direct service may have been writing reviews for competing services. I would think it will be a while before this situation becomes balanced out, but it is great for those that have been supporting PayPerPost as bloggers for almost a year.

So lets apply a filter and see what we find, in this case we will go for primary categories Business and Technology, and set the filter between $50 and $200.

The result for that filter is 30 bloggers sorted in alphabetical order (though you can still sort by price or quality), who match the category and price choices.

The display only shows a snippet of information about each blogger, but it is possible to click through to a profile for more information.

Power User Tip For Posties – You will notice in this next screenshot that I did some experimentation, and that you can use some HTML in your description. Hopefully that will remain because it helps you improve your presentation.
Also note in the preceding screenshot that my snippet displayed isn’t very inviting. It will be important to optimize you first paragraph to encourage people to click through to a full description.

Statistics such as Pagerank and Alexa Traffic are available on the profile page – Technorati Authority is not used, because PayPerPost made the decision recently not to use Technorati ratings, because they can be fairly inaccurate. As an example a theme designer could have a much higher authority with Technorati than major blogs such as Techcrunch, Engadget and BoingBoing.

You will also note that tags are displayed, but there currently isn’t a way to sort blogs based upon tagging – hopefully this is something that will be added in the future. I also hope they move away from having bloggers enter space separated tags, and them being displayed comma separated.
It would be much more accurate to have comma separated tags being entered, and then displayed without adjustment. This would allow tags to be multiple words, such as used by Technorati.

Lets look at the other shortcomings raised 2 weeks ago by other bloggers

Bloggers Should Sell Direct

I thought in my review of PayPerPost Direct 2 weeks ago that orders that will be coming from a new direct marketplace would have a higher charge for processing payable by advertisers. It looks like that is currently not going to be the case.
A 10% fee for order processing, technology, and providing a marketplace and escrow service really isn’t a major concern, especially with the way PayPerPost promote their bloggers to advertisers.

I imagine the level of blogger promotion is set to increase, and that bloggers will be rotated through the system.

The Icons Are Ugly

You could always include them on an advertising sales page rather than in your blog sidebar, and that might be an option I will consider in the future.
The system also allows you to use your own custom icons, or just a text link.

I think a more valid argument, which I don’t think I have heard anyone raise is the ability to customise the popup when someone clicks on a link.

If I only want to allow neutral tone orders, I don’t want any other option available to an advertiser, and I would also prefer to give links in an editorial context, and not have advertisers specify link text – I have a fair amount of SEO experience, and I am not going to give people junk links, but I want to have the choice.

No High Paying Advertisers

In the press release going out tomorrow, PayPerPost confirm they currently have over 6500 advertisers, and those advertisers have ordered, and PayPerPost have delivered 125,000 blog posts – that is probably a turnover of over $1,500,000 in the last year. Not huge by any means, but that number is increasing. I am sure more than $1m of that is in the last 6 months.

Zookoda

PayPerPost purchased Zookoda not too long ago and that business has a lot of potential if they expand into a similar territory as that previously occupied by Feedburner.

Feedburner were recently acquired by Google

Ted, Dan & The PayPerPost Team

Investors invest in people, not just ideas. Dan is one of the investors in PPP, but in many ways is also one of the marketing team, and highly dedicated.

Ted is charismatic and smart, and doesn’t seem phased by anything. Whilst many startups are founded by geeks and don’t have a business plan, PayPerPost was founded by a marketer who saw a need for a certain product in the marketplace.

My blogging friend Jim Kukral frequently calls Ted a Marketing Genius and PayPerPost have certainly capitalised on the controversy that they have caused since they were launched.

The PayPerPost team seem to be very dedicated, and you can tell if you watch any of the videos on RockStartup that they are a well oiled machine, and having fun and delivering development milestones like clockwork.

Calling Microsoft & Yahoo

PayPerPost is a disruptive business model, not just to the blogosphere, but also to advertising. It could be argued that it is also disruptive for search results, but generally it is successful companies who offer good products who can afford to advertise on a large scale, and bloggers who work for Microsoft or Yahoo, and even Google effectively promote their own company products all over the blogosphere whenever something is launched.

Surprise surprise, there are some major companies who offer great product who don’t already have 1000+ bloggers on their payroll, and they would like bloggers talking about them as well.

If Microsoft or Yahoo buy PayPerPost, it would be extremely disruptive to their major competitor, Google, both by offering an advertising model Google can’t touch because of prior criticism (though not official), and one that affects Google’s search quality (supposedly, though there is very little proof)

6 months or less to a major acquisition?

Expect more information on the PayPerPost blog tomorrow and here is a direct link through to the new PayPerPost marketplace.

Update:

Think I covered everything? Think again…

Kat for instance pointed out how well PayPerPost are promoting their bloggers, with the rotating spotlight on bloggers at the top of the bloggers page in the new design. She also highlights some very interesting demographic information that is currently available.
To give you some idea of the misconceptions among the tech sector that “mommy bloggers” are not a worthy audience for advertising, I know Kat gets more traffic than I do every month.

I think the Forbes reporter has been reading Techcrunch too much, and should maybe vary his reading habits more. Whilst the coverage is reasonably accurate on the facts, there is a definite negative slant without looking at what really happens in the blogosphere by employees of INC500 companies who happen to be bloggers.
Colleen again was being misquoted by the press, but in what must be a fairly unique situation, actually gained 2 links from Forbes.

It looks like Jules has found the press section on the new PPP site and is taking advantage of the photos provided.

Update2:

Compensated reviews can be of high quality, all you have to do is take pride in what you write. This article by SapphireKnight in a sponsored post for PayPerPost about the latest funding goes into detail about the difference between the original PayPerPost Marketplace and the new Direct Marketplace.