Forget Pay per post, review me, or other similar schemes. Blogging is crossing over to the mainstream, and in some places, it’s not uncommon for bloggers to get invited to press conferences and product lauching gigs. Inevitably in these events, people get swag like novelty items, gadgets for review, free subscriptions, and other such free stuff. At the very least you get free dining and entertainment, which is reason enough to attend events, as some would think (I’ve had my share of free food and booze!).

However, some would think that this dilutes a blogger’s credibility. Being a blogger usually entails being candid and straightforward. So it’s assumed whenever you write about your meal at this restaurant, or your experience with your cellphone network, or a certain laptop brand or software, you are being honest. But no one really knows if you’re actually on the payroll of that software company, or that laptop manufacturer, or that restaurant. Or at the very least you could be receiving free meals from these guys. And wouldn’t that result to some bias in how you write on your blog?

Whether you’ve been to one of the sponsored parties/events, been given gifts or prizes, sent out on trips, dined in a posh restaurant or handed out free stuff and services — you are automatically subject to questions of credibility. It may not happen now but it’s possible in the future. Reputation management need not be merely reactive. In fact, I think it should be pro-active (touch base with your target market now so that miscommunication and inconveniences could be minimized if not totally avoided in the future).

And with this, the importance of adequate disclosure is stressed. It’s important to be transparent not only with the benefits you get from being a new media practitioner (nifty term eh?), but also with your affiliations. So you could say you work for this certain company in real life (e.g., your day job). Or perhaps you can say that the product you’re reviewing or announcing is owned by the same company you work for.

Maybe then, you wouldn’t be branded as a shill.

Or perhaps you have a newly designed theme that has a sponsored link. Disclosure necessary? Ah, but that’s another (juicy?) story, altogether!

Google is poised to take over the world. But they seem to prefer doing it covertly. They want to take over the world by slowly buying up the services and software you use, and quietly assimilating all of these into their system so things work more seamlessly if you used them than not.

Take for example FeedBurner, which was recently bought by Google (probably for a gajillion dollars). It used to be that FeedBurner was platform agnostic—meaning it won’t give a damn if you used Blogger, WordPress, TypePad or any other blogging software, as long as you published an RSS feed. But now, if your blog is hosted by Blog*Spot, or published via Blogger, you would find it a tad easier to integrate FB into your blog.

If you host your content on a Blogger blog with a blogspot.com address (or use Blogger’s “custom domain” feature), you can now redirect your native Blogger feed to your FeedBurner feed (quite easily, might we add). Gone are the muggy, languorous days of wrestling with “autodiscovery” tags in foreboding corners of your Blogger template code or hacking through this tangled discussion thread for a glimpse of configuration clarity. Starting right now, you just log into your Blogger account, select Settings | Site Feed, enter your FeedBurner feed address and click “Save Settings.” Zap! Pow! Kraaakkkk! Now you’ve got the complete picture of how your content is being consumed out here, out there, out everywhere.

I probably shouldn’t care, though, since I use self-hosted WordPress installations, anyway, and can always just use the FeedBurner redirect plugin to automatically redirect feed subscribers to FeedBurner. (Incidentally, that particular plugin is now maintained by FeedBurner officially.) But this sure is one advantage of Blogger over what is now its main competitor, WordPress.com. And I don’t think there’s a way for WP.com users to redirect their feed URL to their FeedBurner URL right now.

I guess WP.com should just install this plugin and make redirection an option easily accessible to everyone. This should be easy enough to do.

[via Blog Herald]

It was supposed to be the end-all, be-all of phones. Scoble was all excited over it (which made him look really stupid, in my opinion), and the 400,000 or so bloggers have set the blogosphere abuzz with postings about the iPhone, and the 700,000 people or so who have bought the iPhone in its opening weekend.

But the iPhone isn’t all that great. Forget the jazzy new touch-screen glass interface. Forget that it seems to have missed out on some basic phone features. What I’m talking about here is how the iPhone is being bragged as an all-in-one device, especially an Internet-connected device. Sure it has WiFi, but WiFi access points are very limited after all. And when you’re out there in the real world, you have nothing else to rely on but your cellular service.

So a good mobile Internet device should be able to give you broadband access from anywhere. What does the iPhone have? EDGE.

EDGE? WTF? If you don’t know what EDGE is, it’s simply GPRS multiplied several times over. And GPRS maxes out at 30 Kbps or so. So that means EDGE will max out at either about 200 Kbps or 400 Kbps, depending on the network (I know my math sucks, but this is what the marketing materials say).

But trust me, even mobile networks in backwards, underdeveloped countries can support speeds faster than 400 Kbps! They have true 3G (whereas EDGE is technically 3G, but very slow compared to other technologies). They have HSDPA and all sorts of acronyms that stand for “very fast mobile internet.” But the iPhone, which is supposed to be the epitome of advancement and evolution in mobile technology can just support EDGE!

How ironic.

I’m not sure if this is just a limitation of AT&T, the sole carrier that offers the iPhone, or that if they limited themselves to EDGE so users will have broadband across AT&T’s coverage. But they could have done better. EDGE sucks, really. I expected better of Apple.

It’s their job to do so, that’s why. At least that’s how what Jeremy Wagstaff says it is. Compared to bloggers, who write about the world as they see it, journalists are trained to look for kinks. Journalists are trained to “research” for stories in places that the rest of us idiots won’t even dare to look.

Journalists are taught to identify “news”. In some situations, it’s obvious: A bomb goes off in Baghdad; two guys drive a flaming SUV into Glasgow Airport; Apple launches a cute phone. All news, and no one would disagree.

But it’s the rest of the stuff that gets problematic. Most journalists don’t have these kinds of stories to work with so they’re forced to look for them, and that mostly involves prying apart things, people, organizations, situations, points of view and seeing some incremental change or difference that merits a news story, such as U.S. family terrorized by possible phone hoax (Cellphones Terror Weapon Horror!)

So Wikipedia, for example, gets coverage not for the millions of great articles in there and the millions of people who go to it first for information, but the few articles that are wrong, badly written, libelous, mischievous or biased. That, for a journalist, is the news story. (Wikipedia Unreliable Shock!)

Of course we here at JOAB try to do this too to some extent. So does that mean we’re journalists? Nah. That just means we’re a bunch of snarky (and sometimes offensive) people who are fond of picking things apart and criticizing/critiquing what we find.

Just as I thought linkbaiting schemes were a thing of the past, I come across yet another link whoring scheme that I think is all wrong. Do a search on viraltags and viralinks and you will come across this post instructing you to add a matrix of links under any post on your blog, and adding any blog that pings back to your post into the matrix.

So basically it’s link exchange. You get links from people who wish to pingback from your site, and you add their links in return.

Pretty interesting idea, I would say. However, if this concept were to be as successful as the promoters would say, why aren’t they on top of the search results for the keywords viraltags, and even viralinks?

Maybe they used a name of an already existing service (there are sites called viraltags.com and viralinks.com)? Maybe it’s really a fluke?

Here’s what I think. The concept is indeed interesting, as it takes advantage of blogs’ automatic pinging/linking back mechanism in order to “notify” other viralink bloggers that there are people asking for a link back. And we know the value of inbound links in terms of search optimization. However, there might be misplaced enthusiasm about such “viralinking” schemes.

• Link farms? The way the links are set up—which are in matrix form—might be thought of as link farming by Google. Come on, we know Google likes links that are interspersed into text naturally. There’s probably more value in a single link coming from a blog post of substance rather than a long list of hundreds of links. Jampacking your post with links would just dilute its link-love value.


• Anchor text. The original viralinks post tells of linking using a matrix of dots or stars. Where’s the SEO value there? Aren’t you aware that the anchor text plays a big part in optimization. If you used asterisks as anchor text, then you would just be optimizing the site linked to for the “*” keyword (if there is such a thing). You should use something more descriptive.


• It’s artificial. I read some bloggers claiming this would enhance your popularity on technorati. I’m thinking otherwise. I would say the guys over at technorati would think of such schemes as unnatural ways of jacking up link popularity, and hence would eventually filter them out. So whatever popularity you get will likely be short lived.

I guess there may be some merits to getting into link-exchange schemes. But one thing I really hate, and would like to highlight here as such, is how these things uglify your site. I’m not about to add a hundred or so links below my posts (or even just one) just for a link exchange program. I would rather write interesting, substantial, link-able material that everyone would blog about and link to.

Last April I chanced upon a post on JohnChow.com that I thought quite disturbing. I would’ve responded there, but the lazy guy in me thought of postponing it. So here, two months after I’m writing a reaction.

In one of John’s evil SEO trick posts, he says one good way to encourage people to leave comments on your blog is by displaying the top comment authors on your home page. This way they get a link from your front page, and with WordPress this is usually not dumbed down by rel=nofollow (something previously discussed here on JOAB).

This can prove to be beneficial to both blog author and reader. Authors will get more comments on posts. Readers get SEO love from another blog’s front page. It’s much like purchasing a text link, John himself says.

Looking at my Top Commentators lists, I can see that, from a SEO standpoint, three commentators are doing it right and the rest are doing it wrong. Getting a link on the Top Commentators list offers more SEO benefit than traffic benefits. It’s the same as buying a text link. The link sends you traffic but its main purpose to help you improve your Google ranking. Knowing this to be the case, then the anchor text for the top commentator link should be anything but your name (unless your name is very descriptive).

So if you comment on a blog, instead of using your own name you use a descriptive anchor text.

But then that got me thinking. If everyone did this, then no one would be signing blogs using their names or aliases. Everything would be signing as “website copywriter,” “cheap custom content,” or some other text. Maybe people will also start signing as “buy viagra” or “xanax” or some other spammy sounding name. And what happens when that becomes the prevailing trend? You will have a helluva time filtering your comments for spam.

Your spam filters might come up with a lot of false positives. You might end up having to sift through your moderation list for otherwise valid comments.

Worse, wouldn’t this make the line that separates spam from non-spam disappear altogether? And wouldn’t this mean that most of your commenters become spammers by definition?

Personally I have my limits. It’s okay to sign as your blog or website’s name. But if you’re using my comment threads too much for marketing your product, service, or brand, then that’s spam in my book.

Evil, indeed. And bordering on stupid. If I had commenters like that I would block them outright. Search optimization and marketing sometimes just make things too annoying for the regular user.

Some folks would believe that Apple is the biggest liar that the world has seen. Sure, their products are hip and cool (not to mention outrageously expensive by some standards). But the marketing whizzes the people over at Cupertino, CA are, the general public just tends to believe that anything that comes from Apple is heaven-sent. Sometimes what they say isn’t exactly 100% true.

Case in point: the PowerPC. For many, many years, Apple has claimed the PowerPC is faster than a comparable Intel (or compatible) chip because of differences in architecture. Sure, it’s a “reduced instruction chipset” (RISC) after all, and does tasks differently than a more complex Intel chip would. But lo and behold, after hitting some speed bumps (meaning Apple couldn’t get past some speed ceilings for the PowerPC), they switch to Intel processors and declare their new computers 5 times (or more) faster than their comparable predecessors.

Another case in point: Safari. It is a known claim that Safari is the fastest browser around. Come on. What’s so fast about a browser if all your data gets shot through the pipes anyway? That means if your Internet connection is running at a snail’s pace, then you don’t get your webpages, streaming videos, or whatnot loaded up any faster.

Maybe they render the pages faster, but so what? It’s all about perception. I still go to the loo or brew some coffee when loading up big webpages anyway. And I take my sweet time.

My point is that Apple has just introduced its previously Mac-only browser to 90+% of the computing population who use Windows. A lot of people are excited. You get “Safari on Windows” posts from the A-listers, news blogs, and all that. How has the (re)launch of an old web browser ever gotten a blogging A-lister giddy like a schoolgirl (not that I find anything wrong with giddy schoolgirls)?

Maybe it’s because it’s the rise of a new platform? Come on—the browser has been the battlefield of web-based businesses for years now. But come to think of it, the iPhone is said to be running some form of Mac OS X, with Safari as its main UI.

Or is it because it’s kind of a novelty? Like how people got excited over iTunes for Windows. For the second time around, losers Windows people will get a feel of how it is to use a Mac.

I don’t think this one is worth jumping for joy about. I think we had this coming. Ever since Apple switched to Intel, all things OS X are theoretically compatible with PCs. When Apple starts selling boxed sets of OS X for PCs—now that’s something to get excited about.

We bashed Truemors earlier last month, but I was surprised to learn this from Guy Kawasaki himself: Truemors doesn’t even have a business model.

0. I wrote 0 business plans for it. The plan is simple: Get a site launched in a few months, see if people like it, and sell ads and sponsorships (or not).

0. I pitched 0 venture capitalists to fund it. Life is simple when you can launch a company with a credit-card level debt.

Sure, it’s okay for startups and Web 2.0 companies to run just because of raw passion for the medium and for the technology. But coming from a venture capitalist himself, it sounds like Truemors was one big (or small?) experiment. I would agree that if an entrepreneur presented a plan without a business model, then most likely Guy the VC would boot that guy out of his office.

And Guy even admitted that it was a stupid idea.

In total, I spent $12,107.09 to launch Truemors. During the dotcom days, entrepreneurs had to raise $5 million to try stupid ideas. Now I’ve proven that you can do it for $12,107.09.

Hey Guy, you can even do it for less!

But then it got me thinking, Guy’s an entrepreneur, and also a capitalist. He’s one of those people who can afford to lose money. As long as he learns from the experience, then he ends up richer in the long term (money and experience wise).

Here’s the bottom line: Whether Truemors succeeds or not, I learned a helluva lot. One thing is for sure: no entrepreneur can tell me that he needs $1 million, four programmers, and six months to launch this kind of company. With products like WordPress, MySQL, and Salesforce platform, things are a whole lot cheaper and easier these days.

Suddenly, Truemors doesn’t sound so silly to me.

[via Wired]

I’m not so fond of those animated thingamajigs blogs and websites often have these days. They range from video apps like YouTube and MetaCafe, and photo slideshows like slide.com and even Flickr. Some sites even have the tenacity to display animated banner ads in Flash!

Why do I hate them? For one, they tend to eat up memory and processing power, especially when I have a lot of tabs open on my browser (whether it’s Safari or Firefox). That’s even when they’re in the background. Secondly, they eat up bandwidth, especially those that decide to automatically turn on and play by themselves, without even asking me to click a thing.

Some of my friends have flash embedded on their social networking profiles (particularly on MySpace and Friendster, which let you do horrendous customizations). Worse, they automatically play some songs or videos that I just find tacky. I tend to avoid visiting these people’s pages altogether.

I’ve lost a draft blog post, or two, or three, because of these Flash animations that just pop up and freeze up my browser when I’m browsing other sites (for reference, quoting or links). Good thing the latest version of WordPress has auto-save, but that doesn’t always do the trick.

It’s also darn slow. Friends send me links for photos on auto-slideshow services like slide.com, but I would rather not wait for the entire animation to load (I have no patience to wait for the status bar to reach that 100% mark). I would rather go to a photo sharing/community site like Flickr.

But wait, Flickr uses flash, too. However, that’s only for those views where you need to drag and drop items for organizing, or when you want to create a flash badge or button, or when an image has annotations. Otherwise, flickr photo pages are just plain ol’ HTML. It’s not as obtrusve as other applications, and Flickr doesn’t make you wait just to see a photo.

Flash is good because it’s more or less the standard already for animated web content. You don’t have to ask users to download different proprietary plugins, and you can be sure that most are able to view your content. But sometimes it’s just too much, especially if the animations load up automatically, and if they take a long time to load. If it’s the bulk of the content (say it’s a video that a user wants to watch), then fine. But if it just impedes in the user experience, then it’s best to do away with animations of all kind.

That’s why I prefer reading blogs using my RSS reader.

A favorite writer, Liz Strauss recently wrote over at the Blog Herald about the dichotomy between relationships and information when it comes to the Web.

What is a link? Is a link clicks and traffic and Google rankings? Or does a link represent that I know you, that I’ve read your content, that you’re relevant and of value to me? Is a comment conversation or something I can buy or rent?

We’re living in two Internets. It looks much like the companies we find in the world of brick and mortar. One is about places, information, and data. It’s the buildings in which people work. The other is about people, relationships, and conversation. It’s the people who work in those buildings. One is a structure. The other is social

From her articles, I’ve come to know Liz as a relationship blogger, so she highly values relationships in her blogging activities. I doubt if she sells ad space or text links on her personal blogs. Who she writes about, you’ll be sure she’s personally recommending them, by way of linking.

When I started blogging, it was mostly personal. My blog was about my life. Sure, it sounds corny, but a good majority of bloggers are blogging on personal matters. Blogs are their online diaries, and not their soapboxes and online newsmagazines. So on my personal online journal, I linked to sites and other bloggers that I found interesting. Back then, the concept of paid links was still not as prevalent as it is today.

But then blogs became popular among search marketers and optimizers for their link value. If you could get a link from an A-lister, not only would you get traffic, but also good link juice. Or if you can’t get quality, you could at least get quantity. And the text link industry was born. Now you see sponsored blog posts and reviews everywhere. Sometimes it’s weird how people would insert paid links within their paragraphs, even though the anchor text is unrelated. Sometimes people would incessantly post, several times per day, just to meet pay per post quotas, (quality drops significantly in these cases, in my observation). You don’t know what’s real anymore.

Going back to Liz’s point, it seems there’s nothing really wrong with being informational instead of social on your blog. I think the point is that blogs these days are becoming more and more impersonal. Pretty soon, the concept of blogs as personal journals might be a thing of the past.