I do. And that’s because they make the world look cluttered. Imagine my disgust when, checking out a few favorite personal blogs, I realized all their latest posts were about rhinoplasty, botox, hair transplant, real estate agents in San Diego, liposuction and whatnot. And I hear these people only pay a couple of bucks per post—with the sponsored links of course. Sure, some people put in their paid links in the context of relevant posts. But others do it just plain wrong—the whole post is about the sponsored topic.

Heck, sometimes it feels that their blogs have turned entirely into sponsored blogs.

I don’t want my feed reader to get cluttered with posts about all that junk, so I usually just unsubscribe the first sign of having sponsored posts right on the blog post title. And I don’t have the patience of weeding through pages and pages of sponsored articles until I get to some relevant (i.e., non-sponsored) content. I’m okay with those links appearing discreetly within relevant posts. At least I get to read content with sense.

In my opinion, the purpose of sponsored links, anyway, is for link-building, so as long as the link URL and anchor text are there, the sponsors are happy. I don’t think anybody is still gullible enough these days to mistake those sponsored write-ups for honest to goodness blog posts by the author. We should be way past that.

A sign that a blog is going downhill is if it continually spews out sponsored post after sponsored post, again usually with the sponsored listing eating up the whole post.

Bloggers, consider the tradeoff when writing these posts! Is your credibility worth the couple of bucks per post that they pay you? I don’t think so.

Steve Rubel, power marketer raises a good point in yesterday’s entry, Building an Online Identity Through Lifestreams.

Where I will publish in a year’s time is anyone’s guess. However, what you can bank on is that I will have even more community accounts than I do now.

Right now, just as most other bloggers, the number of online profiles I have reminds me of the early days of domaining. You never have enough of them and any semi interesting, or worse even hyped, platform soon has you as member too.

But what’s the point of all those profiles? Agreed, there’there’s Facebook, where one can add almost everything. Or just stick to a Facebook profile and MySpace-ify the formerly geek cyber space of students.
But does exclusive Facebook networking alone satisfy the blogger or does one have to jump the bandwagon and spend valuable time on every possible network? And how much time does all this cost?

But most of all, where will you blog next year? Will any of those profiles, or services such as tumblr, replace your blog?

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.

The cost per click payout method of Google AdSense has been controversial since the time it was invented. There has always been the possibility of manipulation, which translated to advertisers paying more for worthless ads. Click Fraud, as they call it. Advertisers just end up wasting their money on fools who click on their own ads for the sole purpose of generating a payout.

But of course, Google is smarter than the rest of us, right? They banned such curiosity clicks from their terms of service, and created a method to detect whether an account’s click ratio is within acceptable limits. But then the unscrupulous AdSense publishers worked around this by hiring click monkeys to click on ads randomly, and still maintaining the click to page-view ratio. This was mostly from overseas (where labor is cheap). So Google invented the smart pricing. Clicks cost more if they originated from higher-income countries, or countries where the advertiser’s product is actually sold.

But you still can’t get stop wasting money. That’s because even if those clicks are from legitimate users—even your actual market—all they ever do is visit your site. And what happens next is up to them. Even if the conversion rate was zero percent (meaning no one actually buys your product or service), you still end up paying for the click.

Google is exploring a better system: cost per action. Similar to how affiliate marketing schemes pay out publishers. You only pay when people actually do something, like buy a product or sign up for a newsletter, or give you their contact info.

Even the New York Times gave it some attention lately.

Under the “cost per action” system, advertisers decide what they are willing to pay for a specific action, like a purchase or a software download. Armed with that information, Web site publishers then choose whether to run a specific ad or group of ads on their sites.

Many advertisers find cost-per-action appealing, as it greatly reduces their risk, since they are not charged for ads that are ineffective. The model has long been used online by “affiliate marketing” companies like ValueClick, which have created networks of hundreds or thousands of Web sites that display small ads for e-commerce sites. The publishers are paid when they refer a user who makes a purchase.

Cost per action ads are appealing both to advertisers and publishers. Advertisers can finally get 100% (or close) conversion rate, and they won’t have to pay for wasted clicks. And if the price is right, publishers, meanwhile, would be happy to earn more from affiliate sales rather than live by with the few cents that a click can bring you.

Of course, this is still wait-and-see. The advantage of AdSense is that you don’t really have to push your advertiser’s products (in fact, it’s illegal to encourage users to click). But with the usual affiliate systems, you have incentives to push the products yourself since you don’t earn until someone actually makes a purchase. I wonder if Google’s cost per action system will allow for this.

We hope this new results-oriented Google advertising scheme works.

I’m a huge fan of word of mouth marketing (WOMM). I dabbled in WOMM a bit while I was working for a tech company—we were selling enterprise blog solutions back then, and we used our own consumer-oriented blogging service to demonstrate the strong points of the software. And now that I write on and manage blogs for a living, word of mouth—or rather word of blog—marketing is still the game.

However, WOMM may not be as powerful a weapon if the wielder doesn’t know how to use it. It’s like a double edged sword. Use it properly and you have an efficient tool. If you don’t know how to work it, you might end up cutting yourself.

Last week, a local PR firm contact a handful of bloggers, which included myself. They were inviting everyone for a free breakfast Monday morning to celebrate the launching of the Power Breakfast line of Max’s restaurant. I gladly obliged—I got a couple of dozen free breakfast passes, which were shared among friends and family. We were regular Max’s patrons, anyway, so we were excited to be part of the marketing blitz. We planned to review the food and the experience on our blogs.

But when the day came, we were quite disappointed because the service sucked. At the branch we visited, we felt discriminated upon because we used free coupons. We saw paying clients served pronto, while we had to wait an hour just to get our food—and that was after we complained to the manager.

Apparently, it was only in the branch we visited where those of us who ate for free were given low priority. Someone’s going to be in hot water for that.

We did blog about our experiences, and boy did we give a bad review. Now people—or at least those who know and trust me and my blogger mom—would probably think twice about eating at that particular Max’s branch. Talk about word of blog marketing backfiring.

There has been much talk about disclosure policies lately, especially with how some marketing groups have criticized pay per post and similar types of blog monetization schemes. For instance, do you know that PayPerPost owns disclosure.org? So they do encourage disclosure, but then it seems like a double standard with how they encourage disclosure, but covertly encourage people to use an automatic disclosure policy generator that they themselves own.

At any rate, here’s a funny thing I noticed surfing Andy Beard’s blog. He would sometimes include the following note on his posts, whenever he makes statements with potentially legal implications.

• I am not a lawyer, and the wording I have used was not written by a lawyer


• You should check with your legal consultant and this is provided for entertainment purposes only
  

Now I don’t think this would exactly turn away the legal types from actually dissecting your blog and looking for things they can use against you. But for the rest of us unlearned in the legal arts, this serves to be useful. Or at least quite humorous. This way, no one will blame you if they screw up or do something really stupid with the post you’ve just published.

It’s like saying I will not be held liable for any stupid stuff you may do as a result of reading my blog.

So there. Let me reiterate that I am not a lawyer, and if you get into hot water as a result of reading JOAB, or doing stuff that we recommended here on JOAB, it’s not our fault.

The term metrosexual was dubbed word of the year for 2003.

Metrosexuality is the trait of an urbane man who has a strong aesthetic sense and spends a substantial amount of time and money on his appearance and lifestyle. Though the term has undergone a transformation from its original meaning (a heterosexual man who appeared or acted as if he were homosexual), current trends have seen the metrosexual label placed upon masculinity’s embracing of practices usually perceived to be feminine, rather than those specifically associated with the homosexual. Debate surrounds the term’s use as a theoretical signifier of gender deconstruction and its associations with consumerism. Current gender scholars view metrosexuality as representative of the embracing of relational understanding in addition to its lifestyle and aesthetic implications.

Frankly, I think this is bollocks—just some excuse for men to justify wearing makeup and getting pedicures, and crying out their eyes in public. But then society has changed, hasn’t it? And so has the view of masculinity as having to be about gruff, strong-egoed individuals.

Now the term technosexual is coming into fashion. Oh, please. I think I’m seeing a trend here. Next time, (insert favorite word here)-sexual will be in fashion.

They’re more of a marketing term rather than something that really reflects something prevalent in society. So what if men have been touching on their emotional sides and trying to keep a bit neater in appearance? It happens, but you don’t necessarily have to give it a name!

But then if there’s money being made from such marketing hype, then these people must be serious. For one, Calvin Klein is heavily banking on the techosexual for marketing its latest fragrance line, the in2u. From Valleywag:

In 2008, the marketing campaign for the fashion label’s new scent, CK in2u, borrows the language of bloggers, teen texters and Myspace exhibitionists. What better metaphor for the evolution of blogging: first, an exercise in self-mockery; then, irresistible media catnip; and, within a decade, inevitably, a zeitgeist to be bottled, literally, and marketed to the masses.

(I’m not one to rely on Valleywag for useful information, but then who does?)

Even the New York Times featured commentary on the CK ads (via complex.com)

A typical line from the press materials for CK in2u goes like this: “She likes how he blogs, her texts turn him on. It’s intense. For right now.”

So if you’re a blogger, or really into other things technology, you’re a target for marketeers. They know technology excites you, and that includes gadgets, electronics, autos, and even apparel and accessories. But then again, this kind of marketing is more of hype rather than lasting buzz. What happens when bloggin and tech are no longer in the limelight?

Image: Jason Kottke posing in front of a CK one ad, circa 1998