Get that candy ready, neighbors, cause I’m gonna knock on your door dressed as my favorite thing: a blog. And don’t you dare ask me what I’m supposed to be. The Feedburner chicklet painted on my forehead should give it away.

Try and hand me some Smarties or some other sugary junk that you only bought because it was on sale and watch what happens. I’ll ask for the “trick” instead of the “treat” and you’ll be stumped. You see, most homeowners never take the time to plan in case a costumed kid actually requests the “trick.” I call for a revolution. One that calls for kids turning down junk and asking for fun!

Back to my costume. It’s pretty dope.

I’ve gone with the two-column Wordpress. You know the type. It’s the one that bloggers promising to make you rich rely on. The left side of my body is pretty generic. A lot of text talking about how I’m the man and how you want to be just like me. There are a few images flush left and some random embedded media (three YouTube videos, two Scribd documents and Twitter updates). The latest Twitter reads, “Begging for candy, preferably Twizzlers.”

In case I happen to ring your bell and you’re still confused as to what I am, take a look at my left arm. Google AdSense, everywhere. Actually, it’s on my feet too. A blogger’s got to make money right? I’m thinking of adding TextLinkAds and Kontera contextual ads next year. We’ll see.

The right side of my body is blinking, just like any “make money” blog worth its salt in the blogosphere. You see, I have stacked widgets everywhere: head to toe. I need to know who’s visited my blog and from where – and I need to make that information public for the world to see. You also need to be aware of what awards I’ve won (Blogger of the Day, woo hoo!) and every single network I’m affiliated with. Let’s not forget, buried all the way on the bottom, much to their chagrin, the BlogRush widget!

The costume would not be complete without me begging for comments. Since it is a holiday and I’m so happy, I’m going to hold a little comment contest (since that area is so barren!). Leave a comment on my back and I’ll give you a chance to win the candy you gave me back! Sweet! Blog about my costume, and you’ll be entered twice!

Any guy can be Michael Myers, Freddy or Jason. Any girl can dress like a witchy whore. And any kid can be Dora or a pirate. But it takes a special person, like me, to dress up as something I truly love.

Somewhere between you dropping three pennies and a Tootsie Roll into my plastic pumpkin I will ask you to subscribe. You will. Yet when I check my stats on Sunday morning, you’ll be gone.

All I ask is that the kid down the block doesn’t show up at the Halloween party in the same costume. That would just suck. Have a safe and happy Halloween and get your own damn costume. Oh, and keep your Smarties to yourself.

If you’re still trying to work out that bloggers union deal, especially the ‘work from home work out’ $tarbuck$ part of the contract, and finances are rather limited and you don’t manage it to squat days long that posh franchise with the thousands varieties of coffee-imitations… fear not.
Especially not if you’re UK based.

McDonalds comes to your rescue. Starting today.

With the launch of free Wi-Fi access in McDonald’s restaurants from Monday, we can provide the ultimate work break for UK employees to conveniently access the worldwide web. From the comfort of our restaurants, Brits will be able to come out of hiding and surf freely, for free.
[emphasis: waldorf]

I can perfectly imagine how it will feel to blog from home, sat on a hard wooden bench with a clinical table, fries and a tray in front of me. Not to mention the oh so del.icio.us iceberg salad and in ketchup drenched cucumbers falling on my keyboard. No, I don’t want my menu to be maximized, but do you have a power outlet where I can plug in? And maybe a cushion too, because those benches are so comfortable.

Soon coming near to you, 4 Dell equipped bloggers, hosted on blogspot, downloading their free music thanks to McDonalds FreeFi and Ronald ‘Beta’ McDonald 2.0.

Little by little I noticed that the once so-popular and hyped Facebook platform has turned in to a perfect spam box, spam with friendly greetings of… your friends.

Day after day my mailbox is flooded with spam messages, clickthrough messages, every time requiring me to visit the FB website. Sometimes just to read a message or discover that someone has added a picture. Basically the same thing I would have discovered anyway, when trying to follow my friend. That is whenever I log in. Daily actually.

And when I log in… then I am greeted by another spam box, the requests.
A little more than 24 hours of facebox absence generated this nice list, as seen in the screenshot at the right. This list obliging me to go on and on with my rant, because the screenshot is more than 700 pixel high. 700+ Pixels of useless spam, cyberwaste waiting to be added to the list of 32 applications I already have installed. And don’t use except for 4 or 5.

A never-ending list of applications, because most of time someone has been flirting cybervirtually flirting, more than just poke, and I HAVE TO add the application to see what they gossiped about me or check if they gave me a slippery banana or a wet nipple growing in my garden to produce endless bread for the rest of my life as a pirate bitten by zombies who lost the battle against the ninjas.

Not to forget the many notifications landing in my so conventional mailbox, because XXX wants me to add a slideshow to my facebox profile… just because she is too damn lazy to click the link to my flickr account in my facebook profile. sigh

Luckily facebox can be rather satisfying, ego-galaxy-stroking even, too… because right now I am… see the second screenshot.
If only they would have spammed me to let me know that!

Over at some of the blogs we run, we get a lot of pingbacks that say

XXXXXX wrote an interesting post today on YYYYYY. Here’s a quick excerpt …

where

• XXXXXX = a random (or sometimes not so) name or email address, and


• YYYYYY = An excerpt of the original blog post title.

Sure, link to us, post about our interesting posts (today!) and all. But to get tons of trackbacks from our sites (linking to yours), which are obviously MFA blogs (for Made-For-AdSense or Made-For-Insert favorite ad scheme here), is blatant disrespect for the authors of original content.

I advise anyone reading this to add the phrase “wrote an interesting post today on” to your comment moderation list or even blacklist.

Curse those automatic content-scraping scripts!

Disclosure always has been the horse to beat to death among bloggers. Bloggers, especially probloggers (whatever that is), are supposed to be honest, beg and warn you every time they want to make some money on your back that they actually could make money if you are no greedy all for free internaut.

Finally, I’ll come clear with things here and agree with the Master, Shoemoney.

You should assume everything written on this blog is a lie. You should assume I have motivation for linking to everything on this page and will benefit from it somehow.

To be entirely honest honest with you…

I assume you know that I everything I write on this page, I will benefit from it somehow.

Yup, that is correct. I can already see those $ signs in your eyes, but forget it! Being a Jack has some advantages! See, I’m a muppet, I can write what I want here. I can rant & rave. Even at your expense.

As long as I disclose. And I think disclosure doesn’t go far enough yet. Also Jacks and Muppets should disclose [their relations]. And best thing to do that, is the lovely XFN code.

XFN™ (XHTML Friends Network) is a simple way to represent human relationships using hyperlinks. In recent years, blogs and blogrolls have become the fastest growing area of the Web. XFN enables web authors to indicate their relationship(s) to the people in their blogrolls simply by adding a ‘rel’ attribute to their <a href> tags

On a side note, XFN also is the perfect way to get screwed in your search engine rankings, but I digress.
To be entirely honest, I think XFN is for netiquette wussies. Those who believe that the web only consists of hugging cybergenes and cuddling cyberDNAstrings. But one of the best things online always were the flames. What is funnier than sit back and enjoy a great flame war and Wikipedia or Usenet.

But what about disclosure?

• rel=”useless”
• rel=”wannabe”
• rel=”whiner”
• rel=”wussy”

Of course no limitations are set, but when disclosing… better do it consequently.

Lets be honest, things can’t get better than this can they? First you get YouTube, MySpace and Youtube (both things to forget as soon as possible), but then the real platforms launch and they generate some brilliant content.
Forget about the Scobles, Arringtons and Calacanis’s, today it’s all about Valleywag and anonymous twitterers.

Forget even FSJ, this is brilliant. A striking and snarky analysis what exactly is going on on the internet:

Q to Session 2 – would any of the panelists use the apps they have seen today? Not one “yes”

Despite grounbreaking advancements in search technology, I still can’t find a female in this room.

wow…you would think the techcrunch40 web site would not have DDoS just because Arrington is on stage

Having spent a few moments with the 40 list, I am not sure how I feel right now to think we didn’t make the top40.

This is live reporting, interesting live reporting! A worthy Cowboy!
[via Valleywag.]

Although our bestest [sic] friend, Scoble, himself declares that he finally created a piece of great media and there’s not much I can do other than agree. He finally updated his blog with some fun great media. Actually, the focus of his blog has changed and Scoble now officially is a daddy blogger

But back to the great media.
I lied. Somehow.

Scoble wasn’t really the creator of that sublime piece of new media, more the producer or publisher. Screw all that, actually he just was doing what he does best: interviewing someone. But this time, the whole interview part was a master piece!

Scoble didn’t say a word!

Now that’s what I call great media!

The awesome interview? It’s a Twittergram of his new born son, Milan.
Brilliant media!

Seen over the comment threads on some blogs lately:

hello , my name is Richard and I know you get a lot of spammy comments ,
I can help you with this problem . I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50% .In return Id like to ask you to put a link to my site on the index page of your site. The link will be small and your visitors will hardly notice it , its just done for higher rankings in search engines. Contact me icq 454528835 or write me tedirectory(at)yahoo.com , i will give you my site url and you will give me yours if you are interested. thank you (posted verbatim)

Classic social engineering attempt. Straight out of the Social Engineering for Dummies handbook (if there was ever one).

Do you really think people would fall for this one?

Okay, maybe a couple of dummies or so will contact you and link to your site in the hopes of lessening the spam comments they get.

The moment you write these people, they’ll have your email address and include it in their ever-growing list of harvested emails. They’ll sell these for a few bucks to other spammers or to shady companies that use not-so-nice marketing techniques (like spam).

Quite a crafty and creative way of doing things, if I might say so. Spammers are getting creative these days. But I’m not falling for it.

I never thought it were possible, but there actually is something positive about Facebook!

It’s perfect for catbloggers. Take people such as Calacanis and Scoble, those who pee their pants and then blog about it. We also call them A-Listers.

Advantage Numero Uno of Facebook it that it offers anything every catblogger might desire to whore out itself. The blogging narcist.
The eternal entertainer. Entertainer for people who don’t care about any value. Value other than Geek Big Brother.

The positive thing about Facebook lays in it’s platform alikeness: everything all together. It’s microblogging³.
Scoblers and Calacanis’es can import all their stuff at Facebook, without needing any other platforms, profiles anymore: blog feeds, tweets, contact details, facebook messaging can replace their email, aso. But more even, Facebook offers them picture and video upload. A blogging platform with notes and the twitter clone ‘Status updates’.
Anything a blogger needs? Facebook has, Facebook is the microblogger’s myspace. Perfect for kicking out your thoughts at anytime and apps allow you to spice them up. Facebook is a dream for the Scobles among you!

And best of all… most shite bloggers will love FB and forget their blog in the long run. Blogging soon will be for the freaks again, the people who try to add value, but your cat will have moved to FB. And so will have the Calacanis’es, because FB is much more appropriate for blogging emos to win some sympathy, than feed readers are!

Leave the blogs for the people who really spend time at entries. Maybe some day I might be part of that group!

By now everyone already knows that bloggers have a pretty exciting life! Exciting and relaxing. Just like Franky, I’m sitting here naked from the waist down and haven’t shaved for weeks.
But as if all that wasn’t enough, a Union to protect my rights, both on insurance and financial level is exactly what I still need! I want a Union! My kingdom (and the overused wheels of my office chair) for Unionized bloggers!.

Let me explain.

A blogger’s life is hard, it’s the epitome of every professionalized freelance dream. Unionized protection IS needed!
Here’s why.

Blogger’s wake up hours need to be protected
One of the biggest advantages of being a blogger is the freedom to decide my own working hours. And start working whenever I want. With the growing amount of wannabes, it becomes important to protect this advantage: no blog network owner should be allowed to impose me to publish entries before 6.00PM (my local time!)

Coffee is expensive and should be paid for by the network owner
Bloggers are notorious coffee addicts and belong, together with (web) designers, to the resident group of $tarbuck$ squatters. Both $tarbuck$ and good coffee beans are expensive. Those expenses have to be covered by the blog network owners. No coffee beans below Lavazza or Segafredo quality should be accepted. Daily at least 3 outdoor Mochaccinos should be paid for.
Every blog entry hitting the Digg/Reddit/Netscape/Techmeme front page should be rewarded with a bonus kilo of exotic Arabica coffee beans!

Fruity hardware, allowing anytime wireless access has to be provided
How can you call yourself a decent blogger if you use a box equipped with Redmond software? Of course you need the shiniest gadget, allowing you to be online at any time. You never know you might just get that stroke of genius while you’re in the middle of the pampas, far away from your internet connection. Your iPhone will save you and allow you to publish your marvelous entry at anytime. Fancy touch keyboard inclusive.
If you live outside of the distribution area of new, shiny gadgets, it’s the blog network owner’s task to hire a bunch of hackers and make sure anyone, anywhere can access and use those oh so shiny gadgets. And brag about them on their blog. Paid by the network owner of course.

Maximum working time has to be minimalized
It is important for bloggers to be allowed to whip out quick and dirty entries. Entries that only need 4 minutes of work, proofreading inclusive. Actually, the maximum time devoted to an entry should be limited to 4 minutes. If a blogger wants to work longer at an entry, this should only be goodwill-based, not expected.

At least 200 social contacts has to be provided by the network owner
To make sure that bloggers have enough of distraction and IM noise, every network owner has to provide at least 200 active social contacts to newly hired contributors. Minimum 40% of those contacts voluntarily have to cyber on cam whenever the blogger feels the need to go dirty!

Travel equipment and expenses have to be paid for.
Being the overactive, glued to the office chair or couch, blogging species we are, I demand that every 3 months a new set of pillows and ‘soft wheels’ for my office chair and couch are provided. More experienced bloggers will get a new duvet and new bedding every 6 months.

It is obvious that we bloggers, freelance contractors, special working requirements have and those need to be protected by our future Union!
Furthermore, we shall continue to enjoy the right to decide ourselves not to work under a certain rate/entry. But that… that’s a freedom we already have.
Maybe we can oblige blog network owners to include links to at least 5 of our own sites as well. On every network blog of course!

Please give me that Union now! Let my own voice, personality and (in)competence be oppressed (protected) by the strong voice of an Union, putting everyone on the same level. Obviously Union leaders will be the best paid ones among us

For a more serious take on the topic, go read Jeremy Wright’s view on the economics of unionized blogging.