I‘ve seen this discussion happening across the Internet, in forums, on social media and on blogs. Paid posts, are they bad? Maybe. But how are they different from a radio talk show host giving his pitch for a sponsor of the show? Nothing really. Google’s new fight isn’t against spam, though I’m sure that fight is still ongoing, it’s against bloggers who accept compensation for their posting positive reviews of the product without disclosure. Google sees this as a problem because the search giant’s algorithm relies heavily on links to and from sites for ranking purposes. If you as the blogger are pushing a product you aren’t providing unbiased value to the readers and to the Googlebot when you send a link to a sponsor.
Personally, if I review something, I do not promise a positive review. I promise a fair and unbiased view of the product and how it can or can’t benefit my readers. This is my own personal preference and I stand by it 100%. Other bloggers out there do accept paid sponsorships, and though I’m not a big fan, that’s their prerogative. I personally feel that bloggers need to find ways to pay the bills and if writing a PR post for a product or company helps in doing that, then all the more power to them. What I do have an issue with is the bloggers that don’t disclose what their plan is on their blog. They decide to accept compensation, but don’t alert people that it involves a kickback to them.
On the Goldstein Media blog, we have some relevant ads on our sidebar. We feel that these ads are relevant to our readers and don’t detract from the overall value of the blog. When a blogger hides affiliate links in their posts and writes complete fluff pieces for sponsors without alerting their readers to what they are doing. That is wrong.
Disclosure is key. WebProNews interviewed Michael Gray about this very topic:
Protect Your Company’s Collaborative Spaces – You need to be prepared to lock out former workers from your online network once they leave. Good article from the people at GIGAOM
United Way hopes to net new donors via social media – When one of United Way’s 500 cause members on Facebook asked her friends to donate money to the charitable organization in lieu of buying her birthday gifts, officials at the Greater Dayton agency were not only pleasantly surprised but excited about the possibilities for future fundraising.
Obama’s Facebook advice: Making a prez: The Swamp – "Let me give you some very practical tips,'' the president told the high schooler. "First of all, I want everybody here to be careful about what you post on Facebook.
EduFire Raises $1.3 Million For Video Education Platform – EduFire, the startup that offers online video classes for a variety of subjects, has raised $1.3 million in Series A funding from Battery Ventures, with Google AdSense godfather Gokul Rajaram and Western Technology Investment participating.
The Top 20 VC Bloggers (September 2009) – When it comes to lists of top VCs, one of our favorites is the top VC bloggers. Larry Cheng, a partner at Fidelity Ventures, started keeping just such a list last May, based on how many subscribers each VC blogger has on Google Reader. This morning he updated his VC blogger leaderboard. The top 20 are below, all 100 are on his own blog, Thinking About Thinking (No. 71).
Smart.fm: How Well Do You Know Your Facebook Friends? – Smart.fm aims to act as a full-fledge learning platform, wherein users can access the site, say “I want to learn about this topic” and be presented with tools, quizzes and world lists that test memory retention and understanding. There is a social element too, and users can both add their own information to existing courses, and share their learning schedules, remix content and ask and offer help.
While the companies are not each others' biggest rivals, they are increasingly competing with each other.
This follows years of enjoying one of the coziest relationships in Silicon Valley — one that will now get more complicated as the companies compete in more areas.
10 Incredibly Cool DIY Projects – 2009 Backyard Genius Awards – Popular Mechanics – To create an incredibly cool car-crusher or oversize rocket or solar-pedal powered contraption that the world had no idea it needed takes brilliance, determination and a healthy dose of crazy. The winners of our Backyard Genius Awards have all those qualities, and we salute them for it.
Security Threat: WordPress Under Attack – To prevent this attack, if you have not done so already, update your WordPress install immediately to the latest version. Change all your passwords to a strong password (cough), including WordPress blog access for all users, database, FTP, control panels, etc. These are all highly recommended procedures.
WordPress › Blog » How to Keep WordPress Secure – Right now there is a worm making its way around old, unpatched versions of WordPress. This particular worm, like many before it, is clever: it registers a user, uses a security bug (fixed earlier in the year) to allow evaluated code to be executed through the permalink structure, makes itself an admin, then uses JavaScript to hide itself when you look at users page, attempts to clean up after itself, then goes quiet so you never notice while it inserts hidden spam and malware into your old posts.
Improve Keyword Conversion Rates with Google Analytics – When you check all of your carefully selected and researched keywords, the results put a smile on your face because they are in the top spots in each of the search engines. You then look at your site traffic numbers for these keywords, and they are higher than ever. Then you scratch your head and ask, “Why are conversions so low?” Take a breath: the answer can be found in your Google Analytics data.
Bit.ly Launches J.mp to Save You Two Characters – Need to save two characters in a tweet? You could rework your wording a bit (change “people” to “ppl” or “for” to “4” for example), or, if your tweet includes a link, you could turn to a shorter URL.
Bit.ly, Twitter’s default shortener, is already plenty short, but if you want the same experience in two less characters, you can now use j.mp, which appears to simply be bit.ly rebranded with a new URL.
Bad Neighborhood – Link Exchange Tool – Text links are an important factor in today's search engine optimization, and exchanging links with other websites is a good way to get them. However, doing a link exchange with a website that is penalized can have some detrimental results.
Is Google Using A Privacy Double Standard? – On one hand Google doesn't abuse your data and personal information, other hand if the government and legal system comes knocking your information might not be safe from their eyes.
My Favorite Link Building Lie – While it is pointless to seek links (via email or any other method) for crappy content from other sites with equally crappy content, link building via email does in fact work perfectly – but only under one perfectly obvious and sadly overlooked circumstance: when the link seeker represents meritorious content and the link granter is looking for that type of meritorious content to link to. It’s so painfully obvious to me, that I fight the urge to laugh out loud when I read quotes like the one above.
Amazon Adds A Virtual Private Cloud – ReadWriteEnterprise – Amazon has created a hybrid cloud that can work securely for the enterprise, balancing the need for encryption with the low cost and scaling power that the cloud provides.
The Twitter Exploit That Could Have Stolen Your Info and Much, Much More – Found by David Naylor, the vulnerability exploits an issue with a recently added an HTML tag to all of their links (rel=nofollow, which tells GoogleGoogleGoogle that links on Twitter shouldn’t count in its algorithm). The result is that David was able to change the links in such a way that it generates a huge cross-site scripting vulnerability.
Over 80% of Americans Use Social Media Monthly – The demographic data follows the trend we see overall—younger people are more heavily involved, but over-35s and over-55s are becoming more and more active in social networking. While 10% or less of online adults aged 18-34 are “socially inactive,” the older age ranges are showing high growth. Among adults 35-54, participation grew 60% over last year:
Top 5 Current Email Scams You Should Know About – There are numerous ways to be scammed nowadays. Pyramid schemes, ‘too good to be true’ investments and of course the good old internet. There are literally millions of websites that will gladly take your money, personal info, bank details and a host of other things from you and then skedaddle.
Make Post-Mortem Plans for Your Online Life – Email – Lifehacker – Email, Facebook messages, Twitter DMs—they will, as inbox guru Merlin Mann suggests, keep coming even after we're dead. TIME suggests you make a plan for your online accounts-especially if you don't want your inbox contents revealed.
reBlog by Eyebeam R&D – A reBlog facilitates the process of filtering and republishing relevant content from many RSS feeds. reBloggers subscribe to their favorite feeds, preview the content, and select their favorite posts. These posts are automatically published through their favorite blogging software. Thanks @nealwiser for pointing this out.
How Google’s Caffeine Will Impact PPC – ClickZ – Every once in a while Google makes a major algorithmic change to its organic results. In reality, its organic algorithm changes at least monthly, if not more frequently, but the major changes are sometimes announced. Even when they aren't, these changes are quickly named by the industry, like hurricanes named at the time they prove themselves able to do damage.
This is the Link Report for August 6th through August 7th:
Georgia Takes a Beating in the Cyberwar With Russia – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com – Besides the bloody shooting war going on between Georgia and Russia, theres another, quieter battle going on in cyberspace.The Georgian government is accusing Russia of disabling Georgian Web sites, including the site for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Twitter Restores Service After Online attack – NYTimes.com – Twitter, the popular microblogging site, was out of service much of the day Thursday as it worked to defend itself against a Web attack, but service appeared to have been restored by late evening.Many of Twitters 45 million legitimate visitors were unable to use the service for hours. Analysts characterized the disruption as a denial-of-service attack, in which hackers overwhelm a Web site by sending it a deluge of junk requests, and one suggested the attack might have originated in Russia or Georgia.
Revision3 > Hak5 > Episode 524: USB Multipass – Linux, Trinity, USB – Why carry around a dozen bootable USB drives when you could merge ‘em all into one? On his episode we build a USB Multipass complete with customized boot menu ready to launch any of favorite tools–including Backtrack, Ophcrack, Kon-boot, dban, freedos, and more. Plus Shannon reviews the Trinity Rescue Kit, the boot disc dubbed CPR for your computer.
3 unveils MiFi mobile Wi-Fi service – mirror.co.uk – The 3 network has just pulled the wrappers off MiFi, a mobile Wi-Fi device that allows you to connect any Wi-Fi equipped device to the web no matter where you are.
Is Cyber Warfare to Blame for Twitter Meltdown? – Everybodys still regrouping after todays Denial of Service attacks against Twitter, FacebookFacebookFacebook, LiveJournal, and other social media websites. Now, however, some further details about what happened and who might be behind it are coming to light.
Digg Ads Are Here: Will Users Bury Them Into Oblivion? – Two months ago, Digg (Digg) announced a lynchpin in its revenue strategy: Digg Ads. The program, an attempt to fix the companys inability to turn a profit, allows users to vote on specific ads within the homepage feed. The more diggs, the less the ad costs to the advertisers. But if Digg users hate the ad, then their downvotes increase the ad price.
Team Apart Makes the Virtual Meeting Social [Invites] – There is a lot of software out there for conducting virtual conferences and performing demos: GoToMeeting, Microsoft Office Live Meeting, WebEx, and AdobeAcrobat Connect immediately come to mind. Most of these programs though require software to be installed and are meant for conference meetings rather than team collaboration. Theyre not virtual workspaces.
Koobface Virus Gets Smarter; Targets Twitter and Facebook Users [Alert] – Koobface, a virus that targets computers via social networking sites, is apparently back and with added sophistication.A typical Koobface attack like the one that surfaced on Twitter last month comes via a link that purports to be an interesting video (i.e. someone tweets my home video with a link to what looks like a YouTubeYouTubeYouTube page). Those videos then tell you that you need to upgrade your Flash player which, many legitimate videos often do too. Upon upgrading, however, the user is infected with the virus.
Tim Ferris, author of the 4 hour work week, gave a talk at the Wordcamp San Francisco about blogging and how to do it without burning out. He gives great suggestions. A must watch.
Some key points:
Find out when you do your best writing
Print out your most important posts after you write them and edit them by hand
Aim to remove 10% to 20% of the post everytime
Ignore SEO, during the first draft
When you try and optimize right away it reads like you were trying to optimize it and not like there is value there for the reader
After the first draft you can use Google’s keyword tool to help optimize the article. Don’t over do it
Try to make sure the post can only be catagorized by one topic. More than one topic in a post can split up your anchor text in link backs.
There is no correlation to the amount of time you spend on a video to the success of the video
Often simpler and shorter is better
Not suggested to just post a video with no text. Standalone videos don’t do as well as videos that have text in the post as well.
Text spreads through the search engines much faster than video
At least summarize what you say in the video or what the video is about
Most of all have fun with your posts. If you don’t appear to be having fun posting your readers are going to have fun reading it
Before you get started in social media to promote your company, you need to have a plan in place. Not only do you need to plan you need to know how to execute the plan and the tactic.
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‘ve seen this discussion happening across the Internet, in forums, on social media and on blogs. Paid posts, are they bad? Maybe. But how are they different from a radio talk show host giving his pitch for a sponsor of the show? Nothing really. Google’s new fight isn’t against spam, though I’m sure that fight is still ongoing, it’s against bloggers who accept compensation for their posting positive reviews of the product without disclosure. Google sees this as a problem because the search giant’s algorithm relies heavily on links to and from sites for ranking purposes. If you as the blogger are pushing a product you aren’t providing unbiased value to the readers and to the Googlebot when you send a link to a sponsor.
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