Category: Blogging

Blogging, Blog, Blogger, New Media, Social Media

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Thank You, Robert Nelson

This morning I noticed a new link in my WordPress dashboard. So I check out the site and don’t immediately see the link in a recent post.  Then I look closer and see a new blogroll link in Robert’s site!

Thank you Robert! There is likely no higher honor you could pay me as a blogger than to add me to your blogroll. It’s not only humbling but also it occasionally makes me write a post like this! If I ever make it to Seattle again to talk to a company about moving there, I’ll have to look you up.

Wanna be like Robert? The code for adding a link and the suggested anchor text is on the right hand side of the screen. Thanks!

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Bloggers – Where are the C-Level People?

Marshall Kirkpatrick’s post, introducing good bloggers and the companies that hire them points out some interesting issues. It just leaves out one extremely important point! Having a series of blogs being managed by non-bloggers is a recipe for one or more of the following: ineffective blogs, unhappy bloggers, internal corporate strife and/or worse, serious pr problems in the blogosphere.

How does one avoid this? Simple. Integrate blogging into your C-level management team. Don’t have any bloggers in your C-level management team or board of directors? Maybe it’s time to consider a new approach altogether with fresh faces. Is a highly educated and experienced person who is a blogger, with startup and innovative company experience mutually exclusive? No. But it’s a requirement if you are going to win in today’s increasingly complex world that requires broad generalist thinkers to navigate not only the blogosphere, but the constantly changing world we live in everyday. Stop building organizational pyramids from 1975 and start building effective organizations that look more like tree trunks! An informal survey at Blogher07 showed that are almost all self taught people and therefore innovators of the future.

So, where are your C-level bloggers? I know where you can find more than a few that understand that blogging is about living the Peter Drucker principles of innovation and customer listening.

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Search Engine Strategies San Jose – Silicon Valley August 19-23

I look forward to seeing all of my wonderful search engine, mobile search and mobile advertising friends next week at Search Engine Strategies (SES) San Jose!  While I’ll definitely be in Mountain View for the Google Dance (hopefully they won’t run out of XL t-shirts in 2 minutes like last year), I’m unsure whether I’ll make it to Palo Alto, San Francisco, Sunnyvale, Oakland, Monterrey or Santa Cruz to visit and see some other awesome things. I do hope to make it to Barcamp Block.

Who else will be there and what spontaneous events, product launches and parties are you looking most forward to? I’m getting very close to some of my goals! I look forward to seeing you.

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Google News Hypocrisy: Walled Off Content

Techcrunch has a post that outlines a well thought out viewpoint on an issue regarding Google News.

Michael, as I posted the other day in my interview with Barry Schwartz on splogs, Google can wall it all it wants, the top portions are available via RSS. They should turn off the RSS feed too if they truly want to prevent all crawling. 🙂

I personally don’t enjoy some of the effects of comment fragmentation, but I don’t know if it will ever go away.

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Barry Schwartz Gives His Thoughts on Splogs with Adsense

During the August 2, 2007 edition of the DailySearchCast, Barry Schwartz and Danny Sullivan discussed Aaron Wall’s post, Catching a Thief Red Handed. Aaron discusses the problem of copied content (splogs) and then goes on to discuss his view in a great post on Google’s lack of respect for copyright. Danny says Aaron’s post starting winning him over. They are working to solve the Youtube problem, but when do they fix this for the web content issue? It’s the one that truly monetizes today. One wonders if this potential lack of trust could become a Google tipping point?

I noticed that Barry seemed passionate and/or somewhat frustrated so I offered to discuss it further via an interview, the results of which you see below.

Thanks for spending time with me today Barry, it seems that this issue of copied / script replicated generated content wrapped in Google Adsense gets you a bit worked up…

Barry: I guess I did. It is frustrating for any person who writes content to find other’s monetizing their content without permission or even credit. It doesn’t bother me like it once did, because the issue is a lot more widespread and automated than it once was. But during that conversation with Danny, I got a bit worked up on the topic.

If I understand correctly, each time you’ve interacted with Google about this, they always ask you to fill out DCMA request manually yourself?

Barry: Yes, that is correct. No matter how obvious it was, they requested I submit a DMCA request.

But you think that they could be more proactive on this issue with all of the data that they have available?

Barry: Yes, I do. Matt Cutts did comment that there is an easy way to report it. But it doesn’t seem to work. And if I tell my Google AdSense representative of an issue, the response should not be, “go file a DMCA request.”

Why not just forward your email to the Blogger Product Manager if the issue involves a Blogger blog?

Barry: Because I honestly do not have a Blogger product manager on hand!

Feedburner actually identifies what they term “uncommon uses” in their reporting but there is not yet a way to use this helpful information to unsubscribe this feed for this use or to automatically fill out DCMA with one click. Would this be a logical step? What else do you think Google should be doing to resolve this issue?

Barry: I would be very happy if AdSense had a form that you can easily get to, to report this stuff. It is actually pretty well hidden presently. A user must know that they can click on “Ads by Google” which then asks for ad relevancy feedback. At the bottom of that form it gives you a way to report “violations,” but it is not at the top of the page. Make it easier, clearer and quicker. I suggest adding this form to the Google AdSense console and make it clearer for non-AdSense publishers to report issues.

Looking at it from the searchers side, it is clear that splogs and other copied content is certainly not a good user experience…

Barry: Yes, that is clear.

What is your vision of the future solutions of these topics?

Barry: Remove splogs! I know it is hard. Make it easier to report these people and terminate their AdSense accounts and reduce the incentive to make a splog.

Maybe Google will take some action on these issues. Conversation to be continued…do you have strong thoughts on copied content? Please join the conversation!

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Chicago Conference Attendees Point to Chicago Shortcomings

Brian Beutler posts his beliefs on why there are so few electric outlets available here at YearlyKos 2007 conference:

” The McCormick Convention Center is, unsurprisingly, operated by a series of labor groups who, working hand in hand, rip apart the building and put it back together to fit the needs of whichever group happens to be renting space here. So for YearlyKos, the teamsters, and the plumbers, and the electricians all come in to haul partitions, and divert piping, and… lay wiring. One catch is, of course, that the more wiring you need, the more you have to pay. The other, less obvious catch, is that any wiring you try to do yourself–running extension chords and power strips across the room–might well violate your contract and cost you a big fine. So the result is a lot of dead laptop batteries. At a frickin’ blogger convention.”

Matthew Yglesias points out similar sentiment.

Then last weekend Kristy Sammis, the wonderful hard-working conference organizer, pointed out the following issues on her blog in regards to Blogher07:

“The City of Chicago has a lot of rules. A LOT of them. And also taxes. And fines. Like, did you know that there’s a 3% soda tax? Or that our caterer could have lost his license for letting attendees leave with bottles of wine, even though the nice people at Hess were willing to give the extras out? Or that moving one single air wall would have cost FOUR HOURS of labor?”

“The shuttles cost approximately 18 billion dollars. (They would have only cost 17 billion, but we paid that extra billion to have a dedicated dispatcher ensuring that all five shuttles were running all day.)

I do not know why the drivers didn’t know where they were going. I don’t know why they just sometimes stopped showing up. I don’t know why they weren’t labeled, a la BLOGHER SHUTTLE. And I really don’t know HOW you can get into an accident when you’re driving at 3 miles an hour in Pier traffic.

But I, too, would sure like to find out.”

Kristy so would I. Why is Chicago turning off it’s last golden goose, the conference industry? If we can’t run shuttle buses less than a mile for 800 people how can this city possibly even dream of executing on hosting huge events with the current state?

As someone who spends alot of time at Chicago conferences, the time to improve these situations is now – before there are no more Chicago conferences.

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Blogher 2007 is Happening Now!

I’m here at Blogher (blogher07) in Chicago to network with the awesome people, I’m especially interested meeting people working in the mobile search marketing start ups and traditional search engines like Ask, MSN/Live and Yahoo!

I’ve already met some fun and compassionate people! This conference is unique to me in that it’s not so much about me learning about new online marketing or blogging techniques. It’s about learning about different points of view of looking at the world. There are about 800 people here and it’s a bit overwhelming in terms of effective and targeted networking. But everyone is very open – I wish women everywhere communicated to me in the frank straightforward manner that I’m experiencing here.

I’m sitting in a session on branding. Many of the people I know in the room are IM’ing me. Here is a nice summary of the session from Felicia Sullivan.