Update 2: Twitter says they’ve learned a lot and responded with another blog post saying:

The problem with the setting was that it didn’t scale and even if we rebuilt it, the feature was blunt. It was confusing and caused a sense of inconsistency. We felt we could do much better.

I still don’t understand where they’re getting that the feature was confusing or caused a sense of inconsistency from. If you used it, you saw every tweet from the people you follow. That seems pretty simple to me.
Update: Due to the uproar over the “small settings update” Twitter has published a new blog post saying:

The engineering team reminded me that there were serious technical reasons why that setting had to go or be entirely rebuilt—it wouldn’t have lasted long even if we thought it was the best thing ever.

In other words, , “Remember how we told you we killed the option because it was undesirable and confusing”? Well really we had to kill it off because we don’t have enough resources to run our service.”

Bottom line: Twitter lied.

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Google just updated the guidelines that all AdSense publishers must abide by… but somebody had better tell the AdWords team.

Now, Google is obviously well within their rights to set whatever kind of guidelines they want, it’d just be nice if they bothered to adhere to them as well.

While Google is more than happy to charge advertisers for AdWords placement they apparently don’t want their publishers to have anything to do with sites on topics such as the “sale of prescription drugs”:

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Update: Joel Comm (who had been out of town) responded to this post and the numerous retweets (thanks again to everyone who helped!) by killing the frame and keeping the rest of the features that make TwitPwr a an interesting URL shortener. Joel stated that the frame isn’t

“the primary purpose of Twitpwr and not an important feature to me. I instructed our dev to remove.” and “thanks for pointing it out.”

Joel, you’re more than welcome. I appreciate the quick response and hopefully the trend of sites like Digg and TwitPwr accommodating content publisher’s rights will continue.

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce TwitPwr.com.

As you can see in the image above, the site is yet another URL shortening “service” that frames other sites’ content.

I’ve written fairly extensively recently about the evils of this practice (known as framejacking) so I’m not going to rehash all those points here. But just so we’re all clear, framing another site’s content without the owner’s permission, is theft.

So, when I stumbled across TwitPwr today I was shocked. Not because another site was framejacking, but because the site is owned and operated by well known internet marketer Joel Comm!

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In covering the Diggbar controversy I’ve been confronted several times with the question of “What’s the big deal?” or even that only SEO’s care about it.

While there are certainly SEO concerns, content producers (read as bloggers, podcast producers, video producers, artists, and just about anyone with a website) across the web should be up in arms whether they care about SEO or not. Why? Because at the heart of this issue is one small question with some BIG implications…

Who owns the content?

To illustrate my point, look at the image I’ve created below:

That’s right ladies and gentlemen, that’s 5, count them 5 layers of framing on top of the content’s source!

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Update: Digg implemented changes earlier this week which drastically improves the Diggbar. Users who are not logged in to Digg (most importantly search engines) will no longer see the Diggbar, they will instead encounter a 301 redirect which is the SEO friendly way to redirect pages.

Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg.com does a videocast called Diggnation and just a couple weeks back he discovered that someone was framing HIS content. His reaction?

“Why is Truveo doing this? Holy shit they’re framing… oooh someone’s taking your shit”

(skip to 32:00)

In light of the much publicized release of the Diggbar, which essentially places a Digg frame around your content, the discussion beginning at the 32 minute would seem to be a bit embarrassing for the Digg founder.

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Last Friday my friends over at The Drill Down were kind enough to have me on the show to discuss my article on the SEO implications of the new Diggbar.

You can listen to the discussion here, or can watch the podcast below.

(Unfortunately due to technical issues only part of this week’s episode was recorded via Ustream.)

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With the recent release of the Diggbar I simply couldn’t stay quite on the SEO implications of it. My friends over at The Drill Down graciously gave me a platform to address some of the inaccuracies being put forward by members of Digg staff. Go check it out and let me know what you think!
Will [...]

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Obviously it’s been a while since I’ve written that this site is undergoing a transition. To tell you the truth, I’m still not quite sure what I want to do with the site.

But, that works out since I’m really pretty busy with a couple of my other projects.

Currently you can find me writing on FlippingEasy.com, a blog about buying, selling, and flipping websites. The blog just launched Nov 1st but is already doing well and I’m having a blast learning as I go.

After selling BloggingExperiment.com for 5 figures I realized that there was quite a bit of money to be made in launching and selling websites. A lot of people either don’t know how to get a site over that first initial hump or don’t care to take the time. I on the other hand love launching blogs and getting them established. It’s keeping up with them day after day the becomes an issue for me. So, I figure creating and selling blogs might just be the perfect match for me.

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Skitzzo.com is undergoing a bit of a transition. I’m not sure what I’ll be doing with the content that is here currently but I guarantee I’ll keep it online somewhere. As you can see from the new tag line, the site is going to be dedicated to my social media activities. I’ll update everyone more [...]

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