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A Discussion On Blogging

February 9, 2010 By Skitzzo 11 Comments

This blog post is going to be a bit different from my normal posts. Mainly because I don’t really have a point.
Instead I have a series of thoughts running around in my head that I’m hoping once in print will meld together to form some sort of coherent thought or maybe even philosophy on blogging [...]

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SEOmoz Decision Making Flowchart

December 30, 2009 By Skitzzo 24 Comments

While reading through the long string of comments on the aforementioned SEOmoz post, I noticed the tell-tale pattern of behavior emerging. SEOmoz creates controversy, they clarify and apologize, all the while enjoying the traffic and links that come from a good piece of linkbait.

Until today, I never realized it was actually a part of a written plan! I mean you can imagine my surprise when I stumbled across SEOmoz’s official decision making flowchart (included below for your enjoyment) for their blog. (Note: No of course this isn’t ACTUALLY an official SEOmoz document. It’s called satire you twits!)

Filed Under SEO, Social Media

Poker for a Good Cause

November 8, 2009 By Skitzzo Leave a Comment

The charity I chose to support is the East St. Louis Dream Center. Modeled after the LA Dream Center, the ESL DC supports people in the John DeShields housing project in East St. Louis IL. If you’re not familiar with ESL, it’s best known for it’s strip clubs and it’s crime. John DeShields is one of the rougher projects in the city but it’s near and dear to my heart.

I spent just about every Saturday afternoon for over 6 years in ESL visiting families, playing with kids, picking up trash, and delivering furniture. There are several families that I would consider as a part of my own family and watching the violence and poverty that surrounds them truly breaks my heart.

Filed Under Skitzzo News, Social Media

TechCrunch Caught Stealing Images Again

July 21, 2009 By Skitzzo 3 Comments

Update: It appears TechCrunch has pulled the offending image and replaced it with another one. They still don’t provide any attribution so I sure hope they didn’t just replace one stolen image with another.

Just for those of you who happened to missed seeing the stolen image being used on the site, I’ve included a screen capture below:

While the popular blog TechCrunch is known across the web as a leading source for tech related information, they’re also cultivating a reputation for using copyrighted images without attribution or permission.

Unfortunately for the popular blog, they’ve been caught red-handed yet again, ignoring copyrights.

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Twitter to #FixReplies Users: We Can’t But Please Be Quiet

May 13, 2009 By Skitzzo 5 Comments

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.

Filed Under Google, Social Media, Twitter

Joel Comm’s TwitPwr: Yet Another Content Thief

April 27, 2009 By Skitzzo 10 Comments

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.

TwitPwr Framejacking ESPN.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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Who Owns the Content? Framejacking in Web 2.0

April 14, 2009 By Skitzzo 1 Comment

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:

click to see the live example (may take a few moments to load)

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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