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 and social media as a whole.

And, if any of these random thoughts resonates with you, I’m hoping you’ll join in the conversation with a few thoughts of your own.

I’ve Been Thinking of Starting This Blog…

See it all started when I recently found myself in a situation I’m sure many of you are familiar with:

A friend or family member wanted me to help them start a website that would let them make money off their latest amazing hobby.

Or, they’ve started a blog and want my help making it popular enough to make money from it.

Or, they’ve got a great idea for a site that I should start and they’re absolutely certain it’s going to make a ton of money.

As you may have guessed I’ve encountered a situation similar to the above several times. I usually point them to a couple of my favorite blogs on blogging or if they’re really serious, will recommend a few books they should read.

But more times than I can count, I walk away absolutely knowing their blog will never succeed even if they do managed to string together a few posts on a semi-regular basis.

Why is that?

Why are there people who within minutes of meeting I can tell won’t make a good blogger while there are others that I know would absolutely crush it if they bothered to invest the time?

That question has been stuck in the back of my mind for the last several weeks so I began to take a look at the blog posts that really resonate with me.

Now don’t worry, I’m not claiming to have solved the meaning of online life or stumbled onto some fool-proof recipe for blogging success. Like I said, I’m looking for a discussion.

Making a Connection

Johnny Truant recently wrote a post on Copyblogger.com talking about how he built his online business. To be honest, his process doesn’t sound all that impressive. I mean, look at it:

The business model basically consisted of trying to write funny blog posts and generally just hanging out online, and then parlaying that good will into its logical succession, which is, of course, technology services.

Pretty deep huh?

And yet, he’s making 5 figures a month from his online business.

Dave Snyder, the most dangerous man on the internet, wrote a post last week that had absolutely nothing to do with SEO or Social Media Marketing (the pillars of the company he co-founded) but resonated with me more than most posts I’ll read in a year. Does Dave talking about story time with his son make me think he’s better at his job?

Not at all.

Does it make me more likely to recommend him or refer people to his company when the time comes?

Absolutely.

Why? Because I can identify with that post. In my mind, Dave & I share more in common than we did before I read the post.

Interact

At this point I’m sure some of you are screaming that these are perfect examples of Third Tribe Marketing. And to some extent, I guess you’re right.

I am a 3T member, but that has more to do with the fact that I’m an unabashed Brian Clark fanboy. I enjoy reading his blog, got a LOT out of his Teaching Sells course, and am in love with Thesis Theme which Brian partnered with Chris Pearson on.

When you combine those positive product experiences with the fact that Brian interacts with me on Twitter, the result is that I’ll buy pretty much anything Brian puts out as long as I can afford it without having to sell a vital organ.

The interaction on Twitter might seem petty to you, but I’d be careful not to dismiss that too quickly.

I recently interviewed several graduates of my Pops’ Dreamweaver Course in hopes of getting some good testimonials to use for his upcoming launch.

The course had a 100% student retention rate even though he offered a 30 day money back guarantee and every student I interviewed couldn’t say enough good things about it. Now, my old man’s a great guy and all, but these people acted like he walked on water!

When I asked them why their reviews were so positive and why they all were recommending the course the answer every single time was that he took the time to interact with them one on one. Whether it was in the support forum or on the weekly Webinar calls, he gave each student his attention, even if only for a short period of time.

Be Yourself

If you’ve ever read advice on blogging I’m willing to bet you’ve been told to “find your voice.” While that’s certainly good advice, hell I’ve written those very words in a post before, I don’t think it actually sinks in to a lot of people.

Instead I think “be yourself” would be better advice. If you’re analytical in nature, be analytical. Dig deep into topics and break them down into statistical nuggets to share with the rest of the online world.

If you’re crass & irreverent, fantastic! Sugarrae has made a name for herself by saying what she thinks and refusing to filter it. At times she’ll say things that would make a sailor blush but a LOT of people respect her for being 100% her all the time, online & off.

One of her partners in crime, Lisa Barone had me following a site about knee socks for crying out loud!

I really have NO interest in knee socks but I enjoy Lisa’s style of writing and knew she was passionate about those damn socks.

Application

So how does this long rambling post apply to you? I don’t have a clue.

For me it means that I think I’m finally realizing that I can relax on my blogs the way I do on Twitter and in real life. I’ve always prided myself on being honest with people. What you see is pretty much what you get.

If you ask me what I think, I’m gonna tell you. You might not like what I have to say but at least you never have to wonder if I’m being honest with you.

Now don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t staying up nights wringing my hands worrying about what kind of image I was portraying online. But I spent a decent amount of time trying to figure out what I want this site in particular to be and what kind of face I’d like to show to the public.

I mean, future clients or employers could be viewing this blog right? But I think life’s too short and it takes too much effort to try and “polish” your public image.

I’m a devoted husband, a Christian, a sports fan, a political junkie, an SEO, a blogger, a WordPress guru in training, a Thesis Theme designer, and no, all those classifications don’t always play nicely together.

But if you want to hire me to market your website, or design a Thesis Skin for you, that’s fantastic.

If not, at least you won’t waste your time having to sift through all the typical interview/token answers/telling you what you want to hear BS.

Now I’m not trying to dismiss business or act like I don’t care about making money online. I absolutely do.

I guess I just have the confidence that enough people won’t care whether I offend them once or twice (it’s bound to happen) as long as I deliver the goods.

What do you think?

So what do you think? Have I lost my mind? Should I care whether or not people know what political beliefs I hold?

Do you have to play nice to succeed online?

Over the past few years popular marketers have realized that the SEO crowd is a) pretty easy to stir up and b) ready to link to anything at a moment’s notice.

That combination makes them ripe for link bait, flame bait, hate bait, whatever you want to call it. The easiest (read as: laziest) method is stating that SEO is dead, worthless, a scam, etc. If that sounds familiar it’s because there’s a long list of people that have used this method recently.

Jason Calacanis, Robert Scobel, Derrek Powazek and Jeremy Schoemaker (aka Shoemoney) have all gone to this well at various times with decent results if measured in terms of link bait. Today it seems, Shoemoney is back for seconds with his post saying 2009 Sucked for Most SEOs.

Now, Danny Sullivan, Lisa Barone, Jill Whalen, Aaron Wall & just about every other SEO blogger has taken on this issue at some point in the recent past. To be honest, nothing much has changed. The usual sequence of events is that a popular personality claims SEO is dead, they are beaten into submission by the SEO masses, admit that SEO does have it’s place and explain how that’s not QUITE what they meant.

Whatever. The cycle bores me. So, rather than rehashing the same old song & dance, I simply tweeted my thoughts. Unfortunately it sounds like Shoemoney doesn’t like it when people disagree with him or ask him to backup statements he claims as facts.

Don’t worry, Shoe. Calling me a dipshit definitely makes up for the fact that you have absolutely NO support for the statements you make in the post.

But hey, at least you maintained your reputation as the classiest guy around.

SEOmoz caused a stir this week by publishing a “study” that allegedly showed NoFollow tags were still effective in sculpting the flow of PageRank.

This of course flies in the face of what Matt Cutts has said on the issue, and the data in the study doesn’t seem to actually be all that solid. But hey, why let that get in the way of a good link bait post, right?

Now, those of you who know me or have been around the SEO industry for a while probably know that I have a history of disagreeing with Rand and the SEOmoz crew. But contrary to what I’m sure some commentors will say, I don’t hate Rand & I don’t go out of my way looking for reasons to criticize SEOmoz. In fact, I’ve spoken with Rand several times and those interactions have been nothing but friendly.

Then again, I like Matt Cutts too, but that doesn’t mean I have to stop thinking Google is a monolithic monopoly that must be stopped before they turn us all into the Borg.

I digress.

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.

This pattern has been discussed before by myself and several others in the SEO community, but 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 for their blog. (Note: No of course this isn’t ACTUALLY an official SEOmoz document. It’s called satire you twits!)

Naturally this is too monumental of a discovery for me to keep to myself so I’ve attached the flow chart below. Enjoy!

Oh, and by the way, I fully plan on following this flow chart should I begin to receive criticism for this post

As a fellow link-whore, I’d be remiss if I didn’t say feel free to republish the chart as long as you provide a link back to the source. Cheers!

Oh, and Sphinn it too if you have time.

I’m heading to Las Vegas this week for the internet marketing conference known as Pubcon.

This will be my second year attending and I can’t wait. Not only is there a TON of quality information to take in, thousands of people to meet & greet, and more free drinks than my liver knows what to do with… there’s also Poker.

Now, you’re probably saying “uh yeah, it’s Vegas of COURSE there’s poker.” And, naturally you’d be right.

But I’m specifically talking about the Purpose Inc (warning: slightly NSFW) Poker Tournament. Basically, all the IM’ers that know how to play the game end up playing in this tournament. It’s a high quality game (lots of marketers play poker, not sure why but it’s true), a TON of fun and is all for a good cause.

Last year’s tournament was for charity, and while this year’s isn’t officially supporting a charity, writing a post in support of a charity is part of the registration requirements.

For all the vicious names IM’ers are called (spammers, internet polluters, scum, etc) as a whole it really is a great industry. We never miss a chance to give back (for proof, just check out my SEO for Charity post that took of like wild-fire a while back).

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.

When a good friend of mine decided to invest even further into the area by moving in, I knew I had to support her organization in any way I could. It’s not often you see a skinny white girl walking confidently into John DeShields, not to mention moving there, but she has a heart of a tiger and loves that city.

So, it’s the least I can do to support the East St. Louis Dream Center, not only through this post, but also with 10% of whatever I win on my trip to Vegas. I really can’t think of a better cause to support and I’ll update you at the end of the week letting you know how it all goes.

If you’d like to support the ESL DC, you can do so via PayPal and remember, it’s tax deductible!

You almost have to admire the audacity of HootSuite.

The company has released a new version of their “Twitter toolbox” and many of their members are naturally upgrading.

So where’s the problem with that? Well, unfortunately HootSuite requires you to allow them to auto-tweet to your twitter streem in order to upgrade.

Update: HootSuite claims that users aren’t required to auto-tweet. Users who do not tweet will be automatically upgraded in “a couple of weeks” while users who do tweet are rewarded with an immediate upgrade. But, if you want to upgrade to the newest version today, you are in fact required to post a tweet as you can see in the screen shots below.

HootSuite asking you to upgrade

HootSuite asking you to spam Twitter

The result, as you can see for yourself is a massive number of tweets spamming… er promoting a link to HootSuite as well as the #HootSuite hashtag.

Now, I don’t have a problem with a little bit of self promotion or even trying to game your way onto the trending topics list. However, I DO have a problem with Twitter services automatically tweeting to their users’ accounts.

HootSuite  Still Frame Jacking

Unfortunately our dear old HootSuite isn’t JUST spamming Twitter, They’re also still frame jacking other websites’ content via their URL”shortening” service, Owly.

Frame jacking, for those of you who haven’t heard the term before is when a site like Ow.ly places a frame around another website’s content. If you want to read why frame jacking is an all around sucky thing to do, you can do so here.

The point is, it’s still happening.

Invoke Media Lies

But why would I expect Owly to stop frame jacking and placing their ad/link on other people’s content? Well because Invoke Media (the company behind HootSuite & Owly) founder, Ryan Holmes promised to do exactly that in the comments on a TechCrunch post.

On April 15th Ryan stated:

“Great to see digg coming to this compromise. Ow.ly (hootsuite) will be implementing these same changes in an upcoming release.”

Which changes did Digg make that Ryan committed to? That only logged in users would see Ow.ly’s frame & other users would be redirected (via an SEO friendly 301 redirect) to the content’s source.

And, when I pressed them on this issue weeks later, I was told that:

“We’re close w/new release. Need to dot some i’s & test until it’s rock solid. Will be a bit still, but it’s on the way!”

Those must have been some REALLY big i’s to dot if it has taken them 3 months and counting to do it.

Update: As @redwall_hp points out, Ow.ly url’s do serve 301 redirects which solves the SEO issue. However, they still display the frame to users who are not logged in, which is precisely what Ryan stated they would change.

In that time though, HootSuite was able to upgrade their fittingly named “toolbox” to version 2.0 and require their users to spam Twitter in order to use it.

Now I’d fully expect Invoke Media to provide some sort of excuse if and when this post gains enough traction to elicit a response from them. But no matter what their excuse is, do you really want to be using a service that takes advantage of their users in this fashion?

More importantly, would you really want to do business with a company like Invoke Media that engages in these kinds of behavior?

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:

TechCrunch using the stolen image (which they've since removed)

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.

Image used by permission of

In one of TechCrunch’s recent posts I noticed an interesting image of a record collection obviously painstakingly arranged. Knowing TC’s proclivity to steal other people’s images, and noticing their complete lack of attribution for the image, I decided to do some digging.

Thankfully, it didn’t take too long to figure out where the image had come from. After viewing the image source, I did a quick Google image search for montone records and sure enough, the first result was the very same image TechCrunch used in their post.

Just to make sure I wasn’t falsely accusing TC, I dropped the blogger/photographer, Christian Montone a quick email asking whether he held the copyrights to the image and if he’d granted TC permission to use the image.

Surprise, surprise, surprise, not only had Christian never heard of TechCrunch but he CERTAINLY hadn’t granted them permission to use his image.

Christian responded with the following comment on the offending post:

Hi Milo,

My name is Christian Montone and I am the photographer of the image you used above WIHTOUT permission. I understand that life in the blogosphere comes with the caveat that folks can copy-paste-edit-repost your images at any given moment and I am glad to have any and all folks enjoy the images I shoot, paint or draw. It is, however, a bit disconcerting that I was NOT asked permission for inclusion of my image (nor was I even given a photo credit). IT IS COMPLETELY EXPLICIT AND CLEAR on my blog that I am the author of the images I post (and in fact that image was shot in my home). In the future, when using the personal images made public by myself or others, could you PLEASE employ the common professional courtesy of asking permission of the author of such an image?

Respectfully, yet a bit perturbed…

–Christian Montone

While the comment has been published, TechCrunch has issued no response to Mr. Montone’s comment or his similarly messaged email.

Much like the episode with Digg, a mistake like this would be forgivable and maybe even understandable if it were the first time. People are human, we all make mistakes. However, this is yet another influential website, willfully and arrogantly abusing the rest of the web with complete disregard for our rights.

I would certainly hope TechCrunch’s advertisers and sponsors don’t condone this type of behavior. However, by their continued support of a website so well known for their disregard for copyrights, it would be easy to assume that Microsoft and Media Temple among others are complicent if not supportive of this kind of behavior.

It’s time the rights of bloggers, photographers, and any other content producer is honored online.

Image source: Christian Montone

One of the greatest heists of all time occurred over the weekend and if you weren’t paying attention, you might have missed it.

In one big “F*** You!” to the rest of the web, Digg instantly stole millions of links from across the web.

Instead of acting like a responsible URL shortener, Digg decided to redirect all the shortened links they control, to the corresponding Digg story instead of the target site, even if you aren’t logged in to Digg!

Now before you go calling this an honest mistake, remember that Digg has already been through a similar controversy in regards to their Diggbar & URL shortener. They already learned their lesson about stealing other people’s content through the use of frames, and they CERTAINLY learned the value of a link.

In fact, so many SEOs educated Digg that they served an SEO friendly 301 redirect for all of their shortened links to anyone not logged in to their website. Most notably, that list included search engine spiders which meant that even if someone used a Digg shortened URL to link to your site, you would still get the benefit of that link.

Digg Isn’t Just Stealing Traffic!

Unfortunately, over the weekend Digg decided that they just couldn’t live without all that extra traffic. I’m not sure whether their business is failing that spectacularly that they need to steal from just about anyone with a website, or Kevin Rose just made a spectacularly stupid decision, but the net result was that Digg not only stole traffic, but millions of links from millions of sites.

If for instance, someone linked to your site using a Digg shortened URL (http://digg.com/d1sa56) all the benefits of that link now flow directly to Digg.

And, before you think this doesn’t affect you consider that several Twitter sites allow Digg to be used as a default URL shortener. If someone is unaware of Digg’s theft, and tweets what they think is a link to your site, you’re out of luck. Also keep in mind that the move doesn’t just apply to links that are created from here on out. It was applied retroactively across the board!

Fool Me Once, Shame On You…

While some Digg loyalists will no doubt point out Kevin Rose’s tweet stating he’d look into the issue and had been away on vacation as a legitimate excuse, this type of behavior has recently become pattern with Digg.

Sure, Kevin Rose may have been away on vacation, but he had time to send out plenty of Tweets during that two-week time span. And, even if he didn’t know anything about it (which is highly doubtful for a decision with such obvious impact) the decision to steal from millions of webmasters perfectly illustrates the character of Digg as a company.

Whenever Digg gets caught with its hand in the cookie jar, it always seems to happen with Kevin is away or completely unaware of it. Thankfully, he swoops in, apologizes and makes it right. Time after time after time.

I’m sorry Kevin, but you need to either fire your entire staff and replace them with people who won’t flip the bird to the entire internet while you’re away, or you need to stop lying in hopes of saving your good guy image.

We know you need to make money, and we know your company is struggling. Desperate times call for desperate measures but at least be man enough to own up to the completely idiotic measures you take in desperation.

We’re Through

I for one will never return to your site. While once one of your biggest fans, your complete disregard for content producers and website owners has become blatantly apparent and I’ll not support your company because of it.

Yes those big boosts of traffic from a front page story are nice to see in my website stats. But in the last year you’ve stolen my content, my traffic, and my links (which in turn will negatively impact the amount of traffic I receive from the search engines).

As the saying goes, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Kevin and Digg, I’m simply not going to let you fool me a third time.

Let ‘em hear it!

If you agree with this post and would like to see Digg held accountable for their actions, please retweet this story and use the #DiggFAIL hashtag in your Tweets today. While Mashable’s story hit the trendy topics shortly, Digg still needs to have their feet publicly held to the fire for their reprehensible behavior.

Also, feel free to link to the Mashable story with Digg in the anchor text. The story currently ranks 5th in Google for the search “Digg” and with some help can move even higher!

Images: http://www.flickr.com/photos/meltingmama/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/djfoobarmatt

In the internet marketing industry names don’t get much bigger than John Reese and Mike Filsaime. So, when both John and Mike make the same splash on the same day, it’s going to draw some attention.

The splash I’m talking about is abandoning the practice of autofollowing on Twitter. For those of you who don’t know what auto-follow is, why are you reading this blog?

I keeed I keeed!

Autofollow is quite simply Twitter’s version of “you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours.” For every person that follows you, you automatically follow them back.

Obviously the goal of many people on Twitter, especially marketers, is to accumulate as many followers as possible. As a result, lists have sprung up containing the names of hundreds if not thousands of accounts that use autofollow. Follow a few thousand of the people on that list, and BOOM… a few thousand almost instant followers!

If this whole thing sounds kind of pointless and shallow, especially on a site that’s all about actually connecting with others, you’re absolutely right. As John points out in his post, a bunch of automated followers probably aren’t going to be as high in quality as followers that CHOOSE to follow you.

As a result, John (and subsequently Mike) have both disavowed the practice of auto-follow, and purged the list of people they follow, citing the desire to now have genuine interactions on Twitter.

And, for the most part the move has been praised across Twitter. John’s post has been retweeted by thousands of his followers and….

Wait, what? Oh yeah! That’s right! John and Mike, despite no longer following thousands of people, are STILL followed by all those thousands of people who jumped aboard the autofollow Twitter train. Who knows, maybe John and Mike made use of those autofollow lists themselves.

The point is, by making this noble and bold decision, John and Mike have essentially done one big bait & switch on thousands of their followers.

If anyone else followed thousands of people, and then unfollowed them once they’d triggered the autofollow mechanism, they’d be call a spammer.

In fact, Twitter itself stated in March that they’re going to kill off the “feature” because

” this behavior sends the wrong message. Namely, it is unlikely that anyone can actually read tweets from thousands of accounts which makes this activity disingenuous.”

So, no, John Reese and Mike Filsaime are no longer participating in the “disingenuous” activity of autofollow, but before we all go praising them for their brilliant insight and sudden desire to make legitimate connections, realize that they still have 66 thousand followers between them.

They’re not giving ANYTHING up, they’re simply clearing out the feed that they read and limiting the level of access those 66k followers have to contact them.

I’m sure that was a really difficult decision. I mean, as Mike said, John had to “push him over the edge” after all…

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.

The post continues:

So here’s what we’re planning to do. First, we’re making a change such that any updates beginning with @username (that are not explicitly created by clicking on the reply icon) will be seen by everyone following that account. This will bring back some serendipity and discovery and we can do this very soon.

So wait, only @replies that aren’t generated by clicking the reply button will be shown? Meaning users now have to choose whether they want all of their followers to see a reply, or whether they want to link the reply to the tweet they’re actually replying to?

And that’s supposed to be making things LESS confusing? Riiiight.

@Biz concludes by saying

Second, we’ve started designing a new feature which will give folks far more control over what they see from the accounts they follow. This will be a per-user setting and it will take a bit longer to put together but not too long and we’re already working on it. Thanks for all the great feedback and thanks for helping us discover what’s important!

And wait a minute, did you just call this an important issue? I thought the feature wasn’t used by anyone and too confusing.

Putting that issue aside, this actually does sound like an improvement. What makes Twitter great is the ability of users to turn it into whatever they want it to be.

Of course, given Twitter’s history of down time, problems with scaling, and their recent pathetic attempt at a cover-up, I’m not going to be holding my breath on these new features.

@Biz says that Twitter learned a lot from this flap.

Judging from their continuing unwillingness to simply admit they lied about the reason initially and are simply unable to continue to support the feature, I’m not sure they learned anything at all.

====================

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. (& I’ll now be using the #TwitterLied hashtag)

Rather than admitting that despite taking on millions in venture capital, they still don’t have the resources needed to continue running their service properly.

As experienced as the Twitter founders are in social media, I’m a bit surprised they’d try and then admit to a cover-up of this magnitude. As always, their failure is now an even bigger story than it would have been if they’d have been open and honest with their users from the start.

====================

As many Twitter users will notice this morning, #fixreplies, #TwitterFail, & Goodbye People I are all trending topics.

For those of you wondering what this is all about, I’d point you over to Twitter’s blog post announcing the “small settings update” but in reality that wouldn’t help much.

Why? Because Twitter apparently doesn’t explain things very well.

Maybe it’s because they’re used to only using 140 characters, but whatever the reason, the result has been a mass of confusion in the Twitterverse.

Your Reply Tab Hasn’t Changed

Despite the many panicked tweets you may have seen on the subject,  you’re STILL able to see every message that mentions your Twitter name.

Whether you follow that person or not, if they @reply or drop your Twitter handle in a tweet, it will show up in your @replies tab.

What Twitter Broke

What Twitter actually changed, was a setting that they say many users didn’t use or understand in the first place. If you follow me on Twitter, and I @reply to someone that you don’t follow, you will no longer see my tweet.

Judging from my debate with @DanZarella (who by the way is a good guy to follow for Social Media info) this morning, it seems that some people may not understand why you would even WANT to see a one sided conversation.

Who Cares?

Personally, I find it’s the best way to discover new users that I would like to follow. If I see several people in my Twitter stream responding to a person I don’t know, chances are I’ve just found someone else useful to follow.

Also, there are a lot of questions being asked and answered on Twitter. And just like in grade school, even if I wasn’t the one asking the question, the response might be quite useful to me.

By eliminating the option, Twitter has essentially forced you to only be exposed to people you’re already following. Rather than frequently being introduced to new people to follow, Twitter has moved us into our own exclusive cliques.

Why Remove the Option?

The only reasoning for this change that Twitter gave was that:

” receiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don’t follow in your timeline is undesirable. Today’s update removes this undesirable and confusing option.”

You know what was cool about options? They’re optional. As in if you don’t like the feature you can turn it off. If you do like it, great, use it!

So, rather than allowing users to determine whether the option was “undesireable” on their own, they’ve made the decision for you.

Rather than doing a better job of explaining the supposedly “confusing option” they just disabled it, pissing off the users who liked the option.

Heaven forbid Twitter would actually educate their users on the option, possibly allowing them to get even more value out of their service.

New Features!

But don’t worry! Twitter will

“be introducing better ways to discover and follow interesting accounts as we release more features in this space.”

Now, I’m no expert but if you have to create a new feature to replace the one you just killed off, maybe the old one had some value after all.

But just to get ahead of the curve, I’d like to put in a request to Twitter for a new feature. I’d really like to be able to follow ALL of the tweets of people I follow, not just the ones directed at people I already follow.

In other words, give us back the option you just took away.

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

Google actually made quite a few changes (and as usual JenSense has a great rundown of it all) but one section jumped out at me immediately.

The Content Guidelines section now reads:

“Sites with Google ads may not include or link to:

• Pornography, adult or mature content
• Violent content
• Content related to racial intolerance or advocacy against any individual, group or organisation
• Excessive profanity
• Hacking/cracking content
• Gambling or casino-related content
• Illicit drugs and drug paraphernalia content
• Sales of beer or hard alcohol
• Sales of tobacco or tobacco-related products
• Sales of prescription drugs
• Sales of weapons or ammunition (e.g. firearms, firearm components, fighting knives, stun guns)
• Sales of products that are replicas or imitations of designer goods
• Sales or distribution of coursework or student essays
• Content regarding programs which compensate users for clicking ads or offers, performing searches, surfing websites or reading emails
• Any other content that is illegal, promotes illegal activity or infringes on the legal rights of others

It seems Google is no longer content to dictate what kind of content can appear on your site, they also now control who you can link to.

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”:

AdWords doesn't have a problem with prescription drugs

or  the “sale of tobacco or tobacco-related products”:

Google knows cigarettes are tobacco products right?

Now, unless I’m mistaken, those blue underlined things that you click on are links right?

To be fair, these changes to the AdSense policies are new. I suppose it’s possible the AdWords team didn’t get the memo or maybe they haven’t finished rounding up all the advertising sites to cut ties with.

But I’m sure they’re working feverishly to stop accepting all that money from sites that sell Viagra or any other prescription drugs. I mean, Google wouldn’t expect you to follow a set of rules that they have abandoned themselves, in favor padding their bottom line… would they?