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A Discussion On Blogging

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 [...]

You Stay Classy, Shoemoney

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 [...]

SEOmoz Decision Making Flowchart

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!)

Poker for a Good Cause

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.

Invoke Media’s HootSuite: Spamming, Lying & Frame Jacking Oh My!

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 stream in order to upgrade. Update: HootSuite claims that users aren’t [...]

TechCrunch Caught Stealing Images Again

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.

The Great Link Heist = #DiggFAIL

One of the greatest heists of all time occurred over the weekend and if you weren't paying attention, you might have missed it. baby-flips-birdIn 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!

John Reese & Mike Filsaime Perform Twitter Bait & Switch

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 [...]

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

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.

Google Adsense Policies: Now With More Hypocrisy!

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":