Check out the 25 comments on the original post as well for some interesting discussion. Some readers were very critical and I’ve tried to offer some critical thoughts as well, but it’s clear that marking on the web is here to stay. Hopefully it will be based on a greater degree of authenticity, usefulness and innovation than marketing generally is known for.

For more personal thoughts on new media marketing, check out two of my old posts here Social Media for Marketing and Thoughts on Product Launch Promotion. Both are a touch out of date but should be a good source of some still-valuable resources and advice.

Speaking of resources, if you’re interested in new media marketing you may appreciate this OPML file of Chris Brogan’s favorite marketing bloggers to watch in 2009. It’s a special file of all their feeds filtered to deliver just their unusually popular posts (filtering performed by Postrank). You can download that file, then import it into your RSS reader and you’ll be kept super smart all year long. I’ll be keeping an eye on those feeds, myself.

If you’d like a short, concentrated injection of smarts along similar lines, check out my consulting services, just like these happy people have.

And now the blog post I promised…

Will 2009 be the big year for corporate transparency, for a global conversation – perhaps for bargain basement online marketing tactics instead of old-school huge commercial campaigns?

Peter Kim, a former Forrester analyst now working on stealth enterprise software company, recently polled 14 of the most high-profile thinkers about social media marketing and asked them what they expected to see 2009 bring. The end product was an attractive 23 page PDF that we’ve embedded below, but we thought we’d pull out some of the thoughts we found most interesting for all you skimmers out there.

Social shopping

“Now with connective technologies like Facebook Connect, Google FriendConnect, and OpenID, consumers will now be able to see reviews, experiences, and critiques from people they actually know and trust.” – Jeremiah Owyang, Forrester Research

Our take: Much as we are concerned about the proprietary nature of Facebook Connect in particular, the ease with which people are able to see feedback left by people they know, with confirmed identities, really could be a game changer.

Access

“Twitter will continue to achieve legitimacy. But more than any push-channel, Twitter will give customers, advocates and critics unprecedented access to corporate personnel and vice versa.” – Scott Monty, Ford Motor Company (Photo, right, by Wendy Piersall)

Our take: This makes sense, and it’s pretty funny to think about. Even the biggest cynics often have a dramatic turn around about Twitter once they start using it, and the intimacy that develops is remarkable. We agree with Monty that this will become increasingly difficult to resist.

Measuring the success of social networks

“Implement listening programs through social media to get real time authentic knowledge that is actionable… Measure with customer service metrics like retention/ satisfaction & social metrics like engagement.” – Rohit Bhargava, Ogilvy (Photo by Shashi Bellamkonda)

“Slowly but surely, we’re going to develop a set of better metrics to help guide, direct and validate ‘commitment’-based marketing and yes, Mr Kim….they will extend beyond the rather short term, blunt metric called ROI”. – Joseph Jaffe, Crayon

Our take: Good luck with that, we’re not optimistic. This is soft stuff and though clear success speaks for itself, all the gradations between success and failure are going to be very hard to quantify.

Quality vs Quantity in Social Media

“I believe we’ll have more focused velvet-rope social networks in 2009 where the tools and the goals match verticals of interest instead of the general commons of Facebook.” – Chris Brogan, New Marketing Labs

“Exclusivity trumps accessibility. Having thousands of friends becomes ‘so 2008′ and defriending becomes the hot new trend, driven by overwhelming rivers of newsfeeds.” – Charlene Li, Altimeter Group (Photo by deneyterrio on Flickr)

Our take: Maybe, for some people and in some circumstances this will be the case. We expect most people to find a middle ground between the whole sale slow-down that some seem to expect and an evolutionary adjustment to vastly increased data input.

Making the most of limited budgets

“Dwindling budgets suddenly make low-cost social media look like the pretty girl at the ball. ” – Ann Handley, Marketing Profs

“Companies will struggle with how to control who says what — but will increasingly realize that in an economic downturn, they need all the marketing muscle and leverage they can get and actively encourage.” – Charlene Li

Our take: This makes a lot of sense to us, but we expect that it will be tempered by the fear of totally blowing it. Getting into the social media space and doing it wrong is something that a lot of companies fear getting blown apart for. We expect that to change slowly and only for a limited number of companies.

Here’s the full document embedded below – what do you think of these predictions?

The keys in my mind to being a good and employed new media consultant are:

1. Learn how to do cool new things and blog (well) about them.
2. Let people know that you are a consultant.
3. Make sure you deliver clear value to clients that extends beyond your time with them. Search engine optimization and pageviews are the most common things that consultants try to deliver to clients, but I prefer aiming for education, excitement, comfort with new tools and a sense that they can now be full fledged actors in the social media market themselves. My past clients are now happily reading OPML files I built for them, they see the value of and aren’t afraid of Twitter and they have more skills to use in their own work than they did before we worked together. (They are also doing more complicated things like this, in some cases.) I always aim to over-deliver and I don’t worry about giving clients almost everything I know – this market is too new and too big to worry about teaching yourself out of a job.
4. Stay visible by consistently sharing valuable information with other people. I don’t do that so much on my personal blog these days, but I do it on Twitter, on ReadWriteWeb.com and in face to face conversations.

That’s what’s worked well for me so far. Do other consultants reading here have other high-level points that they think are important to communicate?

I didn’t mention it in that conversation – but I do provide training and advising to other consultants sometimes. (As well as working on projects with clients together.) If you’re a consultant interested in some training on the particular things that I’m good at teaching – feel free to drop me a line.

One of my fantasies for awhile has been to hire other consultants for an hour of their training in whatever they do best. I think it would be awesome to do that once a month. Maybe a trade would be good. Oh, the possibilities are nearly endless. It’s an exciting time to be learning about the internet.

AideRSS scores each post by the number of comments it received, number of times it’s been tagged in del.icio.us, inbound links from a number of blogsearch engines, etc. Thankfully, it scores those posts relative only to other posts in the same feed. So while a post on TechCrunch with 20 comments might score a 5 out of 10, for example, a post on Marshallk.com with 20 comments would score a 10 out of 10! Unfortunately, and this is a big dissapointment, AideRSS is just plain wrong far too often – reporting, for example, completely inacurate numbers for several posts in my feed. Come on AideRSS team, fix these problems. So it’s nothing to bet the bank on, but there’s some real potential here and as a rough guide it could still be useful today. I’ve contacted AideRSS to ask why they are getting things wrong as often as they are.

That’s all well and good, it’s a good way to see which of your posts are getting the most reader engagement (at least via these gestures being measured) and the widget that AideRSS provides is a neat way to highlight your most popular posts – but I know there’s a lot more that’s possible here.

Tonight I tried something unusual, at least it seemed that way to me. I plugged the RSS feed for items I’ve tagged “toread” in del.cio.us into AideRSS. It worked! It appears that the service figured out which were the hottest items in my feed. What a handy way to prioritize! I could grab scored RSS feed from AideRSS, including “good posts”, great posts or only the best posts. Here’s a widget displaying the best posts currently in my “toread” feed, according to AideRSS.

Isn’t that cool? Obviously it would be nice if users could define the number of characters and items displayed in that widget and the metrics used don’t capture anything personalized – but nonetheless, I think there’s some real potential here. (The numbers fetched aren’t always accurate, either – hopefully that will improve.)

Here’s an idea I thought of previously: say you’re looking to identify some of the top blogs in real estate. (Woo hoo!?) I would recommend starting at http://technorati.com/blogs/real_estate and sorting from authority. There’s an export in OPML link there, which unfortunately will not give you anything other than the top 10 blogs in that category no matter what you try to do, but you can import that OPML into AideRSS. You can then see the hottest posts in each blog, in other words: you can get a feel for what that blog’s community of readers takes interest in. So Technorati+AideRSS = easy identification of the biggest interests of top niche bloggers’ reading communities. Sounds invaluable to me.

These are the kinds of ideas I help come up with and implement with my consulting clients; though we wouldn’t want to depend too much on a tool that’s as loosely accurate as AideRSS is today.

If this general idea is of interest to you, perhaps more for personal use than marketing purposes, see also Rogers Cadenhead’s recent post on APML – Attention Profiling Markup Language. I tagged it in my blog and shared items feed, which you might like to subscribe to.

Thanks for reading.

This was the second time in a month someone has asked me a question about whether they should be the person to write an article in Wikipedia so I thought I’d share some of my thoughts here.  A Blogher article in particular makes an interesting case study.

Wikipedia has great Search Engine Optimization, can be a good traffic generator and is a good reference source.  People like to have an entry in Wikipedia for their projects for a variety of reasons.  In this case, there ought to be a Wikipedia page about Blogher just so that people can go to this widely trusted source to learn about the project. Who should start writing that page, though?

In general – here are a few things I think are important when considering whether you ought to be the person to write about something in Wikipedia.

1. Conflicts of interest: If you have an antagonistic relationship with something, you probably ought not write about it.  If you have a financial interest in that subject’s success, I am of the belief that it may be ok for you to write about it so long as you practice…
2. Disclosure: Make sure your user page identifies who you are and what you do for a living.  Being open makes a world of difference.
3. Value add: In addition to a neutral point of view, make sure your post adds important value to the Wikipedia community by being truly informative.  Also, the more you have contributed to Wikipedia in general the more any specific contribution will be respected.  
4. Time invested: In some cases, like if a PR agent is writing about their client, I would recommend that in addition to disclosing the fact that you are a PR agent on your user profile page, you should also consider editing the article live in Wikipedia.  Multiple edits over time, even if from the same user, demonstrate time spent on the article in Wikipedia and help demonstrate respect for the platform.

To answer Jeremy’s question about Blogher I first searched in Technorati for his name and the word Blogher, to see what his relationship with the group was like.  He had written some supportive blog posts about the event, which received favorable comments from some people I understand to be leaders in the Blogher community.  I know that Blogher is generally supportive of participation by men.  I also did a google search for this query: site:http://blogher.org “for wikipedia.”  I found one forum thread about the fact that there is no Wikipedia article for Blogher.  The conversation seemed supportive of the idea, people were just wondering who should write it and how it should be done.  The thread seemed to taper off without any clear answers for that question.  That lead me to believe that there wasn’t any clear reason why the Blogher community did not want an article about Blogher in Wikipedia.

I suggested that Jeremy write one up and post it while logged into a Wikipedia account that was clearly tied to him personally.  That way people could see who was responsible and contact him to discuss it if they wanted to. He hasn’t written that article yet, but that’s ok. Eventually someone will write it and I think this is a good opportunity to talk about these questions.

If he does write this article, here’s how I suggest this and other articles begin.  In addition to maintaining a “neutral point of view” and sticking to the facts, it’s important that an article be long enough to satisfy the community of Wikipedians who dislike very short articles.  I’ve had articles be deleted because they weren’t substantive enough.

Since Blogher is an active online community there’s an opportunity to make sure that participants there know that a new Wikipedia entry about them has been posted.  Emailing them or posting to the Blogher forum could be good ways to let them know. Once they know about the article, they will have a chance to edit it as they see fit and help watch in case this new article gets nominated for deletion, as does happen frequently.

Finally, I’d suggest that if you add a new entry to Wikipedia that you check back daily for the first week after posting it to see if any conversation about the article has been posted or if the article has been nominated for deletion.  You can subscribe to the RSS feed for your entry’s history, but there doesn’t appear to be any way to track by RSS whether your article has been nominated for deletion.

If it is nominated for deletion, there will be a discussion and vote.  In that case, you can let people know and provide the URL for the voting page so they can participate in the conversation and respond to any concerns that the Wikipedia community may have.

Those are some of my thoughts about writing articles on Wikipedia.  There’s no guarantee of success in Wikipedia, but if you make a good-faith effort to contribute value to the community (with any interests of your own weighing less heavily than the interests of the community) then odds are good.  You’ll learn more about online social media from the experience of engaging, so in most cases I say yes – write that article.  

I’m going to email a link to this post over to one of my Wiki-loving buddies and see if we can flesh out answers to these questions all the more.

“Being in close to a service and seeing all its differentiation is not the same as having that differentiation be appreciated in the market – at some point it just doesn’t matter to most people. Offer an API, partnerships with a number of other cool startup contendors, and a different aura (respecting privacy better than Google for example) and you can at least be much more high profile – perhaps moving from being seen by casual observers as an also-ran to being a Golden Boy.”

Like Marc Andreeson, I think the web is not in a bubble. Everyone from consumers to industry bloggers to VCs – heck, developers and your own company, can use some solid strategy for how to deal with the fact that many of us are doing things that basically look identical from a standard distance away. I think APIs and partnerships are great things to think about in this regard. The parties who engage on those levels will take the time to notice how you are different, and the end result will be a much more visible differentiation as a result of your roll in the larger ecosystem. Del.icio.us and Technorati are examples of this, Twitter is too.

These guys work hard to build relationships with their users all around the world. They are doing a lot of things that I really admire.

An interface available in more than 15 languages, free pro-accounts for bloggers who write about them, rapid feature development – the list goes on and on. Way to go, guys.

I had the UStream player in question embedded here, but it was leaking audio when my pages loaded.

If you haven’t checked out SplashCast yet, you can see just one example of its many capabilities in the podcast player on my sidebar here.

SplashCast’s Use of Social Media for Marketing

SplashCast has hired two experienced social media producers, myself and Alex Williams [that's Alex on the right], founder of the Podcast Hotel series of podcasting industry conferences. One of our big responsibilities is what I call in-house content production to engage with existing social media communities.

I write blog posts that are accompanied by channels of mixed media content compiled using our company’s product. Alex publishes interviews from events using SplashCast.

My primary media production activity at SplashCast is similar to what I’ve done when working for content companies (TechCrunch, AOL Social Software Weblog, NetSquared and others). I try to break news, publish mixed media content related to existing online discussions and otherwise add value to the media landscape for readers interested in the emerging online video market. The goals of this work are to drive traffic the SplashCast website, demonstrate the potential of our publishing tool and ultimately to encourage people to sign up as SplashCast publishers themselves. Plus it’s a whole lot of fun for me.

The primary ways that we work to build readership for our blog are these:

*Daily blogging, not only about company news but interesting industry news as well. Some of our posts have been deemed interesting enough
to receive thousands of visitors from StumbleUpon, for example.
*Sending trackbacks to other blogs, where our posts that are related to theirs are linked for their readers to discover.
*Leaving thoughtful, value-ad-focused comments in response to posts on other blogs, where our names are linked to the SplashCast site added in the URL field of the comment form.
*Putting relevant bloggers at the center of our strategy for company and new product release PR. That strategy lead to more than 250 blog mentions within 48 hours of our launch, for example.
*Attending events and building relationships with other social media producers, who will think of us later when writing about related subject matter.
*We also use Twitter to stay abreast of what other people are doing and keep friends up to date on what we’re doing at SplashCast.
*Engegement with and inclusion in relevant topical aggregators. This is a big part of what we do. For example, a Google search of Techmeme.com for SplashCastMedia brings back 1,400 results and we’ve now made 15 appearances on the front page of Digg. Both easier said than done, but both great sources of traffic and lead generation.

All of these steps could have been done well or poorly, but because we have two experienced social media producers in house we believe we can effectively communicate in such a way that our commercial message is more implied than it is overbearing. (For another perspective on appropriate marketing communication in new media, see this very smart post written by Jeremy Pepper.)

The high level themes of our work, I believe are the following:

*We find creative ways to participate in conversations of general interest. In particular, we let people publish aggregated collections of mixed media, so we watch the news and see what would be interesting to publish collections like this about. When the DoD banned social media sites from official networks, we published a channel of videos and photos tagged Iraq in YouTube and Photobucket, for example.

*Timeliness has been important – we work hard to cover news as early in the news cycle as possible. That’s a whole other topic that requires its own strategy.

*Helping people do their own work better. This is becoming cliche in the web 2.0 world, but it bears repeating. Our posts on things you can do with mixed media RSS, ways you can tag videos and how you can build a successful website around aggregated media were all big hits.

*Finding the balance between marketing and conversation. It’s no secret that the SplashCast blog is trying to convince people to use our product, so we don’t hide that. We do however try to make our posts compelling enough to be interesting on their own merits, regarding general interest topics, whether you care to try SplashCast or not.

As a result of implementing this strategy before, during and after our initial launch, we had more than 1,000 publishers register for an account at launch, we doubled that in our first month to 2,000 and doubled it again in our second month to more than 4,000. SplashCast player loads are now aproaching 5.5 million.

As a social media service company, it also makes sense for us to do a lot of in house content production so that we know the application, its possibilities and performance issues, as best as possible. That said, I believe that any company can benefit greatly by adding social media participation and content production to the center of their marketing strategy. The use of social media has proven enormously helpful to SplashCast.

The roll of social media in a market sector in a relatively commoditized sector is something else that could use some further consideration.

I hope you’ll stop by SplashCastMedia.com, see this work in action for yourself and create an account to publish your collections of mixed media. If you would like my help in coming up with a strategy like this for your company, drop me a line. I can be reached at marshall@marshallk.com

My point is: the PR backpedal here is just silly. The original email read” “you are welcome to send the machine back to us after you are done playing with it, or you can give it away to your community, or you can hold onto it for as long as you’d like.” Now this follow up:

Marshall,

No good deed goes unpunished, right? You may have seen that other bloggers got review machines as well. Some of that coverage was not factual. As you write your review I just wanted to emphasize that this is a review pc. I strongly recommend you disclose that we sent you this machine for review, and I hope you give your honest opinions. Just to make sure there is no misunderstanding of our intentions I’m going to ask that you either give the pc away or send it back when you no longer need it for product reviews.

Thanks for your understanding, and happy reviewing,

Aaron ***

Ha ha ha – the snazzy laptop I got in the mail from Microsoft yesterday was the only way I was ever going to use Vista anyway. And I’m certainly never going to take a laptop with a stupid looking Ferrari logo on the front anywhere but home and my cube at work.

The computer itself doesn’t retail for $2k plus for nothing – it’s fast. Windows is so annoying and (to me, a Mac user) so counter-intuitive, that I’d never buy a Windows machine. My partner won’t touch the thing. I’m going to set it up to look pretty, take incoming news as if it was the 2nd half of a super large monitor and work on my Mac. Not that I’m super happy with the crash-happy, Flash-hating Macbook I have either. (That said, Parallels is a great program for testing Windows only applications.) See also oops – no new podcasts caught by iTunes for a week.

Ultimately all these companies are probably a lot like cell phone providers. Which is the least ugly one in the room? I wouldn’t chose at all if I didn’t have to.

I can’t believe they are telling me not to keep it now. What kind of blogosphere reaction were they expecting?

Here comes the giant BUT

“Combined print and online advertising revenue rose 1.8% to $11.1 bln in Q1 2006, with spending for print ads accounting for $10.5 bln.”

So what we don’t have here are stats about ad revenue lost by print into the evil clutched of the online world. One way or the other the importance of print to advertisers remains clear. Perhaps the real moral of the story is that most advertisers are still not taking online media as seriously as it ought to be taken? I’m sure there are a thousand thoughts you could think based on the above handful of facts – I just thought readers here might like to see them.

“But in order to do that, we need to be out there! I’ve sent press releases, done a local news guest segment, gotten reviews, created an interactive website, have product placed in a few specialty stores, done expos, etc.

“But I need that Big Thing. What am I missing? What’s one huge thing that might put us on the map? Please help, Hounds.”

I watched the DVD trailer, and it is pretty neat. So I posted the following comment on Joan’s blog. Anyone have any thoughts on the question or this advice?

Not to rain on the parade, but some people contend that the new social media emerging (like blogs) is not at all about the Big Thing – but rather the aggregate result of lots of small things. That said, this vid has a great trailer! You might consider putting it on YouTube, engaging some yoga and mama bloggers in conversation (see, for example http://technorati.com/blogs/motherhood ) and offering them the short code snippet that will allow your video to be shown on their site. Trying to get bloggers to cover your product can be difficult, but the bottom line is reading their blogs before hand and really engaging with them. Beyond that, I’ve bookmarked the best resources I’ve found for pitching bloggers for coverage at http://del.icio.us/marshallkirkpatrick/pitchingbloggers

Good luck!

One thing I didn’t think to write at the time is that I would make sure to set up search feeds for references to the video and make sure to respond to any coverage. I would not set up search feeds for terms like “mother and baby Yoga” because making a commercial pitch any time anything related is blogged about would be in poor taste.

Technorati Tags: promotion, video, YouTube, yoga, bloggers

In depth instructions are also available on the Feedburner site.

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
RSS, FeedFlare, Feedburner

Event Title: Using Social Networking Applications in the Nonprofit
Community

TechSoup is hosting a free event on the TechSoup message boards,
tomorrow and Thursday, April 19th and 20th, on the use of online social
networking applications for non-profits. The event can be found at:

http://www.techsoup.org/socialnetwork

This event will be an asynchronous discussion that will occur in the
TechSoup.org forums. It will be hosted by Chris Law, co-founder of
Tribe.net, Neal Gorenflo, Director of Business Development of
Care2Connect.com, Alex Mouldovan, founder of CrowdFactory.com and John
Lorance, Associate Director of CompuMentor’s TechCommons program, and
will feature representatives from LinkedIn.com, Gather.com, and others.

We all love social networking applications like Friendster, Tribe,
Linked in, My Space, Gather.com, and Frappr, however, most of us have
little time to use these in our personal lives, let alone to create an
organizational profile for our nonprofit. Is there a use for social
networking applications in the nonprofit workplace?

* What do we mean by Social Networking applications?
* How are these different form message-board based online communities?
* Getting discovered: How do you promote your organization’s services
through a social networking application?
* How can an online social network help your organization find
volunteers and raise funds?
* What is the secret to fostering and managing your online social
network?

From the event discussion we anticipate that participants will come away
with some practical tips, models, resources, and tools for bringing the
collaborative technologies of social networking applications to your own
organization.

We hope to see you and your ideas there!

Couldn’t help but notice after doing a Google search for Amnesty these paid results:

You’ll notice that the political right has got its grips on this one. I think this is a way underutilized means of promotion, especially by small radical organizations. You get your links on these lists by chosing keywords, bidding on a price-per-click and setting a maximum daily expenditure. It doesn’t have to be expensive. Here’s where you do it.

Check out this dismal example, paid results for “immigrant rights”. There’s only one paid result. That means that if you bid anything – you’re going to be at least the number 2 result on the right had side of the page in search results for “immigrant rights.”

More, better and stranger after the jump.

Here’s some results that highlight the strangeness of eBay’s bulk automated bidding. Does this read to you that Mexican immigrants can find whatever they need on eBay or that you can find Mexican immigrants and whatever else you need on eBay?

Speaking of buying people online, check out the paid results for the words human trafficking. Lots of anti-trafficking groups making good use of this tool. But for a real trip, click through the 5th paid result here, for the defense attorney. I’m not going to link to them because they scare me, but the site is fascinating. You know these people are out there.

These ones make one of the most insidious uses of a blogger.com blog I’ve ever seen, by the way.

Seriously, go do this search and click through to that site. It’s incredible. Check out their very active blogs. This is what I’m talking about when I say that one side of the coin is using the heck out of new web tools and one side is playing catch up. So let’s catch up, shall we? (For good info on the subject of trafficking, a previous commenter here listed some resources to learn more from an educated perspecitive.)

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Adwords, trafficking, nptech, immigration,

Update: I just followed that link again and it’s up to $30,000 now! And it says the reserve is still not met!

I’ve been thinking about beginning to more aggressively email people and organizations that I find on the web who I think might be interested in my podcast. The conceived email would just include a short introduction and invitation to check out the show. I’m sensitive about the unsolicited emails that I receive and this has me thinking, what is spam? If I take the time to find people that I think might be interested in something that I am doing, and send an email to the person, should that exclude me from junk mail category? What if I personalize each email? What if I don’t and just bcc every address? If the email is readily available on the web, does that mean that the person is open to receive solicitations?

My response was that emailing bloggers for coverage (as well as print publications) and then having people learn about your project there, perhaps email their friends about it etc. was a better way to introduce your work to people than unsolicited emails. I’m really not sure, though.

I pointed readers towards a list of the best articles I’ve found on pitching bloggers (http://del.icio.us/tag/pitchingbloggers)
and suggested that subscribing to the RSS feeds of searches for both links to your site and key terms was an important way to engage with the conversation.

What do you think? Is unsolicited email to introduce your project to people you think would be interested – is that spam? Any other thoughts on promoting a podcast about non-profit work? I hope you’ll go over Corey’s post at Net Squared, put in your two cents and check out the conversation (as well as Net Squared itself). I also hope you’ll listen to or subscribe to Corey’s excellent show, the 501c3Cast.

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
promotion, email, spam, bloggers, 501c3cast, nptech

Just thought I’d post that in case you find yourself in similar circumstances.

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
blogs, promotion, Technorati, web2.0, authority, pitchingbloggers

Technorati Tags: Books, booktour, promotion, blogging

What is going on, you ask? Whenever anyone creates new online content (like blog posts) you want to ping the major search engines and other interested parties to say “hey, come look at what I just put up, you should re-index my site now!” Spammers, unfortunately, end up flooding ping services with rapid fire notifications of new content that’s really just crap intended to get you to look at ads. It’s usually all automated. For example, Ryan King of Technorati and the Super.c.ilio.us satire blog told me awhile ago that some spammers fill their blogs by having Google News alerts emailed to a Blogger post-by-email address. Then they run Adsense around it. Yuck!

How important is pinging? Well, Dave Winer just a few months ago sold one of the oldest ping services, weblogs.com for $2 million. That’s not a lot of money by some standards, but it really is a lot of money.

So Pingoat has been trying a variety of ways to exclude spammers from their service. It’s been a messy but valiant effort. Now it appears that some one is unhappy with what they’ve been doing and has attacked their computers. Possibly with an army of zombified computers sending continual messages to them and inserting malicious code into their servers. I don’t really know the specifics, but if it’s something you think you might be able to help with then you should check it out. They appear to need resources more than advice.

I only use Pingoat as a back up or for pinging for someone else one ping at a time. I use Feedburner’s Pingshot service to automate my own pinging. It works great and is one more reason to use Feedburner for all your RSS and other needs.

Technorati Tags: pinging, pingoat, blogging, spam, DDOS, help,

But seriously, do you think that tagging your own blog posts into social bookmarking databases is a form of spam? I don’t. Here’s what I emailed to someone who accused me of spamming Furl after my last post.

People do ask me all the time, is it ok to bookmark my own blog posts? I think it is, and here are a couple my thoughts on the subject:
*if services like Furl and del.icio.us are collaborative databases, why wait until someone else submits my posts to the database? Doesn’t it sound like a good idea to make the post as findable as possible?
*in del.icio.us at least, you can see that no one else has bookmarked a new post I submit, so the only thing that would lead you to click through would be your own interest relative to the title.
*Most importantly: I try to title and describe the posts I submit to Furl and del.icio.us as accurately and usefully as possible. I also make posts that offer real value to readers. So when you see a post of my own that I put in the database, you’re not deceived into clicking through it, or being pointed towards something that’s of no use.

Does that seem fair?

What do you think?