Wow, with one day left in the bidding, 5 ad spots on Rocket Boom are currently going for $16,000. Am I understanding correctly, though, that they’ve set a base (reserve) price that’s even higher than this? Sheesh I don’t understand money.
Update: I just followed that link again and it’s up to $30,000 now! And it says the reserve is still not met!
Corey Pudhorodsky, creator of the absolutely fantastic 501c3 Cast (a podcast about non-profits with really good interviews and news), asks over at the Net Squared Blog:
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
Doing some promo work for a client (Sustainable Energy in Motion Bike Tour) I’m going through the Technorati Blog Finder list to pitch for coverage. Looked at my “sent mail” folder to see where I left off yesterday, but I notice now that the list changes every day! Default view is ranked by “authority” (by number of inbound links indexed by Technorati). That ranking changed since yesterday and all the sudden my list is catywompus. Should have gone through the list alphabetically or Furled it, where I’d get a cached copy of the pages I was looking at as they appeared when I first found them. I was told to email the ones with the biggest audiences first, so Furling the list would have been the best idea.
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
One of my clients, author Jennifer Lauck, is participating today in a “virtual book tour.” The idea is that instead of an author traveling around the country to speak to people able to attend physical events, a book is promoted by arranging for a number of bloggers to write posts about the book on a given day. It’s a neat idea, I think. This link will take you to see Jennifer’s participation in the virtual tour for the book “It’s A Boy: Women Writers on Raising Boys.” One of the things I did to help was to create the link that reads “click here to see who else is blogging about this book.” It’s a pop-up window that displays the search results for the title of the book from the blogsearch engine Feedster.
Spammers can be a frightening bunch sometimes, not just an annoyance. The good folks over at Pingoat have taken a firm stand against their service being used to spread spam, and now they are paying the price. If there is anyone with the skills and resources to help them, they sure deserve some help. Here’s their blog where they describe the problem.
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,
One of the things I often do after making a post to this or any other blog is to tag the post in both Furl.net and Del.icio.us. I make sure to include tags like viagra, texas-hold-em and *&% expansion with every post. Just kidding.
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?