Link Bait Me

Michael Arrington clearly comes off as a complete ass in his post yesterday.

A few times a day, I skim my Google Reader account for posts that look interesting and came across this post from mythoughtsideasandramblings.com, which points out how Michael Arrington is alienating himself with his recent post about the Page Rank smackdowns Google handed out earlier this month.

Those unfamiliar with Michael’s opinion of PayPerPost, just read one of the many posts TechCrunch made about PayPerPost since June of this year. While I get that Arrington dislikes PayPerPost and it’s CEO, I don’t get why he chooses to insult and laugh at his own readers and I hope he loses some of them for it.

In his post, he calls one blogger “pathetic” for complaining about the large loss of PayPerPost revenue. He also calls bloggers who use the system as a means of income “shills who are going to have to find a real job”. C’mon, Michael. Didn’t TechCrunch grow up on advertiser dollars? Surely, there are people who post about anything and everything that will generate a revenue for them, but there are also bloggers, I’m sure, who DO post only about those products and services they truly believe in. Are they, too, shills? He goes on to say “PayPerPost isn’t dead, but a big chunk of their advertisers are clearly bailing now that the SEO value of paid posts is gone.” I’m not PayPerPost and I’ve never used them, so I can’t speak to their advertiser numbers lately, but there’s still plenty of value in sponsored posts, even if google does dump the Page Rank from many blogs.

I guess Michael has done so well for himself that he has forgotten the struggle many of us make to find time to post while working our day job. I have made a grand total of two sponsored posts (via a PPP competetor) on my other blog, while I turned down plenty of others that were available because I didn’t believe in them. Still, Google dropped my page rank from 5 to 0 overnight and removed my base URL from all search results. Is this fair? No. Did it help the blogosphere at all? Not one bit.

There ARE bloggers out there who have been adversely affected by this, Michael, who did not deserve to be.

Popularity: 14% [?]

You do a lot to get new visitors to your site, but are you doing things that drive them away just as quickly? As a web developer, I cringe when I see some of the things I am about to mention and I try to never make these mistakes in my own sites. Here are 5 reasons I make a point to steer clear of a website for good:

1. Utilize pop-up advertising on your site
I’m not going to click on the ad that pops up, so it just irritates me that you’re going to make me go through closing an extra browser window to get to your page. The one exception to this is CNN and that’s only because they get the news to the web so quickly that they’ve become my first stop for breaking news and I’m willing to compromise. This type of advertising earns the webmaster a very VERY small amount of money per visitor. Further, many of the ads I see pop up are made to appear like Windows alert windows requiring the user to click a button in fear of losing files or some other catastrophe. Just wrong.

2. Resize my browser window
I have my browser window at a comfortable size. Nothing irritates me more than a site shrinking my window, or worse, expanding it to the full size of my screen. If your web site design requires a certain window size, feel free to create a splash page with a link indicating that it will open the site in a new window at the required size. The first thing I do when a site resizes my browser window is leave the site and fix my window size, grumbling about how I’ll never visit THAT site again.

3. Embed your favorite song in your home page
You like that “Who Let the Dogs Out” song, do ya? Listen to it on your own computer. I like to listen to my own music while I work and I absolutely hate it when some site I happen upon takes over as my own personal 1-track DJ. This rule has a general exception, which is MySpace and similar sites where it’s pretty much expected that there’s an embedded music player. Additionally, band websites are clearly excluded from this rule. Everyone else… Ask if that song really adds any value to the content you’re providing. Or at least code it to not play until I hit the Play button.

4. Put 5 MB of content on a single page
Sometimes blogs can get away with this on their home page if a particular post runs long, but otherwise, I can’t thing of any good excuse for this. If you have that many images to display, include pagination or scale the images down to thumbnails and link to larger versions. Remember, you only have about 5-10 seconds to impress most first-time visitors. Don’t use it all up in load time.

5. Make your page a mess
If I can’t figure out where the content starts, can’t read the text, or it’s hard to focus on the content because it’s surrounded by 30 animated images from the 90’s, I will give up quickly. If you want to keep your readers, you’ll need to make it easy on them. You are competing with billions of other sites on the Internet. If I can read the information more easily on another source, I will.

You want people to visit your site, right? Don’t spend all your time creating content and then drive people away from it.

Popularity: 27% [?]

The Midwest Teen Sex Show, self-described as “a video podcast about teen sexuality” it creating waves and stirring up controversy with its bold podcasts about sex, sexuality, dating and similar teen concerns. Planned or not, they’re drawing a lot of attention.

After checking out a couple episodes, I can see why parents might show some concern, but more than that, I see a group of people reaching out to teens in a way that they’ll listen and understand and telling them how it is. I was less than pleased with how they joked that “if you ask someone out and they turn you down, just tell everyone at school the next day that they raped you”. That’s never funny. Other than that, it looks interesting and although I don’t have any personal need to watch, I might just check back in a month or two and see if they’re still turning heads.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Google Experimental is trying out a new experiment, in which you can modify your search results to your liking.

This experiment lets you influence your search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results. When you search for the same keywords again, you’ll continue to see those changes. If you later want to revert your changes, you can undo any modifications you’ve made. Note that this is an experimental feature and may be available for only a few weeks.

So far, it appears that Google is not yet toying with the concept of community ranking scores to be really like Digg, and that’s a good thing. If they ever did that, it would be a mess of new “black hat SEO” activity that would ultimately just force such a model out. Still, it’s nice to think that I can fine-tune my results for stuff I commonly search for like “CSS Menu”.

[via BlogStorm via googlified]

Popularity: 10% [?]

I happened to be in the middle of my daily routine on MyBlogLog.com when I clicked the logo to get back to the home page and saw this:

(click for full screen cap)

Were they hacked or is this is this just a crazy bug? At the time of this post, it remains this way.

UPDATE: Now I get “Unable to connect”

UPDATE 2: They fixed it

UPDATE 3:  Jamie Lynn at MyBlogLog has informed me that it was, not a hack.  She didn’t confirm that it was, in fact, a bug, but we’ll just assume it was, as I doubt it would have been done intentionally.

Popularity: 13% [?]