I’m a pretty big fan of Mybloglog and I really like using it, but I see some significant problems that may end up spelling its demise if the MBL/Yahoo crew don’t make the necessary changes soon enough.

1. Security issues - Shoemoney has covered two of them and I’m sure more exist. One is a flaw that lets anyone hijack your “top 5 links” to enter in their own spammy keyword-laced links. Another is a way that uses a MyBlogLog cookie exploit to make people seem like they author websites (when they in reality do not). To me, the entire cookie-based system has some worrying implications beyond this, but I won’t get into that here.

» Continue reading “Big Problems Facing MyBlogLog”

Yesterday Jason Calcanis gave a keynote speech at SES where he stirred up quite a bit of controversy. I still can’t decide if he’s a pompous asshat who creates controversy by virtue of his own ignorace or a brilliant marketer who stirs the pot intentionally to create buzz. Either way, he is once again the center of attention. Allen at CenterNetworks has the audio (I’m always very impressed by Allen’s coverage of events) of Jason’s speech so you can judge by yourself.

» Continue reading “Jason Calacanis Thinks Netscape Users are Idiots”

Well, not really - but it might as well be. Squidoo is Seth Godin’s web 2.0 redheaded stepchild. It’s a user-generated experiment gone bad. The basic premise is that anyone can create a “lens” and become a “lensmaster” of a page about anything they want or are passionate about.

But lately the only time I hear Squidoo mentioned is when somebody talks about parasite SEO or ways to get easy trusted one-way links. About five months back Techcrunch blasted Squidoo. There are just so many problems with the Squidoo concept once reality sets in. Here’s a few notable ones:

1. Most non-seo’s probably build a page and never come back to it. There is just nothing to come back for. The site is 0% sticky.
2. Once someone claims a lens it’s theirs. This means there’s a crapload of really empty pages that will just stay that way because of point #1 and nobody will fix them. It’s like wikipedia without the wiki or the pedia.
3. The whole payment/revenue-share concept is ridiculousy complicated and confusing - how the money splits before and after expenses, what those expenses are, how much of it goes to charity and under what circumstances, etc. They even have trouble explaining it themselves.
4. The children in a Bangladeshi sweatshop earn more than the top Squidoo lensmasters. The highest payouts (if you work really hard and promote it) go all the way up into the low 2 figures range. Cha ching!
5. Even their best content (Top 100) is utterly useless and complete crap. I sure hope the Magic of Harry Wong makes it into the top 10 to overtake Chocolate Obsessions. (Did John Mark Karr shadowrite the “Wong” lens?) I’ve seen content on scraper sites that puts Squidoo content to shame.
6. Visually the whole site looks like a bunch of IRS agents decided to create their own Friendster, but with instead of writing, they scraped a bunch of articles from a network of grandma blogs. The visuals on the site are really bland and the users have no control over layout or style.

So I went ahead and created a new lens called Spamdoo. Do me a favor and go give it 5 stars. I want to see just how easy it is to move up the “most popular” rank. This is assuming the editors don’t get offended and remove it before you read this.

One of our small sites got a massive spike in traffic and conversions starting last weekend and looking at logs we were scratching our head about where this bounty was coming from.

Since 80% of that traffic was direct, we pondered that someplace must have given out our text link and people were copy and pasting it in. We figured that whoever was sending that much “copy/paste” traffic must have MASSIVE traffic themselves - at first we thought a popular news site or something similar.

Several days later, we realized what was happening. Our page was scraped by a spammer and mashed up with tons of other scraped content, remixed, and thrown out to thousands if not millions of spam pages, all using the subdomain trick, which apparently none of the 3 SE’s have patched yet.

So thank you, Jose P. from Rio, for spamming the hell out of the search engines with your .org subdomains, and letting us ride your wave to the bank. And if you’re wondering where the title comes from, check out this amusing and ongoing story from Greywolf’s blog.

This morning I was spammed by Shark Byte Media and their new project, LuxuryHomesofSarasota.com. I’ve never signed up for anything from these people and a huge pet peeve of mine is when I get unsolicited email. Especially when it’s marked “High Importance”, which is just too arrogant and annoying. Furthermore it took me only about 3 seconds to figure out that the copy on their pages is the same as 2 other realtors’ websites.

To recap: if you want to draw the ire of the web community, harvest a bunch of email addresses, spam them with a “high importance” header, and put up a site with copied content. The beauty of the web is that it’s so transparent - if you do anything like this, it’s bound to come back and Byte you in the rear.

I hope none of the “real” Sarasota realtors signs up for this thing. There are a number of great Sarasota realtors and brokereages that sell truly luxury homes, just don’t see them using this website.