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Digital Magpies and Usability Ignorance

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Whilst out and about on my travels a couple of days ago, I happened across a blog that had had an article syndicated on a favorite read of mine, and wanted to email the author rather than comment. I spent nearly 10 minutes scouring the page for a simple contact link or form. I waded through heaps and heaps of useless digital trash in the hope of being able to contact the author and ended up giving up.

To make a point, let me share with you what I had to traverse in the sidebar whilst squinting at the tiny fonts for a link:

  • A bunch of feed button links, all for the same feed but hosted at different feed services
  • A form field that wanted my email address for no dicernable reason
  • 9 or 10 other buttons all one after another in the sidebar that advertised and linked to a bunch of trendy services i had absolute no need of
  • A block of recent posts provided by Technorati — why the blogger didn’t use their own blog softwares version of this or why such a useful set of links was buried under all of the above escapes me
  • A pile of recnt comments
  • A stack of the authors comments on other blogs
  • A bundle of “incoming links”
  • Some related links — at least that’s what the title said they were
  • A “bitty browser” monstrosity that looked more like an adsense block and had the audacity to scroll me through a bunch of the authors favorite blogs
  • A set of links offering to let me read the same post as opml, or at a bunch of other gimmick services aswell as in pdf format or read it at various other rss/opml service and as if I’d not already had my fill, an invitation to browse the authors OPML at Dave Winers site
  • More options in the form of “rojo” links. Lord knows what they are or why they were there.
  • A creative commons copyright button, followed by a copyscape button
  • Another block of incoming links, this time with handy rss links in case i wanted to subcribe to the people that were linking to the author based on a text link to their blog
  • A broken “my pagerank is” button, just in case i was mentally ill and felt the need to know…
  • A map widget, in case my curiosity about the page had not been slaked yet
  • One more widget for incoming links, Zzz….
  • A blogshares widget (haven’t they died yet?)
  • “My blog is worth”… oh god, don’t tempt me…
  • Half a dozen or so more widgets to useless web2.0 services i’d sooner cut my arm off than visit
  • Some more generated bookmark/tagcloud links
  • Lastly, the authors recent bookmarks at del.icio.us

On revisiting the blog today to write this post, i actually found the contact link. It was hiding in a graphical button, naturally. God forbid it should be a blue underlined link in a prominent location..

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The Performancing Blog Network

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As many of you know, we’ve been quietly working away at our upcoming ad network for sometime now. It’s always been the plan to eventually launch an ad network that serves the blogosphere well and helps compensate our publishers for their hard work. We’re not there yet, but we are ready to talk a little about it.

Performancing Partners

As part of the plan, we’re contemplating expanding the content offerings of Performancing by working together with acomplished authors writing about design, coding and other webmaster related topics that would be of interest to our core audience. A Performancing blog network if you will.

With the combined expertise on monetization, Search and promotion of the Performancing team, those authors we work with will have to worry about little else other than reading, and writing great content we hope — it’s the value add that we bring to the table in order to forge a partnership with exceptional authors.

Who We’re Looking For…

We’d like to talk to people that blog about code and design subjects. Particularly those people that are already considered an authority in their field, and those with time to read a LOT of blogs on their subject, and post several times a day, every day.

Subjects such as:

  • Web design
  • CSS and HTML
  • AJAX, Javascript and DHTML
  • PHP, ASP Ruby, Rails
  • Other blog related topics such as traffic building and monetization

The Plan

The plan is simple, we want to expand performancing.com by working with authors on subdomains of our main site (eg design.performancing.com) in order to offer various complimentary channels to the Performancing mix

Those channels will be monetized with a mixture of referals (a designer-blogger that takes client work for example), Performancing Partners CPM ads, affiliate programs where applicable and various other means depending on the content offered.

We have some great folks here that really know their stuff on building traffic and monetizing, so that should be the least of your concerns hopefully.

What You Get

For the right author, the sky is the limit. We can offer instant traffic, monetization and direction expertise and a healthy slice of the pie — details to be arranged per blogger, but the cut is not our main concern, our main concern is to put out quality content to the existing Performancing reader base, and to extend that base. Part of the monetization will also come from showcasing our CPM ads network: Performancing Partners

With a first class blog statistics program, and awesome blog editor and an audience already well on track to these kinds of topics there is i hope, much to say for joining forces with Performancing.

Interested?

If you’d like to know more, please email me at [email protected]

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ASK’s New Blog Search ROCKS

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I’ve been a closet fan of ASK for some time now. I’ve thought, like many, that they could. And since the purchase of Bloglines over a year ago, I’ve been waiting for them along with everyone else to bring out a robust, useful blog search.

It’s here, and it’s awesome! blogsearch.ask.com

Thank God They Get It

What worries me about these things (Search releases in general) is the lock in factor. I’m pleased to say that whilst promoting themselves, ASK have done a fine job of realizing that not everyone uses Bloglines, and that we all have our own preferences. You can see just from doing a simple search that there are very neat pulldowns to get the feeds of the individual results in handy subscribe buttons to major services, and lucky for me, to the raw feed.

You can also Digg it, Del.icio.us it and more. Game on!

No Crawler = Less Spam, Hooray!

Blogines founder Mark Fletcher says they’re indexing over 1.5billion archived posts, and the fact that they are searching what people subscribe to means that with a bit of luck, the results will be less prone to being full of shit, a la Technorati and pretty much every other blog/feed search already out there.

Chris Sherman, who wrote a great writeup for SearchDay tells us:

Since blogging and feeds tend to be more associated with individuals rather than organizations, Ask has also implemented a sophisticated name-recognition capability. Search for a name, and for active bloggers you see links to posts by and posts about the person. Another feature surfaces “top feeds” based on a combination of relevance to your query and popularity of blogs that match your query.

which is cool, though i’ve yet to find a way track links to posts, though to be fair, i was so excited when I saw this this morning that I really didn’t explore everything before posting. If you work it out, let me know….

Looking around at the various posts on this, it’s getting a pretty good play in the ‘sphere, and for my part, i LOVE it!

Let us know what you think.

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5 Steps for Identifying Dodgy Blog Submissions

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Recently I had to investigate a couple of article submissions here at Performancing. They smelt wrong, so I did the sensible thing and poked them with a stick to see if there really was something amiss. Im going to tell you why you need to check user contributed articles, and give you 5 easy steps to help you make the call.

Before we get into HOW, let’s just talk about WHY…

As a publisher, what goes out on your blog is your responsibility. Content does not necessarily have to be original, or even well written, (there is a lot of value in some aggregation and not everyone writes brilliantly) but you DO have a responsibility to your readers to not fill them full of shit. And it’s the kind of mind numbingly dreadful, regurgitated content that content spammers want to foist on you and your readers that you, as a responsible publisher have a duty to identify, and kill before it hits your RSS.

5 Steps For Checking User Submitted Posts

If you get that “somethings not right” feeling when reviewing a user submission, look for these tell-tale signs of content spamming.

1. Are the linebreaks out sync?
You can often see if an post has been cut and pasted rather than typed into your form by looking at the linebreaks. Most blog software automatically puts
tags on new lines for you, and if the article is breaking in the wrong places, its a good indication that further investigation is required.

There are a number of legitimate reasons why this might happen, so its by no means conclusive by itself.

2. Has it been submitted elsewhere?
Here’s a neat Search trick: take a 5 or 6 word fragment from the article (one without punctuation preferably) and enter it into Google like this: "this sentence was taken from the article" include the quotes.

Pick something as unique as possible. If the article has been submitted to a ton of places already, and Google has had chance to index them, it’ll showup in the results.

If it does, then also take a look at where it’s been submitted. Are those good sites? Or are they spammy article syndication schemes?

Tip: If you get results in your search, hit the ” repeat the search with the omitted results included” link at the bottom of the page — Google doesn’t like duplicate content much, so filters it out. If you find a ton of filtered stuff, it’s even worse than you thought.

3. Is there an obvious promotional angle?
With my recent investigation, there was a link and piece of promo text just screaming out at me. It stuck out like a sore thumb and looked to be the sole point of the article — to promote this service. Sometime’s that’s ok, but often it’s not, it’s a judgement call you need to make in combination with other factors.

You can check this with another Search trick. Enter this in Google: "Author Name" "linktext of service" — In my case I hit the jackpot.

4. Are there affiliate links embedded in the content?
One sure sign of undesirable content is having the authors affiliate id appended to urls in her links. If the links seem to contain codes/id’s where you wouldn’t really need them to reach the page linked to, then that could be the entire purpose of the submission. Motive doesn’t mean the article is bad quality necessarily, but 9 times out of 10, if you find affiliate links, you’ll find multiple submissions aswell.

5. Is it just wrong?
In some years of working with online communities, i’ve learnt to just trust my instincts sometimes. Occasionally something just feels all wrong, though you can’t put your finger on why. This isn’t usually the best reason to take action, but sometimes you just have to trust that your brain is processing stuff and reaching a conclusion without necessarily bothering you with the details….

Blogger Beware

I’ve been seeing more and more of this type of thing over the last few months, particularly from those touting promotional services. If you have any thoughts on this, or any other good means ot spot dodgy posts i’d love ot hear them.

It’s unfortunate that we have to even be aware of this stuff, but as publishers we do, because as i said earlier, if it’s your blog, it’s your responsibility.

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Blog Hosting Recommendations

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Over in the Performancing blog forums Jill Murray is asking if anyone LOVES their blog host? So far, the clear winner is Dreamhost.

If you have a recommendation, please check the aff links and coupon codes at the door and dive right in…

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Tim O’Reilly Speaks, Oh Boy…..

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You’d have to be living under a rock to have missed the kerfuffle over O’Reilly sending a C&D over the term web2.0, and the tech blogosphere has been waiting for a response from Tim with baited breath. Well, here it is: Tim O’Reilly speaks.

The post raises a ton of points, most of which im going to ignore as it’s past my bedtime and I could be here till next week trying to comment on them all…

A couple of things I’d like to say though: I can understand Tim being upset, but slamming bloggers for not being journalists is just naive. The ‘sphere is a mad, out of control mob at times, and it’s not going to change, it’s only going to get worse. That’s just the way it is.

Having said that, the cream does rise to the top, and those at the top, the thought leaders in tech blogging, should indeed show a little respect, and perhaps restraint when someone with such a stella reputation is under-fire and not their to defend themselves.

It almsot certainly wont happen though.

As for the whole “who owns web2.0” shinanigans, i’ll leave that for others to debate.

If I was really cynical, I’d say that there is a very good lesson in how to deflect attention in Tim’s post 🙂 Havefun reading that one, it’s long, but worth the time it takes as it brings up jsut sooo many questions…

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Why NoFollow Was A Failure

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A year and a half ago, i wrote a long post explaining why nofollow would not work, so it’s no great surprise to be proved right. This hasn’t just happened, it’s not suddenly stopped working: It never worked, and has only had the predicted detrimental effect on the web and the way we link.

Jeremy, a top bod in Yahoo! Search, who also supported this ludicrous idea, points to this post that lays the blame solidly at Google’s door. Im pretty sure I said so at the time, but if not, let me repeat my thoughts here: NoFollow was a “this will shut them up”, ill thought out, knee-jerk bandaid hurredly implemented to get bloggers and blog vendors off of Google/Yahoo’s back.

It could never work. As dylan points out, the economics of blog spam are that it is CHEAP to spam comments, and spammers don’t care if some of their efforts are in vain because it costs virtually nothing.

Since its enthusiastic adoption a year and a half ago, by Google, Six Apart, WordPress, and of course the eminent Dave Winer, I think we can all agree that nofollow has done … nothing. Comment spam? Thicker than ever. It’s had absolutely no effect on the volume of spam. That’s probably because comment spammers don’t give a crap, because the marginal cost of spamming is so low.

Spot on.

Jeremy actually has the best advice I’ve seen regarding linking, particularly in the context of nofollow from a Search rep:

Look. Linking is part of what makes the web work. If you’re actually concerned about every link you make being counted in some global database of site endorsements, you’re probably over-thinking just a bit. Life’s too short for that, ya know? Link and be linked to. Let the search engines sort it out.

Really, that’s a breath of fresh air.

Google, and Yahoo, Knew this Wouldn’t Work

Remember I called this a bandaid? More precisely it was a PR bandaid, hastily slapped on during a crisis when no real answers were forthcoming (not ones that would be popular anyway). I find it impossible to believe that Search reps like Google’s Matt Cutts, NoFollows most ardent supporter, and Yahoo’s Jeremy Zawodny really believed this would work.

When Search pundits like Danny Sullivan point out that it’s a non solution, aswell as a host of other Search bloggers (some of whom are linked from this thread), why is it that GOOG/YHOO were the only ones who couldn’t see it?

Note that the people saying this wouldn’t work are as enthusiastic, and as knowlegable about Search as most Search reps.

The only people that believed this was a solution other than the engines, (who as i’ve said, were only paying lip service) were a bunch of folks who didn’t understand Search or the economics of blog spam.

Can we have some real debate on solutions now? Is it time yet? Or do we need to hear a few more fairy tales first?

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