My recent posts have included one about Google opening up the directions API, and about Loki and its geo-location systems.

The next flood is open APIs - everything is opening up, and while it is exciting, it is also a bit overwhelming.

Beyond the above two (all great fits for iBegin), we have Garmin releasing an API to interact with its devices, we have Google Mapplets, and Facebook’s shift into a platform. And those are only a few. What about integration with login systems like OpenID and Yahoo? Exporting capabilities so others can create too?

I think we are reaching the point of so many powerful (ie - highly trafficked) sites having open APIs that it is becoming more and more important to have someone fulltime mashing your data with these systems. The above examples I gave are all perfect fits - figure out the closest gas station using Garmin. A mapplet for important categories like cafes or fast-food. A module so Facebook users can not only search but also incorporate their reviews, pictures, and events into the system. Allow Yahoo!/OpenID/Google ID users to login so they don’t have to create yet another account.

And the list goes on and on - whew … keeping up is becoming harder and harder.

There is a lot of talk about walled-garden et all, but I believe with the hyper-activity now going on in building out APIs that anyone can use, it is becoming more important to just by everywhere. Users don’t like being forced one way in another - but they do like it when you support a multitude of systems.

Companies were initially afraid of search engines - but then became best buddies with all the traffic they sent. Same thing happened with social networks - they were very resistant at first, but now you see Digg and Del.icio.us links everywhere. Sure they send traffic to Digg/Delicious/et all, but they get a lot of traffic back. And the same thing is going to happen (especially in the local space) with all these open APIs. Garmin works hard to get its users. Google is always angling new ways to keep users on their site. Facebook works hard to keep users on its site. It makes sense to leverage their platforms to get more traffic to your sites.

Think about this - a user (with a Yahoo account) ends up on your website. They want to add a review - but have to be logged in first. In one situation, you require them to create a new account. In another, they can login using their Yahoo account. The choice should be obvious.

I believe the ‘winners’ will be those who are found everywhere, on all the major platforms.

I promise after this I will go out and criticize some sites

TechCrunch covers the ‘.CM scam’.

The choice quote:

This is actually one of the cleaner scams occurring in the extremely dirty domain name business.

and

And when money is thrown at these small countries, it seems that they have little hesitation in giving control of their namespace to a relatively unknown speculator.

Lest anyone forget - Pool.com:

Pool management team headed by President and CEO Michael Arrington

I remember seeing listings of TM domains in Pool’s upcoming list. I’m sure Pool picked up a lot of domains that had expired and had been previously websites. Was it not a ‘dirty’ domain business back then? Were domainers not ’speculators’ then?

I only say this because - I don’t think domainers are evil. I do admit I am jealous of what they do. I do admit some cross ethical and moral lines (eg registering typos or disaster domains for pure profit). But quite a few own some decent domains (eg I sold beat.com to the .cm ’scammer’ back in 2003). Anyway - I find it quite irksome when the grand crusader of ‘web 2.0′ was in charge of the largest domain catching service and now pretends like he had no relationship with it.

I’ve been around for a while. I’ve dabbled in many many markets. And by far the worst market I worked in was games (the one except being virtual items/currency).

Game sites pull some horrible CPM rates. The reality is that it is a perfect storm of crap-traffic - skews young, skews ADD, skews impatient, skews banner-blind. This translates into poor, tons of pageviews, little clicks. Branding may work best here - if they notice the ads.

The problem becomes simple - so much bandwidth is sucked up that the amount of revenue generated by ads doesn’t cut it.

So I shake my head when I see all these IM sites popping up. Not only are they piggy-backing (in a back way) on other networks, the ad market simply won’t support something so spastic as IM. I was recently at Kool IM and all I saw were Google Adsense ads (where do you get contextual relevance?) and annoying flash-banner ads.

You want a recipe for disaster? Start up a web-IM company that piggybacks on AOL/Microsoft/Yahoo/Google’s networks.

We advertise quite a bit. Be it Adwords/Overture, or sponsoring sites (ie becoming the sole advertiser), newsletters, forums, etc - advertising is an important part of how we keep our profile up.

I was quite excited when sponsored blog posts came out. Not the PayPerPost crap (it didn’t allow you to control who did the review - how absolutely retarded. Maybe it has changed since then).

The thing many people fail to understand is scale of a business. Lets say I have something tech-related that tech-bloggers would find interesting. We will try to build relationships with 10-25 bloggers, but it is impossible to build a relationship with the 500+ tech bloggers (who have traffic we are interested in). $5,000 is not that much. It is far easier (time efficient) to simply nurture relationship with a dozen bloggers, but pay the rest. With contextual relevance - we have a product that makes sense for their audience.

In an effort to save even more time - Sponsored Posts allows you to create an ‘opportunity’ and let bloggers bid. You don’t even need to go looking for them now (both SR and ReviewMe have medicore search capabilities).

While they were originally decent, both of them now suck ass. Two primary reasons:

Firstly - laziness. Most of these bloggers are horrible at doing any sort of decent look through (one great exception that quickly comes to mind is Michael Gray - his reviews are intelligent and meaty). We bought about a dozen reviews for iBegin Source. I’ll admit people have a hard time understanding the significance - local data is expensive, and that is why we keep seeing the same re-hashed sites. Plus - local data is inaccurate. Horribly so. It is relatively technical, but still an issue any tech blogger should be aware of (accuracy of local search sucks today).

I actually stopped using ReviewMe (their horrible ordering system didn’t help) after those reviews. It ground my bones that here I was, paying hundreds of dollars, and they couldn’t even be bothered to fix these inaccuracies - trying to contact the bloggers and explain their factual errors were blown off or entirely ignored.

With Sponsored Review’s opportunity system, we’ve gotten at least 75+ bids. I think less than 5 actually met the requirements I had clearly spelt out (ie must be tech-related, must be in english). For example - I had a spanish parenting blog apply for the bid. Thanks dumbass.

Secondly - utter shit. These bloggers are basically whores, willing to review anything that pays. Both ReviewMe and SponsoredReviews suffer from this - blogs full of paid reviews. SponsoredReview’s opportunities make it even worse - I love how a tech blog can talk about drug rehab, credit card debt, and fashion shopping all on the front page. What makes it even more annoying is not only are people basically doing a ‘drive-by’ and applying for every single opportunity they can - they have multiple blogs all with no focus, no quality, just filled to the brim with absolute shit.

A few of them even went ahead and did a review! This just helps elucidate my earlier point about paid links -I definitely did not pay for those, and I have no desire to be associated with those neighbourhoods. What is to stop a competitor from buying 100 (shit) paid reviews at $5 a pop? When being at the top of a keyword search can net thousands of dollars in profit a day, $500 is but a walk in the park.

I do want to state that there are some decent blogs out there doing intelligent and relevant reviews out there. Unfortunately there is so much shit out there (making it hard for me to find that) that you can count me as an advertiser who is pulling out.

Technology in itself is benign - it simply lets us do things we could not before.

The internet is a fantastic place, but also a classic double edged-sword: while it lets people read news/information they would have never had access too, it also lets people spread mis-information and other general douchery.

Text is hard to communicate with. I use emoticons a lot (will post about it later), even though it can come across as unproffesional to some. Conveying tone and language through text is extremely difficult.

This also means a lot of people get offended really easily. I’m not even talking about political correctness (also for a later post), I’m talking about people making mountains out of molehills.

Case in point, on my post about how blogging journalism gets its due. Hassan had this to say:

Should not you be saying Allahu Akbar bro? Man this western influences…

I’ve received hate from all religions - I’ve been called anti-semite for rejecting blogs on Blog Flux where the webmaster was Jewish (how would I know that? Not to mention Arabs are semites heh). Ive been told that I will be going straight to hell for accepting blogs on atheism, and yadda yadda.

It is amazing how we have all evolved into a culture where a single word of criticism is considered offensive. I personally love criticism (objectively - personal criticism by people who don’t know you or general blanket statements like ‘you suck’ are retarded). Half of my posts on local search are about local-search sites and how they do things wrong. I’m doing them a big favor - pointing out flaws they didn’t notice themselves. Instead, most of them privately gripe about how I have a conflict of interest. Instead of being thankful for free advice that will improve the user experience, they complain. Amazing.

Regardless, back to Hassan. He was somehow offended that I didn’t bring up God, and that I was ’succumbing’ to western culture. Forget that all the major religious figure heads (including Prophet Muhammad) stressed education and learning. Forget that there was no religious context at all to my post. He still got offended.

With everything so connected now, its hard to take a step back, take a deep breath, and look at something calmly (I’m almost always late to report on ‘news‘). I’ve noticed the longer I sit on my computer/use the internet, the more irate I become. My personal solution is to go out back and throw things around for the dogs. I suggest everyone find their way of cooling off.

Pretty simple.

Matt complains about selling text links through WordPress to game search engines (he focuses on templates, but you know the gist of it).

He does this on a blog that has the following links:
* Donate your car
* Online payday loans
* Payday Loans
* myspace layouts
* Free web directory
* Professional Web Hosting
* domains
* Payday Loans
* Articles & Tutorials
* Rome hotels

Kettle, pot, black - you know the drill.

Over the years, I’ve been a ‘fan’ of Google. I say that with hesitation - I’m not an unbridled fan that runs around saying how Google is the bestest ever. I simply try to take a step back, see what they are trying to do, and think it through. I’ve made many a snide comments on Webmaster World to people who do nothing but bash Google non-stop. But I can see reasoning. As someone who has lived in highly oppressive countries, I believe that education is the single best way to help people. So I sorta understood why Google wanted to operate in China (the altruistic companion to their desire to make more money).

I only mention the China incident to separate me from the usual Google-bashers. Sometimes second-best is better than nothing.

But the recent post by Matt Cutts (lead of their quality control team) on reporting paid links really ground my bones.

As in most things in life, there is black, there is white, and there is a ton of gray in between. Matt’s previous post on hidden links was quite slam-dunk - that was a concentrated effort to hide the link from the users. The trifecta of link posts came with Matt agreeing with Matt (Mullenweg, creator of WordPress) that sponsored WordPress themes are bad (something for another day).

Four separate issues to tackle.

1. First off, I agree with Michael Gray - Google is now trying to dictate what we can and cannot do. The common argument is that if an advertiser is buying adspace for traffic, why not just nofollow it? The problem with that is nofollow was never intended for such use. The intention behind nofollow was links you could not throw your merit behind. When someone posts a comment on my blog and throws in a link to his/her website, I have no clue if that website is spam or not. Nofollow was a way of covering my ass. But advertisers are different. I’ve vetted them. They make sense for my audience. I am only going to allow related ads on my site. Just like Google ensures ad-quality by having relevant ads, I do that myself. So I can vet for these links, and nofollow makes no sense. I have no problem with recognizing that these advertisers exist, and are useful.

2. The one place where Google’s hypocrisy shows - dealing with sites they ban. They’ve publicly caught, banned, and shamed large companies like BMW for using spam-techniques (keyword stuffing, black text on black background, etc). Matt hosted spam content on Wordpress. What did BMW and Matt get? A slap on the wrist - they were back in the index within a few days. If I did the same? Good luck to me. I’m still fighting to get domains unbanned that were banned a year ago (when I didn’t even own them). The double standard here is bullshit.

3. What exactly construes a paid link? This is a huge gray area. What about partnerships? What if I happen to like a site (most webmasters do not worry about SEO and PageRank - thats why Blogflux.com has 2.6 million backlinks, of which most are not even required). How is Google going to make the distinction that a link is paid or not? On my personal site, I could link to sites that I own. That is now suddenly a no-no? On Enthropia.com (PR7) we link to sites which we own and operate. How does Google know if those are paid links or not?

4. What about pre-filled links? The WordPress installation comes with a default blogroll, and links to quite a few sites. What do we do with those? Does Ryan deserve his PR8? Should I report it? Over on the Wordpress Trac, Matt Mullenweg completely dismissed the idea of removing any of those links. So those are suddenly fine now?

As a webmaster, we have a very tenous relationship with Google. This latest call by Google is so close to a witch-hunt that it makes me feel uncomfortable all over.

Learn more about who I am and what we do.

Yep, I just cursed.

I had written a post on how to monetize a DUGG site (basic idea: setup a new website, get it to the frontpage, re-sell). A few sites picked it up, including this post by Blog Herald.

If you read the Blog Herald post, it adds a bit of analysis, but by-the-by, the meat of the post is what I posted.

So it eternally grates my nerves when the Chitika blog added a link to the end of their post about monetizing Digg traffic, only linking to BlogHerald, not here.

This stuff really pisses me off. There is a big difference between posting news and writing something a bit deeper. When companies like Chitika short-change the source and instead link to the ‘better known brand’, it just dilutes the web.

This isn’t anything against BlogHerald (J Angelo is especially good at taking something and running it in a totally new direction). But what Chitika did (and innumerable other big blogs do) is quite insulting and annoying.

UPDATE: Alden DoRosario (who wrote the post over at Chitika) added his comments - he apologizes for the slipup, and explained how he ended up on BH (Google search). He has since fixed it, so a huzzah for him on that. The general rant still stands though.

I had posted earlier about a service stealing our bandwidth because well - they were bastards.

The latest goes does the trifecta: Tagspage.com.

First off, they were using our PageRank Checker without linking back. Strike 1.

When we forced a PR3, they decided to simply rip our image. Yes I know PageRank isn’t ours, but dammit that image is ours, whether you like it or not. Strike 2.

Worst of all, they aren’t even a PageRank7. The real PR: Strike 3.

I feel sorry for the people that fell for this scam. Talk about mis-information.

Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn’t mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar. Edward R. Murrow

If there is one thing we struggle with, it is the amount of misinformation out there. As an organization, we are subscribed to blog results from both Bloglines and Google Blogsearch on every domain and sitename we operate (Technorati RSS feeds seem to update without any new updates, so those are manually checked).

It is absolutely stunning how people can get simple things totally wrong. Not only that, but many people somehow equate all websites with free-speech. It simply boggles their mind that www.whatever.com is my site - I can do whatever I want with it.

But my two points here are different. The problem I am talking about is bloggers often times would rather be loud and wrong than anything else. Too often stories spread that shouldn’t have been even repeated. And not only do they spread, but they get more sensationalist as people try to drive traffic to their site. Case in point: Muslims & the Apple NYC cube. The original (unsourced) story was some muslim was suppousedly offended by the apple cube story. It suddenly morphed into ‘Muslim community offended by Apple NYC cube. Our subtle jab and the stupidity of the story and sensationalism was met with incredulity, as if we were promoting an agenda. In the end, the source turned out to be a forum posting. Some random idiot on a random forum morphed into the Muslim community. And I still see this bloody story mentioned.

While politics is the breeding ground of misinformation (eg Barack Obama was raised as a radical Muslim), its disgusting how this has spread into every facet of our lives.

A recent blog post (which ended up with 20+ comments) recently insinuated that Blog Flux deliberately does not have categories for ethnicities. That we were deliberately stifling people who blog around ethnicities.

I was absolutely floored. Hell, I’m an ethnic minority (and have received my fair share of racism). Instead of even bothering to ask us (or suggest), they instead decided to publicly suggest we were just a bunch of stifling racists. Fantastic.

There are far too many prominent bloggers who spout out ‘facts’ without even doing more than a cursory look at what they are talking about. Frankly, its gone on too long.