[I Was Naked]
When I Wrote ThisMMMMKay?
2007-07-18
I wish I didn't care anymore. I think I've got a case of the Mondays' on a Wednesday. But anymore I look at the internet as one big fat corporation run by a bunch of Bob's.
I thought I was going to be in for a huge battle with Associated Content to remove my published posts. Afterall they claim they won't delete anything once it is published. It didn't take much for me to get them to delete my account. I refunded them their money, and called the administrator out on their deceptive business practices. They wished me well, terminated my account, and I realized how my one little non conforming account wouldn't matter, as they had the whole online world to prey on. I'll rewind a bit to bring you up to speed.
I found it odd that they would select one of my articles to publish and not the other. Both were humorous, and in the same vein. So I did little more in depth searching. They posted my Red Umbrose and Filthy Whores under the categories Christmas and Soccer, but changed the name of the article. But Two Buckets for Trout was declined because they don't accept humor pieces, prose, poetry...kind of odd don't you think for a writing site?
So I read some other content that was accepted. I was surprised to find that a housewife in Bumbledork IA was considered an 'expert' for watching a soap opera, and posting an update and pulling information from TV Guide and Soap Opera Digest. Hmm. I took it one step further and looked at the new content they were calling for, that is what they wanted all members to write about. All name brand products. So the idea is to write content about these approved products, submit your work, they review, post it and pay you anywhere from 3 -20.00. Than you notify all your friends and family about your expert opinion and how you're a real live pro and you send your loved ones to read your posts. Everyone is happy right? Wrong.
Truly the money isn't that great. 20,000 hits to my story would have generated a total of $30.00.
Not quite so for these social networking sites. The following chart comes from emarket.com 
That's some pretty big dollars made off of you and I and in the case of AC - our writing.
Don't get me wrong, the average person couldn't afford the bandwidth necessary to host free sites so they rely on the advertising dollars. I don't have a problem with that. I do have a problem with so called sites using the members to generate income and masking the reason. No one is that altruistic, and playing on the members to get family and friends, to read their posts that generates huge dollars for the owners and pennies for the writer. At least give the people a bigger cut. The other problem with AC is they claim they can't track the hits to the website for at least two weeks so as my counter sat at zero, I know they were checking stats daily for their revenue. Puhlease.
The following is a little behind the scenes look at this world. It full of new acronyms such as SEO (search engine optimization) But we also have link baiting, SERPS, SPAM,SPIM, and SPIT and the standard symbolic black hat and white hat.
This article from Searchmarketingstandard.com shows you the thinking behind this new way of garnering money from everyone online. You probably wouldn't think about it, but again I am old school and here's where I sound old, and back in my day, we walked to school, in the snow, barefoot, and it was uphill both ways. But I do miss the internet before advertising came along. Now they make whores out of all of us. Read along.
SMO: Social Media Optimization
Posted by Kent Lewis on April 12, 2007 Social Media Optimization (SMO) has long been a hot topic at Anvil, and I was very interested to see what the panel had to say. Rand Fishkin with SEOmoz kicked off the session in his trademark animated and informative style. He provided a helpful overview and foundation for the following presenters.
Rand started by provide an overview of the benefits of SMO: visibility, branding, link love, community engagement and influencing traditional media. He also addressed the perception that SMO is often seen as spam, yet SEO itself is responsible for driving significant traffic to the social media Web sites. His tips included respecting the community, building and maintaining a consistent and robust profile (or brand) and engage in the community by commenting, contributing and sharing regularly. Rand’s favorite social media sites include: Magnolia, Ning, 43 Things, Newsvine, wikiHow, Frappr, Yahoo 360, StumbleUpon, Technorati, Flickr and Furl among others.
Neil Patel with Advantage Consulting Services (ACS) took a much more candid approach. I enjoy when novice speakers with tons of experience share their secret sauce with the audience. Patel was enthusiastic and entertaining as well as informative. He focused his presentation primarily on Digg and StumbleUpon, providing examples of successes. SMO best practices, according to Patel, include: add tons of friends, participate regularly, optimize titles & descriptions, gain top user status and submit in a timely manner. Don’t include: blatant self-promotion, posting biased information, paying for votes or breaking community rules or spamming.
Andy Hagans with Text Link Ads rounded out the panel with a case study on Network Security Journal. He stressed the importance of a catchy title, in that it is the single most important factor of SMO. If it makes a good magazine cover title, it will work well for SMO. The content should be focused, pretty and “lifehacker good.” Hagans also recommended promoting aggressively in a short timeframe and linking out generously. His favorite sites include Digg, netscape, StumbleUpon, Reddit and Delicious. SMO junkies should also remember to reach out to relevant bloggers to generate link bait. Overall, the presenters were informative due to their specific and candid recommendations. Bravo!
Bravo?
Its just one big ugly narcissitic machine, that we keep feeding. I like to think that I purposefuly don't spend my money on advertisements I see here, I can assure you as I write this that NETFLIX isn't getting any business.
At any rate, I got them to remove my posts. I just registered my witqueen.com and I am copying and backing up all my posts here. I'm just trying to find the best hosting site and I'm steering toward mochahost.com. Its just going to be a process, and I haven't been writing but since I read another blog on here this morning, that pointed the reader to Associated Content, I thought I would bring it up. Beside there is a whole gray area of retaining the rights to your posts, but they can do what they want with it, once its "paid" for. No thank you. I think I'll stick to profitting off of my thoughts thank you, if it ever comes to that. In any event and if anyone is interested I'll post a link here to a memo from 2001 that talks about the revenue dollars to be made and how not to piss off the online community and how to advertise responsibly. http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3098.txt
Seems to me that no one got the memo that day, maybe they just forgot to put the cover on the TPS report.
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