Ben Folds in Chat Roulette piano guy ode

I've been watching Chat Roulette roll out. It's rare to see such a quick rush from geek culture to mainstream awareness. Heard of Chat Roulette? French Connection already use it an an ad campaign.

First we had the piano guy in a heart warming, but Chat Roulette style, viral success. Now we're entertained with the awesome Bend Folds' playing a copycat ode to Merton, the original.

Both videos follow. Yes, there's swearing.

Introducing Madame Tre Sesti

Introducing the new keyword Madame Tre Sesti!

Er. I mean. The new social viral Madame Tre Sesti from Vodafone.



Whereas I can't believe this has been done in entirely in Flash (a hybrid would have done - makes it more social!), I do think this is a good idea.

The viral really does put the focus 360's ability to join your social networking together - it's not a crystal ball you're peering into, it's your phone.

Mind you. I didn't let Madame Tre Sesti connect to my Facebook. Did you?

Ethical, Google okay, money influenced links by Zemanta?

I’m a fan of Zemanta. It’s a handy addition to either your browser (but not Chrome, boo) or your blog that makes image discovery, tag and related link recommendation easy. Those related links can be contextual and in the footer of the blog post.

That’s right. Zemanta encourages bloggers to link to other sites.

Here I will admit an interest in the story. I got in contact with the good folks at Zemanta (and they’ve always been helpful) with regard to the Brinkwire project.

Brinkwire, the pro-blogger, press release hosting site, makes use of Zemanta’s reblog functionality. I also had chats about what Zemanta could do with their recommended link idea but I wasn’t specific.

I’ve not spoken to them since. That’s clearly not stopped the Zemanta team pushing on.
I did notice the suggestion that PRWeb had become the first press release hosting site to do a deal with Zemanta thanks to a piece written by Mihaela Lica. That’s not correct. I maintain Brinkwire got their first.

What I’ve also just noticed is "promoted content" links now appearing in Zemanta’s suggestions.


So, to be clear, no one is paying bloggers to link anywhere. That’s not happening. What we have here is a payment deal that alerts bloggers to the possibility of putting a link in. I’m not Google, I don’t speak to them and I certainly have thought “Google will be okay with this” and be terribly wrong before... but I think Google will be okay with this.

Why? There’s still editorial control. The writer of a quality blog post still gets to decide whether or not they think that link is editorially appropriate. I don’t believe that link is marked as nofollow (should have checked; will try and re-create and test) but it is marked with Zemanta’s signature so Google can ID and tweak the weight of these links should they want (and perhaps it would be appropriate to do that for the paid-for suggestions and the none-paid-for on the grounds that they’re both recommendations made to a blogger).

If you’ve not had my link/election spiel before – here it is.

Google has created a link economy but that doesn’t make link buying okay. For example, democracy creates a vote economy but it is illegal to buy votes. What’s not illegal is to money to influence people and to encourage them to vote for you. Linking works in the same way; you can hire a PR firm, who can create a media frenzy around your new product, this alerts bloggers to your product and you’ll pick up some links. In that scenario you’ve not engaged in paid linking.

I think these Zemanta links are the same scenario. You’re using your money to influence people to give you’re their vote/link. There’s still that editorial discretion that Google wants.

And if I’m wrong? Then we add Zemanta to a growing grey area of next gen services that contribute to an evolved linking model but which may cause Google to loose trust in blogs that use them. I hope I’m not wrong. I’d like to keep on using Zemanta (even if I never ever elect to put one of those promotion content links into my post.


Here’s the last question; what do you think?

Game: Spotting the product placements in Lady Gaga's Telephone video

This is a big vid. It's nearly 10 minutes long and it features Lady Gaga and Beyoncé. Here's a 10 minute long game you can play; try and spot the product placements.

Here's the list I managed. Would you add or remove any from it?

1) Virgin Mobile
2) Diet Coke
3) Plenty of Fish
4) Bebo
5) Wonder Classic White bread
6) Polaroid

Other suggestions
7) LG (the phone in the pic below)
8) HP (the laptop with the Bebo sticker on it)

The harm SEOs do: Pride

Image by voss via Flickr

I really enjoy SEO and the SEO community. I can’t believe it’s been a double digit number of years since a few of us started to promote sites to the top of AltaVista – just for bragging rights on UseNet. It’s been nearly as long since that new search engine, Google, the one we all knew would be a huge success bought Deja.com’s Usenet Service.

At times, though, I get really annoyed by the SEO community. We are often our greatest enemies. One fault in particular brings us down – pride.

There was far less pride in the early days. When Google said it didn’t want to see white text on a white background or even light-grey text on a white background no one moaned that “Google had created a content economy and should expect – allow – people to hide text if they wanted to”. When Google said it wasn’t a fan of people dropping links into Guest Books no one significant moaned that the “search engine had created a link economy that people should be able to promote sites however they wanted to”.

Nevertheless, when Google further clarified its stance on buying links a whole chorus of complaints rose up.

I can see why. Some SEOs had built not just their career but their reputation on link buying and selling techniques and tactics. It wasn’t just about the money. It was also about the pride.

Money was important, sure. It wasn’t just that some agencies needed to buy links in order to move the SEO needle it was that some agencies took significant commission on link dealing and wanted to protect that income stream.

Compare that to the loss of the Best Practise Funding in the UK, though, which involved far larger figures. Sure the PPC community isn’t as vocal as the SEO community and some of the traditional media agencies simply didn’t know what to say – but, by and large, pride wasn’t harmed and so most people moved on.

Even today we have SEOs who try and argue that any advert that looks like a link is comparable to a bought link. It isn’t. These people know the difference between JavaScript and HTML. They know exactly what Google is objecting too and what the search engine isn’t objecting too. Nevertheless; they continue to muddy the waters in order to protect their pride.

It’s not just paid links that we see this intractable pride coming from too many SEOs, though. It’s all over the place.

Too many SEOs are in denial about the radical changes that have overhauled Google in recent months.

Personal search is now automatic and standard. It’s actually quite hard to opt out of personalised search. Nevertheless, too many SEOs push on with a “business as usual” message and haven’t updated their techniques since 2008 or before.

Social search is running, as a beta, but as a default. Once again you’ll be hard pressed to find an SEO strategy that accepts this, works with or even recognises this.

Real-time search means that we’re not far away from the situation where no two Google searches being identical. Are we seeing a flood of blog posts discussing this? No. It’s more business as usual.

Sure, some of this is an honest lack of understanding from some of the more junior players in the SEO industry, some of it is an unwillingness to change and adapt – protecting the old model – but I fear some of it is the belief that the old ways should continue unchallenged.

I believe that this unwillingness to admit the need to change will harm the SEO industry. I also fear it harms clients. Clients pay for best advice – they don’t pay to maintain egos and hubris.

I’ve made mistakes in the past. Rather than let them haunt me I find it more helpful to learn from them and make sure they never happen again.

I strongly believe that SEO needs to evolve in 2010 if it’s too survive, I don’t think it is a lack of skills that will hold the industry back; if fear it’ll be pride and protectionism.

Google Thailand drops bold, goes red

Just a quickie - and I don't mean to suggest this is anything new as I'm not often search Google Thailand.

Google normally uses bold/strong to indicate the keywords in the results that matched the searcher's query (which could be an an exact match or a synonym). Not in Thailand, in Thailand they use red.

FourSquare needs Fish and Chips

Mobile-social and location darling FourSquare have rolled out a sexy update to their history feature.

You can now put locations into better defined categories. People frustrated with the number of trains choking up the system must now content with the fact there's an official train type (which seems to make sense; you spend hours in trains). As you would expect there's also a food type.

Disaster! The Great British institution of The Chippy has been omitted. Users cannot classify locations as either "chippy" nor as "fish and chips". The best we can do is "Fast Food". Boo! Hiss!

I think we should all encourage FourSquare to add this stalwart of British tradition.

LiveJournal in spy tracking, affiliate cheating, ad scandal

Image via Wikipedia

Poor old LiveJournal. I fear the once popular blogging community is still fighting against the tide. The site is clearly desperate to raise some cash but the latest attempts look to be on the dark side and have, understandably, provoked a backlash.

LiveJournal were ambushing outbound links to about 150 e-commerce sites. In other words, if a LiveJournal blogger linked to one of these sites, that link was hijacked by LiveJournal and turned into an affiliate link.

The site that these links are being pushed through is outboundclick.net and already it’s been added by thousands of people to the ad blocker plugins that the LiveJournal community are fond of. However, it was also possible to opt-out of the tracking.

This opt-out is obscure and unpublicised. LiveJournal didn’t tell anyone they’d add the link hijacking in the first place. Users had to find the rarely used admin console and use it to execute the command set opt_exclude_status 1.

LiveJournal seemed to have tried hard to keep this outbound link hijacking a secret. The links looked normal until they were clicked. At that point some obscure JavaScript hijacked the action. It also looked that the script stripped any of your own affiliate ID and replaced it with their own.

It’s against Amazon’s T&Cs to tamper with other affiliate links in this way.

Needless to say, once the scandal broke last night LiveJournal noticed. To their credit they were fast to act.

Kyle Cassidy, a blogger on the LJ Advisory Board (a non-paid role, I think, and an elected one) started to communicate.

LJ was indeed redirecting about 150 urls to advertisers, even for paid users. They are now aware how Not Good an Idea that was. They're pulling that code tonight.

It seems that LiveJournal have been good to their word. The code is gone.

The whole drama really highlights the challenges some social networks have around making money. There’s no easy way to turn UGC into cash. It’s often not where advertisers want to advertise either.

The lesson seems to be clear too – LiveJournal got it wrong by trying to hide the code. People also worried about the privacy implications of the third party tracker being used. The way forward? Do social networks need to use their own ad system – for trust, if nothing else? Perhaps so.