Social Media

Quick Poll… Who Here Wants To Bing Jessica Biel?

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Today CNN wrote a piece about the “‘Most dangerous’ celebs to search for online”. The article discussed which celebrity searches that were most likely to lead to sites infected with spyware. It was an interesting enough story, but what caught my eye were the two opening sentences:

Be cautious if you plan to Bing Jessica Biel or Google Brad Pitt. A new report says you might get a virus.

Now, while Microsoft may be hoping that people will associate the name of their revamped search engine, Bing, with

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Amazon Confirms: Shortened URL’s *Are* Allowed On Facebook and Twitter

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Last week there was some commotion over the fact that it was being reported that Amazon.com was refusing to pay affiliates if they used url shortening services to post affiliate links on social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter. This actually makes no sense from a business perspective, since it would discourage people from sending traffic to Amazon using some of the most popular communication mediums that are out there today.

I decided to go through the affiliate operating agreement myself to see

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Win A Date With Pedobear? WTF??

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I was checking out a link a friend of mine Stumbled on tonight, when I see this ad for what looks like a teen dating site. Like most of the adult version dating sites that you see plastered all over the internet these days, the banner ad featured profile pics of the girls you could supposedly wind up hooking up with. The service advertised is not some small time website thrown up by amateurs with a very low budget… it is owned by Hearst Teen Network, the same guys who own Seventeen.com, CosmoGIRL.com, and a bunch of other teen oriented websites. I am not exactly sure who the hell their advertising team is targeting with this one, however. The ad features profile pics of two cute girls… and Pedobear:

I mean, seriously… wtf??

Is Plagiarism Ok… If It Was An Accident?

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Last year I wrote this handy little script named EasyWP. It makes installing WordPress much easier for those without Fantastico or shell access, and is many times faster than having to upload all of the files individually. It’s very useful, especially if you install WordPress on a regular basis, or if you need to do a complete WordPress reinstall for whatever reason. Lots of people use and enjoy the script.

Today I receive this email from someone by the name of Joel Drapper:

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Robert Scoble Chews Out Lisa Barone’s Ass For Taking His Name In Vain – WTF?

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Tonight Robert ‘I Am Thy Lord And Thou Shalt Kneel, Bitches!’ Scoble, a blogger who has some claim to internet fame through his blog Scobleizer, decided that the title of “technical evangelist” that has been often attributed him simply wasn’t enough, and that deity is apparently more fitting.

Lisa Barone wrote a piece talking about personal brands and false idols on the web. In it she wrote the following paragraph:

Don’t support personal brands built on smoke and mirrors. Make people work for the brands they’re trying to create. Don’t let them scoble their way in. Don’t accept that someone is important just because they act like they are or someone told you they were.

Apparently Robert is the ultra sensitive type, and didn’t take too kindly

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Is Digg Trying To Tell Me Something?

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As far as CAPTCHA’s go, I think that the one that Digg.com uses for story submissions is fairly reasonable. It’s monochrome, decent contrast, and doesn’t try and get too fancy with out of focus characters or exotic fonts. Of course I have a preference for my own PuzzCAPTCHA as far as usability goes, but for mainstream CAPTCHA’s I think Digg’s in intelligently done.

Maybe a little too intelligently, actually. I think that it might be trying to send me messages. I logged in to submit

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Digg Allows Image Ads Embedded With Hidden Subliminal Messages

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I was looking through Digg the other day, when this image ad caught my eye for some reason. Something about it caught my attention, and I wasn’t quite sure what it was, so I took a closer look at it. It was subtle, and hard to figure out at first. The copy on the ad itself was unremarkable, and went like this:

FLASH NEWS: Pam Scott, N.Y., made $1,000,000 on FOREX!

19 y.o. housewife, using $99 Autotrading program-robot, made $1 million in only 2 weeks! READ FULL STORY..

The copy itself was bad enough to make me simply ignore

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Matt Cutts, If This Paid Link Were A Snake It Would Have Bitten You In The Ass

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PageRank for sale. Wednesday TechCrunch posted an article about a new ad product launched by MediaWhiz. The name of the product is InLinks, and it involves people being able to purchase anchor rich text links embedded into content in a way that is supposed to give it a “natural” feel. Michael Arrington called the product “insidious”. His whole take on it was that these new paid links would “be hard for Google to detect”. Quite a bit of discussion followed, sparked in large part by the fact that Matt Cutts chimed in on the matter. What no one seemed to notice, however,

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How To Remove Your Website From Linkscape *Without* An SEOmoz Meta Tag

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You do have rights to your content. Over the past couple of weeks, one of the biggest concerns about SEOmoz’s new Linkscape tool (which I recently blogged about in reference to the bots that Rand refuses to identify, and then again due to suspicious additions of a phantom 7 billion pages to one of his index sources) has been the complete lack of a method available for someone to remove their data from the tool. Assuming that all of the hints Rand has been so “subtly” dropping are accurate, and the one bot that they do actually have control over is in fact DotBot, then from the beginning the data was collected under false pretenses. The DotBot website clearly states

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How To Add 7 Billion Pages To Your Index Overnight

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A couple of days ago I posted my assertion that Rand Fishkin had lied about the details of the new Linkscape tool on SEOmoz. During the discussion that followed, Rand continued to maintain that they owned the bots that collected the data that powered the tool, despite several points on that being very unclear, and that his bots had collected those 30 billion pages.

Right in the heat of the argument, someone decided to drop a comment on my blog that struck me as a little odd

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