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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Dear Google, Both Yahoo and Bing Crushed You Today

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Dear Google,

I ran a search today. It was a real search. In other words, this search wasn’t something I was researching as a search professional. This wasn’t a search for one of the high keyword value phrases. This was just me … being an ordinary user … wanting to find some information. And what I discovered was that Google failed me, big time, with absolutely nothing in the first ten results that was of any relevance to my query.

Now at first, I assumed *I* was the problem. After all, we’ve been conditioned to believe that if you don’t give us the answers we are looking for, then we must have asked the wrong question. And just as I was about to figure out how to rephrase my query, I decided to do something else first.

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Poopfree what? WTF?

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Yesterday, I wrote an email which included words like “cluck” and “chicken” in it. I then sent it off to some friends. When I got a reply back, and I opened it up in Gmail, I noticed the ad that Google served based on the content of my email. Here’s a screenshot of it. Really, it rendered me speechless, and well, I just think a picture is worth a thousand words.

cluck1

WTF? A poop-free chicken waterer? What??? Wait, I don’t even want to know.

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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Google Decides To Slow Down Search Results And Cloak Their New Tracking URLS

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Today over at ReadWriteWeb Sarah Perez wrote an article on how Google was gaining ground on their share of the search market. In the article she talked about the latest buzz from Google Analytics blog having to do with changes to the way Google.com handles clicks in their serps, which were a implemented as result of what Google would break in analytics packages by implementing AJAX driven search results. She notes that even though the speed benefit Google gains from going AJAX would be minimal on a per-search basis, when multiplied by the millions of searches performed every day it would eventually add up to more of a market share for them.

Although a change to AJAX technology would only make searches milliseconds faster, those milliseconds add up, allowing people to do more searches, faster. And that would let Google grow even more, eating up percentage points along the way. – Sarah Perez

However, what was missed by many

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Google Re-initiates Testing of AJAX SERP’s With Faulty Proposed Fix

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Last month I blogged about the fact that I had noticed that Google was playing around with delivering the SERP’s via AJAX. I pointed out that due to the way that referrers work, using AJAX to generate the pages would cause all traffic coming from Google to look like it was coming from Google’s homepage instead of from a search. This means in turn that analytics packages, including Google Analytics, would no longer be able to track what keywords searched on in Google were sending traffic to the webmaster’s websites. There was a bit of a buzz about it, and Google seemed to stop the testing shortly thereafter. Google’s only reply on the subject was “sometimes we test stuff”, to point to a post from three years ago that also said, “sometimes we test stuff”, to say that they didn’t intend to break referrer tracking, and that was it.

Shortly thereafter, the tests

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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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