If you’re a long time reader of Marketing Pilgrim, you’ll know my unease with anyone trying to define blogging; who should and shouldn’t blog; and, especially, talk of a “bloggers code of conduct.” So, you can imagine that my Monday morning is not off to a good start, when sipping my coffee I see Tim O’Reilly’s attempt to draft a code of conduct for bloggers.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I complete

Despite rumors to the contrary, Technorati is not looking to sell, but looking deeper into their sphere. Technorati President, David Sifry, delivers the “State of the Live Web” address post today, expanding the scope of Technorati’s quarterly State of the Blogosphere.
I had just noticed that the quotation in the upper right corner of Technorati’s SERPs had changed from “55 million blogs and some of them have to be g

I’d like to hear your thoughts on CNET’s look at whether journalists are starting to break the informal code that prevents conflicts of interest.
Their expose of well known MarketWatch journalist, Bambi Francisco, reads as more of an attempt to undermine a rival publication, than a serious look at whether traditional journalists should avoid getting involved with companies they write about.
Here’s the summary CNET uses to descri

We wanted to give you some good news on the continuing saga of jailed blogger Josh Wolf - he’s finally a free man.
According to CNET, Wolf agreed to hand over the video he had shot of an anarchist protest in San Francisco on July 8, 2005, and also answer two questions posed by prosecutors.
The questions were whether he knew the identity of the person who threw an object at the police car during the protest, and if he could identify the per

I have to agree with Mark Evans’ observation on David Sifry’s “State of Technorati” post, it sure feels like he’s plumping his plumage, in hopes of finding a suitor. Hey, I’d boast too, with this kind of growth…
We’ve seen huge growth in the number of unique visitors to our site. In March, we exceeded 9 million unique visitors, which is a 141% increase in monthly visitors in a single quarter. Moreo

How would you like a chance to win an iPod for simply sharing your advice for promoting a blog? Interested? Read on!
Mrs. Andy Beal has gotten the blogging bug and has dived head-first into the blogosphere. Her Go Visit Hawaii blog covers Hawaii vacation news and promises to keep readers updated on the latest Hawaiian travel deals and adventures.
So, I have a few ideas to kick-start her blog traffic, but would love to hear what id

Every once in a while, there comes a call for a blogging code of conduct. Usually, these rules are unwritten, but after what’s been happening to Kathy Sierra et al., some are campaigning for a more concrete code of ethics for bloggers.
And it’s not just people outside of blogging that are out of touch with its ins-and-outs. Tim O’Reilly tells the BBC: “I do think we need some code of conduct around what is acceptable be

Did you know that staff writer Jordan McCollum is also a MamaBlogga?
Well, she recently went through the nightmare that is known as the “Blogger to WordPress switch”, something we went through last year. Anyway, she’s uploaded a detailed guide to how she did it, and passed on lots of cool tips for others considering making the switch.
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Over at SEOcritique.com Tom Schmitz asked a few search marketers to reveal some the alternative ways they discover news and tips.
Asking bloggers to share their tips, is a great way to put together a post that will attract others, and Tom does well to get feedback from Danny Sullivan, Rand Fishkin, Neil Patel, Todd Malicoat, Barry Schwartz and myself.
Here’s a couple that I shared… I monitor the job classifieds sites to understand wh

Not since SEMPO Tahoe mocked SEMPO, has anyone pulled off a great spoof of a questionable search marketing organization. Michael Arrington serves up a treat with news that BegForPost has launched.
What’s it all about?
You’ve worked for months building a startup on a boostrap budget and the launch is near. How will you get an initial influx of traffic to propel your product/service into viral bliss? Don’t pay off bloggers to pro

It’s been like a day since we’ve talked about Twitter, so I guess it’s time again. (Okay, it’s really been two weeks, but I just keep hearing so much about it that it’s hard to remember that I didn’t write those things!)
So, in our first brush with the IM/SMS-based “miniblogging” platform, Liana Evans had already covered how Twitter could become useful to business. A few businesses caught the ide

Yes, folks, the ultimate authority on the status of blogging weighed in today. Unfortunately, they did not side with the bloggers.
The Lithuanian Parliament decided that bloggers do not meet its definition of journalists. The reasoning, as reported by Agence France-Presse (via Breitbart): The Media Law describes a journalist as a person who collects, disseminates and provides information to the media, based on a contract with the media, or who

For the past year or two, bloggers have put up with mainstream media articles that suggest we’re nothing but a crazed online lynch mob looking for trouble.
Well, the focus is about to shift somewhat, as it appears those that comment on blogs are starting to wield an unhealthy amount of power. I’m not talking about the average blog commentator - who provides value, even with criticism - I’m talking about the disturbing news that

After last week’s insular* debate on the A-list, it’s good to be reminded that blogging offers more advantages than just getting mentioned by Robert Scoble or Michael Arrington. Even the mainstream media is starting to pick up stories on the advantages of blogging. Earlier this month, MSNBC published an Entrepreneur.com article called “Make Blogs Your Best Marketing Tool.”
The article details a few stories of real-world,

Calling all B- to Z-list bloggers, and those who feel they’re left out “the old boys SEO club“, I want your RSS feed.
It seems like there’s a mini-revolution brewing with the long-tail of bloggers (around 57+ million of you) feeling there’s a class of blogs in each industry that keeps to its own and doesn’t link to those outside of the “A-list”. While I believe the “A-list” is relat

What is Amanda Congdon? She blogs on her own site, vlogs for ABC News (after leaving Rocketboom) and . . . stars in commercials?
After Amanda starred in a series of commercials for DuPont, some are calling into question her credibility as a journalist and/or a blogger.
Amanda defends herself: ABC and HBO both approved the DuPont spots. And under the “blogger” title, which is what I am, hello? I am not subject to the “rules” traditional

So, unsurprisingly, Jason Calacanis has once again inflamed some bloggers by stating that there’s no such thing as “A-list” bloggers: Give me a break… there is no A-List in blogging. Just people who’ve been blogging longer than others and who are smarter or better writers–or all of those things.
I think there are a lot of folks who think because they re-blog a couple of stories a day for a couple of weeks, and

OK, so maybe Al Gore didn’t try and take credit for inventing the humble “blog”, but, as CNET informs us, there are many early diarists that could stake their claim for being the father of blogging.
Was the first blogger the irascible Dave Winer? The iconoclastic Jorn Barger? Or was the first blogger really Justin Hall, a Web diarist and online gaming expert whom The New York Times Magazine once called the “founding father

Lots of sites reporting news that Google has taken down a Blogger blog, after it posted a death threat against a New Zealand politician.
Google spokeswoman Victoria Grand today said the weblog was taken down this morning after a complaint from the Ministry of Social Development. She said it was not just yesterday’s death threat that prompted the site shutdown, but that Google believed it was repeat violation of site rules.

That’s all fine and dandy, but Google doesn’t move as quickly - or at all - for regular requests

Earlier this week, I had the chance to join a group of bloggers for lunch at the studios of NBC 17. They were kind enough to invite us out, feed us and provide a tour, in exchange for our thoughts and feedback on blogging and consumer generated media.
They’re still trying to figure out how consumer media could help them strengthen their #3 position in the local market (they’re behind the local CBS and ABC news affiliate), and so were open to all suggestions.
Of course, it’s hard to make recommendations, when the station itself is not sure of their end goal, but here are a few things I suggested:

They asked how they could encourage more bloggers to link to their content

Just when MyBlogLog plugs the hole on one exploit, Jeremy Schoemaker finds another one.
Want to browse other blogs as Scott Rafer, Jason Calacanis or Jeremy Zawodney? Head over to Shoemoney to learn how, before MBL makes the fix.
On one hand it’s funny, on the other hand it’s somewhat concerning that MBL has so many “easter egg” vulnerabilities.
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A few Blogger bloggers have noticed their SERPs acting funny lately—they’re not there. Of course, the first hypothesis is that they’ve incurred some penalty from the search engines. But SEOptimise.com, one of the affected Blogger blogs, thought to check their code.
A little background: Blogger has made up a bunch of really ugly generic code so they can create generic templates that work for all their blogs without every blogger having to go through the code and insert their blog’s name, meta data, posts, etc

I feel bad for the guys at MyBlogLog. Ever since being acquired by Yahoo, they’ve not exactly had a comfy ride. Things escalated this weekend, with reports that spammers had found an exploit that allowed them to add themselves as “co-authors” on as many communities as they wished.
Saturday evening, a member discovered an exploit where you could send someone a request to join their community as a co-author and then automatically approve the request.  In other words, someone (dare I call them a jackass) could force you to be a co-author of their community.  I have no idea why they would do this, other than a negligible bump in marketing, but who ever said jackasses made sense?

To their credit, they’ve reacted well and today announced new steps to improve the community and hopefully reduce the amount of spam

MarketingSherpa’s boasting a case study on how to get famous with viral marketing in one year (available free for a limited time). The subject of the case study isn’t the type of company I think of when I think “viral marketing success”—Arbor Networks is an enterprise security software company

It’s been an interesting weekend to watch the blogosphere’s fleeting excitement as one by one, they realize their RSS subscriber count hasn’t actually seen a huge increase, Google’s just made some changes to the way it reports Google Reader and Google Homepage subscribers.
That said, it’s still nice to see your Feedburner stats take a jump.

Darren has more.

Pheedo’s new FeedPowered advertising platform offers to take any RSS feed and turn it into a dynamically updated ad unit (see their site for live examples). Where can you run the ads?
You can run your FeedPowered ad on targeted sites across Pheedo’s network of publishers. Alternatively, you can distribute FeedPowered advertising into just about any ad network or via your preferred ad server.

It’s an interesting idea and one that might be appeal to any blog that has made the leap from personal journal to a monetized site

Back in September we highlighted the legal situation video blogger, Josh Wolf, was in, because he refused to hand over video evidence to a federal court.
Facing contempt of court, Wolf was placed in a California jail and is now the longest-serving journalist behind bars in US history, for contempt, according to CNET.
Unfortunately, state laws can’t protect Wolf, as the case is a federal matter.
Wolf might normally be protected by California’s Shield Law

The Christian Science Monitor looks at how ad platforms, such as Google’s AdSense, are helping the average blogger make a little extra cash.
“People can participate in the economy in ways that were once unimaginable. Not just moonlighting, but serious money,” says Mr. Tapscott. In the past, writers, musicians, and videomakers needed to prove themselves as “home-run hitters” in order to get distributed and earn significant money

I must admit that I’m not an avid viewer of Technorati’s Buzz TV. I’ve seen it a couple of times, and host Aaron Krane is perfect for the role - when you have only two minutes, you need to be that energetic - but I just don’t have the time to tune in each day (I know it’s only 2 minutes long!).
Anyway, maybe it’s part of Aaron’s plan to get me to talk about Buzz TV - in which case it’s worked - but Marketing Pilgrim is featured on today’s episode.
So like the pavlovian blogger I am, he sent me the embedded video and I came running to hit “publish”

DazzlinDonna at SEO Scoop is polling her readers to find out how they feel about paid reviews.
Let’s make this ’scientific’—go vote!
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MyBlogLog is certainly the talk of the blogosphere these days. Readers know that I’m a big fan of the service - even though I can’t wait for their move to faster servers - and the company continues to add new users every day.
Lee Odden had a chance to ask Scott Rafer a few questions. Not too much info - Scott’s a busy man - but we do learn that they have over 50k users and growing by 2% each day.
Meanwhile, Shoemoney, has a list of ten features he’d like to see added to the service

We caught a brief glimpse of Technorati’s WTF, yesterday, when Rubel captured a screenshot before the service was pulled. Today, Technorati’s David Sifry makes the official announcement about the launch.
So what exactly is WTF?
When you see a top search with an orange flame next to it, it means at least one person from the community has written their view as to why that topic is hot - right now

I’m with Pete Cashmore on this one. Popular video search engine, Blinkx, had launched a widget for blog owners and social networks (MySpace etc) that allows them to display relevant videos on their site.
But why?
Ok, so the videos are targeted, and the widget is not very intrusive, but where’s the benefit for me? Us? Bloggers?
I already have a number of widgets on Marketing Pilgrim - each already slowing down load times

Steve Rubel managed to capture a screenshot of a new site called WTF (Where’s the Fire), before it was taken down. It appears to be the work of Technorati, the well known and trusted blog search engine.
Boy, I’m excited to see this move by them. Digg has become a very closed community, and it’s virtually impossible to have your site featured, if the top users decide they just don’t like you

You may have noticed that I have again removed the MyBlogLog widget.
Over the weekend, I noticed - as did others - that MP was taking far too long to load. After a quick analysis using the nifty OctaGate SiteTimer, I managed to isolate the offending item. The MyBlogLog widget.
Here’s a snapshot showing the widget taking almost six seconds to load.

I email the MyBlogLog team to see if a server had gone down again, but have not heard back as of yet

Google’s expanding on the recent addition of custom channels in AdSense and is now allowing publishers to create premium inventory on their site with the use of new “ad placements”.
Think of ad placements as ‘enhanced’ custom channels. To create an ad placement, you create and implement a custom channel just as you normally would

We’d like to take the opportunity to introduce you to one of our new advertisers, BidVertiser. If you’re a publisher looking for a new way to monetize your hard work, BidVertiser provides a way for you to allow advertisers to bid for ad spots directly on your site.
Here’s how BidVertiser explains their service:
BidVertiser Publishers Program is a fast and easy to use way for publishers of all sizes to display unobtrusive text ads on their website and earn money

JenSense has the scoop on Google’s policy change that will allow publishers to display competing contextual ad units, alongside AdSense, so long as they don’t look like Google’s ads.
“When it comes to enforcing policies on third-party contextual ads, we’ll be following the updated program policies instead of the T&Cs on this point

Publishers and bloggers, looking to monetize their site, have a new option to consider with today’s launch of MIVA MC. Any publisher in the U.S. or U.K. can apply for a MIVA MC account, and if accepted into the program, can display a wide array of ads on their site, including:

Content Ads: keyword or contextually targeted Pay-Per-Click Ads displayed in fully customized implementations beside site content.
MIVA InLine Ads: Pay-Per-Click Ads that appear when users mouse over hyperlinked keywords within actual site content

By now you’ll know of the great search marketing tools you can get when you sign up for SoloSEO (disc). They’ve just announced a set of free tools that will help you get the most out of the MyBlogLog community.
“The Missing MyBlogLog Tools” include:
Compare Blog Visitors
Compare Your Contacts
Compare Community Members
There’s a few more and each are worthy of MyBlogLog providing themselves

I just received word from PollDaddy HQ that they’ve added a new Flash version of their sweet-looking polls, which should allow users of MySpace, Bebo and Blogger (among others) to publish their own polls. And it looks just like this…
 

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360 Enterprises, Inc. - the parent of our sponsor Text Link Brokers - is getting ready to launch SponsoredReviews, a marketplace where bloggers can charge a fee for a review and advertisers can search a database of publishers.
It appears they’ve sat back and watched the reaction to both PayPerPost.com and ReviewMe.com and taken the best parts of each service

Marshall Kirkpatrick’s post about the amount of spam getting thru his Gmail filter - 19 of 26 emails were spam - has a comment from blogging buddy, Jeremiah, that reminded me of an issue I’ve noticed with Akismet.
While Jeremiah’s finding Akismet to be reliable, I’m finding it to be less so

Have you visited TechCrunch today? Did you notice that really annoying 125×125 animated ad that just went up? What the…?
I’m not sure why Michael Arrington would think this is a good thing to allow on his site. Having six 125×125 ads on your blog is fine - we all need to make money - but they are only tolerated because they don’t annoy, i.e

Douglas A Karr provides two great examples of how to build traffic to your blog.
In this post, he explains how he was able to generate a lot of traffic to his blog by simply engaging other bloggers in conversation. I’ve said before that commenting on other blogs is a great way to build awareness and traffic, now Douglas offers hard proof of that.
26.13% of visits to my site are through connections I’ve made through other sites! In addition, the number of page views of those visits is 1.86 pages versus 1.61 page views of those that find my site through search and other means