Monthly Archives: December 2006

Payperpost.com to challenge Google

PayperpostJust when you thought the Internet couldn’t become any more cynical, along comes Payperpost.com, a site that pays “professional bloggers” to pimp products and services. Here’s the deal: if you have a blog, you can pick from a list of products and services to write about, and each one has a bounty that you will earn once your article is posted and approved by the company that’s paying for it.

For those of you who don’t have a background in journalism, there is supposed to be a huge, big, massive, ginormous brick wall between Editorial and Sales. That means that editorial should never be influenced by the people who pay the publication, but Payperpost flies right in the face of convention and does exactly that.

After running along completely without ethics for their first few months, they have now added a disclosure requirement thanks to FTC regulations, so their bloggers have to disclose that they were paid to post their articles. Okay, so it’s okay to be a slut as long as you disclose that you’re a slut, I suppose.

What really interests me, however, is the possible implications for search engines, and in particular, Google, who put a lot of weight on inbound links. A key point to think about here is that despite their happy, shiny marketing copy Payperpost will not be used by professional bloggers. A real blogger lives and dies by her reputation for honesty and impartiality, so they could never afford to put a disclosure on their site saying that they were paid for an article – their reputation would be shot, and it would be all over. Payperpost isn’t hiring professional bloggers, they’re hiring paid bloggers.

Sluts

So, what good does it do to hire someone to write about your product if their blog isn’t a big, popular one? I’ll tell you: if you hire enough of them, the collective weight of their links to your site will give you more weight in Google. Although it isn’t written anywhere on their site, Payperpost’s purpose seems to be to help companies increase their Google rankings, so they can drive cost-effective traffic to their sites.

With dozens or hundreds of bloggers writing about your product, it shouldn’t be too hard to build a high relevancy rating at Google. Just tell the bloggers to link to your site using the text “Green widgets” and to talk about green widgets in their articles a lot, and before long you’ll show up on Google when people search for “green widgets.”

So what is a search engine to do? Google can try to give less weight to these paid blogs, but it’s essentially impossible for a machine-driven search engine to tell which blogs are paid and which aren’t, so Google will doubtlessly be fooled, and may end up full of spammy links thanks to little old Payperpost.

The only definite solution is to go social. People (as a whole) know what’s good and what isn’t, and will filter out the garbage that’s being linked to from a hundred paid blogs. Jimmy Wales is apparently working on a new social search, but it’s quite a ways off from being relevant. Perhaps Social Q&A will step up to fill the void?

Amazon forges yet another beaten path

Askville LogoI guess Bezos is getting tired of the ecommerce biz – Amazon has just released their Askville Social Q&A service, a competitor to sites like Yahoo Answers, MSN Live QnA, and my own Answerbag(which predates all of them, incidentally. Not being snippy, just pointing it out so the title of this post doesn’t sound hypocritical.)

I suppose for Amazon it’s opportunistic – they saw it work at Yahoo Answers, so they did it themselves, and they have enough traffic already to make almost any social service work. (I won’t pretend that they were imitating Answerbag, the smaller, nimble competitor!) The bummer is that they really didn’t add much to the concept.

It works essentially the same way as Yahoo Answers and MSN’s service, but it’s actually even more limiting – when someone asks a question, only 5 people can give answers, and then those five people are the only ones who can evaluate the answers and decide which one is the best. Why the limits, guys? Server too small? Wouldn’t having more people evaluate your answers make them better? Wouldn’t allowing more people to PROVIDE answers result in better answers? According to their site:

We’ve placed a limit on the number of answers per question to make sure you are not overwhelmed with too many answers to your question. If you want to get more than 5 answers you can simply ask your question again – it’s free!

They’re probably right. Six answers is just too many for my feeble brain to process. Thank you for giving me that limit, and encouraging me to ask the question again if I really, really want a sixth answer.

One more thing, you can’t see the answers until all five have been posted, so you may end up posting the exact same answer someone else already gave, and you won’t know until the question gets five answers. Another bummer about that is if your question doesn’t get answered, it gets deleted. You have to come back and ask again. Seems like a pain.

I will give them credit for Map Answers – neat idea, and it was implemented well. They do Video Answers (as Answerbag does), but for some reason don’t do Image Answers. And, of course, they let you embed Amazon product listings in your answers, if you happen to be eager to help a struggling ecommerce company hawk their wares.

I could go on, but I am far too biased to make this post sound objective at all. I have nothing against Amazon as a company and in general I like their stuff and I’ve even found inspiration from various features of their main site. But this time…c’mon guys – let’s innovate a little!

Imaginary friends…Web 2.0 style

Many of us had imaginary friends when we were growing up. Many of us even gave those friends names, talked to them when we were lonely, and hosted tea parties with them. Some of us pretended they were our personal slaves and ordered them to rub our feet.

But this is 2006, and the old school imaginary friend is apparently passe. Now you can have an Imaginary Girlfriend. She won’t go to dinner with you. She won’t talk to you on the phone, and she won’t meet your parents. And no, this isn’t a prostitute or escort – it’s just a girl (in theory) who sends you letters, emails, photos, and romantic gifts as if she were your actual long-distance girlfriend. All of the nonsense of a real relationship without the benefits.

From the site:

“Tired of your friends and family telling you to get a girlfriend? Want to make that certain someone a little jealous? Need a confidence boost? Just feeling lonely sometimes? With an Imaginary Girlfriend, you can carry on a completely fictitious, yet authentic looking relationship with the girl of your choice.”

And my favorite part of the pitch:

“The girls are real. The relationship is not. When your time is up you can break up with her for whatever reason you decide, and she’ll write you a final letter begging you to take her back. Our service is easy-to-use, lots of fun, and discreet. The privacy of our customers and Imaginary Girlfriends is always protected.”

Wow, writing that pitch must have been a blast. I can just imagine sitting around a table coming up with copy…I really wish I could see the copy they thought wasn’t good enough for the site…

  • “Sick of actually having to see your girlfriend day after day? IG is for you!”
  • “Looking for the excitement of an affair without the guilt? Or the excitement?”
  • “If you’re one of the millions of people who love long distance relationships but can’t find someone far enough away that you’ll never have to actually take them out or bring them flowers, this is your lucky day!”
  • “All the hassle and wasted time of a long-distance relationship, with none of the benefits!”
  • “Enjoy breaking up with people, but sick of the tee-peeings, keyed cars, and tearful calls at 3 in the morning that go along with it? Sign up now!”

But hey, who’s to say it’s a bad idea? Maybe it’ll make millions of dollars and satisfy lonely men around the world. Or maybe not.

Santa Monica Siteseeing: Bum shaving his chest

While walking in to work this morning here at Demand Media, I saw something that raised a lot of questions.  There was a homeless guy standing next to a bench where his belongings sat in a heap, and he was holding his shirt up.  He was shaving.  His chest.  Right around the nipple.

Only in LA do you find metrosexual bums.

Several questions sprang to mind naturally: isn’t it a little cold to be shaving one’s chest outdoors at this hour of the morning?   No shaving cream, or at least water? Did he buy the razor or find it?  If he bought it, what did he decide not to buy so that he could shave his chest?  One never gets bored people-watching in Santa Monica.