Techcrunch reports on a site which Michael Arrington titles as a 1000Tags - Another Stupid, Brilliant Idea. Uh, well he got one word out of the bunch right. At the end of the piece, the opinion is somewhat redeemed by:

Is this an incredibly cool new web 2.0 business? No. But it is a smart idea that I wish I had thought of and executed on. Good for them.

No, it’s not even smart, keep reading.

The idea behind this site is folks are meant to buy tags by character at $5 per character and the ones who spend get a bigger font size making it appear as if they are more popular, twising and confusing reader confidence. For those readers not familiar with tag clouds, they are essentially a bunch of keywords that users have assigned and the more folks who have used the tag, the bigger the font size. So, here we have a place that is selling out for the size of the tag?

That’s stupid, not brilliant. Worse, I think it’s downright deceptive. But then again, I haven’t much cared for tag clouds anyway.

When I looked at the actual 1000tags site I quickly realized that:

a) most the links were affiliate links
b) a deal existed that allowed anybody who wrote about 1000tags.com to get a free tag, maybe, see the add tag section for details.
c) Arrington doesn’t say one way or another if that was what he was doing with his post — pointing to it to get a free tag for TechCrunch or pointing to it because he actually like the idea or pointed to it just because it was something new (the point of TechCrunch)
d) the site design is about as dry and uninteresting as paint drying, it looks like something thrown up in five minutes (why is Techcrunch giving crap like this exposure?)

Speaking for myself, I would like to be able to trust those I read and stuff like this makes me go hmm — in a negative way.

Nowhere in the TechCrunch post is it mentioned that by writing about the piece, Techcrunch was elligible for a free tag while the rest of his readers are essentially being told they have to buy a tag to get involved (at least some of them looked around and saw what I did and commented). I have no way of knowing if this was an honest omission or if this was intentional, but it seems like an important part of the coverage about this site for Techcrunch readers. I left a comment for Mr. Arrington questioning this omission and recommending it be an addendum to the piece.

But … it gets worse
Also, this isn’t the first time Arrington has seemed to admire something that I looked at and thought: what am I missing? This site isn’t cool or brilliant, it is a link farm. Those who buy a link to this page risk getting on the wrong side of Google, see the following Google page:

Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

Why should I pay or even want it free a link from a site like this? I’d rather have Google search engine traffic than 1000tags.com traffic. I put a rel=’nofollow’ on the 1000tags link above — only the second time I’ve ever done that with a site linked here — and no, I won’t be asking them to put up a free tag cloud for this site. There, my disclosure.

Awhile back I though the idea of the Million Dollar Homepage (MDH) was a “creative idea, but seems just too spammy for me.” The Techcrunch piece in question relates to MDH but what it did was spawn a bunch of mostly bad copycat sites. I was getting dozens — yes, literally dozens — of comment spams from other MDH clones. Look at the post yourself. I eventually had to shut the comments down because after asking nicely in the comments for folks to stop, they ignored and kept telling me about their cool spinoff of MDH. Argh.

I sure as hell hope this post doesn’t spawn yet another series of 1000tags clone sites. People, please save yourselves from being part of a linkbait farm. It will not help your sites in the long term and in fact, it might make your site look like you’re part of a “bad neighborhood” to the search engines.

This is a webmaser beware world. Write good content, be ethical and honest in your dealings, watch who and what you link to and get involved with on the web and you’ll be just fine.

Now those who are pissed at me for calling a spade a spade, flame on. It can’t be any worse than the Nintendo fans for getting on me about saying the dogs don’t poop when they do.

Update 3:57pm PST: Qumana guru, Tris Hussey, writes: ” Business model? It makes sense. People go for curiosity, click a link or two. Advertiser might get some extra traffic. Maybe some sales. I guess this is a tag cloud that really does have a silver lining, heck maybe even gold.”

Arrington’s response thus far: “Wow. My skin is getting thicker still.”

I sure hope he doesn’t write this off as some inconsequential detail. I appreciate what he does for the rest of us out here with his blog, but this situation has a foul stench to it. I hope he does the right thing. Says something if he doesn’t. I’m not sure I can or will be looking at his blog and the companies/products/services represented there in the same light heretofore.

This data mining 101 article by Tom Owad shows just how much information is available and easily accessible online. He takes a few lines of custom code, a bunch of free scripts, a Mac and his home DSL line to do the mining and then closes with an unsettling thought:

… imagine if one had access to Amazon’s entire database - which still contains every sale dating back to 1999 by the way. Under Section 251 of the Patriot Act, the FBI can require Amazon to turn over its records, without probable cause, for an “authorized investigation . . . to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.” Amazon is forbidden to disclose that they have turned over any records, so that you would never know that the government is keeping records of your book purchases. And obviously it is quite simple to crossreference this info with data available in other databases.

Privacy — or the lack thereof — is one of the reasons I try my best to not follow patterns online. I’ve bought some books at Amazon, but I tend to spread purchases around. I’m a firm believer in avoiding predictability and patterns with buying habits, schedules and road travels. Structure is unavoidable with some things, but adding some unpredictable activity is wise. Eventually everything becomes a pattern, I suppose with a large enough data set — or wide enough popularlity — there is a point at which it becomes futile to try and protect your privacy but along the way if you try and do the following the leaks will at least be minimized:

1. spread online purchases around and be careful about what’s shared publically, specifically purchase history
2. if you blog it or share it with someone else who blogs it, then it’s no longer personal, always keep that in mind. Since I blog a lot of my new purchases here (they often become detailed reviews), I’m already making a lot of my purchase data well known. At least I know what I’m doing with this information and how it’s archived instead of wondering what Company ABC is doing with it.
3. watch out for public RSS feeds of your own data. Share only what you want to share when you fully realize the ramifications of sharing. Assume the FBI, your best client, parents and grandparents will be able to find and read anything you share and/or publish on the web.
4. do include privacy message in your emails if you don’t want this information shared. Yes, it should be obvious that email information is inherently private and personal, but some folks need it in their face next to your names to drive this home
5. robots.txt and .htaccess can be useful for helping to prevent third party access to data but they are not fullproof solutions.
6. always edit your profile — if you have one — after you register online. Sometimes information you fill out during registration is made public by default. Don’t be caught in this privacy trap.
7. do not use mother’s maiden name or other personally identifiable information for password retrieval. Choose vague options like favorite food or create your own unique and vague fact that only you and people very close to you would ever know.
8. don’t auto-save credit card information unless there’s no other way. It’s not that big of a hassle to retype a credit card number but it’s a big hassle if the company’s card database is breached.
9. always, always, always ensure sensitive information is being transferred over an https:// secure connection. Look for the lock in the browser. If you don’t see it, don’t shop there.
10. don’t link to your email address unencrypted in profiles, web pages, blog entries or otherwise.
11. use your nick/handle, not your legal name whenever possible online
12. read, yes, really read the privacy and terms of service (TOS) policy of sites you sign up. I’m guilty of not doing this sometimes and those are usually the sites that end up whoring out my information

Got other online privacy tips/tricks to share?

Received a trackback a little bit ago from my post on the hole in the Alaska Airlines plane from some new site called Wobble. Checked it out and seems like they are a Digg clone that might be automatically generating the entries and storing them as ‘wobbles’ instead of ‘diggs’? See this entry

This is the first time I can remember intentionally placing nofollow on a link in any Hmm post, so if this site isn’t some digg.com spam ripoff site then I’ll happily remove that and also remove this from the “spam” category. Honestly, I’m not sure if this plans to be a legitimate site or if it’s a new diggsplog variant?

Compare this:

To the real Digg.com site here.

Nothing wrong with clone sites of course, but my personal opinion is I tend to prefer the originals to copycats. I’m curious if this Wobble site has added a feature which watches certain blogs and posts the stories as if they were submitted by users automatically? That would be one way to start out with some content which seems to me along with getting users to use the digg clone vs. the original site the biggest challenge. The fact that it sends out trackbacks makes me wonder if other bloggers were trackback pinged as well.

With Digg’s success I’m kind of surprised that more digg clones haven’t emerged, but maybe I just haven’t looked hard enough for them? There is diggclone software available freely, so maybe now we’ll see more of these type sites. Also, there is rumour of a possible Digg API coming out (see comments) someday so that might be another possible avenue of rolling your own digg clone site.

I could see an active community site for a specific niche using a diggclone engine for sharing links among each other. Perhaps we should experiment with a HmmDiggClone? Might be fun to play around with, maybe I’ll download and install the program someday. What do you think?

As for these Wobble folks, are they on the up and up? Anybody know? Spam? Legitimate? What do you think?

Just did some recon after a series of futile comment spam attacks were launched against this site (only we saw the spam, it never reached the public site) and learned that an affiliate SEO challenge is coming to an end in 48 hours that centers around an online backgammon site (play65.com) and some less desirable affiliates are running out mass blog comment spamming tools to try and snag the $15,000 in prizes.

This “TC.Ads SEO Challenge” (see affiliates.tcads.net/contest.asp — intentionally unlinked) encourages their affiliates to target Google for the following terms: Backgammon, online backgammon, backgammon games and backgammon rules.

This contest started way back in July 7 and ends December 31, 2005 so it seems some spam sandbaggers are starting to crawl out of holes for a final assault against, you guessed it, bloggers with high Google Page Rank.

I’m curious if Google condones SEO challenges like this? The affiliate program owner cleverly leaves themselves an out by writing in some specific content criteria:

The page needs several sections, each section can be about anything related to backgammon, for example: Backgammon rules, backgammon history, strategy, backgammon news, tables of top players, future tournaments and so on. The page can be designed as you wish with images and banners.

Those who follow these content terms might — and I hesitate to use the word might — be adding value to Google’s search results, but sadly it’s the jackass affiliates absorbing CPU cycles littering Google’s search results with redirects pointing to the same site ruining it for the white hats.

Note to readers who are also bloggers: might want to add some backgammon-related keywords to your comment/spam filters so your blogs don’t get spammed up in the next 48 hours. Things could get ugly if the first spam storm signs I’m seeing worsen. Batten down the hatches.

Splogs on blogspot aren’t Google’s only problem, the Google Adsense for domains program is also under assualt.

The data from the Strider Typo-Patrol System also highlighted the use of typo-squatting in phishing attacks. Web sites belonging to Bank of America Corp., Barclays Bank PLC., Citigroup Inc. have all been targeted, with misspelled variations of domains pointing to fake banking sites with Google ads tailored to financial services. In an interesting twist, the Google ads sometimes point back to the actual site that is deliberately misspelled, meaning that companies are paying per-click fees to the scammers.

Does the Google Adsense team needs to hire away some of the Microsoft Labs team to help them defeat this typo domain scamming?

I curious how the (coming soon for the rest of us?) AdCenter will handle scams like this, or will they stay completely out of the domain parking business? It’s easy to lob stones into the water when you aren’t wading in the current. It seems to me that Google’s domain parking service is open season for abuse and it will be interesting to see how they deal with this.

Are they making some improvement in the battle against the splogs? I haven’t used their blogsearch very much, so am not a very good judge. I just did a search there and saw some spammy results but when I clicked through the blogspot domains seem to have been taken offline. So they seem to be disabling at least some of the suspicious activity.

Any readers using Google blogsearch over Feedster, Technorati, IceRocket, etc?

I’ve intentionally steered from using the term ‘Web 2.0′ very much on this blog because it has all the appeal and substance of a snake oil salesman.

I even used the term: Yuppie Bone Smuggler to equate it in a former post. Time hasn’t softened these feelings.

Both our businesses involve sales so I don’t have anything inherently against intelligent, exciting marketing, but some people have taken the ridiculous notion that the web is enjoying some sort of version upgrade that simply does. Not. Exist. Sadly, some really smart people seem to be championing this lame salespitch. And since the fad is burning faster than a meteor entering the atmosphere those who have tried to build businesses around this are going to be left wearing bell bottom pants to the 2006 prom.

Russell Shaw is among the collective unimpressed:

The problem I have with this “Web 2.0″ slogan is that it is a contrivance, meant to imply a unified movement or wave toward a better Web. Just the very numbering of the thing brings out my moo-goo detector: 1.0 sounds like a beginning. 2.0 (as opposed to a tenth-decimal, such as 1.7 or a 2.4 implies - by its very roundness, a coordinated, standards-based, like-minded rebirth, reconstruction, renaissance, resurrection, whatever you want to call it. 2.0 is the ideal number for such an impression: it implies a concerted, noble effort at refreshing an inspired, but now aging, creation. even “3.0″ implies, well, we didn’t get it right the first time, 2.0 was transitory and is getting long in the tooth, so here we are transitioning to 3.0. But 2.0 sounds good.

The fact that there is a blog network with the name (Web 2.0 Workgroup) that people are part of like Dave Winer — who is about as far from slippery salesman as one can be — really shows the shark has been jumped. Add to that 100+ applications using technology that are several years old (RSS, JavaScript, XML, etc) and you have a marketer’s dream and customer’s nightmare.

More irony: Richard MacManus, also part of the Web Pooh-Point … Oh Workgroup, calls this “dead”:

The thing is, I agree with Russell. The term ‘Web 2.0′ is distracting from the real value going on in the Web right now.

Then there is this whole mashup thing. Why are financial people (VCs primarily) getting all jazzed up about technology that more often than not violates the TOS of other sites when used for commercial purposes? Are they hoping the big companies will buy these crappy programs without consulting their gargantuan legal teams? It seems like a very dicey argument when Adsense is placed next to some mashup programs out there saying they are not being commercially used. Some of these programs are skipping the APIs altogether and scraping pages. Hey, if you won’t give us the data, we’ll just take it. That’s hasn’t ever been considered a stable method of data collection and is downright dishonest.

The widget explosion hasn’t helped. Here you have people — many of which aren’t programmers — blindly mashing apps, TOS be damned. Hey, widgets are used for personal use, so who cares, right? Where did this line of thinking ever come from? Is this a side effect of Web Pooh-Point … Oh?

Finally, you have the use of so called AJAX which is yet another slippery marketing word slapped on old technology. I’m seeing the use of AJAX on programs that are refreshing entire pages using AJAX. Are you freaking kidding me? Why refresh an entire page using AJAX? Talk about waste. It’s like when Flash first came to be and the smart people used a little bit of it to spruce up their site and the other extreme was people thinking they could Flashify their entire website. A little AJAX in the right place could be very wise, but an overdose of anything is ill-advised.

Sour grapes? Nope, that’s not it. I enjoy finding new programs using new and/or innovative ideas. We buy software and subscriptions on the web. I also like to build new things. The best ideas are usually the simple ones that don’t need cling to buzzwords. Look ma, we are using AJAX, we’re cool. We’re sooo Web Pooh-Point … Oh!

[retch]

Let the products/services stand on their own and leave the oily, disingenuious terms out and describe the real underlying technology in the backroom via the developer area where fellow developers might be impressed or perhaps curious. The general public just wants it to work right and fit some type of need in their life, they don’t need, want or like to be sold. People love to buy though! So give them reasons to buy by giving them what they need.

But please don’t break site/API rules to build it. That will just piss people off. That will get people calling their lawyers or firing off emails. Or making angry blog posts.

The web doesn’t need yet another RSS aggregator or tagging application or mashup TOS violating piece of crap that cannot scale. If this keeps up, Web Pooh-Point … Oh could go down as dot.con 2.0.

Word to those making New Year’s Resolutions: axe the web versioning. The shoe doesn’t fit, you must acquit.

Or so this blog post intimates anyway that Google has already devalued links in their algorithms and will continue to do so in favor of clickstream:

You can be sure that with the amount of user behaviour that Google have already collected through their myriad of applications, that they are already experimenting with injecting small influences into the ranking process. It’s unlikely to be a major compenent yet as compared to links - but there is an ongoing shift in the balance of power between them.

I wonder: can we be so sure? I disagree that link value will go away anytime soon (never say never). This is what made Google rise from unknown to king.

Things change. Times change. Better algos come and old ones go. I realize that but I don’t think analyzing and incorporating wide sweeping changes based on clickstream is the SE promise land.

How can they trade links for something based completely — or even primarily — on clicks especially when it has already been pointed out that stuff like accidense exists. Clicks are not a failsafe method of proving anything. Clicks can be automated. Clicks can be fraudulent. Clicks are just as fallable and exploited, if not more so, then links. Ask anybody who has ever run and/or been involved with the affiliate owner side of running a pay per click (PPC) program. Google knows this well because they run a PPC program (Adsense).

Therefore I seriously doubt that the clickstream model is the direction Google is ultimately headed. Rather, I think they will utilyze this data to customize the experience by user, hopefully further personalizing the Google search experience individually but not collectively.

For those using Google search personalize, this is already happening. What you click on is being tracked (you can turn this tracking off) and you can easily search back through your own clickstream. I’ve found this handy more than one time, but it would be awfully brazen for Google to assume that my clickstream data is useful to every surfer. And even more brazen that collectively among all users (who turn this tracking on, or authorize tracking in the Google toolbar or Firefox extension, etc) this clickstream data is more indicative of anything except individual checking out sites that look like a match from their search results.

But even that is fallable. Ever clicked on a search result and realized: hey, this is not what I’m looking for? That happens to me almost every day. You know why this happens? The blame it on the user response would be to say they used the wrong query, but the closer reality would be because spammers and over-SEO’d pages that aren’t truly relevant snake their way into the result set. This is what Google and every other search engine is trying to avoid, not embrace.

Links are still important. Links are still vital. Links still matter in the search engines, including Google. Links aren’t going anywhere because links are what makes the web the web. Without links being a huge part of the valuation I think things would be a huge step backwards.

What about the future?
More likely the future holds some sort of organic method of analyzing website relevance — some sort of super advanced artificial or semi-artificial intelligence — will be the next true evolotion in search. The iceberg is there. Human data evaluation and cataloguing has already begun with tagging, although some people have been complaining that even tagging is unreliable. I’m not saying tagging is the answer either, but it is one more set of data with human involvement. Another piece.

Bottom line: Google isn’t going to base their default search entirely or primarily on clickstream. Yes, they will use it as a factor and I’d be surprised if that weren’t the case now (it is). Yes, it is a bit spooky how much clickstream data they are collecting. The fundamental problem, and I’m sure the brainiacs at Google already know this very well, is that not every click is a legitimate and/or even guaranteed to be a human vote. I’m not saying clickstream isn’t part of the ingredients, no, but it’s not the whole soup today, nor will it be tomorrow. Not in its current state.

Now what do you think about clickstream vs. links being used as a measurement of relevancy in search engines?

The FTC is showing some teeth. Don’t mess with the FTC is the clear message over the $5.3 million fine (pocket change for them) levied against DirecTV for violations by telemarketing firms, via CNN:

The investigation into the case took about two years, according to Majoras. Large numbers of complaints began rolling into the FTC in November 2003 Prior to the DirecTV settlement, the biggest penalty levied over unsolicited calls was a $500,000 penalty against a company called Flagship.

I’ve mentioned before that we got our offline business off the ground using telemarketing, so I’m definitely feeling it a bit for telemarketers in the current climate. Still, it’s not difficult to pay attention to the ‘Do Not Call’ lists and they don’t apply to existing clients. At the same time, I don’t like telemarketers who call back after you have nicely asked to be removed from the list and never to call again.

Then again, with VoIP and cell phone numbers being so easy to obtain, changing non-business numbers is rather trivial. Don’t get too many telemarketing calls with VoIP, so I guess that’s another nice benefit. Don’t think I’ve ever had one via SkypeIN, and there have been very few with Vonage.

Ok, I chuckled and clicked through on this obviously photoshopped blogad from simplydumb.com:

Former king of pop Michael Jackson’s ex-wife Debbie Rowe has revealed to an Irish newspaper that he is not the father of their children Prince Michael Jr and Paris.

Jacko with boobs, spooky!

Once at Simply Dumb, I looked around a bit and found it to be one of the B5media network blogs about weird and unusual stories where primarily snipped news articles are classified as “simply dumb” or “simply simply dumb” or various other categories. Duncan Riley is credited as the writer on the sidebar although most bylines I saw were using “admin.” I already subscribe to a couple weird, unusual, bizarre RSS feeds so I decided to dig deeper on this one.

As far as frequency of updates, it looks to be updated about once per day on average, by going back over the last month’s worth of blog posts (although the last set of updates were on the 8th and here it is the 12th). Partial text RSS feed. I didn’t care for the design, which is a black background with tiny slice of yellow across the top (what for?) and JavaScript errors in IE. Loaded fine in Firefox and Opera. Love or hate IE, you still have to make sure your blog works without errors in it unless it’s a competing browser only blog maybe. Numerous ads being deployed: Adsense, Adbrite, Chitika, etc, not a real clean reader experience when the content is primarily not original.

End result? Their advertisement on another blog through blogads sucked me in (good job), site content lacked much in the way of editorial and seemed more like simply splog (check the permalink above and see that it was entirely pulled from Webindia), left after a couple minutes, didn’t subscribe.

Wasted time, wasted opportunity, wasted ad, wasted money. The best part was the photoshopped pic which is thumbed above, and even that was a quick PS hack job if you clickthru and see the full-sized original.

Blogs like Simply Dumb continue to reinforce my belief that most of these blog network owners are more concerned about generating a sheer number of blogs — even when they suck like this spam weblog from a competing blog network that recently sold in the network package to AOL for millions of dollars — to bolster their numbers and attract advertisers ($$ ad revenue $$) as opposed to actually creating worthwhile content.

Wanna start a good blog network? Then don’t add new blogs just to increase the numbers, add new blogs with dedicated, passionate bloggers on the topic. Splogs primarily consist of content from other places.

I really have to wonder how search engines like Google will treat networks using obvious tactics like these over time? Will they penalize the good sites on the network? This is another reason I’m about as likely to join a network as urinate on an electric fence.

Hopefully worthwhile content won’t be subverted by these type blogs but it’s already happening. It seems to have worked against CNET’s editors who spotlighted the above mentioned WIN spam weblog as one of the top 100 tech blogs on the web and skipped other blogs that deal regularly with spam like Aunty-spam (no affiliation).

Like this wasn’t destined to happen, finally Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has announced some new changes that will lock down some of the capabilities for anonymous users.

Thus, to avoid future problems, Wales plans to bar anonymous users from creating new articles; only registered members will be able to do so. That change will go into effect Monday, he said, adding that anonymous users will still be able to edit existing entries.

These changes were a reaction to two recent issues with the system and piggyback on Wikipedia issues cited last month and general policies and procedures Wales said they were looking into back in August.

Wikipedia has gotten a lot of (mostly negative) press this last week due to Adam Curry anonymously making edits to the history of podcasting and an op-ed piece in USA Today pointing out that a bogus Wikipedia article suggested that a former assistant of Robert Kennedy may have been involved in two assasinations.

I think eventually more changes will be required to keep “anyone” from being able to alter the Wikipedia articles. And the more changes that reduce the ability for anyone to be able to change/edit material will make the project less about anyone and more about certain people. And the more limiting that is done, the more bias that could seap into the material.

The problem isn’t that there is a growing group of volunteers to correct errors and ban malicious users, the problem is that these people are, in fact, volunteers. What is Wales and company going to do if the volunteers don’t weed out stuff like the USA Today article pointed out?

More policy changes. Tighter restrictions. This road seems to be leading to a future with an encyclopedia that is created by only specific volunteers in the world instead of professional librarians and historians. Put me in the crowd that is not convinced that this road is worth travelling.

I don’t use Wikipedia that often. Do you? I always thought the site and idea had an underlying flaw, not to mention being backed by a completely unfriendly user interface but I still believe the concept and spirit are cool. In theory anyway. In practical, real world use? Sure taking a lot of bullets, isn’t it?

The reality is one can only go so far with managing and operating anything with a team of volunteers, especially online. I’m not down on volunteers in general for many, many things in this world, but a system of the entire world being a Borg-like collective of online volunteer librarians might just be an unrealistic goal in an age where spammers, trolls and miscreants flourish and could be editing out history. Not to mention people who were actually a part of history editing their own involvement, as Curry had tried to do. Yes, the system caught him. And yes he was flogged in the public square for his admitted misdeeds, but the media and bloggers aren’t going to pick up on every case of Wikimisdeedia.

And as for running a wiki without a community of volunteers or paid help to monitor it? Expect that thing to be spam bait faster than you can find the definition of wiki. My opinion remains unchanged: Wikis more often than not suck.

I still like the Wikipedia concept and wish Wales the best of luck, but I really am doubting this thing can take too many more credibility hits before the volunteers become the volunteered.

Then down comes the house.