The relatives filled up the ‘ol email box today because they saw me on MSNBC Nightly News last night. The story was about email bankruptcy. You can watch it here (doesn’t seem to work on Apple browsers). What’s my advise on how to deal with email overload? “Eh, not sure yet.”
Thanks to Apple for featuring Rocketboom on the front page of iTunes this week!! Ive been a quintessential Apple fan forever but for good reason, they have the best interface, best design and push innovation like nobody’s business. Ive yet to review my iphone though to give you some idea, I finally stopped carrying my blackberry last week (‘been using gmail and flipping the board sidewise for speedy thumb typing). A+++ I remember well when the idea was but a dream.
Yep, Twitter blog spam. These kinds of sucker fish latch on to the RSS feeds of others and then repost the same exact information, but with surrounding contextual banner ads. They set up each website once and then it all happens automatically. Whoever sets the site up can just check their bank account each month to see how many click-thrus they got. The more blogs they can set up, the more they can automatically make.
I figured this stuff out because there are some spammers that regurgitate Rocketboom feeds too, though I have always reported them to Technorati and Google Blogs (currently there is just one or two).
The Techcrunch article Rocketboom was cited in got regurgitated by over 40 different spam blogs (BTW, thanks to Paul L. for pointing out a comment from Michael Arrington clarifying that “Interesting” just meant “Interesting to him”).
You can imagine Techcrunch is happy to have 40 blogs per article link to them just to start with, let alone all of the other blogs that link to them that are actually intentional. Thus the auto-blogs have an easy time existing and perpetuating because they increase the link status of the fish they are feeding on.
One of my favorite blogs in the world, Gizmodo, probably has the most spam blogs attached to it that I have ever seen. Here is a headline from yesterday that has 70 links (over 50 spam links) with the same exact headline, “Jet-Man Is So Cool It Hurts“.
What should be done about this? Anything?
**update: Rex Hammock calls these kinds of blogs “splogs” (in a comment on Heather Green’s Business Week column). Splog is actually short for “Spam Blog”, I’m just leaning. It seems that they are in fact often created by the bloggers themselves for link authority. I guess when applied to Twitter it would be Spit Splogs.
It would make an interesting study to see how the ranking of Technorati might change without all the fakes.
I see these kinds of headlines almost every week. I always hold my breath when I read them and get all mentally unsettled each time as I gear up to watch. It’s flattering to receive the comparisons yet also a bummer – even though its just a personal, subjective opinion, I’ve been in a funk all weekend on the Techcrunch article just knowing that they think Rocketboom is not interesting.
A lot of people have left comments to Rocketboom’s defense and many people posted about it to their own weblogs. Michael’s post received more comments than most of his other posts I think and the next day he posted again along with a defense for liking the show.
The sentiment that we all feel each time a new Rocketboom killer comes along (probably Michael’s feelings as well), is damn, it’s been almost three years now since Rocketboom came around and despite the explosion in personal media, we still dont have much out there that has struck a major chord. Our options for valuable, entertaining and independent information in a daily is really limited.
In the meantime, I dont think we need to pit Rocketboom against other shows like football teams, there is plenty of room for anyone who can put the pieces together. The harshness of the effect can be positive as it certainly helps to keep us trying as hard as we can – complacency is death – though there are positive ways of supporting growth.
While important comparisons to other popular shows like Geek Brief and CommandN (classics) can be made, the hope for Webb Alerts, which really does make it a compelling and fresh entry, is the adoption of a regimented, daily, regular schedule. That’s smart. Very few independent productions have been able to commit to a full time, regularly scheduled show and by doing so, the show enters into a wide open market with a lot of demand.
It will be important for this show to not follow in the path of a prior Rocketboom killer, Yahoo 9, which in my opinion is still weak for feeling fake on the “fake-to-real” feeling scale. With everything else in place, as long as Webb Alerts can develop it’s own personality with the writing and a personable presentation, it should become really popular in no time at all.
