DISQUS

"All you can do is make a GOOD video. If it goes viral, it goes viral." BZZZZT Wrong! good != viral

"good enough and relevant enough to have a chance at going viral" Memetic theory and general observation (and a blog post of mine) have shown that ideas do not spread because they are "good" or "relevant" there are tons of "bad" ideas that spread like wildfire.

You can't guarantee success in any advertising discipline, not all tv commercials will be successful, does that mean clients shouldn't ask for a "successful" ad? of course not.
Virality is merely another way of measuring "success" and with metrics and tracking and all the other science of marketing (plus some other fields of study) you absolutely can make a piece of content designed to go viral just as you can make an ad designed to be "successful".
Too often those who cry "virality is a lie" would be better served by crying "sour grapes!"

Is there any relationship between these two sites other than that post? Though, I guess if there was that would have been disclosed.

The Link Attraction Factors report should be on this list :(

I do make a living selling my work, but its all custom, I'm a consultant.

I would imagine the same or less number of people make a living selling non-customized content than make any money giving it away.

The tides of technology and culture are washing away the value of non-custom content. I of course support author's rights, I just question reliance on them as a business model.

Thanks for reading my article Anthony, and for the nice words.

I use twitterberry and find it perfect for keeping me involved.

Perhaps now we can start talking about stuff like this too?
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2006/...

Watchful Eye made a grammatical error in his post which I've found on a local competitor's "human aggregator" site, and his indepth knowledge of old posts from my site, leave me pretty certain who he is.

JB: I'm thinking the ratio should be in the area of better than 50%, it seems like a logical delimiter, legally I'm not sure there is much to be said about attribution and human aggregation,(pure RSS scraping with ads is a different story, i'd think).

Watchful Eye, two points:
a) why are you hiding behind a psuedonym?
b) and yes I, like most bloggers, use blockquotes, however if you look at the overall balance on puritan city, you will see that much of what I post is original and unique, I take stands on issues, I make snarky (or at least attempts at snarky wit) comments, and in general I try to add new value to everything I post. (The Circus post was merely a followup to a number of other unique posts I made, including one pretty big one) Perhaps if you stepped out from behind your veil we could compare and contrast sites, and get more specific.