DISQUS

I've gotten traffic from the New York Times before via Sphere recommendations and never ran Sphere myself. Do you think adding a Sphere widget would improve the odds of appearing on Wordpress.com blogs?

Paul,
Your trailing comment is an important one. I think the key is, if doing it to make money, you need to blog strategically.

By driving traffic into your sales funnel, that is what you are doing. Part of the reason that blogs can be successful at this is that blogging can be a good way to help build trust over time.

It can also attract natural links much easier than an overtly commercial enterprise. If channeled properly, it gives you a little firehose that you can use to spray link juice at your commercial projects.

To get back to SBI -- there is no reason that with some fiddling WordPress themes can't be tweaked so that they support the blog and the commercial side.

That said, what I really like in many cases is a full-fledged SEO-friendly CMS like ExpressionEngine that can be shiftedd into so many sizes and shapes you can really accomplish a lot with it. There are hybrid sites that, although technically doable in WordPress, become a pain to manage over time once you've jumped through all the hoops that you need to...

Andy, I'm taking the latter of the two paths you presented as well.

I think that the "blog it or build it" piece raises some issues about blogging that are legitimate. A chronological approach to content organization is not the best way to lead people through a sales funnel for most e-businesses.

One area the critique falls way short though is in its implicit critique of WordPress software to accomplish similar things to SBI given a proper theme and plugins for the task.

When I use WordPress for niche sites one of the things that goes away from my templates are the "archives by date" (and sometimes date indicators on the posts themselves to make things appear even more evergreen).

Just wanted to follow-up and say that I've signed up to be "a Player" and am pretty impressed with Alex's eagerness and vision for the community so far. There are a few rough edges once you get inside, but it looks like he is getting them sorted out pretty quickly.

I've looked through about a third of the initial course material so far, and it all seems like a pretty practical approach to creating and marketing an info product to a niche. Over the course of 8 modules, Alex steps you through it all in an easy to read, hands-on fashion.

In this case, it was surely your review that pushed me over the edge as (no offense Alex) the sales letter just didn't resonate with me personally enough that I would have given it serious consideration.

Kudos Andy -- one of the great things about your reviews is that you respect your readers, make well-reasoned recommendations, and don't settle for the easy buck.

This looks pretty interesting. Your parting thought about driving traffic to blogs via PPC got me to thinking about a past project I was working on which was setting up a landing page system to convert to RSS/Email sub or bookmark.

I ended up scrapping it as I wasn't able to really lock down a use case where it wouldn't be better to just promote a newsletter signup rather than a blog subscription. I'll be curious to read more if you go down that road further in the future.

One thing that I like to do after writing a post is to scan it without reading it and see if it is interesting visually. Lots of things are competing for a reader's attention and it is awfully easy to bore them. For example, you've broken things up nicely here with imagery, whitespace and bold headings. All these things work well together in combination.

But doesn't that cute little fellow that peeks up from above the photo make up for it?

What do you think of the idea of FriendFeed generating a trackback to the referring blog post upon the first comment? It seems as if that ought to be doable as each FriendFeed item has its own permalink.

I think this is a perfect area for an inline RDF standard. This would allow for threaded comment aggregators and RSS of comments across.

I'd love to get your take on the SIOC project: http://sioc-project.org/

Our inability to manage information like this is one of the things that will speed the trend towards more adoption of semantic web technologies.

I wonder if now that they are starting to add captchas that might open some things up. I suspect though that the friends limit might be, at least in part, an infrastructure problem that is harder to solve. It may be that some key part of their algorithm takes more processing time to work out the more friends one has. They may have determined that capping it at 200 is a good spot to keep everything under control.

@Vlad -- Hmmm... maybe StumbleUpon has 4 stealth friends they are sneaking in there to keep an eye on you ;-)

Actually, I've seen this before and I wonder if there are times when their database gets out of whack when removing friends, where a friend gets removed but sometimes you don't get the credit.

@Andy - What they really need is an interface solution on this if they won't raise the limits. There should be a little alert that pops up and lets the new fan know that you are maxed out and that friending them is going to involve some juggling... Maybe let us customize the message: "Hi! I'm maxed out right now...."

Yikes! This means I'm still in jeopardy.

As for the count, I now see 196 of them both when I am logged in and as anonymous. It does list 213 fans total. I suspect it is some kind of quirk due to the profile ratings of a few of them. Maybe a few of the boob aficionados you mentioned have X ratings ;-)

I see you are down to 192 now. Glad to see I made the first cut :-)

Wow, that activation process is a really well done. I think we are going to see a lot of plugins like this in the future. I know mine will ;-)

If any fellow readers out there are using a different WordPress address than their blog address, they are going to have it tank as the page redirects during activation use not-quite-the right parameter.

I've emailed Pawan about it but if you have this trouble, just go to lines 117 and 118 and change get_bloginfo('siteurl') to get_bloginfo('wpurl') and you'll be good to go.

@Joost - One possibility might be to use a delayed redirect on a page with analytics tracking code that updates the utm_source variable (I think the appropriate one to use for this case). A substantial enough is necessary to make sure that the tracking code has time to execute.

This post of yours really got me thinking about roadblocks to launching online ventures. I feel that it is a little cryptic, and although I've read it two or three times I'm not sure I fully appreciate what you were trying to express. Of course, I might just be having an off-day and be a bit more dense than usual.

It sounds like you are struggling with how to best progress with knots and complications in your online ventures. As for me, I'm highly susceptible to overthinking and a self-imposed paralysis through trying to hone my plans before they are realized. The problem is that moving too slow leaves you open to many of the environmental risks that you identify, such as competition and changes in the Internet ecosystem.

The two parts of Paul Graham's startup recipe that really impacted me were (a) simplicity and (f) rapid iteration:

Simplicity is useful in that the simpler an idea is the easier it is for people to comprehend and communicate it. The more viral it becomes. Yet, some simple ideas have really complicated underpinnings that are hidden from view (Apple's products being a good example).

Crude "beta" release and rapid iteration strikes me as a reasonable balance between "as fast as you can go" and "perfection paralysis".

In particular, I'm thinking a bit about the BlogRush launch -- it launched a little crude and require rapid, iterative changes. It did this it the midst of lots of positive and negative buzz. But the feedback itself enabled them to identify the exact problems as opposed to the theoretical ones. They could have waited longer, fine tuned their product but may have found the "need" already filled in the marketplace making a splashy entry harder to pull off.

I'd be really interested in elaborations of your thoughts on successful online project development, if you care to do so.

(and sorry for the long comment! -- I've really got to start using linked blog posts for these longer musings rather than use so much of your vertical space)

Great idea for a blog series! Looking forward to it greatly.

@Michael - Just wanted to clarify and say that PPP does have an option for a "neutral" review that can be positive or negative. I don't know what percentages choose that of course. Plus, some handle it more like Andy does and only take reviews that are on their terms. I didn't mean to imply I think advertorials are something Google should punish. Google shouldn't even be in this business of making lists of who's naughty and nice. Just stick to giving us relevant results when we search. In fact, if they could just classify the information and let the searchers decide what filters to use even better.

What I think is funny about the whole thing is that they make PageRank and then they give themselves a 10. The epitome of quality. Is this a joke?

One thing I want to bring up though in response to what you said -- all of these attacks against visible PageRank may be only the first shot across the bow. Actual rankings may be next, a la John Chow. But unlike John Chow's site, many sites are unfortunately dead in the water without qualified leads coming in from their Google traffic.

I know you suggest that those sites quit whining and play by Google's rules if they can't take the heat, but I still think it is worth whining about.

Another point Duncan - you correctly noted that Google does seem to be grinding the axe harder against PPP than TLA.

If we can stipulate that:

1) The reason for both sets of penalties has been to thwart paid links.

2) All paid links without nofollow are basically equal as far as their ability to manipulate Google's search results

...then what basis does Google really have to draw that distinction?

Duncan, I don't think it is fair to construe all PPP/ReviewMe contracts as "advertorial". According to American Heritage dictionary an advertorial is "an advertisement promoting the interests or opinions of a corporate sponsor, often presented in such a way as to resemble an editorial."

Many of these paid reviews are structured so they do not necessarily "promote the interests or opinions" of a sponsor but are structured in a manner similar to the way Andy has handled his -- being paid for a real, editorial review. So, if you are sitting in Andy's shoes, a PPP review can even be more trusted than a regular sponsor link in nature as a full review is going to likely be a more stringent review than an ordinary site sponsor would have.

Great blog! What a wonderful group of writers.

PasswordSafe is a rather nice free, open source program that is pretty secure and portable. I store about 2k passwords in it as well. While it doesn't have the robust browser integration of RoboForm you can quickly browse to a login URL from it and can do a quick copy/paste of usernames and passwords. Coupled with Mozy for backup and FolderShare or a thumb drive for portability across systems it makes for a pretty slick setup.

My toolbar is currently using 74.125.19.147 -- I didn't see that one on any of the lists at Digpagerank -- I wonder if they are blocking queries from Digpagerank or switching things up as to what datacenters resolve on purpose. I didn't see a way to include an IP of our choice at Digpagerank to test it.

Regarding that odd Google bug -- "O - A. I." (not spelled out to make it easier to study in G) was one of the commenters on that page. I find this a really intersting quirk -- if we could nail down what may have gone wrong it may give us more insight into how sitelinks operate.

I've studied the link profile for O's blog and the links to that particular page of yours and I am really scratching my head on this one.

Somehow I think it has something to do with the two links from the comment heading to a blogspot blog... Google's spiders might get a little drunk when they stumble onto their own properties. :-)

Another interesting thing here is that Google reordered "O - A I" to "A I O". Quirky.

I'm surprised they even included images in their suggestions. Seems to me that that gets awfully dangerous. Not that the textual results look a whole lot better...

But what is really funny is that the *same photo* is in my personal recommendations as well... So are a few other things like the bouncing boobs in Resident Evil, and oddly that same Flickr photo...

How personalized are these recommendations anyway? Anyone else seeing the same thing?

Wow! Congratulations! Rest up now because once they learn to crawl you are in for it :-)