DISQUS

Choicehotels.com has a dormant twitter feed, but they SO should jump on this sponsorship opportunity. Nearly 2 week roadtrip, cross country, social media marketers and SEO's....

As you note, in the US it is virtually impossible to prevent/recover from infringment unless you have filed with the copyright office. So that changes the rules.. practically speaking. The rules follow specific time schedules that flow from the day you "first published" the work, which means yes, there are reasons for paying attention to when you shared your work with others, emailed it, posted it, etc.

On the one hand people blindly follow mythical rules for copyright... yes. But on the other hand, many of those myths are based in fact and those facts might be important practically.

Oh my more competition in Google for "John Andrews".

Good to see the ideas flowing forth. @chris I was in the audience at Wordcamp and enjoyed your humor. Maybe you could so some stand up at Simply Gourmet? Or maybe John can settle for running some Meetup.com events and tweetups, making sure to invite you ;-)

Too funny. The irony within the post, within the comments, and the placement of this in the social media space. Nice work.

Given the above images, I wonder about your perspective of women, though. Just wondering.

As for reality,anyone who is actually working in the online space can qualify a talking head within minutes. Never underestimate the positive power of celebrity, or the costs of negativity.

this affair is smelling more and more like something Jason Calcanis & Friends would dream up.

I was abut to say your comment about "the market share of Ask" was ridiculous, as Ask has no market share. But then I second guessed myself and checked my traffic logs, and sure enough, I got a visitor from Ask a few days ago. Dang, Pilgrim, you're way ahead of me. Keep up the good work!

Okay, so "your industry is full of incompetence and worse. As others have pointed out, that is true for almost any industry, and I agree."

I get it. Everyone is incompetent, not just SEOs. Okay. Nothing further to discuss.

Thanks for clarifying your position, Andy.

Doug, I disagree with you on most counts. Every industry has meetings about "reputation management" because it's smart to manage that as a group, and there are always detractors. Those who bad mouth an industry as a whole are problems for everyone, especially if they are not held accountable for their claims. Consumers are easily misled (look how well QuackWatch ranks in Google for just about everything that's not AMA-sanctioned and Pharma-supported). It's SOOOO easy to highlight negative aspects and lead from the back. Skeptics are easy prey. It's hard to lead from the front. Education is expensive, but ignorance is more expensive.

SEO is largely good webmastering, almost comletely accountable to metrics, and highly specialized. I find it very easy to test the caliber of an SEO, just as I can evaluate a designer or coder or database admin (or alarm installer or landscaper or crew candidate for a regatta).

If you really care about the clients, educate them about picking an SEO (checklists, questions to ask, signs to watch for) instead of saying that 90% of them are frauds. That approach hurts everyone. Educating the world about SEO helps everyone. So what's the problem?

Sorry about the name, Doug. I get called JohnJohn over at Sphinn, too. Not sure what's up with that.

I am not as quick to infer intent as you (you say "fact", "people are afraid", "types of members are the majority", "it's very revealing" etc). I've been unhappy with results from many service companies over the years, but that doesn't mean they are fraudulent scammers. It's a bit more complicated than that (I am a perfectionist my self, with low tolerance for poor customer service. Even IBM disappoints me sometimes).

I hope you don't now characterize me as defending a legion of scammers. In my SEO work I see about a 10:1 ratio of clients who don't know their own business to SEOs who don't know theirs. Are the clients all scammers and frauds?

But seriously, who spends 6 hours listening to a professional service provider pitch, and then rants about there not being enough good ones and most being frauds? I will infer that there's way more going on in that office than "there are no good seo consultants".

Wow... six hours listening to an SEO consultant on his philosophy of SEO? That's the first red flag. Sorry to hear of your predicament, but seriously. When did you last give 6 hours of attention to a database guy, or a graphic designer, your physician, or your BMW mechanic?

The readers are not sophisticated enough to recognize this as a rant, and I suspect that's why some criticize this appearing on MP.

Disturbing, indeed. The bias behind the copywriting on wikipedia and some other sites becomes more obvious to me every day. Sadly, I suspect that is just a reflection of it being tuned to the mass audience. Whether it is centrally directed or not doesn't really matter.

Any suggestion that "anyone can edit it to fix what might be biased" is ludicrous - because "anyone" doesn't have financial backing to craft such well-crafted propaganda.

Andy,

I have quietly enjoyed reading over and over how "image search doesn't convert" on affiliate and SEO forums, year after year. Truth is, as I have known and Google no doubt determined with the testing it did, some images are magnets for click throughs in some markets. The same has been true for certain aspects of local search, which Google displayed frequently enough during testing for guys like me to see decent volume.

I am not the only SEO ready for this. I'm looking forward to more free impressions from Google, and more volume to test the quality of organic search traffic.

The missing piece was PR from MBL (they do have a blog, right?) that might have gone something like

"wow... it's amazing to see so many users adopting our service so fast. We are really excited to see the validation that the MBL platform is capable of so much more, and also how amazingly innovative the blogging community is. We'll have to fix some of the loop holes of course, and we've got great people working on keeping things moving forward, but keep the feedback coming and let us know what we're doing right and what you need from us..."

Instead we get "what planet" comments. Yah.