Cool Marketing Thoughts

“Most bloggers don’t know the power of linking to their sources. You see, I’m often surprised when I find a fellow blogger has stolen some code or text or idea from another blog without any link back to the source.” – I have to agree that what Randy says in that post is very true. Very often bloggers ‘forget to mention’ where some quote or image came from. Last time I checked my logs, I saw a lot of traffic caused by images from certain blogposts, but the html count was way under the image count. About 5 times as low. That means somewhere someone is hotlinking my images. Very often I check out the sources that ‘hijack’ my bandwidth and I’m rather confused to see how many people out there consider me to be a free image host. I can only imagine I’m not the only one dealing with this problem. That’s what happens with copy pasting or with automatic reposts, I guess. Text Thievery, however, is something I highly disapprove of. Even more than Image Theft, this is showing of little respect for the blogger community. It often happens in the form of copying text and pretending it’s yours, but it also happens in form of ‘bypassing’ the messenger.

Isn’t blogging about linking? About people? I guess for certain sites and bloggers it became all about ‘owning content’ hereby blocking off their sources to ‘be the first one again’ when their secret source brings another stunning piece, posts another hot link. Some people then just link to the hot link, without mentioning their source. And that’s just too bad. Taking credit from your audience for something someone else has done research for is just lame.

I don’t care if people steal my images. Well in fact, I do care, but there’s not much I can do about it but send a mail, so I started caring less ;). But I hate it when they hotlink without even mentioning the source. Not only are you kicking me in the back, you’re also robbing me when I’m down on the ground. I have to pay for bandwith I’m not using and get nothing in return. I’m not a charity organization. Either you pay me in cash, or you link to me. The least you could do is right-click-save the image and upload it to your own host. The other nice thing to do would be linking to me. I do it all the time. I don’t hide where I nicked stuff, I invite people to go see where it came from. I have an idea : let’s all do that, all the time. Then maybe if you do a blogsearch, you finally get to see where you end up instead of discovering a week later you’ve been duplicated without even knowing it. Becoming duplicated is an honor for the writer. A signal of recognition. Being robbed makes you feel just not that recognized.

I recently saw it happen with a blog that posted a really hot link to a good story. I know this because I watch the rss feeds of those blogs very closely. The soon as I’ve received that certain rss post in my mailbox via r|mail, I then saw the story pop-up on very different places, of which you could tell they all quoted or congratulated the second source, ‘the thief’, and nobody every knew about the original blogger who actually was the first one to bring this story up.

The same quotes, but no link to the messenger, just to the source. As if they accidentally stumbled upon the same Chinese newpaper or Mexican blog. Goh, jeez, what are the odds? You monitor all Chines blogs and translate it yourself too to see if this story is true, and then you accidentally come up with identically the same ten lines of text from a 2-page-issue? Wow, man ! Congrats ! (you can fill in every country you like, examples enough- unfortunately). That’s just not right. It’s selfish. I assume anyone could tell for themselves whether somebody pointed them to the story or not. I think anyone should be honest enough to mention the guy that actually monitors these foreign sources to blog the news, because without this guy you wouldn’t probably have read the news in the first place. And if everybody keeps blocking their sources, perhaps there’ll come a day these sources disappear, because nobody knew about them so logically nobody had the opportunity to help support the investigators and preserve their existence or encourage them to continue with the marvellous job they do.

It’s all about the electronic handshake.
It’s all about saying ‘yo man, thanks! I’m blogging this!’ or ‘Good job! Mucho gusto!’

And then there is the opposite. You can also ‘overdo’ the linking stuff. That’s what happens with Weblogs.inc for instance. Nathan posted a really good story about that, which you should read… cuz it’s good. – Weblogs.inc is a network of blogs, and every week they post an entry on all of their blogs with a ‘hot this week on weblogsinc.’ sauce topped over it. Then they line up the ‘top reads’ from all of the blogs, interlinking them to help increase traffic – and maybe adsense revenue :) – Apparently blog search engines like Technorati count those links as independent sources, Nathan says.

“See, the latest one of these ‘posts’ contains 69 links to other Weblogs properties, and Technorati counts every single one. And since these posts are replicated across all of Weblogs properties, getting seven links in the post (as Slashfood did) can translate to well over a hundred links in just one day.”

If this is true, and let’s say you’d value a blog on how many links it gets, using a recognized company to do so, there is a significant difference between how much your blog(s) is(are) worth with or without the interlinking system. By overdoing this, you could ‘game’ a valuating system by tapping into it and playing out this flaw, so you can artificially crank up the value of your blog(s) and make it look more appealing if you put it up for sale. Technorati values blogs in terms of in influentialness. So the more links you get, the more influential you are and thus the more you are worth.

It’s also a deformation of reality because, for instance, if the first ten or fifteen results are in fact coming from the same sources or platform, then a lot of information is no longer really relevant, because in the end they all represent the same point of view. It goes without saying that a lot of people don’t go beyond page 2 of the search results, so in fact any of their choices regarding a certain topic would guide them to the same platform anyway, to then arrive in a crossposted link that takes you to another blog in the network, increasing hitcount and traffic numbers. And that’s not really meant to be so, but it’s not forbidden.

“[...] that the relevance of a site can be determined by the number of other sites that link to it, and thus consider it ‘important.’ [...] Technorati tracks the number of links, and the perceived relevance of blogs, as well as the real-time nature of blogging.” – Technorati’s ‘About’.

Makes you think, doesn’t it? – Dave from Technorati said in Nathan’s comments that they’re working on it, so I guess it’ll get fixed somehow. It’ll be interesting to see the stats ‘after’ the new code has been applied. This would then be the naked thruth.

[Randy : Where Credit is Due !]
[Nathan : How Weblogs.inc Games The System]