Social & Community

Ad Age and Vizu Answers conducted a new study on blog readership. The study showed that that blog readers are loyal, trusting and eager for entertainment. Most readers read the same blogs regularly. According to the study two thirds of study respondents read more than three blogs per day. Similar number of respondents indicated that they read for entertainment. Over half of the respondents judged the quality of the information on bloggs by the quality of the writing.

A James Beard Foundation's page about the real Dave Pasternack.

On the PPC side, the editors voted for Graywolf's AdWords ad.

Wired: I Bought Votes on Digg

Why People Are Such Jerks Online

Truth be told, and excuses aside, I suspect that one's online personality is cutting pretty close to the core.

DaveN, Greg Boser, and Jen Slegg are launching a 2 day SEO conference series named SEO Days.

...but I gotta admit, I'm impressed.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not getting all warm-n-fuzzy about social networks, 99% don't have a snowball's chance in hell and I'd assigned LinkedIn to that category. When I joined up (I think over 2 years ago, but couldn't find a date field in the profile), I didn't see much critical mass, and promptly bailed out. I figured the profile would die. It didn't, evidently, and I was ping'd a day or two ago by an old friend in the SEO industry.

Read the comments, there may be a TW pop-quiz later.
Debbie says (yes, Debbie is back); Uummm, this and $4 gets YP a cup of coffee at Starbucks.

YellowPages.com Gets It

Gary Ruplinger, the guy with the famous social bookmarking video, recently replied on Greg Boser's blog about his video:

I think that for a lot of new people, they’ll spend hours trying to get their meta tags just right or get their keyword density to an optimal level because some free article they read, some outdated forum post, or some friend just as clueless as they are told them to. When instead they should be focusing on two things – quality content AND quality links.

Nick Wilson posts about his new it'll-do-until-the-next-real-one-comes-along-baby, ClickInfluence.

Clickinfluence is a dedicated social media marketing agency focused on helping companies build traffic, relationships and brand awareness within the social media space.

Some of the comments are out of order because for a while the site was posting comments as though it was tomorrow already...I think it was a server clock issue assocatied with the site recently moving servers...sorry about that.

http://searchengineland.com/070208-203153.php

Oh, sorry Danny. That's a tough crowd. What was the quote I once used under my nick at SEW?...
"There's no justice like angry mob justice!"

After the success of last year's event, the London SEO community has announced another even bigger party to coincide with this year's SES London conference.

Congrats to Rand...he was the guy behind the Superbowl proposal, and she said yes.

Flickr announce that all users will need a Yahoo login to continue using the service after March 15:

http://www.flickr.com/news.gne#merge

For those not familiar with the Australian version of ABC think in terms of very conservative broadcasters of a similar type to the BBC and you're close to the Australian Broadcasting Commission

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I wanted to follow up this thread about my petition to MySpace (which asked them to show us profiles of children that have gone missing in our areas, based on our Zips and/or IPs.) A few days ago Simrin Mangat, the Manager of Safety & Security of Fox Interactive Media Inc., sent me the following press release that said they are going to do precisely that...

Threadwatch has decided to get on the SEO contest bandwagon. Whoever ranks #1 in Google for Dave Pasternack at noon Eastern on March 1st, 2007 wins $1,000 from Threadwatch. In addition to the $1,000 prize for the top ranking site, Threadwatch will also give away $100 to the most interesting PPC ad running at that time, as voted for by our editors.

Scott Richter has been named specifically in a suit filed on friday in Los Angeles by MySpace/Newscorp.
http://money.cnn.com/2007/01/22/technology/myspace.reut/?postversion=2007012215
http://news.google.ca/news?hl=en&ncl=1112944821

MySpace has long been a repository of SPAM, but now they are looking to stem the flood by targeting the most troublesome of the bunch, Phishers.

Prompted by the recent myspace thread, I'd like to ask the question:

"What are others here doing to protect or monitor their children's online activities?"

It's a tough job. There's all sorts of nasties out there, from viruses to predators, to porn, to disturbing videos. All stuff we don't want our kids viewing during their formative years.