I’m with you on this Kevin. I use Google Reader on my Mac and NewsStand on the iPhone. The only two ’short excerpt offenders’ that I’m subscribed to are SEO Book and Search Engine Land. Obviously they have their reasons to excerpt, rather provide a full feed, but I find it annoying to have to click through on either the iPhone or in GReader.

Surprised to see no mention of Skimlinks (who have been written up by TC in the past) which, similar to how Bernhard describes adtago, automates the process of turning of regular links into affiliated links (on the fly, via Javascript).

Yes, Monster helps people find jobs, Facebook helps people lose them (sorry, couldn’t resist pointing that irony out).

I wrote a post about the importance to Twitter of click-tracking for external links (including via API clients): http://tr.im/xewY

Would be interesting to see how many of the 22,000 in the boycott group are/were also fans of Whole Foods on Facebook.

Great case study, the stats you got back – the direct traffic score specifically, highlights the importance of finding a solution for better attributing Twitter-driven traffic. I blogged about this a few days ago here: http://www.charlesneville.com/2009/08/twitter-needs-credit-for-links/

Great case study, the stats you got back – the direct traffic score specifically, highlights the importance of finding a solution for better attributing Twitter-driven traffic. I blogged about this a few days ago here: http://www.charlesneville.com/2009/08/twitter-needs-credit-for-links/

Great case study, the stats you got back – the direct traffic score specifically, highlights the importance of finding a solution for better attributing Twitter-driven traffic. I blogged about this a few days ago here: http://www.charlesneville.com/2009/08/twitter-needs-credit-for-links/

Great case study, the stats you got back – the direct traffic score specifically, highlights the importance of finding a solution for better attributing Twitter-driven traffic. I blogged about this a few days ago here: http://www.charlesneville.com/2009/08/twitter-needs-credit-for-links/

That’s a pretty bad case. I don’t think it’s a function of the bad economy causing sleazier practices, they were always there. It’s this sort of the thing that makes people think all marketers are bad. The problem is the view that all email addresses are of equal value, no matter how they were obtained. That’s simply not true as we (you, the people who read your books and blog) well know.

Important to consider here is that all of us commenting on this article are inside the fishbowl – we’re discussing social media via social media. Remember that there are millions of people on Twitter whose conversations doesn’t revolve around social media and the right or wrong way to use it at all. For every one of us there are thousands of regular people.

We need to stop thinking of Twitter as ‘ours’ and instead realise that it’s for ‘normal’ people too. If they’re finding value following someone on Twitter, I doubt they’ll mind the odd sponsored tweet – if the brand being promoted fits with a celebrity profile I don’t see why a sponsored tweet is such a bad thing.

Something worth considering, especially in economically turbulent times, is buying up expired domains previously owned by competitors that have gone out of business – if you can get there before the link farm people do.

Up to you whether you 301 redirect it to your homepage (maybe worthwhile if there’s some Google Juice left in the domain), or just put up a page explaining that XYZ Co has ceased trading but you’re happy to fulfil the customer demand, then link through to your own site. Fact is that there will be links out there to that site for years to come – people don’t often check their links are still valid – and someone might as well get the clicks.

A domain name that brings you one click a day pays for itself vs PPC traffic pretty quickly. Put analytics on the domain to see where the traffic is coming from and contact the webmasters of the larger contributors to get them to link directly to your own site instead.

The Fake Steve Jobs post on the matter is worth reading: http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2009/07/im-really…

How strange? Apple don’t exactly get out there and engage in social channels. They get a lot of coverage, but that’s users/fans not the company itself.

This is a great move by McDonald’s. The concept of "cheap luxury" is a winning one in the current economic climate.

Just because people use a third party client not the web interface doesn’t mean twitter won’t be able to serve up ads to them, and any app that doesn’t play ball would get its API access withdrawn. Look how the ads show up in the stream in in the free desktop version of Tweetie. Key phrase in Twitter’s docs is: “API calls for search, if you pull us enough you have to run the adds [sic]“.

Where I live (Prague) pretty much every business is finadable online – most have websites, some of which are very good, in both Czech and English. Small enighbourhood restaurants will often have very good, regularly updated websites – it’s more common here than in the UK. Even if they don’t have a website, they have a basic profile in a business directory operated by the biggest search engine player (Seznam.cz – not Google) – the data for which comes from the commercial register, so everyone’s in it.Maybe the Czech Republic is ahead of the curve in that respect, they’re certainly well served by reasonably priced no-nonsense web design/production agencies.Adoption of social media however is a little different. A good few places have facebook fan pages and some are using them very effectively, but that is the exception rather than the norm.

Zeality’s business model appears to have just been shot to pieces (by Google): http://mashable.com/2009/07/06…..al-estate/

I heard a stat in a podcast recently that based a comparison of the usage volume of Blogger and Wordpress by comparing their Alexa rankings (Blogger.com is 7, Wordpress.com is 17). That doesn’t give anything like the true figure however. Wordpress can be self-hosted – that ranking of 17 therefore doesn’t fairly represent the reach of the Wordpress platform.

That’s a big if - I’ve seen numerous cases over the years when going to a site via an affiliate link (I’m talking to you Expedia UK) gets you a worse price than without. How can the user compare that other that clearing cookies or going to the site homepage in another browser?