Wannabe viral marketers still getting it wrong

We covered it in Old Marketing vs New Marketing - the internet is a community of people and their websites are their nodes of communication.
Therefore marketing now needs to be able to access this community in clear niches that reflect a client’s marketing base.
And therefore directly connect products and services with the user market […]

Chris Beasley kicked out from Sitepoint

Andrew Johnson posts that Christ Beasley of Sitepoint has had his blog removed and moderator privileges revoked from Sitepoint. Chris posts in the thread just linked to, and reports basics of the issue on his new blog.
Overall situation is that he’s been basically pushed out.
I first cut my teeth on SEO at Sitepoint under Chris […]

Legal action as amarketing tool

There’s discussion on the chronicles network about the Dan Brown lawsuit over plagiarism claims.
The simple basis is that the authors of a book - Holy Blood, Holy Grail, published by Random House - are taking Dan Brown to court over his book - the Da Vinci Code, published by Random House.
They claim that he stole […]

Lamenting the infighting of the SEO industry

The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) industry is something that people tend to drift into.
It often attracts problem solvers, who get into the subject as a matter of addressing existing problems relating to their own or client websites.
Recently, there has been some ugly infighting in the industry.
In part it’s due to misunderstandings, but there’s an […]

Backup tips

Tips:

Before upgrading a database-driven application, save the database first
Don’t do major software upgrades to a database-driven application while tired

This is after this tired numbnut tried to upgrade vbulletin - accidentally into the root folder, overwriting the Wordpress files that power this site. :)
I also accidently upgraded the forum database twice to the original version. […]

Blogs vs forums

Let’s cut to the chase - blogs as a community medium are over-rated - if it’s community you want to see online, no blog can match the massive readership influence that online forums have.
If blogs are like newspaper columns, then forums are entire newspapers unto themselves.
Even “A-list” bloggers such as John Battelle, Jeremy Zawodny, Robert […]

Too much time on their hands

So a thread at Digitalpoint went into “firestorm” mode, when one of the moderators was accused of running a series of scraper sites - by someone else who runs their own network of scraper sites.
What’s a scraper site? Simply put, sites created solely with the aim of using content copied from other sites (either directory […]

Public moderating on forums

Danny Sullivan - the man behind Search Engine Watch (SEW) - takes a risk and moderates in public.
One of his moderators takes the board to task, and Danny highlights the issue by splittng the post into its own thread, and publically demoting the moderator in question.
Moderating in public is always dangerous for forum admins - […]

Platinax faces legal threat

Today I received a letter through the solicitors for a company, demanding removal of material from the Platinax forums, after people claiming to be customers posted complaints about the company’s sales procedure.
I received two phone calls from a representative of the company in question, telling me to remove the threads or face the legal consequences. […]

Dear Accoona

Stop spamming my forums with your worthless pathetic attempt at viral marketing.
Innovative search is it? Strong debut eh? Clinton helped?
Worthless bunch of pants.
Accoona forum spammers - go tell your dumb corporate marketers to at least learn something about online communities, not least how they work, before thinking it’s big and clever to go about forum […]

White knight plays foul

Seems like Edward Lewis at SEOconsultants has decided that trying to be a “whiteknight” is boring.
After positioning the website on SEO ethics and best practices, he then vindictively include’s Phil Craven’s WebWorkshop” in a list of Traffic Power affiliated sites - on the grounds that Kevin and Phil both had an argument once.
They continue […]