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Tuesday, July 25, 2006

This is NOT the Way to Make Friends

I was reading a great Wall Street Journal article this morning about how NBC is promising to pay one of its advertisers, Toyota, based on the amount of information retained by viewers. Sort of a broadcast media version of Adsense. You only get payed if people noticed your ad.

The WSJ is now listing blogs that link to their stories. There are 17 blogs linked to this story, a huge number for a WSJ article. I looked through their list and visited them. Unless I'm a total idiot, which is very possible, the links are all just spam from a single blog group. I couldn't find references to the article on the blogs listed.

This really ticks me off. I like hits and links. I work very hard for them. When I link to a WSJ or WaPo article, I like the fact that my blog gets listed with the article. My WaPo commentaries typically generate about 50 hits. The more blogs linking to an article, the fewer hits any one blogger will get. 17 is a lot. I won't get a darn thing out of this one.

That's OK if there are 17 bloggers actually writing about the topic. I was really interested in what they had to say about the article. When I found nothing at all, it was infuriating. Go check it out and see what you find. It looks like someone running their blog host threw the link up there and associated it with all their blogs. Furthermore, the links go to the root page of their blogs, not to individual posts by the bloggers. That's pretty incriminating.

The lion's share of them come from a blog group called "Visual Editors." They all seem to work in the MSM. Many of them work in advertising. You like advertising? Here's some for you. This sucks.

Those links didn't get there by accident.

Not funny, guys. Not funny at all.

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