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Buy blog comments, anyone?

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Buy Blog CommentsWhat can you say about buying and selling blog comments? Here’s a new online service to ponder upon.

BuyBlogComments.com is a startup that offers unautomated, human-made blog comments aimed for, as said on their site, “blackhatters who are looking for good quality backlinks”. (IMO, something’s seriously wrong about having the word “blackhat” and “good quality backlinks” in one sentence.)

This one-of-a-kind startup offers three packages, starting at $20 which gives you 100 blog comments, $100 for 500 comments, and $200 for 1000 comments. The company claims to have a group of trained professionals who do the commenting themselves, making sure that the comments are related to the blog post they comment on so that they “look completely like legit comments.”

While BuyBlogComments claims they’re NOT spam, Darren Rowse, the Problogger himself, thinks that the service is “sick” and “disturbing”. I think so, too. I’m very much aware that there are underground companies doing spam, but to go out in the open, offer your spamming service, and make it “look legit” is something else. I think it’s just odd to be selling a service aimed at blackhatters so that their sites would “rank better in the SERPs” when we all know well that black hat is the bane of every search engine’s existence.

Scott Karp: Journos should start blogging

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Journo at workScott Karp over at Publishing 2.0 have a post up, basically saying that every journalist should start a blog. And of course, there’s rebuttals to this stance, which also shows in the post and comments.

I’m not sure I entirely agree with Scott. While journalists have lots to gain from blogging, there’s also the fact that a lot of them suck without an editor bringing out the best.

There, I said it. Self-publising isn’t necessary a good thing, editors save us from crappy grammar and hollow stories in the print world. Editors also tend to miss out on lots of that, proving that it’s not a universal law that print is better than web. But at least it’s another set of eyes on the writer’s piece of work, and that ups the chance of getting rid of errors. I know a lot of journalists, and have edited some, that definitely can’t be left with a Publish button.

Not all journalists should blog, it might end up biting them in the neck. In other words, just the good ones should get into blogging – the rest would do us all a favor by shutting up.

New7Wonders becomes a global phenomenon

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Started in 2001 as inspired by Swiss adventurer Bernard Weber to “protect humankind’s heritage across the globe”, New7Wonders Web site is now part of the prestigious top 1 percent of the world’s most popular websites.

It is the first global election site poised to alter world history by choosing the New 7 Wonders of the world based on more than 45 million votes using modern communications technology like Internet and mobile phones. With only 46 days and 10 hours left as of this writing, official results of this exceptional campaign will be announced in Lisbon, Portugal and broadcasted globally on 07.07.07 (July 7, 2007).

“New7Wonders has one of the fastest-growing online communities. People from every country in the world have voted and continue to post photos and videos, submit slogans and spread the word. New7Wonders is a passionate movement that is making waves worldwide,” commented New7Wonders Founder and President, Bernard Weber.

New7Wonders has joined the ranks of other powerful Internet brands and organizations like Coke, Levis, UN, FIFA, Olympics, and BMW.

Is Digg facing their greatest challenge right now?

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Digg screenshotDigg is in trouble, although they might not even know it, which I think they do but that’s beside the point. They’re in trouble because the people who are making their service interesting, the content providers, are starting to get pissed off. There’s a lot of talk of censorship around Digg these days; here’s the most recent Techmeme thread, which originates from a post by Neil Patel over at Pronet Advertising.

What happens to a social content service when it appears too frequently around this kind of accusations? A smaller one would falter, perhaps even crash totally, but Digg is not a newcomer nor a baby in the business. They’re the giant in their area, Netscape, Reddit, StumpleUpon and whatnot are just up and coming projects but not real competitors. Or are they? Could Digg actually alienate their core crowd with this proposed behavior? True or not, just the fact that there’s a discussion about wether Digg is censoring or not, and how they’re doing it (Digg users burying “anti-Digg stuff” is old news) is hurting the site.

Core Digg users will probably stay, but others will leave, in search of other places to share their stories with the world wide web. Like Netscape, Reddit, StumbleUpon and whatnot…

How New Media Leveled The Playing Field For Presidential Candidate Mike Gravel

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It goes without argument that the Internet will play a big role in the 2008 presidential election, but I don’t think anyone expected that an Internet based grassroots campaign could effectively level the playing field for unknown candidates like former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel. But that’s exactly what is happening. Over the course of a few days, a candidate unbeknown to virtually everyone has generated buzz on the Internet like we’ve never seen before.

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As the graph above shows, Mike Gravel’s website now rivals that of the top tiered candidates in the race in reach, traffic and page views. What’s even more amazing is that this happened in just under a week’s time, and shows no signs of stopping anytime soon. Now of course this is only representative of Internet popularity, but with the new media on the Internet beginning to rival and even influencing old media mediums like television, this news is significant.

Update: As of May 3rd there has been a significant pitfall in traffic to Mike Gravel’s website, which would normally indicate that he’s lost all momentum, but in actuality the traffic is merely diverting to Students For Gravel, a new website that is devoted to building a grassroots campaign of students supporting Mike Gravel. Here’s an image of the graph as it appears today.