Blogs.com place to promote “well known” bloggers is interesting to me only as a variation of the same American herd mentality signaled by the like of People Magazine.

In the context of the site the featured writers are famous as bloggers. These are the so-called A-List bloggers who certainly read each other. That bloggers with large audiences point to one another does breed a sort of fame.

It is a thin and dubious fame. They guy who invented the Mosiac browser was a one hit wonder. That former minor TV actors acquire celebrity status in the land of blogs that doesn’t translate elsewhere indicates the quality of that status.

To me collecting these people with little in common reinforces the classic time wasting web surfing we usually try to outgrow.

Like most people I barely have enough time to keep up with the carefully selected material collected by my reader.

Not that I necessarily think Blogs.com will fail. Or that it is a bad thing. People like to be told what to read. They enjoy idling away the hours. And, if it makes them happy, who would I be to criticize.

So I visited Digital Point’s forum devoted to buying and selling content.

Clearly English is for most of the authors and vendors their second language. The - my apologies - Engrish, small ineptitudes, incorrect spellings, painful grammar: these qualities make you doubt the value of what is being sold. The ordinary English words that are repeatedly misspelled makes for easily spotted duplicate content.

If you want to sell words and software to English speaking webmasters you might seriously consider developing a surer mastery of the English language.

I have a several domains that I registered through Yahoo for $1.99. The past two days I’ve been trying to move some of the domains to GoDaddy.

I start the process. Nothing happens. No progress. No error message. No hint or clue.

I’m reluctant to whine for help because I have a sneaking suspicion that it is my fault. That I’ve made a mistake akin to not realizing you forgot to plug a device in until you’ve called a technician for help.

Vanity.

10 tips for creating an effective banner ad campaign

This morning brings an email from them:

I remind you, that your RSS feed has been registered in -scraper site- database. -scraper site- is based on website RSS feeds.

Hourly our RSS parser reading new link from each registered RSS feed and publish it on our website. New links ranking system and search ranking system based on rank of the website in top referrers.

In total -scraper site- database contains 127 your links.

From the moment of your RSS feed registration, -scraper site- has sent to you 1206 hits.

If you want to take part in traffic trade, you should publish reciprocal link to -scraper site-.com and start to send visitors to us.

More you’ll send visitors to us, higher getting up your links in the list and you’ll get more traffic.

If you will not publish link to -scraper site-.com in 3 days, we’ll consider that you refusing from traffic trade with us and we’ll delete all your links from our database.

My logs don’t show so much as a single referral from them.

That registered bit reminds me of those envelopes that hope to fool you into thinking they are from the government.

Pretty ballsy.

Though one character promising the usual phallic magic has come up with yet another new twist: homilies.

Three or four sentences of generic pieties that might apply to just about any damn thing. They might appear on a Hallmark card from a grandmother with poor taste.

Might actually get approved by a naïve Blogger who doesn’t bother to look at the URL accompanying the comment.

It seems almost forever since I had luck with AdSense. Admittedly that is partly because I don’t have enough pages running AdSense anymore. I’m not clever enough to auto-generate pages. And only have so much time for creating pages.

I do have one site that does fine with AdBrite. But only one. Until Google slapped one of my sites down I had decent luck with SearchFeed but they don’t really have enough inventory, nor did Kanoodle for the sites that I tried it on.

As Google has wised up my luck with datafeed sites has declined considerably. I guess what I need to get a handle on may be to mix datafeeds with “content.” Generally one affiliate click beats an AdSense click by far.

I need better time management, better focus and to somehow gain a clearer insight into how things work.

Don’t far too many of us.

“Greetings http://www. … .com/. You have a very interesting blog, as I can see you have been really working on it. Regarding your work I can make you an offer. Our writers agree to write some UNIQUE posts for your site every week, in your turn you will place the link of my site on your home page. If you are interested, and you have some questions, look please at my new blog http://www. … .com/, posts on your site will be like this. Reply me please with your answer regarding my offer. Best regards.”

I went to the solicitor’s site.

The unique “content” was mostly two paragraphs posts that almost anybody could write in their sleep. The example posts were along the lines of :

It is nice to know that people are saying nice things about you. If you feel it would be nice to read more nice things about yourself why don’t you try writing nice things about others. They’ll think it nice to read your nice words.

Not sure how to say nice things? Just think of what nice things have happened to you, nice things people have said to you and done for you. Then you’ll be in a nice mood and feel like saying nice things about the nice people.

Well, I guess it would be nice for you to build up some backlinks. But it would be even nicer if your unique “content” were nicer than what I can download off the myriad of free articles sites.

I do wonder how many people will go for this.

AdSense has launched a new beta test called Vertical Images, where an image would take the place of an ad within an AdSense ad unit. These images - which are generic, and not company-specific - act similar to an ad link unit, linking to a page related to the ads and image that appeared in the ad unit.

New AdSense “Vertical Images” within ad units

New age web design:

Believers in vaastu shastra say the Indian science, which seeks to create harmony between nature’s five elements – earth, fire, water, air and space – man and objects, can be directly applied to the web, just as it is to home design.

“Just as the world comprises of the five basic elements, each website has five elements and these need to be in balance with one another,” says Dr Smita Narang, author of Web Vaastu, a new book that marries vaastu laws with the Internet.

The book has proved popular with businesses.

Recently I decided to add a few sites to some almost randomly selected directories.

My only criteria were quick and easy entry and relevant categories (with the latter proving the tougher of the two).

I couldn’t help but smile at the serious policies statements of these sometimes threadbare directories. Particularly: no MFA sites.

Clearly many of these general web directories were made for AdSense. Sure they are hoping some webmasters will pay for featured listings. But some are only charging a dollar. And they have AdSense code plastered all over their pages.

In this case the submitter is their content writer. By supplying site descriptions they are giving MediaBot words to read so that Google will display more than the PSAs that many of them were showing.

Excepting the directory creators who know what they are doing - e.g., pursuing tight niches - I wonder two years from now how many of these sites will have become parked domains.

My most recent one (admittedly that I’m aware of) was a beaut.

Now I wondered why traffic to a site suddenly spiked. Seemed to be lots of traffic from Google all of a sudden. I didn’t wonder deeply: Google is as capricious a mistress as Wanda in Venus in Furs.

Nor did I notice that my 404s had similarly spiked.

Looking at the .htaccess on another site I saw that I’d really screwed up a redirect last week when I moved an old section of one site on to a domain of its own.

I’d pointed to the wrong domain. While they are similar in theme they don’t have the same pages, hence the 404s.

All I did was lose useful traffic and annoy a number of web surfers (who should be spared that at least until they get to the page they wanted to see).

This is among the more boneheaded mistakes I’ve made as a webmaster.

A couple of years ago I - who am nobody - made a mention in an old weblog that I was buying a new computer and after thinking about it decided to stick with Windows though I’d toyed with the thought of a Mac.

There was a deluge of hateful responses. One guy literally told me that I’d been offered the keys to paradise but had refused them.

So it was amusing to read Dvorak write about baiting Mac users as a publicity stunt. Linkbaiting.

I’ve come to the conclusion that after my last publicity stunt, I must be a sadist—and I probably, at this point, need counseling. I do have seriously mixed feelings about tormenting people, especially masochistic Mac nuts, who I seem to target every so often, much like dropping a cherry bomb down an ant hole and running for cover.

Dvorak Reveals Old Formula, Panic Ensues

So you go to your Google Sitemaps page and it says your site hasn’t been crawled in a week.

You look at your site’s log and see Googlebot has been there gobbling away.

Five days later your Sitemaps page says Google had been indexing your pages even as the sitemap stats were saying it hadn’t been there in days.

Seems that the Sitemaps data is actually updated well after some crawls. So if it looks as if Google is ignoring you: just be patient.