Rojo

Oh my.

Oh my oh my oh my. I don’t even know where to begin, so I’ll just say it outloud.

BusinessWeek are stupid!

Not the journalists or editors working there though, but the knucklehead that thought it was a good idea to tell users not to link to pages on the site, and put it in a user agreement (the only link to BusinessWeek you’ll find in this piece) at that, and then follow it up by telling you not to link should you do it, well, s/he’s stupid.

Web 2.0, oh yes.

I thought old media (this is ancient media really) had gotten a bit further than that, and an overall pretty good site/mag like BusinessWeek should be getting it, right? Well, obviously they’re not, as SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill found out, after wanting to link to an interview with him from his blog. My, my, very smooth.

What happens next? Well, Gawker picked it up, along with CNET’s News Blog, and I’m guessing this’ll make even more rings on the water.

So stupid. Really, it is stupid. Why would you say no to free traffic? Traffic brings ad dollars! Making it hard for bloggers and well-meaning sites like this makes them pissed up, and you end up on The Blog Herald with a cranky editor whining about your policies!

What do you think? How stupid is this?

I’m reading that Google is closing Hello, which apparently was (and is, as I’m writing this), a photo sharing service that came with Picasa. I guess they feel it doesn’t fill a purpose anymore.

This from Hello.com:

We originally embarked on a mission to make photo sharing easier and more fun with Hello. We plan to keep carrying that torch in new projects to come.

We hope that you continue to enjoy the other sharing products Google offers including Picasa, Picasa Web Albums and Google Talk.

More over at Google Blogoscoped, with some links to the old version. Matthew Ingram says that Hello was a really cool app, in which case it’s a shame it closes.

On May 15, Google can begin doing something really cool with hello.com, a truly premium domain name. Too bad for the users of the defunct service though.

Sometimes our thoughts crystallize not through direct learning but through looking, comparing and contrasting. Such a moment happened for me after returning from Chicago and checking through Twitter and my emails. I saw a division between the openness, positivity, helpfulness, encouragement, passion of social media, with one or two individuals who, frankly, don’t want to get it.

I was jabbed with a tweet yesterday “all this ‘feelings’ stuff and those that gravitate to it are for those that cannot compete”. Oh dear, how sad. How many ways can one sentence be wrong? Now, of course, this particular tweet account is all about getting a rise out of people, so best not to give too much attention to it. Let’s instead look at the top of human achievement, according to Maslow:

Read through what Maslow said we as humans need and, you know, I think feelings do matter. It’s very much not just about competing for dollars. I do ok financially, I pay my bills, have nice vacations, buy boys toys, but if that’s all it was about I would still be in my corporate commuting day job.

Self-esteem, confidence, respect, morality, creativity. Sounds right to me.

As Terry Starbucker (via the New Radicals) says:

“Wake up kids. We’ve got the dreamers disease”

That’s what I like about blogs and bloggers. We achieve without climbing over each other, we cooperate, we assist, we share. The old guard can keep their cut throat business, I’m sticking to my touchy feely social media stuff because I like it :)

I recently interviewed Colleen Coplick about taking over Buzz Networker, and there I said that an interview with her focusing on PR was due on BloggerTalks. Well, it is up now, and Colleen shares her views on paid reviews, PR agencies sending out samples, getting famous in the social sphere, how to write a great press release, and more.

Check it out, over at BloggerTalks!

MyBlogLog have added some new stuff, since the obviously get that we’re not monogamous when it comes to online apps and social networks.

Specifically, whenever you:

• post a question to Yahoo Answers
• share an item on Google Reader
• post a video on Seesmic

MyBlogLog will post those events and make them part of your New with Me page.

All you need to do is to share your service ID for these services respectively. Good stuff.

It looks as Blog*spot users will soon be able to insert a ratings system in their Blogger blogs which will allow readers to rate an individual post from one star to five.

Unfortunately it seems as if they launched the feature prematurely, and the Google team has currently disabled the feature–at least for now.

(Blogger Status) Some users may be seeing star ratings on their posts without having opted in to this new feature. This is an experimental feature that was accidentally enabled on some users’ blogs. We’re currently working to remove star ratings on all affected blogs. In the future, you’ll be able to choose to opt-in to this feature; it won’t appear automatically.

Update: The Star Rating feature has been disabled for the moment.

Previously the only way Blogger users could insert star ratings (or something similar) was through OutBrain and Spotback, the former who previously raised $5 million in a financing round.

There is no word on whether a user will have to register for a Google account in order to rate, although if so, they will hopefully add OpenID users to the mix (since Blogger is an official provider now).

Celeb gossip blogger Perez Hilton, aka Mario Lavendeira, is set to launch his own line of clothing, to be sold exclusively in the Hot Topic chain of stores, as well as online.

“2008 is all about expanding the Perez Brand,” the blogger explained. “I talk about clothes all the time on my website. I have a good eye for what’s hot and what’s not.”

Perez, who says his celebrity website, Perezhilton.com, is more popular than MySpace among women aged 18-25, said he can’t wait to share his new line with fans.

The line will debut on June 6, includes T-shirts, hoodies, flip flops, and other extremely necessary stuff every Perez fan should own.

Let’s wrap this little piece of blogger branding news up with another nice quote from the announcement post:

“It seems natural to make products that my readers will love and hopefully some guys will rock it too,” he said. “Some people might even call me a perfectionist, well that person would be me! I’m very passionate about my brand. I have extremely high standards and I like to get my hands dirty!”

Yeah…

Hat tip!

We do not remember days; we remember moments.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Successful and Outstanding Bloggers Conference (SOBCon) in Chicago last weekend was a collection of moments I will remember for a long time.

Throughout the weekend, people kept asking what was different about this conference from all the other conferences they go to. It was clear it was different, and different from the first moment. Why?

Was it because it was a group of bloggers? I’ve been to blog events and while that was part of the reason, it wasn’t the whole reason.

After the first pre-conference party, Joanna Young of Confident Writing made an attempt to explain it. She said that so many business conferences are filled with attendees that arrive with an agenda. It’s all about them and what they can get. It’s all about grasping the opportunities. Admitting she hadn’t been prepared for the openness, she struggled to make sense of it. I told her that there is something special about social bloggers. They don’t arrive to such events ready to grasp and grab. They arrive with open hands, waiting for whatever drops in.

As fans of Liz Strauss, the leading expert in the art of the blog conversation and online community building and producer of SOBCon, the people within the room in Chicago read each others blogs. Even if they didn’t, they had some notion of the type of blogger they were, and cut to the chase. Unlike other conferences, conversations didn’t start with “How do you do. Nice to meet you. What do you do?” There was no need to explain what blogging is or why it’s easy to get so passionate about it. We knew all that. We got right to the point.

“Tell me about you.”

It wasn’t about me. It wasn’t about preconceptions or assumptions. These people were here for the connections, not the surface stuff. As showcased in the post-conference reactions, there was a level of honesty and sincerity that was extraordinary. People didn’t want to play the typical social games. They wanted to get right to the heart of the issues. No holds barred.

In her presentation, Liz Strauss made these important points that might help define the difference:

Customers: Is your traffic a reader or a customer?

Don’t sell your customers something they don’t need or what you think they need. Sell them what they want.

Make it about them.

How to be irresistible. They are all about Frosted Mini Wheats. The fiber appeals to the adult in me. The sugar appeals to the kid in me. If I don’t want breakfast, you need to tell me something to make me want them. Tell me they make a good snack or that they are good for me.

Head, heart, and meaning. Make the connection.

Make it about them. Sound familiar? For these bloggers, it wasn’t about them. Having learned that the strength in a successful blog is making the blog about the readers and giving them what they want, the conference attendees understood how to connect in person, too. Make it about them, not you. When you do, you’re more interesting, and they want to know you better. You make them want to come to you.

A lot of business connections were made this past weekend. And a lot more will develop over the next year or two. These connections will be stronger as the courtship dance was over before they ever met.

I’ve been to a lot of blog conferences and events, but there is something special about SOBCon. Maybe you and the attendees can explain it better, but I think Wendy Piersall of Spark Plugging summed it up very nicely:

SOBCon is like walking into a room of your best friends you have yet to meet.

We weren’t there for the day. We were there for the moments. And we got them.

Pownce, the microblogging service you know, have upgraded itself to a filesharing service. They’ve done this by letting you share 100 MB files with the public, should you want to. Previously, the cap was 10 MB, and 100 MB was for pro users only, so I wonder what they’ll do to compensate that feature that some people (me included) paid for? Edit: It’s now 250 MB for pro users.

Anyway, this means that you’ve got yet another way to share files with friends. Might this be another dump for RAR:d porn and overall crappiness for people not wanting to spend money on a VIP account on Rapidshare? I hope not.

This is great news for Twitter users (like me and The Blog Herald)! Twitter have been marking accounts as spam, but the practice have been a bit weird to say the least:

Before today, Twitter would mark accounts as “spam”, but not tell the owners of the accounts they marked them as spam. Those owners of the accounts could follow others, but no one was able to follow them, and there was no way for the owners of those accounts to know they had been blacklisted.

The excellent Jesse Stay broke the story (also on TechCrunch and Techmeme), and found the confirmation that spam accounts would be suspended on the Twitter Dev mailing list.

Luckily, Twitter won’t just suspend spammer account to the left and right, they’ll contact them first to give them a chance to state their case, which is a good thing.

Jesse also points to a new feature in the API, the “since” variable, something that a lot of stand-alone applications and services will find useful, I believe:

Now, with the “since” variable, I can keep a tally of when I last checked your following/follower ratio and only do a request on those friends that have followed you since the last check. I can now go from checking those you follow on a daily basis, to checking almost every minute!

For more in-depth coverage, check out Jesse’s post.