A few years back MicroSoft used to use LookSmart to power their search database. This meant that LookSmart listed sites would be listed near the top of the MSN search results. Simply write yourself a good relevant title, submit to LookSmart, and pay per click for all the MSN traffic you can eat.

But, there was an even better way for this then nearly bankrupt kid to get MSN traffic. For free. LookSmart used Zeal as a backup directory to feed noncommercial content into the LookSmart database. It also allowed you to list pages instead of sites.

For any topic you wanted to collect feedback about you could:

• do a bit of research
• write a page
• edit your way into the search results for hyper competitve single word queries

I was a fairly depressed person for a number of years (and still sometimes act like a jerk or screw myself over without reason). My behavior got me interested in depression and anti depressant drugs.

I created pages about most of the major anti depressant drugs and then people started emailing me with comments thanking me for the small bits of information I had on that site. I then started getting so much email that it was overwhelming, so I decided to allow people to leave feedback via a blog, and I created Depression Blog, which is essentially a forum without deeply specific thread titles. Each thread is “name of drug” feedback.

The benefit of a blog over a forum are:

• does not require a login
• you can customize the fields to make it hard for automated bots to spam
• since most people do not think of it as a forum they are more likely to state exactly what they want to in a single informative post
• after a few people post the rest will likely follow suit with their style

For the longest time I did not put ads on the site because I wanted to keep it pure. Recently I put ads on it, and it looks like the site will probably generate around $500 a month.

I am collecting feedback about a topic that is typically heavily marketed to be pro drug manufacturer, and the feedback shows it is not always rosey. Many of the side effects people mentioned were similar to ones I noticed from when I used to dabble in hard core drugs. Some of those side effects are not listed on the lables.

All in all, that site:

• gives depressed people an outlet where they can express themselves
• lets them realize not everything is their fault, showing them that others are dealing with the same things
• see they are not alone in their struggles, and that the drugs effect different people in a wide range of ways

Add to the above that

• the site is almost entirely self generating
• it creates a nearly livable income with minimal effort or maintenance
• that profit can also be used to help buy further distribution for the site

Now MSN no longer uses LookSmart, but MSN search is still easy to manipulate and there are other networks that provide free and fast feedback loops which can be used to help generate self generating sites and business models.

Some people may argue that my creating of Depression Blog is me profiting off of the suffering of others and that the site is dishonest. I say it gives them an outlet and collects information that probably would have never been collected. It may also help people learn to look deeper within to solve some of their problems (and I still need to do a bit of that too).

Automated sites can have a social conscience, and are far better for the web than the cut and paste news story blog business model is.

Off the start they can take a bit of time to set up, but many of those types of sites can run on autopilot after about a month or two. If you create 20 sites generating $20 a day you are making 6 figures a year without the hassle of having a boss or customers.

The initial vision of the web was a version that allowed anyone to edit it. An open form box where people can express themselves about a topic relevant to their life and mind helps collect a broad base of human experience that may have never otherwise been gathered.

Anti-blogging, obviously.

You know that is sad. A person who couldn’t cut it being a blogger. Anti blog. Not yummy. 🙁

Podcasts are subscription audio recordings. You can get feeds of your favorite audio recordings and listen to them whenever you like. Odeo, founded by Evan Williams, was probably the #1 player in the fledgeling podcast market. Yahoo! just announced they are launching podcast search:

Hoping to tune into the latest craze in digital media, Yahoo Inc. is introducing tools for finding, organizing and rating “podcasts” — the audio programs designed to be played on Apple Inc.’s iPod and many other portable music players.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company, which operates the world’s most visited Web site, plans to begin testing the new service Monday.

Search is rapidly evolving into a multimedia game. Check out Yahoo!’s podcast search at podcasts.yahoo.com

David Naylor posts about how to prevent Google’s newish duplicate content filter issues from hurting WordPress blogs:

first what you need to do is get rid of those Urls that look like this:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/?p=16 and replace them with
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/up-up-up-up-up/ .. but Matt.. what you must do is have a robots.txt .. in that robots. txt file add this little line in ..

User-agent: *
Disallow: /?p

If you already have a bunch of links into the ?p pages then you would probably need to do other things as well, but if your blog is fairly new it is fairly straightforward and a good call to block search engines from accessing the ?p pages.

Some related threads about Google Washing:

• Threadwatch
• WebmasterWorld
• Dark SEO Team (responsible for Google Washing Matt Cutts blog)

People follow links. Search engines also act as users, and largely determine document quality scores based on linkage data. Based on the direct and indirect value links are a great proxy for value.

After the AOL purchase of Weblogs, Inc., Tristan Louis quickly created a chart of blog value based on the number of sources.

Based on a selling price of $25 to $40 million the value of a source linking to your site is anywhere from $564.64 to $903.42.

The average link is not worth that much. The biggest things that the study failed to account for are:

• The value of links widely ranges. I have bought links for $3, and have also paid thousands for a link.
• The average link quality of the Weblogs, Inc. network is higher than the average link quality of the average blog.
• The reason their average link quality is higher is that Jason Calacanis has built significant linkage data through PR efforts with traditional media.
• If you pulled those media links out of the equasion I bet the Weblogs, Inc. network would be lucky to get more than half their current traffic volume.
• I do not think Technoroti tracks most traditional media websites.

Tristan then questions:

Should we now assume that traditional media companies are willing to pay between $500 and $1000 per site that links into a blog?

As mentioned above, reducing links down to average and then just looking at Technorati sources leaves much to be desired.

Jason Calacanis was quick to discount the value of the linkage data in the deal. Jason also frequently talks about how Weblogs, Inc. spends no money on marketing. If you are not spending money on marketing then your value comes from the attention you get other ways, and most of that is driven through the link popularity.

You could get a more accurate view of their link popularity by looking through Yahoo! linkage data, but it would take a while to filter through that many sites.

• [linkdomain:www.engadget.com] = 1,810,000
• You can view through the linkage data and filter out sites, but when they have around 100 sites in their network that gets to be a good bit of effort.
• If you wanted to filter out their cross linking the best way would be to filter out the network links on one of the smaller channels that is only a few months old. Then you know you can subtract that much link popularity from each site as being due to cross network linkage data.

Profitablility, attention, and influence are the real measure of a blog’s value, but attention & influence are hard to measure.

The real reason I mentioned this link = value measurement is that Tristen threw out something debatable that many people are absolutely going to love to link at. Wow, my blog is worth X is probably going to appear on hundreds of blogs.

Some amazingly well known bloggers have already syndicated the idea:

• Tim Bray
• Jeremy Zawodny

Well, sometimes I forget this, but an outbound link in every post keeps the link love alive. When you blog, whatever credibility and authority you have is granted by others. The best & cheapest way to build up your credibility and authority is to regularly link out to good stuff.

Regular webmasters, who frequently exchange links in an effort to boost their search authority scores, are told that when in doubt it is best not to link. Blogging is the other way round. It is best to be known as the gal or guy who is all about gratuitous linking.

Some small changes in your outbound linking strategies on a post by post basis may present opportunities for you to make more money, but I tend to think the money does a good job taking care of itself if your blog is interesting.

Linking out is a form of free marketing. Linking to useful resources means:

• you raise your credibility in the eyes of viewers
• you make your site easier to link to, as the people you link at may want to link back, and nobody wants to read a dead end site

Some of the people you link at will never link back, and it is best if it is that way. When people are new to the web (at least the commercial bits of it) some people feel they need paid in one way or another for anything they do for others. When you are new and you reference quality stuff it helps associate you with the quality sites. That in itself is a form of pay

If your site contents are found interesting by a large number of people then the overflowing cup theory works well. You can’t give too much away on the web, especially on the well socially connected pieces.

There is little reason to worry about what machines think of your site. If humans like it you will do well. Add links whenever it makes sense and, like karma, the link love comes back around. Regularly linking out improves your linkability 🙂

Jeremy Zawodny does not like the tools used to search the blogosphere.

The problems he is running into are based on:

• Writing original posts takes so much more time than just copying other’s information, so the signal to noise ratio is just plain shit
• there are limits to the social capacity of the human brain
• the software is designed to help you find, not filter
• even if the software was better at filtering inevitably the recall would plumit
• sometimes even we don’t know what we are going to be interested in until we see it. How can software predict that without filtering out some of the good stuff?
• The best blogs are good not just because how they state their opinions, but also because they are willing to do the hard work to find that extra bit of information. If information were easier to sort through then we would just find ways to produce & consume more information.

What is the solution? I have always found that taking effort to look through areas not well covered and trust others to catch most the main stuff works well. I also think sometimes you can find your way into other conversations if you give other people excuses to find their way to you. There is no better way to get a scoop than to create the news, story, or idea yourself.

There also seems to be a huge push throughout blogworld to be the first guy with a story. Sometimes this is going to end up being effort wasted, as only one person can be the first person with each story. It is a far more efficient use of time for most people to spend a bit less time flipping through their feeds over and over and over again and trust other people to bubble up important issues.

If the issues do not bubble up then most of the time they probably are not that important. It is also hard to find new information reading the exact same things everyone else does, and most blog authority tools are going to only tell you what others already think is important.

Each day content generation and remixing is getting more advanced. In fact, on some of my other blogs I even noticed automated comments having an ongoing conversation.

When humans think another human created machine generated content, it is said that the machine passed the Turing test, as described in the Wikipedia:

The Turing test is a proposal for a test of a machine’s capability to perform human-like conversation. Described by Alan Turing in the 1950 paper “Computing machinery and intelligence”, it proceeds as follows: a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with two other parties, one a human and the other a machine; if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine is said to pass the test. It is assumed that both the human and the machine try to appear human. In order to keep the test setting simple and universal (to explicitly test the linguistic capability of some machine), the conversation is usually limited to a text-only channel such as a teletype machine as Turing suggested or, more recently, IRC.

Mikkel deMib Svendsen, a well known SEO, recently mentioned on Threadwatch:

The Turing test have been passed many times in real life allready. I’ve personally been involved in a few things that did so (not stuff I programmed though :))

What makes it even easier when it comes to blogging is the fact that a lot of the “real” blogs are of such a poor (writing) quality. All your program has to do is make the output just a little bit better than that.

Why be so obsessed with who and how a piece of text is written? If my computer program can produce better pages than an average human then whats the problem? What is so bad about machine generated content? Some of my favrite sites are machine generated (search engines, news portals etc).

I think this issue is going to hit a bunch of bloggers harder than they realize. As the space gets increasingly polluted with unoriginal thought and remixed content some of the things people are openly advocating today will become marginally profitable within a few years.

Some people argue that when they do a snip and quote and then post it to their blog that they are sending more traffic to the end destination, but if there is no original thought going into the posting process there is probably no value add.

I have had a few friends who do not understand this, but if all you are doing is snip and paste then you time would be better spent learning how to program an automated agent to do that for you. I do not think it is any more honest to do it manually than let a machine do it.

Make no mistake, even award winning bloggers are getting fooled by fake blogs:

Today I noticed someone actually subscribed to one of my spam marketing drivel blogs. After following his profile I noticed he’s subscribed to some other legitimate non-spam blogs in the field as well. Looking deeper at his feeds, I found out he’s a blogger as well. While he’s not an A-List blogger, he did win a best blogger in category award from a legitimate organization this year. His feed also has close to 100 bloglines subscribers. Should I be flattered or worried that a real person has subscribed to my fake blog?

When most fake blogs are able to past the Turing test how will that effect who you are willing to link at? How will that effect how & what you post?

Some of my friends have business models where replying to comments on their real blogs is viewed as a waste of resources. I am betting that philosophy changes on many of those sites within the next 6 months.

A while ago a prospective search engine optimization client wanted to sell a miniature motion video type service. We were both unsure of a market purpose for it, or how we could market it on a reasonable budget. I knew at first glance that SEO was not the answer though.

I decided the best solution would be to launch a low end free version of the product and market it at bloggers. Let them spread it by making it free. It only took me a few minutes to come up with the initial marketing plan and a name for the service, Blog Flix.

I sent the site owner to my designer, who created a kick ass design for under $2,000, integrating MovableType and vBulletin into an awesome mesh up integrated login. The service quickly started getting the right kinds of links, getting mentions on sites like Smart Mobs.

Had he had a bit more funding, time, and attention to devote to the project I think it would have created the mini flash movie on site equivalent of Flickr. After I named the site and came up with the concept the site owner never contacted me again though. 🙁

One area where we really messed up that launch was the content of the example videos. They showed scenic moutains in New Zealand. What would have made the product amazing would have been good and fun examples of what to do with it. If I were still involved with that project I would have made those videos funny. Perhaps even having me reenacting some of the dumb things I did as a kid.

Emotion is the key to viral marketing. The mountains were pretty, but the pictures were not high definition. The real amazing thing with BlogFlix is how it could have sequenced human emotions.

Sadly, the domain is already expired and owned my a pay per click pimp.

Not is all lost though. I realized that I saved the BlogFlix guy many thousands of dollars he may have spent on marketing his site some other way. I also realize that if he put a bit more work in the follow through he would have a powerful position in the web right now.

Now blogs are not some magical thing that can make up for a low quality product or lack of business model, but they are a way to get quick and honest feedback to help you create a product that people would:

• like;
• use; and
• want to market for you for free

Well I don’t know much about Sphere, but Om Malik likes it.

They are still in stealth mode beta, but you can sign up for email news about when they launch here.

Most blogs are splogs (spam logs), so it is going to be interesting seeing how they deal with the spam, and how bloggers respond. Most blog search thusfar is, in a word, garbage.