Intense Debate might be a winner

I was reading yesterday on Techcrunch about a new web 2.0 player: Intense Debate. After the review and a first look at the site I already got a “WOW” feeling. Basically they start from the initial ideea of CoComment and push it a litlle bit further.

Key features:

• Centralized comments management for all your blogs. I am curious how well are they going to handle comment spamming and how much it will take untill the first bot dedicated to them will appear
• Allows you threaded comments and voting, something like Digg comments. Because this lacks from the major platforms and cannot be added to platforms like Blogger this will appeal to a lot of users moving them to change
• Easy account creation for commenters that will allow them to spread like wild fire in the blogosphere
• Commenter profiles

Minuses or were they might fail:

• You cannot track a conversation unless is on a blog that’s Intense Debate enabled
• They’d better be prepared for high traffic because if they are down, blogs that are using them will be down.
• Due to the fact that is an AJAX based system, the comments that your visitors make will not be available to the search engines. I think that this is a major downside and if I’ll remove it this will be one of the first reasons.
• Also due to Ajaxa, commenting oncertain browsers (like Opera Mini) is not possible

All in one I like it and I like it a lot and that’s why I am willing to give it a try here and on my romanian language blog.

Posted in Web 2.0 | No Comments »

Buy Blog Comments

I was writing last time about a new form of intelligent blog comment spam commenting. This new form implies that instead of mass, automated, crappy comments on low value blogs you get some medium quality comments made by humans, with links that are going to stay for a while.

Jon Waraas  has just started a business out of this. The packages that he offers are:

• 100 comments: Get 100 targeted blog comments with BuyBlogComments.com for only $24.99.
• 500 comments: Get 500 targeted blog comments with BuyBlogComments.com for only $123.99.
• 1000 comments: Get 1000 targeted blog comments with BuyBlogComments.com for only $239.99

What those packages mean in fact? You get PERMANENT links at ~0.25$. Not for month, not for year. But as long as the target blog will last. That implies links that get old on pages that in time gain PR. And links not on non related pages but targeted to your niche. That’s quite a bargain.

Why is this better for blog owners and is different from common, crappy comment spamming? Well:

• The blog gets unique content
• Those comments are very likely to stimulate conversations. Remember those are human made and on subject

After all is a win/win situation, the only ones who’d might not like it being the Google engineers. But this form of comment spamming is pretty hard to catch, so they’ll have to deal with it

Posted in Blogging, SEO Tip, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »

A few points on blog commenting

1. “Intelligent” comment spam

The classic, automated, blog spamming seems like is living it’s last days. This is basically the result of two factors:

• Stronger and better spam filters (read Akismet)
• Better informed blog owners

Because of those two factors a new spamming industry is on the rise and I think that’s here to stay. Human comment spam. This consists of companies that deliver medium quality comments in niche blogs for those interested in getting quick links. Lately, with no activity on this blog, I got a lot of those. My choice? Let it be. They provide unique content for the posts and might encourage genuine readers to interact. In the future? No ideea

2. The nofollow scare

Latest Google PR update has hit pretty bad on some of the SEO industry ego’s. What really surprised me were the denial reactions and later the cowardness. Search Engine Journal, if my memory is good, was one of the first and only SEO sites that removed the nofollow tag from their comments. A pretty brave and intelligent step, not because they were against Google’s rules but because they figured out the way to get more people interacting. Today, to my total dissapointment, I saw that they have added it again. I have no ideea when that happened but I bet that this came after they were downgraded by Google. I just hope that DaveN won’t do the same under Google’s pressure.

Note: I have removed the nofollow tag from this blog a while ago

3. Comment spamming protection fee

If I said previously that automated blog commenting is dying, for the Mafia it might not be true. Just look at the following (non-) spam comment I got:

hello , my name is Richard and I know you get a lot of spammy comments ,
I can help you with this problem . I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50% .In return Id like to ask you to put a link to my site on the index page of your site. The link will be small and your visitors will hardly notice it , its just done for higher rankings in search engines. Contact me icq 454528835 or write me tedirectory(at)yahoo.com , i will give you my site url and you will give me yours if you are interested. thank you

This was beyond hilarious and this dickhead qualifies for sure for the Idiot of the Year Award.

P.S. It seems like the “Mafia” is pretty busy, a simple search for the idiot’d ICQ number returning 10.900 results. Or for the black hats 10.900 blogs with comment moderation turned off

Posted in Blogging | 3 Comments »

Autumn Cleanup

Well, this blog has been ignored by me lately and I’ve decided to change this. The roadmap is as follows:

• Change theme - done
• Upgrade to the latest WP version
• Install the needed plugins
• and of course START POSTING again

Posted in General | No Comments »