DisclosurePolicy.org - well intentioned, or a scam?

Posted by stuart as pay per post

The people behind payperpost have launched DisclosurePolicy.org, in their words:

This site is designed to provide you with the tools you need to provide transparency to your readers about the content on your blog. By including a disclosure policy you are protecting the integrity of your blog and providing a service to the advertisers, sponsors and organizations that you support you. Disclosure encourages trust amongst your readers and promotes an ethical blogosphere

The idea is that you sign up, drop an auto-generated disclosure policy on a page somewhere in your blog, link to it using a fancy graphic that they provide, and all is good with the world.

The Disclosure Generation procedure is pretty straighforward, with the user just needing to answer a few questions, then it is suggested that you place a text link, or one of their buttons in the sidebar, or footer of your blog, linking to the disclosure statement, as you would with a privacy statement.

Now down to the nitty gritty. What purpose does this really serve? Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has (not surprisingly) gone in hard on this service, saying:

While that sounds like a fine idea, PayPerPost bloggers should also be disclosing the fact that they are being paid for their post prominently within the post, not on some separate page in their blog. Also PayPerPost subtly works with the language they use, particularly around the definition of “compensation” to suggest that all blogs have bias (and therefore PayPerPost isn’t really that bad).

And this is the crux of the matter, which has still not been addressed by Murphy et al. Disclosure in the post itself. All the people who have a problem with disclosure as it relates to payperpost want to see is a disclosure as it relates to the post itself. Ideally, the disclosure as part of the post headline, or the first paragraph, such as:

This post is sponsored by xyz.com, I have been compensated by company xyz.com to provide my views on their product.

Alternately, the three simple letters, PPP, at the beginning of the post headline would suffice.

Blog readers who are saying that they have a problem with paid posting are usually doing so because they don’t want to leave their feed-reader to visit a site with what they think is fresh, useful content, to find after reading the post that the content was bought.

Whilst this, in theory, is a positive move by its creators, they’re still not (purposely?) addressing the issue of disclosure on the micro level at which it needs addressing, choosing instead to focus on the macro level, where bloggers have their conscience appeased by a disclosure policy which virtually no-one will read, and even less will be aware exists.

How big is your home page, and does it work without images?

Posted by stuart as w3c validation, wireless internet

After battling for years the financial behemoth of a large multinational healthcare provider, I’ve finally given up on the idea of them providing wireless internet access at my dialysis unit. As I spend four hours four times a week there, I’d like to be able to use the time there productively, and getting online and writing in my many blogs is one use I can see for the time.

So I’ve finally bitten the bullet, and subscribed to the net access provided by my mobile phone carrier. I subscribe to Three here in Australia, a third generation mobile phone carrier, who does the whole voice/video/data thing.

So I can now plug my mobile phone into my laptop, log in, and get (slow - 384kbps) “broadband” data services as long as I’m in their coverage area.The problem is, that this service costs me AU$0.50 per megabyte down and up. Now this could get expensive, right? You betcha. I tested it out yesterday, and downloaded 1.5Mb in about ten minutes of fairly casual web surfing. Ouch! You can do the sums.

So (obviously) the first thing I do is turn off images in firefox. That’s a bit better, but some pages are still around the 50k mark. That’s a lot of code!

This got me thinking a bit about surfing the web without pictures. This blog (PMPR) looks ok, because it basically doesn’t have any images, but apparently it’s still 40-odd kilobytes. This means that every time I load the page on my mobile interenet connection, it’s gonna costm e two cents.

I think my next project is to go find a CSS only wordpress theme, under 20k, which validates (Thanks Raj for the email!)

Next - captcha images don’t work with images turned off. Which means logging in to a whole pile of websites I’m a member of which use captcha to verify log in information is a complete pain in the ass.

Adense for Audio?

Posted by stuart as google adsense, google, adsense

Rumours are doing the rounds at the moment that Google are about to announce an “AdSense for Audio” system. This might be interesting….

The rumours are that Google has a kick-ass audio recognition software which will allow it to place contextually served ads alongside podcasts, and other streaming media (Youtube, anyone?)Just think for a minute, if you will, where this technology might take us….a few possible uses might include:

1. A free VoIP service which interjects with ads contextually relevant to the conversation taking place every couple of minutes.
2. Advertising on public transport, which picks up on what people on the bus/tram/train are talking about, then serves ads based on the topic of the day
3. Advertising for talkback radio, based on what the callers are talking about

Anybody else got any idea what this sort of technology could be used for?

Could PayPal introduce their own currency?

Posted by stuart as paypal

I checked my Visa card statement this morning, and discovered what I thought was a suspicious transaction. It turned out that the transaction was fine, it was for the advertising on a blog I had purchased throught performancing partners.

What did strike me as odd was the amount (in Australian dollars) which had been withdrawn. It seemed to me that something was wrong, and when I did my sums, it turned out that the amount charged to my card was a couple of dollars more than my USD to AUD would have made the sum.

It’s all water under the bridge now, as there’s not much I can do about it, but it did get me thinking about the next logical step in the world of online purchases.

PayPal dollars.

Before you fall off your chair laughing, stop and think about it for a minute. If you do any kind of business online, you use paypal, probably on a daily basis. But there’s two things missing from the service:

1. The ability to do business with Goolge (AdSense and AdWords) using paypal
2. The complete pain in the ass which is currency conversions if you live outside North America, considering most transactions online are done in US dollars or Euros.

Consider the benefits of a universal currency, all incomings and outgoings are in a single currency. Sure, there’d need to be a conversion at some stage, if you’re outside the US and withdrawing money from your paypal account to your bank account, but if the paypal dollar was calculated against the US dollar, you’d know exactly what you were getting when you withdrew your money.

Do you see this as something we could be seeing in the future?

Headlines and first paragraphs - they’re not just for Search Engines.

Posted by stuart as blogging, copy writing

As bloggers, most of us have two main aims: traffic, and money. You can’t have the money without the traffic. (Although it’s certainly possible to have the traffic without the money, just ask me!)

Up until the last year or so, there were pretty much two ways to get traffic: regular visitors who like what you’ve written in the past, and search engines, which send people to your blog based on certain search terms.

In the past, we’d stuff our headlines and first paragraphs with our chosen keywords, in the hope that they’d rank well in the search engines, but now, we’re playing a whole new ball game to try to reach our intended audience.

In this web 2.0 world, all full of RSS feed readers, social bookmarking sites, and blog aggregators, we bloggers are presented with a wonderful new opportunity to put our content in front of potential readers. But we need to think about these readers in a completely new way.

The one thing that RSS readers, social bookmarking sites (digg, reddit etc) and blog aggregators (technorati etc) have in common is that you have a very short period of time to catch the readers attention. In most cases you get a headline, and the first paragraph to convince the potential visitor that your site is worth visiting.

So instead of stuffing our headline and first paragraph with our chosen keywords, we need to make those parts of our post as impactful and enticing as possible.

Striking the balance between getting our hands on these new readers, and making our posts relevant to the search engines in the longer term can be quite difficult, but with some practice and hard work, can be acheived.