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Alaskan Politician Outs Anonymous Blogger

There are lots of politicians out there who aren’t thrilled with the anonymous free speech the Internet offers. If they don’t know the blogger’s name, they don’t know who to be mad at. One Alaskan political blogger got so under a representative’s skin the representative spent months trying to find and disclose her identity.

You know, because apparently there’s nothing else to do in the Alaskan legislature at the moment.

Alaskan state representative Mike Doogan apparently thought there was some justice in outing a gadfly citizen blogger, but all he really accomplished was making himself look like an incredibly abusive jerk.

The author of The Mudflats blog had a surprise hit on her hands in the wake of John McCain’s selection of Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. Jeanne, as she is now known thanks to Doogan, became so popular among readers and reporters feverish for information, she had to outsource the creation of a discussion forum to volunteer moderators.

Once the national election passed, Jeanne posted a lengthy criticism of Doogan and his lack of email etiquette. According to her, he was so upset about her criticism it wasn’t long before she heard that Doogan was on a mission to out her. In the local paper, Doogan criticized anonymous bloggers because of their inherent lack of accountability—that would be accountability for their First Amendment guaranteed right to an opinion.

Last Thursday, Jeanne received an email from Doogan addressing her by her first name (previously no name appeared on the blog) saying he knew who she was and he was soon to tell all of his constituents about it. Sure enough, he exposed her in his legislative newsletter:

Anonymous Blogger Anonymous No More

The identity of the person who writes the liberal Democratic Mudflats blog has been secret since the blog began, protected by the Anchorage Daily News, among others. My own theory about the public process is you can say what you want, as long as you are willing to stand behind it using your real name. So I was interested to learn that the woman who writes the blog is Anchorage resident Jeanne _____.*

Best wishes,
 

Doogan was apparently very proud of himself for his important investigative work of outing an Anchorage resident with an opinion, a member of his own party, to his constituents, who now likely are afraid to say anything to anybody. Nice work, Doogan. You’re now the frontrunner for the Insufferable Jerk Award of 2009. It’s early yet, though, and as more news comes out of AIG then things could change. Either way, you’re a loser, Mr. Doogan.
 
Be sure to read all of Jeanne’s post. She explains the various reasons a blogger might choose to be anonymous, the different more important issues facing Alaska at the moment (an erupting volcano comes to mind), and how Benjamin Franklin might be an anonymous blogger if alive today.   
 

 

Majority Use Social Media Marketing, Still Have Questions

Author and WebProNews Blog Partner Michael Stelzner, has put together an interesting report based on a survey of 900 marketers. The report looks at the state of social media marketing. Interesting stats from the report include:

- 88% indicated they were employing social media for marketing purposes

- 72% have only been using social media marketing for a few months

- 64% of marketers are using social media for 5 hours or more each week

- 39% are using it for 10 hours a week

- 81% say the number-one benefit is generating exposure, followed by increasing traffic and building new business relationships

- Over half saw a rise in search engine rankings

- Out of social media tools marketers most wanted to learn about, social bookmarking sites ranked highest followed by Twitter.

Marketers and business owners still have a lot of questions about social media marketing. The report looks at the top ten questions they have:

1. What are the best tactics to use?

2. How do I measure the effectiveness of social media?

3. Where do I start?

4. How do I manage the social balance?

5. What are the best sites and tools out there?

6. How do I make the most of my available time?

7. How do I find and focus my efforts on my target audience?

8. How do I convert my social media marketing efforts into tangible results?

9. How do I cohesively tie different social media efforts together?

10. Does social media marketing work, and if so, how effective is it?

Stelzner’s report contains plenty more information than what is sampled here, and it paints a pretty interesting picture of the overall impression of social media marketing. Most people appear to have accepted that they should be using it in one form or another, but there are still a lot of unanswered questions, and there is a large thirst for knowledge in this area.

The medium is still in its youth, yet continues to evolve rapidly. Some questions don’t have any concrete answers, and are perhaps best answered by the marketers/business owners themselves. Not every business is going to find success through social media marketing in the same manner. That’s one of the greatest appeals of the medium though. There are so many possibilities.

You can see Stelzner’s full report as well as a video narrated by Stelzner himself here. 

Have the Answer to one of the top 10 questions? Share it here.

Have another question about social media marketing? Ask it.

Rapper Teaches Lizz-ink Building 101

You’re about to reach the end of the Internet. Please keep hands and feet inside the web browser at all times. Final destination: A YouTube video featuring a link-building rap. And it’s not half-bad, either.

Just when you were sure you’d seen just about everything, Charles Lewis (a.k.a. Big Chuck, a.k.a The Poetic Prophet, a.k.a. m0serious), a Missouri City, Texas online marketer, reminds us that, well, maybe we haven’t.

If Eric Ward or Aaron Wall had done it, we may have filed under "Pimp My Site" SES tomfoolery. Big Chuck, though, boils down the basics of link building with sufficient grace, the rhyming of "bank" and "can’t" notwithstanding.

I especially liked this part:

So you start hunting down sites like a predator,
Doing back links on all your competitors,
Whoever linking to them need to link to me,
Is it free, do we swap, or do I pay a fee,
Well take it from us, before you take that step,
Some things about the site that you might want to check,
Did they use a link farm or some dirty tactics,
Could have a bad effect on your site that’s drastic,
Could’ve link baited, look at what they created,
Compare it to yours, is it even related,
Take the time, go inspect and see,
Take advantage of paid directories

And yeah, that’s pretty much the basics. Be careful of which paid directories, though. 

Brand New Websites: SEO Company Perspective

It’s an unfortunate fact – no matter how good your search engine optimization company or in-house talent is, brand new websites have a more difficult time achieving search engine success for competitive phrases than their older counterparts, particularly on Google.

However, the worst thing that a new site owner can possibly do is presume that they are "too late to the game" and decide not to pursue this marketing channel at all. A good search engine optimization company should be able to effectively work with a new website; setting the foundation for a remarkable success story while still achieving steadily increasing short-term benefit.

The Issues

There are many reasons why new websites face an uphill battle. What follows are only a few of the major stumbling blocks:

The Google Sandbox

There is much debate as to what exactly the Google Sandbox is, and even debate as to whether it actually exists. However, recent patent filings on behalf of Google would seem to confirm that one of the factors that Google will take into consideration when deciding how websites should rank is the age of the domain name. More than one search engine optimization company has noted that there seems to be a penalty assessed to new websites, especially those that seem to gain too many inbound links, too fast. This is all conjecture, but this would make sense. Inbound links factor largely in Google rankings, and therefore many sites that were already popular in Google began selling links from their sites based upon that popularity (a practice that goes against Google’s terms of service). However, text link buying is very hard to police. The Sandbox makes sense in this scenario, because Google seems to be saying "we may not be able to stop people from buying text links, but they are going to pay a pretty penny for them before we’ll give them any ranking boost because of them." This is more conjecture, of course, but it is a popular theory in numerous search engine optimization forums.

Lack of Links

Unfortunately, here, a new website is faced with the opposite problem. Links to new websites are called into question, but without incoming links, a new website has a slim chance of performing well on Google. This Catch-22 is obviously a sore spot for many owners of new websites.

Trustworthiness

For many years, a common search engine optimization company strategy was to set up numerous new websites all for one company, each geared toward targeting a different search term. This was largely due to the fact that search engines used to place a much higher importance on the home page of a website, rather than interior pages. Over time, search engines caught on to this trick, and as a result new domains are now looked at more skeptically. The prevailing wisdom seems to be that while it is relatively easy and inexpensive to set up a new website that targets a certain term, a website that has been around for much longer and has a breadth of content has much more to lose and is less likely to attempt to "game the system".

The Solutions 

Does this mean that you shouldn’t hire a search engine optimization company to work on your new website? Not at all. In fact, it is in the very beginning of your website planning that a long-term strategy should be put into motion – a strategy that still offers positive results in the short term.

Before You Build

It is important to get your search engine optimization company involved as early as possible before you build your new website. Not only are there many technical issues that you should be aware of before you begin design (such as linking architecture, types of text to use, and balancing your SEO efforts with your brand), but there are also strategies that can be set in motion at the outset that will counteract some of the stumbling blocks listed above. If you involve your search engine optimization company after you have built your new website, much of the work you have done will likely need to be redone with a long term strategy in mind.

Targeting Appropriate Phrases

A good search engine optimization company will tell you that targeting highly competitive phrases with a brand new website can be an exercise in futility. However, this does not mean that you cannot achieve initial success on search engines. The trick is to target less competitive phrases at the outset, and to begin tackling the more competitive phrases later. For instance, let’s assume that your company makes custom widgets, and that "custom widgets" is a very competitive search phrase. A search engine optimization company working on your new site might recommend that you instead target less competitive variations of the term, such as "custom made widgets" or "custom widget manufacturing." Since these terms are less competitive, you will be more likely to obtain high rankings for them with your new website. You can thus enjoy highly targeted traffic in the beginning of your campaign and eventually target more competitive and popular phrases as your site gains traction, quality inbound links, and a reputation for usefulness. 

Make Your Site a Resource

A quality search engine optimization company will encourage you to turn your new site into an industry resource. You can do this by providing educational content about your industry in the form of articles, whitepapers, and other forms of non-biased content. There are many benefits to this approach, one of the primary being that such content attracts inbound links without any effort on your behalf. In addition, such a resource area builds your credibility in the eyes of your potential customers and serves to educate them in all stages of the buying cycle, so that when they are ready to make a purchase, you will likely be first in mind.

Build Links

While making your new site a useful resource is a great way to attract inbound links, this does not mean that you shouldn’t also be seeking them out. Your search engine optimization company should get your site included in many general directories (such as the Yahoo directory and Business.com) but, even more importantly, in directories that are specific to your industry. Not only do these links help to boost your search engine rankings over time, but they are also a quality source of targeted traffic.

Keep Your Content Fresh

A search engine spider will revisit your site frequently if your content continues to increase and evolve frequently. A site that has been optimized for three years with no changes to its content will usually not fare as well as a site that has content which is consistently updated. It’s as if the search engine is saying "Well, this old stuff still looks good, but it certainly isn’t the newest stuff out there about this topic." This so-called "freshness factor" can have a large impact on rankings, particularly with new websites.

Although it may seem that achieving search engine success with a brand new website can be a daunting prospect, it needn’t be if done properly. Hiring a skilled search engine optimization company is a good first step. There’s little use in lamenting the difficulty before you, or feeling that you have already fallen too far behind to begin. As an old Chinese proverb reminds us, "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today."

Alaskan Politician Outs Anonymous Blogger

There are lots of politicians out there who aren’t thrilled with the anonymous free speech the Internet offers. If they don’t know the blogger’s name, they don’t know who to be mad at. One Alaskan political blogger got so under a representative’s skin the representative spent months trying to find and disclose her identity.

You know, because apparently there’s nothing else to do in the Alaskan legislature at the moment.

Alaskan state representative Mike Doogan apparently thought there was some justice in outing a gadfly citizen blogger, but all he really accomplished was making himself look like an incredibly abusive jerk.

The author of The Mudflats blog had a surprise hit on her hands in the wake of John McCain’s selection of Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. Jeanne, as she is now known thanks to Doogan, became so popular among readers and reporters feverish for information, she had to outsource the creation of a discussion forum to volunteer moderators.

Once the national election passed, Jeanne posted a lengthy criticism of Doogan and his lack of email etiquette. According to her, he was so upset about her criticism it wasn’t long before she heard that Doogan was on a mission to out her. In the local paper, Doogan criticized anonymous bloggers because of their inherent lack of accountability—that would be accountability for their First Amendment guaranteed right to an opinion.

Last Thursday, Jeanne received an email from Doogan addressing her by her first name (previously no name appeared on the blog) saying he knew who she was and he was soon to tell all of his constituents about it. Sure enough, he exposed her in his legislative newsletter:

Anonymous Blogger Anonymous No More

The identity of the person who writes the liberal Democratic Mudflats blog has been secret since the blog began, protected by the Anchorage Daily News, among others. My own theory about the public process is you can say what you want, as long as you are willing to stand behind it using your real name. So I was interested to learn that the woman who writes the blog is Anchorage resident Jeanne _____.*

Best wishes,
 

Doogan was apparently very proud of himself for his important investigative work of outing an Anchorage resident with an opinion, a member of his own party, to his constituents, who now likely are afraid to say anything to anybody. Nice work, Doogan. You’re now the frontrunner for the Insufferable Jerk Award of 2009. It’s early yet, though, and as more news comes out of AIG then things could change. Either way, you’re a loser, Mr. Doogan.
 
Be sure to read all of Jeanne’s post. She explains the various reasons a blogger might choose to be anonymous, the different more important issues facing Alaska at the moment (an erupting volcano comes to mind), and how Benjamin Franklin might be an anonymous blogger if alive today.   
 

 

Majority Use Social Media Marketing, Still Have Questions

Author and WebProNews Blog Partner Michael Stelzner, has put together an interesting report based on a survey of 900 marketers. The report looks at the state of social media marketing. Interesting stats from the report include:

- 88% indicated they were employing social media for marketing purposes

- 72% have only been using social media marketing for a few months

- 64% of marketers are using social media for 5 hours or more each week

- 39% are using it for 10 hours a week

- 81% say the number-one benefit is generating exposure, followed by increasing traffic and building new business relationships

- Over half saw a rise in search engine rankings

- Out of social media tools marketers most wanted to learn about, social bookmarking sites ranked highest followed by Twitter.

Marketers and business owners still have a lot of questions about social media marketing. The report looks at the top ten questions they have:

1. What are the best tactics to use?

2. How do I measure the effectiveness of social media?

3. Where do I start?

4. How do I manage the social balance?

5. What are the best sites and tools out there?

6. How do I make the most of my available time?

7. How do I find and focus my efforts on my target audience?

8. How do I convert my social media marketing efforts into tangible results?

9. How do I cohesively tie different social media efforts together?

10. Does social media marketing work, and if so, how effective is it?

Stelzner’s report contains plenty more information than what is sampled here, and it paints a pretty interesting picture of the overall impression of social media marketing. Most people appear to have accepted that they should be using it in one form or another, but there are still a lot of unanswered questions, and there is a large thirst for knowledge in this area.

The medium is still in its youth, yet continues to evolve rapidly. Some questions don’t have any concrete answers, and are perhaps best answered by the marketers/business owners themselves. Not every business is going to find success through social media marketing in the same manner. That’s one of the greatest appeals of the medium though. There are so many possibilities.

You can see Stelzner’s full report as well as a video narrated by Stelzner himself here. 

Have the Answer to one of the top 10 questions? Share it here.

Have another question about social media marketing? Ask it.

Rapper Teaches Lizz-ink Building 101

You’re about to reach the end of the Internet. Please keep hands and feet inside the web browser at all times. Final destination: A YouTube video featuring a link-building rap. And it’s not half-bad, either.

Just when you were sure you’d seen just about everything, Charles Lewis (a.k.a. Big Chuck, a.k.a The Poetic Prophet, a.k.a. m0serious), a Missouri City, Texas online marketer, reminds us that, well, maybe we haven’t.

If Eric Ward or Aaron Wall had done it, we may have filed under "Pimp My Site" SES tomfoolery. Big Chuck, though, boils down the basics of link building with sufficient grace, the rhyming of "bank" and "can’t" notwithstanding.

I especially liked this part:

So you start hunting down sites like a predator,
Doing back links on all your competitors,
Whoever linking to them need to link to me,
Is it free, do we swap, or do I pay a fee,
Well take it from us, before you take that step,
Some things about the site that you might want to check,
Did they use a link farm or some dirty tactics,
Could have a bad effect on your site that’s drastic,
Could’ve link baited, look at what they created,
Compare it to yours, is it even related,
Take the time, go inspect and see,
Take advantage of paid directories

And yeah, that’s pretty much the basics. Be careful of which paid directories, though. 

Brand New Websites: SEO Company Perspective

It’s an unfortunate fact – no matter how good your search engine optimization company or in-house talent is, brand new websites have a more difficult time achieving search engine success for competitive phrases than their older counterparts, particularly on Google.

However, the worst thing that a new site owner can possibly do is presume that they are "too late to the game" and decide not to pursue this marketing channel at all. A good search engine optimization company should be able to effectively work with a new website; setting the foundation for a remarkable success story while still achieving steadily increasing short-term benefit.

The Issues

There are many reasons why new websites face an uphill battle. What follows are only a few of the major stumbling blocks:

The Google Sandbox

There is much debate as to what exactly the Google Sandbox is, and even debate as to whether it actually exists. However, recent patent filings on behalf of Google would seem to confirm that one of the factors that Google will take into consideration when deciding how websites should rank is the age of the domain name. More than one search engine optimization company has noted that there seems to be a penalty assessed to new websites, especially those that seem to gain too many inbound links, too fast. This is all conjecture, but this would make sense. Inbound links factor largely in Google rankings, and therefore many sites that were already popular in Google began selling links from their sites based upon that popularity (a practice that goes against Google’s terms of service). However, text link buying is very hard to police. The Sandbox makes sense in this scenario, because Google seems to be saying "we may not be able to stop people from buying text links, but they are going to pay a pretty penny for them before we’ll give them any ranking boost because of them." This is more conjecture, of course, but it is a popular theory in numerous search engine optimization forums.

Lack of Links

Unfortunately, here, a new website is faced with the opposite problem. Links to new websites are called into question, but without incoming links, a new website has a slim chance of performing well on Google. This Catch-22 is obviously a sore spot for many owners of new websites.

Trustworthiness

For many years, a common search engine optimization company strategy was to set up numerous new websites all for one company, each geared toward targeting a different search term. This was largely due to the fact that search engines used to place a much higher importance on the home page of a website, rather than interior pages. Over time, search engines caught on to this trick, and as a result new domains are now looked at more skeptically. The prevailing wisdom seems to be that while it is relatively easy and inexpensive to set up a new website that targets a certain term, a website that has been around for much longer and has a breadth of content has much more to lose and is less likely to attempt to "game the system".

The Solutions 

Does this mean that you shouldn’t hire a search engine optimization company to work on your new website? Not at all. In fact, it is in the very beginning of your website planning that a long-term strategy should be put into motion – a strategy that still offers positive results in the short term.

Before You Build

It is important to get your search engine optimization company involved as early as possible before you build your new website. Not only are there many technical issues that you should be aware of before you begin design (such as linking architecture, types of text to use, and balancing your SEO efforts with your brand), but there are also strategies that can be set in motion at the outset that will counteract some of the stumbling blocks listed above. If you involve your search engine optimization company after you have built your new website, much of the work you have done will likely need to be redone with a long term strategy in mind.

Targeting Appropriate Phrases

A good search engine optimization company will tell you that targeting highly competitive phrases with a brand new website can be an exercise in futility. However, this does not mean that you cannot achieve initial success on search engines. The trick is to target less competitive phrases at the outset, and to begin tackling the more competitive phrases later. For instance, let’s assume that your company makes custom widgets, and that "custom widgets" is a very competitive search phrase. A search engine optimization company working on your new site might recommend that you instead target less competitive variations of the term, such as "custom made widgets" or "custom widget manufacturing." Since these terms are less competitive, you will be more likely to obtain high rankings for them with your new website. You can thus enjoy highly targeted traffic in the beginning of your campaign and eventually target more competitive and popular phrases as your site gains traction, quality inbound links, and a reputation for usefulness. 

Make Your Site a Resource

A quality search engine optimization company will encourage you to turn your new site into an industry resource. You can do this by providing educational content about your industry in the form of articles, whitepapers, and other forms of non-biased content. There are many benefits to this approach, one of the primary being that such content attracts inbound links without any effort on your behalf. In addition, such a resource area builds your credibility in the eyes of your potential customers and serves to educate them in all stages of the buying cycle, so that when they are ready to make a purchase, you will likely be first in mind.

Build Links

While making your new site a useful resource is a great way to attract inbound links, this does not mean that you shouldn’t also be seeking them out. Your search engine optimization company should get your site included in many general directories (such as the Yahoo directory and Business.com) but, even more importantly, in directories that are specific to your industry. Not only do these links help to boost your search engine rankings over time, but they are also a quality source of targeted traffic.

Keep Your Content Fresh

A search engine spider will revisit your site frequently if your content continues to increase and evolve frequently. A site that has been optimized for three years with no changes to its content will usually not fare as well as a site that has content which is consistently updated. It’s as if the search engine is saying "Well, this old stuff still looks good, but it certainly isn’t the newest stuff out there about this topic." This so-called "freshness factor" can have a large impact on rankings, particularly with new websites.

Although it may seem that achieving search engine success with a brand new website can be a daunting prospect, it needn’t be if done properly. Hiring a skilled search engine optimization company is a good first step. There’s little use in lamenting the difficulty before you, or feeling that you have already fallen too far behind to begin. As an old Chinese proverb reminds us, "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today."

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Have you ever wondered what can you do during the recession that could save you money and help you through all these hard times?

Well if you want to find out how to save money in the recession then continue to read on and you will find out how!

Since late 2008 the government have been trying their hardest to think of ways that can help everyone out of the hard times. It’s not just us though that are finding it hard, the banks and businesses are also finding it hard and you may have noticed by now all those companies in the high street going out of business just like Woolworths have already had the unfortunate of doing.

Solution?

Well here you go the moment you have waited for, the solution!

The best way to save money is to believe it or not firstly pay back the most you possibly can on bills you have outstanding. I’m not talking about the mortgage or 6,000 pound car payments but those credit and store cards or those late council tax bills you forgot about. The first way to make money is to save money and throwing it away on un-needed interest is a great start.

Save Save Save

The next best step is to use the compare websites out there that can help you get the cheapest rate on your bills such as Gas, Electric, Phone, Water and so on and so forth.

There are some great deals to be found out there if you spend a little time searching around for them! Take GoCompare Car Insurance and Go Compare for all your insurance needs. There is also USwitch which can save money for you on phones, gas, electric, water, heating, loans and almost anything!

Ok there is even a compare website for your supermarket shopping as well at My Supermarket, here they compare all the main supermarkets and are up to date.

Ok now you have saved as much money as you can do, the next thing to do is the hardest one of all and the only one nobody can help you with (although i can help if you want to send me your money?). This stage is not to spend your remaining money unless you absolutely need to!

I know this sounds a bit much but then if you can save money and not spend it then you won’t have any problem later on when times get even harder and those surprising bills come out from nowhere.

Bit too far?

There are some more things to think about but i believe these to be taking a step probably too far for now.

Get a lower emission and cheaper to run car! This will save you in tax, petrol and insurance which means you can save anywhere from 150 to 2,000 pounds a year which is a lot when times are hard.

Thank you very much for reading and good luck to you all!

Please visit free link directory at http://www.totallylinks.com/ for more information.

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/affiliate-programs-articles/saving-money-in-the-recession-1004992.html