MyBlogLog Bans ShoeMoney

Yo, Money, it’s the shoes! Boy if there was ever a better nickname for an affiliate marketer than ShoeMoney, then I don’t know what it is.

Jeremy Schoemaker is a popular affiliate marketer who was recently very supportive of MyBlogLog, he actually challenged Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim fame to a contest to see who could get the most members, Andy giving away a Zune, Shoe, pimping his cute new assistant Nicole. Jeremy Zawodny actually had the nerve to call Andy a spammer because of it, and later changed it to say he messed up and apologized.

Now it appears that MyBlogLog has banned ShoeMoney from their site, as he is getting 403(Forbidden) errors on any page he visits. The reason? He showed everyone a little hack to allow them to browse websites as other users. It was nothing more than taking the unique id for each bloglog user and putting it in your cookies.txt file, but they ban a popular blogger like Jeremy, one who has almost 900 users and probably introduced many more to the site. The smart move would’ve been to fix it, which they did, and post a note on their blog. Banning a user seems pretty childish to me. Especially since it was their cookie that was not secure to start with. Andy is boycotting MyBlogLog, and others have stated they will as well, so this definitely seems like a bad move for them, this following large sites removing the code because of speed issues, such as Techcrunch.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Online Marketing, TechCrunch No Comments » February 2007

Highschool 2.0

Hope Dave, a commenter from TechCrunch, doesn’t mind me borrowing that, that’s what he called this post on TechCrunch by Michael Arrington, Blogger Wars: How Jason Calacanis Gets Even. This kind of reminds me of some YouTube videos I have seen recently, well she said and he said and she said, yadda, yadda, yadda, but I think this is kind of the nature of things sometimes on the Internet. I think everyone says things differently online, everyone is quicker to say something than they would be face to face, you can see it in forums and chat rooms everywhere, and now, even with the “A-listers”.

Nick Denton (pictured left) likes to use his blog Valleywag to take shots at competitors - his most recent hit job was on [tag]Jason Calacanis[/tag] (on right), who founded and then cashed out of the blog network Weblogs, Inc. Denton has always played second fiddle to Jason, never quite achieving the same level of success. Many say this is because he can’t handle it when his writers get more attention than he does, and he finds subtle ways of undermining them. His recent firing and public trashing of writer Nick Douglas certainly lends credibility to this rumor. Source: TechCrunch

It started with this post from Nick Denton, called “Netscape: the Calacanis effect” where he said Jason was just leaving because it was a good time, that he was killing Netscape and that traffic had dropped 70%.

Traffic the week of June 18th, before the Netscape team remade the front page, was 137m page views. The following week, as Netscape decommissioned areas such as news and weather, it declined to 115m. The new front page, a clone of Digg.com, went live on June 29. The first full week after the change, traffic had plummeted further, to 72m page views.

Calacanis has resigned from AOL ostensibly out of loyalty to Miller, and, having founded Silicon Alley Reporter and Weblogs, Inc., he probably also has several startup ideas. Part of the truth, for sure. Valleywag’s more cynical theory: he messed up Netscape.com, and used Miller’s departure as cover. Source: ValleyWag

Jason’s response? To talk up one of Nick’s best bloggers, Gina Trapani from LifeHacker, describing how he had tried every two months for a year to hire her away, but it was never enough. He described how she has grown the site and how he figured the site made a million a year. Obviously, he is trying to cause some friction there, and either get her asking for more money, or other companies offering her more money to jump ship.

The one blogger I wished we had landed at Weblogs, Inc. was Gina Trapani from LifeHacker. I tried every two months for a year I think… no offer was good enough. Very, very frustrating.

Gina is the Peter Rojas/Ryan Block of software… for real. Source: Calacanis.com

I say the hell with the bullshit, lets just talk some bullshit, get away from the attacks and back to some technology stuff. Wonder what’s on techmeme?

Added: Just saw this post on Scripting.com, in which he says Arrington is being challenged be Valleywag, which Nick has already admitted, and that this is a shot because of it.

And Mike, isn’t it good that Nick is focusing on business instead of the salacious stuff? Wouldn’t it be nice to go to the bathroom at a conference and not worry about whether your sanitary habits might appear in Valleywag (true or not). Maybe Mike is protesting because the new Valleywag is getting a little close to TechCrunch? Nahh, couldn’t be.

Note that Nick has more or less said he’s aiming Valleywag at TechCrunch. So when Mike gives Nick grief for challenging a competitor well, Mike ought to be careful about that, because he appears to be doing the same thing. Source: Scripting.com

I guess it doesn’t really matter to me whether all these guys like each other or not, I’ll be reading the good stuff and passing over the rest.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Blogging, TechCrunch, Web 2.0 No Comments » November 2006

TechCrunch Burning It Up

You can tell when a website starts getting pretty big and popular, they start becoming the news and in the headlines. TechCrunch.com has been in a lot of headlines and stories recently as well as making lots of headlines with their reviews of Web 2.0 companies and the industry in general.

Lots of articles on TechCrunch recently, here’s one from the Wall Street Journal,

Two years ago, Mr. Arrington, a onetime lawyer and Internet executive was living the life of a surf bum in southern California. Today, the 36-year-old has become one of the most influential people in Silicon Valley. Like a latter-day Henry Blodget, the onetime star Wall Street analyst who helped fuel the late 1990s dot-com frenzy, Mr. Arrington uses his TechCrunch blog to determine the destinies of new start-ups and to fan the flames of the current Internet boom.

Some investors worry Mr. Arrington and his ilk may contribute to an investment bubble that could end badly. In May, Josh Kopelman, an investor with First Round Capital in Philadelphia, warned on his blog that many Web companies today “run a big risk of designing a product/service that is targeted at too small of an audience,” namely subscribers to Mr. Arrington’s TechCrunch blog. (The number of subscribers, then 53,651, has since grown to 133,000, according to the site.) The TechCrunch blog has also spawned its own minipublicity loop, with other bloggers rehashing many of the tidbits Mr. Arrington reports and posting photos from his backyard keg parties. Source: TechCrunch Site Makes Arrington A Power Broker

Lots of blogs, like this one, rehash TechCrunch stories because they report the news before mainstream media, such as the recent Google buying YouTube story. I myself am not interested in all of the Web 2.0 companies he covers, some are interesting, I am mostly interested in industry news, like the YouTube deal, the release of MSN Soapbox, and some of the PayPerPost paid blogging and others. Of course ValleyWag is not a big Arrington supporter, or are they, I can never tell, sometimes you can get more coverage be staging blog fights, here is what they thought in the Michael Arrington dated Miss Denmark, and other things we didn’t want the Wall Street Journal to tell us post.

Michael Arrington posted on his companion blog CrunchNotes about all of the TechCrunch hate going on,

TechCrunch is a new kind of publication. We don’t fit into a neat little box like traditional media, who refrain from financial conflicts of interest with their readers and feel that they are therefore above reproach. They aren’t, but they really, really feel that they are, and look down on blogs and other media as the unwashed masses. Yes, I’m grouping them unfairly, but the really good reporters will all soon be on their own anyway, so this will be completely true eventually.

TechCrunch is different. TechCrunch is all about insider information and conflicts of interest. The only way I get access to the information I do is because these entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are my friends. I genuinely like these people and want them to succeed and they know it and therefore trust me more than they trust traditional press.

I am an active investor, board member and advisory board member with a number of startups. That isn’t going to change. I also write about startups. That isn’t going to change, either. Obviously people like what we write on TechCrunch or they wouldn’t come back. But no one should think TechCrunch is objective or conflict-free. We aren’t. We never have been. We never will be.

All I promise is to give my honest opinion every time I write, regardless of whether there is a conflict of interest or not. Source: Crunchnotes

It’s a good blog and I think most people realize he gets insider information because he’s an insider to start with, if people don’t like it or don’t believe him, then they won’t come back.

Posted by Jimmy Daniels Posted in: Blogging, TechCrunch No Comments » November 2006