DarrenBarefoot.com

“Currently, comments are extremely slow”

Darren: When oh when are you going to resolve this problem? Can i help?

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The page would look a lot nicer if they ditched the second set of Google ads at the top of the content column. Neat idea, expanding upon Google’s “local” idea but using blogs. Methinks it needs a lot of work before I’ll use it, and even more before I’ll click on those zillion ads…

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I tend to agree with you that it’s a little exploitative. They’re taking the principle of “create a blog to generate more search engine traffic and promote return visitors” and sort of leaving off the “create” part. Sure it’s only excerpts, which would be fine if they used them as supplemental material to their own content, but the inclusion of the “nofollow” directive is pretty good evidence that they’re treating the excerpts as original content, rather than as secondary source content.

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Really, it’s little more than what a log of splogs do, except with a very slight attention to trying to focus it geographically, rather than simply being random content from other sites.

That they try pretty hard to obfuscate who they are (WHOIS records are hidden, for instance), use rel=”nofollow” for no good reason, show no email or other contact information, and seem to be moving their hosting mere days after first registering are all not good signs.

Yes, Technorati does similar things, as does Urban Vancouver, but those sites have clear ownership and also tell you what they’re doing. At least blog-o-city links back, unlike the splogs do, but this:

“This special metablog is devoted to all aspects of the great city of Vancouver. Whether you’re a local, interested in visit or are moving to Vancouver, we hope that you’ll find something useful here. Blog-O-City is a network of sites dedicated to collecting and organizing information on some of the greatest cities in the world.”

is hardly proper disclosure. A grey area, and annoying, to be sure.

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I guess I do something kind of similar, except that I don’t use the rel=nofollow and the blogs are hand picked (though not the posts) and there is plenty of contact information etc., Still, if anyone has any questions, comments, input or feedback I’d love to hear it.

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Thanks Darren. I also make it a point to tell people when I’ve included them on the off chance that someone doesn’t want to be included. That doesn’t happen often, I’m actually trying to drive traffic to people and most people who blog, vlog, podcast etc., like traffic but I have had 2 that asked to be removed.

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