It is quite easy to hide behind anonymity, but it doesn't hurt to be polite on-line. And if you can't be polite, at least be gracious. Here are a few rudenesses that I have noticed on the internet.

ALL CAPs is a pretty rude way to address someone online, as is F... this f... that on a forum or site you haven't commented on before.

Racial remarks, hate and personal attacks are a no-no too. Did you hear of the nasty episode involving a speaker called Kathy Sierra

Spamming isn't exactly polite either , and off-topic remarks can verge on rude at times.

Mis-spelling someone's name is a faux pas to avoid (sorry Barry Hnetka) as is revealing someone's personal details to the world.

Ignoring emails When you go to quite a lot of trouble to write someone an email, to be nice, and they never acknowledge you in the smallest way. That is rude, especially when you are in their address book!

Ed's personal irritants with comments

There are a couple of comment-related things that really irritate the fricking HELL out of my ugly white ignorant hetero honky protestant ass currently located at IP adress 76.345.274.

Ignoring comments

Firstly, leaving comments that never ever get an answer or so much as a by your leave. Turn off comments if you don't reply to anything! If I sound hypocritical to anyone who thinks I haven't replied to their comment, that is blindness on my part, not ignorance, as I check the comments summary every day and do my utmost to acknowledge you all in some way.

Password protecting comments

How annoying is to go out your way to leave a comment and then you have to work out some captcha crap, or make out some contrived code of hidden letters or add 2 plus 2. I don't know what spam filters the commenting systems for Blogger and Wordpress use, or how much spam you guys get, but can we all please play fair and have the filtration work done by the same robots that haloscan use behind the scenes? No passwords or hoops to jump through at the front end, just comment and send.

I will probably be spammed off the planet tomorrow, but, honestly, not one single spam comment yet. Just wish my Pisstakers email filter was as efficient.

So, now that is off my chest, what online mal etiquette irritates you?

Tags: online etiquette, Spam, Comments, Email

Talk about a storm in a coffee pot. Silly fellow, John Chow dot com mogul, has decided he is going to nickel and dime some of his readers with a $10 a month comments oriented scheme. He is offering commenters a backlink to his site via a Do Follow applied to any comments they leave on his site. Woo hoo say some, boo say I, wtf is a Do Follow, say many.

What's a Do Follow, dude?

By default, Wordpress and many other commenting systems tell Google not to make a big deal of the links that commenters create with their names when they leave a comment ie the in-built coding says, Google, No Follow Ed, man! On the other hand, Do Follow unleashes the beast and advises Google to do something constructive with the link.

Woo hoo is what you hear from the bloggers who think it is cool to get a link to a PR6 site just for leaving a comment plus $10 in John Chow's piggy bank. And for his part, John Chow is probably thinking $10 x a large proportion of 5000 subscribers hmmmmm. $$$$$$$$. I say boo, though, along with a few others, and here is why.

Do Follow craps on content

I don't have a crystal ball, but if I, or you, were to advertise, "For $10 a month, post comments all over this high PR site and get a backlink every time." what would happen? Most likely scenario is, instantly a certain pool of not quite tech savvy people would go mad and trawl through my every old post leaving remarks like, "Cool, nice blog, I agree, You're a twat etc etc."

There are a couple of quick points worth making, methinks!! Content is king, and bulk commenting schemes produce crap content. Readers, as well as Google will read crap comments and make up their own mind about the quality. Net result for all concerned in the long term - not good!! The long story follows:

Look at Do Follow from a Google standpoint

While the demented ones are wasting their lives commenting inanely in the hope of getting loads of link love, it is highly debatable that Google would think very highly of their comments.

Certainly a Do Follow link is going to be better (in theory) than a No Follow link , so the $10 deal appears to have a positive side, but...

But, indeed! As far as Google is concerned, compared to links in the body of a real post, these comment-based links hold marginal value from the outset. Worse than that, from a Google perspective at least, the more comments-based links (or any links for that matter) populating a page, the less value each link has. The $10 link love scheme encourages lots of people to leave lots of links, so you know the dilution process on any page is going to be major.

It also gets worse. The idea that you have a link on John Chow's homepage because you paid $10 and commented on a front page article, is false - as far as Google is concerned. Within a couple of days, the article drops off the homepage, and it loses its homepage PR. It is how it works. That article fights for its own popularity level as a standalone page. The post's new PR will invariably be less popular than the homepage that attracted you to the DoFollow offer. In the blink of a $10 transaction, your link love payback on the back of a comment binge will be majorly diluted.

Google logic, therefore, says your return on $10 a month "investment" has almost no lasting value, and the more pointless link-grabbing comments you leave, the worse it gets.

Look at Do Follow from a site owner's standpoint

To be honest, $10 x a few thousand sounds nice, but I don't think that the return is worthwhile compensation for the repercussions of a drop in the entertainment value of a site built with long term gain in mind.

If you assume that comments are a part and parcel of the overall content of the site, you want to encourage the highest quality comments to keep rolling in. Some of the best remarks made on the Pisstakers are to be found in the comments section, so I wouldn't want to dilute their quality. But, if I gave a green light to you to spam the comments section, that part of the site would turn to rat's poo and I would expect a few readers to start complaining, "Hey Ed, your comments (ie an important part of your content) are shit, we arent commenting any more and certainly aren't reading them either." This isn't a great scenario!

Most blogs depend on a relationship, a sense of community and discussion. This is where comments play a major role in the success of a blog. John Chow is expecting advantages from a proliferation of crap content? If that is a good strategy, please don't show me a bad one, buddy. Or maybe it is all a pisstaker post ?

John Chow is expanding on a bad idea of his!

It could be argued that my pessimistic Do Follow for cash forecast is based purely on what I think would happen if I applied this Do Follow policy on my 200 uniques a day site. On that basis, sure, mine is not necessarily an accurate forecast of the scenario on John Chow's 4000 uniques a day site. I say otherwise, because the evidence I based my assumption on is from what I see on John Chow's own site. This Do Follow deal of his is based on an idea he already has in place, and it ain't that great at all!

His current Do Follow plan

To be fair, his comments section is generally vibrant and the quality of many commenters is quite good, but that is only half the story! His comments boxes are already peppered with crap, thanks to a scheme that encourages commenters to strive for Top 10 Commenter status each month. ie If you leave loads of comments, you will get one of these same Do Follow links that I am talking about now with the $10 scheme. People are leaving 100 comments a month. Feel the quality - not!

Can a variation on this comments-based theme (times 10) really improve the quality of comments / the quality of his site content / the chance of attracting more readers? I think not.

John Chow may well retract his latest experiment as another bad, sorry, "evil" idea and will carry on as before. But he may not, and certainly lots of bloggers will be tempted to give him $10 just to see what happens.

Fans of his may say I am missing the point and it is all about the numbers game ie he is evil, always pushing the envelope and the figures show his earnings are constantly rising, regardless of experiments. Maybe, but he hasn't tried charging like this before!

But maybe John Chow thinks that with such a big readership in place, eating his every word, he can get away with subtly worsening the content? Good luck trying to mask the mass of crap coming his way. The skewed mix of sponsored posts and real content is already attracting adverse comments, but hey, income is up so who cares!!

Do Follow or No Follow, that is the final question

To reiterate, the evidence isn't great if you expect appealing comments (ie more new reader bait) to rise from incentives to mass comment.

As a blog owner offering the Do Follow service correctly, ie as part of your friendly helping hand to people who contribute a realistic number of meaningful comments to your site, go for it. It is a good use of the tool.

As a blog owner offering this type of inverted cash for comments strategy to readers, I would reflect and quickly draft a backtrack post - sorry this was a bad experiment , we are stopping it / radically over-hauling it now. Of course I could be a greedy short termist dummy, take the $10 now and pray I can blag my way out of it once I have earned a few bucks.

And finally, as a site visitor contemplating handing over $10 to spam comments boxes galore, I suggest you act like a wise fellow and do not follow the DO Follow for $10 scheme. Put your $10 away and spend 5 minutes answering my Blog Interrogation - an easier and far more constructive way to create content and gain some readership. Or write a post on your own site that others find worth linking to. Anything but inane comments on someone else's site. Proper content is king!

And thanks to Phishie for alerting me to this original story. His is almost the sole external link on this page so far. Almost pure link love, man.

Tags: blogging, Wordpress, Comments

7 months ago I tentatively hit the blog waves and I have been reading traffic stats ever since. I have noticed a few trends on The Pisstakers in terms of visitors, some good, some eye-brow raising, and one, bad.

The good bits are: increasing traffic, a steady increase in the the time that visitors spend on the site per visit, a drop in the number of visits per reader per day and some really cool commenters.

The bad bits are: some of the keywords people search for! Many are, shall we say, surprising. I have dispensed with a few of those in a post called Keyword phrases to cringe at!

Increasing traffic

After reading this next paragraph, perhaps you will be able to work out how many unique visitors I have had this month (up to 21st of May):

Starting in September, traffic rose from zero to around 600 per month by November. In December that monthly total doubled - despite Christmas spirit that ruins it for the last week opr so!. By March, the monthly traffic doubled again, and with spring in the air, April saw 10 times as many people visiting as had called by in any one of the first three months. (I am running around the stat counter here, so keep up!) So, here in May, I predict I will reach last month's total by the 24th.

The uniques count for May up to today is? Answer at end of article

More time spent on the site

I estimate that if you read this article and then go check out this post from beginning to end, you will increase the average time each visitor spends reading The Pisstakers by at least 10%. And because there is only text on the page, the hit on my bandwidth will be negligible!

Out of interest, how long do you spend on this site on average? If it is more than 2 minutes, welcome to the 6% bracket.

Less visits per visitor per day

I think this is good? Most newcomers can't believe their eyes the first time, and have to return later to confirm that they won't be coming back again. That number is going down and regulars are going up.

A weird stat is that something like 70% of visitors are first timers and about a third of them bookmark the site, but most don't return. I think I need to do a widget for them. The self destruct bookmark. If it isnt used within 7 days, it blows up your computer. What do you think?

It is also quite scary to think some really important people have taken a look at this site, and rolled their eyes never to return. Oh well, when we are famous!!!

More comments, and plenty of cool ones too

As a blogger, there is nothing quite like reading new comments. It is like astronauts finding life on Mars. They revel in the knowledge that there is somebody out there perhaps even bigger than themselves! So, thank you to those kind souls for making a sad blogger happy.

As an aside, I read that if you get 1 comment per 400 visitors, you are doing OK. A round of applause to the trend breakers here, then. And apologies to silent visitors who obviously read stuff here and lose the will to write even a few words in response, in anger, in sympathy. For what it is worth, I try to leave a few words when I call by, because like I said, even a couple of words makes a difference to morale.

A few more trackbacks

I didn't know much about Trackback, all very blog nerdy, but they are a good time saver and a neat way to promote your own posts too!

Say you already covered the same topic as me, and have nothing else to add to my post, just ping through your article to my comments box via trackback. That way, you don't need to dream up any thing new to say, you add to the "conversation" and you can lure people away from The Pisstakers to read your far more entertaining words in their entirety.

Lies, damn lies and statistics

So there are a few hidden insights to the state of blog traffic(king) here. How does it compare to your experience? And for them that care, I have had 5000 unique visitors , and 22000 pages read up to the 21st.

And that just goes to prove that Google page rank is not an indication of popularity! In Google's eyes I am more "valuable" than John Chow dot com's site last month. Yet he earned something like $10000 and had more than 20 times my level of traffic. Just blog and ignore the stats!!!

Tags: stats, Comments