Florida Venture Blog by Dan Rua dan

No-BS Venture Thoughts for No-BS Entrepreneurs.

A running perspective on Florida's growing tech and venture community, with an occasional detour to the Southeast/national scene, venture capital FAQs and maybe a gadget or two....

By Dan Rua, Managing Partner of Inflexion Partners -- "Florida's Venture Fund".

PPP Direct Makes it a TechCrunch Baker's Dozen

In honor of TC's lucky 13th post about PayPerPost, most with some Mike Arrington swipe at PPP or Ted Murphy, I've created the "Be Like Mike" game below. Although TechCrunch and PPP compete for the same social media advertising dollars, Ted and Mike are like the "Odd Couple" of the web and have helped each other build industry-leading companies.
The PPP Direct transaction widget really disrupts the industry PPP created last year, enabling bloggers to cut direct sponsorship deals without the 100% markups of some PPP copycats. I was going to provide an in-depth review of the announcement, but honestly couldn't do much better than Andy Beard did in his post "PayPerPost Direct Changes the Paid Review Landscape". The Digg of Andy's post also includes some comments worth reading for anyone impressed with the quality of Andy's review. As much as I like Mike and appreciate his coverage, I'd love to see more TechCrunch reviews at Andy's depth. Maybe I should make a game called "Be Like Andy"? I just did...

Hat tip to Amit for PicToGame.

UPDATE 05-29-07: Talk about synchronicity(?). Arrington jumped on the customized game meme less than 24 hours after my post above. PlayMyGame is another entry in that space and I expect more. I can't wait to see this functionality combined with StripGenerator to allow personalized SouthPark strips/movies or the like.

I'll call this game "Be Yourself" and you can guess whose face is under all that cake:

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Comments (8)

Anonymous Anonymous said...

They messed up their viral element because I can't find a way to pass it along without looking at your source code

4:22 AM  
Blogger VC Dan said...

Actually, I did. I've corrected now. Hope you didn't mind the reference...I was just looking for some fun ways to use those games.

9:11 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I would look on that as their failing in the widget, not your failing to provide a specific link.

Of couse I don't mind, it might have a chance some more link love.

Did you see this one?
http://www.profy.com/2007/05/25/blogger-educators/

Noticed you also just sent me a trackback, have you just started using Scribefire or another tool?

Lots of Posties need to learn how to send trackbacks and they could have got some nice like juice that is relevant.

I have another post coming about various PPP things, including RMP which just returned to my comment box.

I will include something about trackback, referencing posts rather than domains, and links when commenting.

9:25 AM  
Blogger VC Dan said...

re:trackbacks, I use HaloScan. It surprises me how many bloggers, postie or not, don't understand or use trackbacks. One way to help is education.

Another is to create a feed-driven auto-trackback service to connect the dots across various platforms for any blogger with a feed automatically. Wanna collaborate? ;-)

10:29 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I don't think it is a very good business model, because it is a service Google should already offer built in their software, and it doesn't require repeat visits, and most bloggers wouldn't pay for it.

There are other ways to integrate bloggers and monetization ;)

3:02 PM  
Blogger VC Dan said...

I'm not really talking about monetization. I'm talking about a service that truly saves time/energy and accelerates legitimate cross-blog reference/conversation surfing.

I don't think you build a whole business around this, but I do think you could get significant blogger signups across platforms. There is value in that to build from just as MyBlogLog built from the simple concept of outclick tracking.

Think beyond the trackbacks standard alone or any one host like Blogger -- it should be cross-host, cross-standard, driven by a blogger's feed. The service could understand various standards and facilitate trackbacks/pingbacks/backlinks as necessary for the links from a blog post. TOS can bar auto-splogs, but the service has value for human bloggers whose posts contain legitimate links to others.

On this post alone, a service like that would have saved me about 5 minutes of HaloScan time recording trackbacks to TC and AndyBeard. Now multiply that by all my posts and by all bloggers -- big time/effort savings.

3:38 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The ideal way would be to have a universal linkback module - technorati already supply a widget for linkbacks but that doesn't provide actual links.

Using Google for the data would require API keys for each blogger, or picking up their search results.

Whilst I have done that on a few posts, if all bloggers started to do that on every post, Google would block it.

I am sure they would prefer people to use their javascript widgets for things link that, which defeats the purpose of linking a little, just like nofollow.

Google APIs are no longer available for individual users and might even be phased out. I tink there are some other ways to get the data which are not as flexible.

Technorati also have APIs, but those are limited again unless you do a licensing deal. 500 requests might seem nice for a single small blog, but for large sites it just wouldn't be suitable.

These companies want to take up your sidebar rather than have access to their data, and some of them can be very sneaky with the way they write their widgets for SEO purposes.

If it is a service, you really need a way to offer it free.

I just feel it is better to maybe encourage the use of various desktop solutions for blogging which do offer trackback functions until such time as Google fix their service, or encourage blogger users to move on to greener pastures.

2:26 PM  
Blogger VC Dan said...

I think you're seeing something different than I. You are trying to integrate with Google/hosts when I'm not sure it's necessary.

Why can't you have a site/service called TrackbackButler where:
1) bloggers register their feeds
2) when new posts are received from those feeds the service scans for outlinks
3) the sites referenced in those outlinks are checked for trackback/pingback/backlink acceptance
4) if accepted, a trackback/pingback/backlink is registered for those outlinks
5) if not accepted, you could either toss those (maybe preferred) or create a manual trackback via comments at the outlink site saying "FYI, this post was referenced here:"

Of course, TOS needs to handle abuse, but why wouldn't this work for legitimate trackbacks across platforms/standards?

We're getting to a level of detail that is better discussed via email, but thanks for the clarifying questions to flesh this out...

3:53 PM  

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