Negative SEO blog : SEOassassin

I found an amusing tool from Dane Carlson via dontclickthis. It uses Technorati data to “value” your blog, allegedly “using the same link to dollar ratio as the AOL-Weblogs Inc deal.”

Although I’m not TOTALLY convinced that this blog is worth circa $15k, it’s an interesting insight into how business deals work… If a 4 month old blog can come up with a nominal valuation in excess of $10k, somebody, somewhere is wildly overestimating the amount of value being created on the WWW. You get the occasional incredible success story like YouTube, “creating” in excess of $1b of value in under 12 months, but those are very much the exception, not the rule.

You can also make the case that what was paid for YouTube was a premium price to the founders for :

1) Identifying all the problems with Google video
2) Fixing them
3) … and doing it in a scalable manner
4) … and building the market share to PROVE it all worked

…. allegedly. At the time of writing, here is the proof. It’s only for the Internet Marketing category, but I’m happy with that. Bob Massa is there at #2 as well.

Now I’ll see if it’s worth anything beyond the vanity equity

Well, it had to happen - MySpace is being sued by four families in the US, who allege their kids were assaulted by adults they met online through MySpace.

One of the plaintiffs lawyers said :

“In our view, MySpace waited entirely too long to attempt to institute meaningful security measures that effectively increase the safety of their underage users,”

Currently, most reportage is just reprinting or paraphrasing the AP release, but I found a more detailed report here. It’s early days for the actual cases - I’d be amazed if News Corps legal team allows any of these cases to come to trial, because I suspect any actual proceedings would get a LOT of coverage. There’s not much media outlets like more than embarrasing other media corporations.

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It seems that someone out there is trying to push the SEO blogging community into writing “more interesting stuff”. To quote the perp directly…

Why I’m doing this?
1. Because I want
2. Because I can
3. Because lately the SEO industry is LAME and BORING - Want a proof of that?
- The SEO industry is just a bunch of self-proclaimed gurus making more money from their “guru” status than from SEO.
- The blogsphere (God I hate that word) is filled with countless “SEO blogs” syndicating what other “SEO blog” syndicated from another “SEO blog” that syndicated some bullshit guru.
- The most insightful and fun thing that has happened recently in the SEO industry (and anyways It was a looong time ago!) was the freaking search engine spammer who indexed billions of pages in Google thanks to a bug in Blogger, some DNS wildcards and a PHP content generator. Oh boy, people over webmasterwold and digitalpoint where going crazy about it!. So I’m about to bring back some fun to your lives…

I get where he’s coming from, I really do. One of the reasons I started a blog was because I’d like to try and inject some more useful stuff into the mix. I’ve done, and published, some genuinely original SEO research (not much, yet, but some). Whether you actually like it / agree with it / were bored by it is irrelevant - it’s real research, freely available. If any aspect of it troubles you, go do your own!

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Following the “Peanut Butter Manifesto” debacle, grassroots opposition to the current managment team seems to be growing. Eric Jackson is starting a campaign to get some shareholder activism going, and make waves for the USS Yahoo.

Here’s a YouTube clip explaining the basis of “Plan B” (I hope this works…)

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OK, OK, it’s a bit late… but I’ve been busy. I saw Scott ribbing me over the Kubrick theme, so you may notice I’ve been and grabbed a new, spangly theme - like it?

I’ve been looking at my stats over the last few months. Interestingly, December was still on the same upwards slope as I’ve been seeing since launch, and the amount of SE traffic continues to grow. I’d have thought that December would have been quite quiet, so I’m pleasantly surprised to note the trend.

I think that may be related to the fact that I seem to be picking up some real links (ie 1 ways from other sites that I may not have heard of - real readers, in fact. Thanks to you all). I’m hoping I’ll actually get to write some more content this week, and justify the love.

Cheers