We have set up a fun quiz together with Gerald that tells you which type of Twitter user you are. Go take the quiz and let me know your result!

Here’s mine:

Learn Which Type of Twitter User You Are My Result: Twitter Bad Ass annsmarty You Tweet like a bluejay on crack! You spend hours upon hours each day/week finding quality content and relevant news to tweet to your followers. You have a reputation for tweeting quality content and along with this comes a small cult following that thanks you. Excellent job you “Twitter bad ass”! Quiz School Take this quiz & get your result

Related posts:

1. Monetize Your Twitter Account! (Really?) Today in the morning I was pinged by one...
2. How to Create a Useful Twitter Retweet Bot Twitter can be used in various, almost countless ways. In...
3. Twitter Translator, Twitter Tickets, What’s More? I usually try to avoid posting here what is...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

*The following guest post is by Duncan*

Have you ever felt like your blog readers are just a hassle to your site? Using up all your bandwidth and leaving messy comments all over the place? If so, you need some tips in how to alienate them and stop them coming back for good. Just follow these 4 simple tips and you’ll soon be the only one reading your posts in peace and quiet.

Insult Their Intelligence

Thinking that you are more intelligent than your readers and assuming they won’t understand if you start talking technical is one way to annoy them. You can of course alienate readers by being over-geeky, but this is nowhere near as affective as stopping to explaining every other word, or saying things such as “I would explain about this further, but it’s for a more proficient audience”. BTW ‘proficient’ is an adjective meaning ‘competent’ or ‘adept’. If you don’t know what these words mean either…go away.

Make Stuff Up

Following on from the last point, you can both anger and patronize your readers by making things up in your posts as well. Firstly, your readers will see right through it and become angry that you have the gall to lie to them, and they will then feel patronized by the fact you thought you would get away it. I once lost over 30,000 subscribers to my blog overnight when I lied about my gender. My readers Google-imaged my name and found out quite quickly I was not in fact a girl.

Not Proof Reading

Nobody is perfect and expecting bloggers to write without making any mistakes is unreasonably. However, when you read posts that have quite obviously been thrown together in ten minutes and have more mistakes that a dyslexic child’s workbook, it suggests that they don’t really care about what they are writing. If they cannot take the time to go over what they have written a couple of times and think carefully about their sentence structure, why should a reader invest any time in digesting what they have to say?

Disallow Comments

If you’re confident in what you are saying and you think you’ve pretty much covered all the bases, why should you throw your posts open to the audience? Believe it or not, blog readers like to have their say and often consider it arrogant when a blogger does not allow comments. The Internet is built on freedom of speech and choosing to terminate a conversation because you think there is nothing left to add will likely rile your readers beyond belief. Just in case you’re wondering ‘terminate’ is a verb meaning ‘to end’ or ‘finish’.

If, on the off chance you don’t want to alienate your readers, you might like to do the opposite of the advice given here and instead write honest, well thought out and intelligent posts, having the decency to allow your readers to leave their comments if they wish. This will help build trust and respect between you and your readers, and leave everyone much happier.

Duncan is an online marketing expert and SEO blogger, working for a corporate hospitality company in the UK

Image by TheAlieness

Related posts:

1. Does Your Blog Have a Flavor? The blog flavor (the term is invented by me,...
2. I Am So Sorry, My Dear Readers That won’t be a long post. I just need...
3. The Strategy of Blog Commenting – Case Study Along with blogging itself, commenting is a powerful tool of...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

It’s no secret I believe in guest blogging as one of the most effective ways to build your brand, broaden your scope and find new audience. In fact, guest blogging is one of my most-often used link building tactic that has helped me get my most valuable links.

My constant quest for new blogs to guest blog for has brought me to one important question: is it possible to unite all bloggers interested in publishing posts by other bloggers and those guest bloggers under one roof? The idea seemed tempting enough: plenty of people are interested in guest blogging to build their network of contacts and promote their sites.

So I decided to go ahead and give it a try; and here it is: MyBlogGuest – currently not really feature-rich (implemented as a simplified forum) but with the concept behind it: join if you want to guest blog!

Want to be my friend?

Then help me by becoming my beta tester:

• Please join the forum and create your detailed profile;
• Please post at forums and announce yourself;
• Please report all bugs (there should be quite a few as the site is brand new) and feature requests;
• Please share the project with your blogging friends.

I promise to further work on a project to make it a great community!

As always, your thoughts are more than welcome!

Related posts:

1. The Ethics of Guest Posting – Am I Wrong? Guest posting (contributing to other blogs with the link...
2. 6 Benefits of Guest Blogging + 9 Tips for Better Guest Blogging This is the second post in the series of guest...
3. How Guest Blogging Made Me 5-Figures in 2009 The following is the the first post in the...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

*This is a guest post by Gab Goldenberg*

[This is a slightly adapted excerpt from a much longer law school essay I wrote this past summer for on the issue of rebills, those affiliate marketing 'offers' that trick people into signing up for products that will bill them on a recurring basis without their knowledge. The excerpt deals with Canada's Trademarks Act and how the rebills may/not fit under its provisions.

I referred to rebills as 'manufactured consent scams' since they make false claims, such as endorsement or association with well known people or organizations, which lead people to give "consent" which they would not otherwise give. ]

As I explained earlier, the scammers promoting the tangible-product [as opposed to intangibles like money-making schemes such as Google Cash, known colloquially in the affiliate industry as 'biz opps'] offers like acai berry pills, colon cleanse products, resveratrol and so on are notorious for their shameless abuse of others’ trademarks.

They display the names, images and logos of famous people like Oprah, Dr. Oz and other famous personalities and brands to imply or even explicitly claim endorsement.¹ This exposes the affiliates, merchants and affiliate networks involved to liability under the Trade-marks Act, as well as the common law of passing off.²

The relevant sections of the Trade-marks Act are 7 (b) – (e), 8, 9.1 (d), 9.1 (k), 9.1 (l) and 9.1 (n), which read as follows.

Prohibitions

7. No person shall
(a) make a false or misleading statement tending to discredit the business, wares or services of a competitor;
(b) direct public attention to his wares, services or business in such a way as to cause or be likely to cause confusion in Canada, at the time he commenced so to direct attention to them, between his wares, services or business and the wares, services or business of another;
(c) pass off other wares or services as and for those ordered or requested;
(d) make use, in association with wares or services, of any description that is false in a material respect and likely to mislead the public as to

1. the character, quality, quantity or composition,
2. the geographical origin, or
3. the mode of the manufacture, production or performance of the wares or services; or

(e) do any other act or adopt any other business practice contrary to honest industrial or commercial usage in Canada.

Warranty of lawful use

8. Every person who in the course of trade transfers the property in or the possession of any wares bearing, or in packages bearing, any trade-mark or trade-name shall, unless before the transfer he otherwise expressly states in writing, be deemed to warrant, to the person to whom the property or possession is transferred, that the trade-mark or trade-name has been and may be lawfully used in connection with the wares.

Prohibited marks

9. (1) No person shall adopt in connection with a business, as a trade-mark or otherwise, any mark consisting of, or so nearly resembling as to be likely to be mistaken for,
any word or symbol likely to lead to the belief that the wares or services in association with which it is used have received, or are produced, sold or performed under, royal, vice-regal or governmental patronage, approval or authority;
(k) any matter that may falsely suggest a connection with any living individual;
the portrait or signature of any individual who is living or has died within the preceding thirty years;
(n) any badge, crest, emblem or mark

[...]
(iii) adopted and used by any public authority, in Canada as an official mark for wares or services,
in respect of which the Registrar has, at the request of Her Majesty or of the university or public authority, as the case may be, given public notice of its adoption and use; [...]

What the provisions mean in [almost] plain English

In summary, these provisions codify the prohibition against the common law tort of passing off, and expand upon the tort to prohibit dishonest commercial practices connected to both trademarks and passing off.³ Where others’ trademarks are displayed on the packaging of goods sold, the seller warrants that they have the right to use the trademarks, or else must disclaim [e.g. reject any claim to] such a right explicitly. Finally, section 9 prohibits the unauthorized use or words or graphics that imply a connection to or the approval of living people or the recently dead, as well as to the government.

Passing Off

Pritchard and Vogt write about passing off that it “arises when Party A uses without permission, Party B’s name, design or other trademark, or one so closely resembling it as to be mistaken for it and causes consumers to think that Party A’s product or service is actually that of Party B.”⁴ The essence of the tort is that the tortfeasor confuses consumers as to the origin of the goods or services.⁵ This tort and its Trade-marks Act codification apply neatly to the resveratrol scams and certain other scams marketed by those claiming to be Dr. Oz, WebMD and so on, but also to the “business opportunity” scams using names like Google Cash, Google Money Tree etc.⁶ Similarly, those scams may fall under section 8, which limits the use of trademarks to their owners or others authorized to use them.

Section 7

However, since this is a paper on manufactured consent scams in general, subsection 7 (e) carries greater interest. By using broad, general language prohibiting dishonest commercial representations (which Eldon limits to the “genus of acts prohibited by section[s] 7(a) to (d),” the Trade-marks Act potentially opens the door to liability for any misleading use of Trade-marks. This means that the “As seen on” claims and video footage of various shows used by virtually all the tangible-product scams can be targeted.

So far, there has been very little appellate-level jurisprudence on the application of 7(e) and only Trudel at the Supreme Court level. So I will limit myself to saying that, if the “genus” of section 7’s prohibited acts is construed liberally, 7(e) may expose the scammers to lawsuits with significant damage claims. These might come on behalf of the persons whose trademarks were used, and perhaps even to class action lawsuits by consumer protection groups for the damage caused to confused consumers.

Section 9

Finally, section 9 likely offers the clearest avenues for litigating against these scams. First, the CBC’s logo has been used on some of the weight-loss product ads.

Similarly, the Prime Minister’s likeness and government-issued cheques are featured in offers for “government grant kits.”

These practices together violate each of section 9’s subsections listed above. And second, the celebrities whose names, images and signatures have been used to promote manufactured consent scams likely have a claim under subsections 9 (k) and 9 (l).

Additionally, the related tort of wrongful appropriation of personality has been recognized in Canada.⁷ To succeed, a plaintiff must demonstrate that they were identifiable in the representations made⁷ and that their personality – and not just their activity (such as playing football)⁹ – was used in association with the product or service being promoted. It’s plausible that Oprah, Dr. Oz and – who knows? – potentially even the Prime Minister might make such claims.

[None of this purports to be legal advice; for that, speak to a lawyer.]

Footnotes

1. Online consumer complaint sites prove that people really believe they are buying products endorsed by Dr. Oz. “Resveratrol Complaints – stealing money from my bank account,” by “Salivini,” features this telling quotation:

“I mistakenly thought that a product connected to Dr. Oz’s name would have high professional standards, but I see that he is just like any other person trying to make a fast buck from some poor sap who actually believed that he was on the level.”

2. Trade-marks Act, R.S.C. 1985, c. T-13.

3 “An act of dishonesty within the meaning of section 7(e) of the Trade Marks Act which does not fall within the genus of acts prohibited by section 7(a) to (d), which does not amount to breach of an express or implied contract, or which does not constitute a tortious act, is not actionable.”
- Eldon Industries Inc. v. Reliable Toy Co., 1965 CarswellOnt 31, at 28. Accessed via Westlaw Canada at Canada.Westlaw.com.
Cited with approval by the Supreme Court of Canada in Trudel v. Clairol Inc., [1975] 2 S.C.R. 236. Also accessed via Westlaw Canada.

4. “Advertising and Marketing Law in Canada,” Brenda Pritchard and Susan Vogt, LexisNexis Butterworths, Markham, Ontario, Canada. Second Edition, 2006, at p 225.

5. “The law on this matter is designed to protect traders against that form of unfair competition which consists in acquiring for oneself, by means of false of misleading devices, the benefit of the reputation already achieved by rival traders. Normally the defendant seeks to acquire this benefit by passing off his goods as and for the goods of the plaintiff.”

- Salmond on the Law of Torts (17th Ed., 1977) at pp. 400-01, cited by Consumers Distributing Co. v. Seiko Time Canada Ltd., [1984] 1 S.C.R. 583 at para 23.

The case discusses at length that the confusion and damage to the goodwill this causes are essential to the tort. The following quotation at para 23 is emblematic.

“Consequently, the trial Judge concluded that, by marketing the bare watch without the other three elements, the appellant was creating confusion in the market place and damage to the goodwill, which the respondant had built on the sale of its complete or composite product through its extensive distribution and service network.”

6. Supra, note 1.

7. Krouse v. Chrysler Canada Ltd. 1973 CarswellOnt 884; Gould Estate v. Stoddart Publishing Co., 1998 CarswellOnt 1901; “The Law of Torts,” by Phillip Osborne, 2nd Ed., Irwin Law, Toronto: 2003, at chapter 4 recognizes the tort, too. This recognition in his book is cited with approval in Bass Clef Entertainments Ltd. v. HOB Concerts Canada Ltd. 2007 CarswellOnt 3101.

8. See Holdke v. Calgary Convention Centre Authority, 2000 CarswellAlta 523. The court rejected the plaintiff’s claims on the basis that the plaintiff was not identified in the ads aired and also on the basis of the [quite tenuous, imho] assertion by the judge that his appearance in the advertising for the Cowboy Festival did not serve to promote the Festival.

9. Krouse, supra note 7.

Gab Goldenberg posted this on behalf of DoneSEO.com, offering numerous SEO services

No related posts.

There can be several reasons why a search marketing professional would want to be “ghost-googling” (i.e. searching Google without Google to know you are searching it):

• He/She may want to see absolutely “fair” results (not influenced by his/her recorded browsing preferences, territory, etc);
• He/She may want to be served “non-targeted” Google ads;
• He/She may want the competitors to be unaware they are being watched (have you ever noticed any [site:yoursite.com] type of Google referrals? This is quite enough to suspect someone is after you).

So here are a few steps to take to ensure some preferred level of Google privacy:

[Btw, I do see the irony behind trying to make our sites visible to Google while getting invisible ourselves ]

1. Use Google Privacy Greasemonkey Scripts:

GooglePrivacy is a cool Greasemonkey script that is claimed to work the following way:

• It replaces all tracking cookies with faked data.
• It disables the script sending Google your browsing records:

Normally each link on a google search page has an onmousedown script that sends a request to their servers telling them what you clicked on, it’s an invasion of privacy and it slows down your connection.

Remove Google re-directs: I’ve listed three Greasemonkey scripts turning Google tracking re-directs within SERPs into direct link for privacy and usability purposes.

2. Configure Your FireFox Browser:

Try accessing this page to see how your browser is passing your referrer string. You can configure FireFox to hide your referrer string (hat tip to Distilled) by following these easy steps:

• In the Firefox address bar, type about:config
• In the “Filter” box, type “referer“
• Double click the line named ‘network.http.sendRefererHeader‘
• In the dialog box, enter 0 and click “OK“
• Click referer checking page to check that Firefox isn’t passing your referer string (make sure that the first line is blank).

3. Disable Google Web History

Obviously you are well aware of the fact that unless you opt out, Google will be saving your search and browsing history to “improve the search quality” and show you personalized results.

Web History uses the information from your web history or other information you provide us to improve your Google search experience, such as improving the quality of your search results and providing recommendations. In addition to enabling the Web History functionality, the information we collect when you use Web History may be shared among all of our services in order to provide you with a seamless experience and to improve the quality of our services.

You are free to pause the feature as well as remove items already stored.

Obviously, you can turn off personalization of search results by simply signing out of Google account.

4. Configure or Uninstall Google Toolbar

That’s never been a secret that Google is using its official toolbar statistics:

Any time you use the Google Toolbar to contact Google, such as by sending a search query to Google, the Toolbar sends standard, limited information including your machine’s IP address and one or more cookies. This data is retained in Google’s server logs and protected according to our general Privacy Policy.

There’s almost no definitive way to tell how much this influences the search results returned to you personally but to be on the safe side, you may want to block this leak too.

You are given the option to disable the user stats via Google Toolbar settings:

1. Go the Toolbar’s settings ( icon).
2. (Firefox) click the Search tab.
3. Deselect the “Send usage statistics to Google” checkbox.
4. Click Save.

Alternatively, you can just uninstall the toolbar. Here are a few addons for you to perform its most useful features:

1. SearchStatus (which displays Google PageRank), though it has been slower than the official toolbar;
2. And this post of mine lists two alternative addons that offer quick access to Google services (like Gmail, image search, etc).

5. Anything Else?

Did I miss anything? Add your tips in the comments!

Post imageby striatic

Related posts:

1. My Google’s Addiction : Sorry Guys, but I Do Love Google Search Recently it occurred to me that I not only use...
2. New Study by Reliable-SEO: Google Personalized Search Personalized search is one of the controversial Google’s babies:...
3. Tracking Google Keyword Position (SEJ) I have just posted another article at Search Engine...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

It is funny I’ve started a new project but haven’t shared it with my best friends – SEOsmarty readers (no, actually it is sad)…

From now on, apart from seeing me regularly on Search Engine Journal, you’ll be able to read my posts at DailySEOtip.com – a new blog I’ve started together with my boss and good friend Loren Baker.

The site will be featuring one fresh SEO tip daily. You are welcome to come along and comment (we DOfollow all links in the comments by the way). Besides, you can submit your daily tip and either I or Loren will publish it and link back to your site.

We will also be twittering SEO tips at DailySEO Twitter profile.

Related posts:

1. 6 Benefits of Guest Blogging + 9 Tips for Better Guest Blogging This is the second post in the series of guest...
2. Don’t Miss the Search & Social Spring Summit 2010 When I first saw Loren publish the photos of the...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Today in the morning I was pinged by one of my Facebook friends with some cute news: a start-up called Magpie (aff link) offers you to monetize your Twitter account and earn money for Tweeting the ads.

My instant reaction was “Nah…” The whole idea of earning money from friends sounds somewhat not good. But curiosity won, I went ahead and signed up. You can estimate how much you will be earning by clicking the “Start” tab.

So far I have no real data to share as I spread 0 Tweets and thus can’t see any statistics but here’s what the service looks like both from outside and inside:

What the service promises

• Magpie (aff link) promises to give you full control over your Tweets: you can set the ad frequency, stop it any time and even pre-approve each ad before it will be tweeted on your behalf.
• You can add a disclaimer before or after the advertisement text before the ad goes live to warn your friends that the Tweet is sponsored;
• Advertisements are served based on the person’s general networks (so the service appears to classify the whole Twitterati into groups by interests);
• You can spend the earned credits to advertise your own product or site (this one looks pretty cool by the way).
• You can also earn money for any new Advertiser who signs up through your personal referral link, you will earn a 30% commission of our transaction fees.
• Payment is made via PayPal as soon as you earn at least €50.00

Why I am in a doubt:

• Even with disclaimer and pre-approval, won’t this result in my following loss?
• CPM model: will those ads be ever clicked? Will they devalue Twitter: “in order to raise your revenue, all you need is to multiply your tweets or to increase your followers. And their site promotes these two facts for every low revenue account” (as my friend Rishi Lakhani points out);
• While the design is pretty sleek and clear, why would anyone trust the guys? Where are people I refer listed? How all my stats will look like?
• How is Twitter going to react? They have been expected to monetize themselves for a year now – will they bear with someone monetizing their network prior to them?

Anyway, I am curious to see how this will evolve. I definitely see the potential (for both parts: publishers and advertisers). I’ve never been paid for participating in social media communities and it might be a cool opportunity to combine business with pleasure.

So what do you think? Would you join? Would you pay for advertisements? Would you click the advertisements?

Related posts:

1. How to Create a Useful Twitter Retweet Bot Twitter can be used in various, almost countless ways. In...
2. Twitter Translator, Twitter Tickets, What’s More? I usually try to avoid posting here what is...
3. Search Cloudlet Adds Twitter Tag Clouds I recently shared on SEJ my latest favorite FireFox...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

The common delusion (under which I’ve also been for some time) is that you can use any image you find at Flickr as long as you link back to it. Well, this is wrong. Let’s try to figure all Flickr image license types to see which images you are allowed to post at your sites and blogs.

You are only allowed to use (not all) images under Creative Commons with appropriate license:

Attribution License

You are allowed to publish the image (even for commercial use) and modify it (e.g. crop, resize, etc) as long as you link back to the author;

Attribution-NoDerivs License

Publish the image (even for commercial use) but don’t modify it and link back to the author;

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License

No commercial use is allowed.

Attribution-ShareAlike License

You can publish the image (even for commercial use) as long as you link back to the author and to the license

Note: in all the above cases, when linking back to the author’s profile, you can use ‘nofollow’ attribute.

What is fair use?

Really, journalists and bloggers can take advantage of fair use that allows them to use any web content as long as they credit the original creator. Fair use would apply if you are making journalistic commentary on a particular image

But this fair use does not refer to the cases when you use images for decorating purposes.

How to search for images with appropriate license?

• Flickr built-in search engine;
• Creative Commons search;
• Compfight: the service lets you set the Creative Commons (’Off’, ‘Commercial’, ‘All’);
• FlickrStorm allows to search by keyword and /or by Creative Commons. The tool also has a handy flash-based interface:

Image credit: fair use classroom poster draft by tvol

Related posts:

1. How To Optimize Images For Search Engines, Social Media and People Optimize your images for search engines: Keywords in alt...
2. How to Watermark Your Images and PDF Files for Brand Awareness and Copyright Protection Having a couple of hours of free time on the...
3. 6 Benefits of Guest Blogging + 9 Tips for Better Guest Blogging This is the second post in the series of guest...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Ok, my blog is back! I have to apologize for being so dumb that the hosting transfer took me about a week! But please bare with me: I have reasons (well, one reason to be precise) to be busy and overwhelmed and… Alright, I guess that’s enough for excuses – I just mean to say I am sorry and I am so excited to see my blog back!

Happy Holidays to all of you!!! This has been an exciting year for me! It deserves to end with a huge party.

Image credits: I’m so happy!

Related posts:

1. Huge! Search & Social + 10e20 Merge = BlueGlass Interactive Now, this is a huge day and exciting news! Search...
2. My One Month Of Blogging and SMM Results Ok, I am a bit late to New Year’s...
3. Search Within a Search – How This Could Mean Bad News for Your Site This post is courtesy of my fellow Mozzer – Rishil...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Guest posting (contributing to other blogs with the link back – usually in the “About the author” section) is the great way to:

• build backlinks;
• attract audience (probably interested in neighboring niches);
• build relationships with other bloggers, etc

I’ve been recently involved in a number of guest posts throughout different-niche blogs and was struck by some common unethical (as I see it) behavior:

• My posts were edited (without even letting me know): links deleted and/or nofollowed;
• [even more irritating] The post was published untouched and edited a few days later (probably for me to never take notice of that);
• I was never replied back after the post had been received and even published (I found out about the published post from referrals).

I’ve been a displeased (to make it sound softer) by this behavior as I always considered a guest post to still be my property: a blogger should either refuse to publish overall or publish it as it is.

But probably I am wrong? Am I granting the editing rights when sending the guest post to the blogger and allowing to publish it at his blog?

Related posts:

1. The 7 Reasons Every Blogger Should Be Guest Posting FYI: One year after this post was published, we decided...
2. 6 Benefits of Guest Blogging + 9 Tips for Better Guest Blogging This is the second post in the series of guest...
3. Announcing MyBlogGuest: Community of Guest Bloggers It’s no secret I believe in guest blogging as one...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.