One man's trash is another sucker's lollipop
Someone said something or other about John Chow which led me to this post at his site titled "One Man's Junk is Another Man's Treasure." I never read blogs like John Chow dot com so until now I never knew that such blog entries existed. If you haven't taken the moment to go and read it, I'll explain it in short.
John Chow (dot com mogul extraordinaire) came back from a conference with a crappy party favor that amounted to a fountain pen and a 128 Mb usb drive. Being the opportunistic businessman that he is, he took this opportunity to throw a contest (exclamation point) for all of his wonderful, loyal, eat-crumbs-from-the-master's-table readers. The contest? Everyone who has or does add his blog as one of their favorites on Technorati.com will enter a pool to be randomly selected to win the junk. Fair? Yes. Lame? Definitely.
You may not know much about Technorati, but it's basically the authority on ranking blogs around the world. They have two criteria: most links and most favorited by users. The latter is the one that really counts; it takes a lot to get a user to call your blog one of their favorites. In that vein, buying "favorites" from your users is really uncool. Buying favorites from your users with a lame contest, one for which the prize isn't worth more than $10, is even worse. Let me tell you, I go to career fairs every semester and I get junk like fountain pens and usb drives all the time. If it's that easy to get people to favorite your blog on Technorati, I should have thrown a hundred contests like that long ago.
Better yet, when I attend the next career fair this spring I'm going to collect bags of free junk from companies and throw a thousand little contests of my own. I won't do anything lame like bribe my readers into doing something that they should do purely out of their own will though… I'll just give them away to anyone and everyone. You just have to visit me to pick them up. Sorry if that complicates things.
Anyway, back to the point at hand. I don't know if John Chow's readers are saps or smarties, but I really hope they know better than to follow along with such a lame scheme for bribing what essentially amounts to a huge boost in supposed "user approval" for his blog. To all 300-something of my readers out in RSS land reading this entry, I just wanted to let you know: I heart you and I would never try to buy your approval. If you like my blog, I want that to be your choice, and if you don't like my blog, then please, pretend to like it. Seriously.
p.s: Please excuse my inability to write a serious blog entry without injecting my own sarcasm. I try hard not to, but then sarcasm just ends up all over the place anyway.
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While at it, John also exchanges a linkback for a full out review about his blog.
He keeps on talking about the imporance of linkbacks, appealing to SEO interested readers… though I don't think that most realize that his blog is just PR4 as of current update.
Actually, the fountain pen and a 128MB flash drive is just the beginning. I have a lot more stuff to "bribe" my readers with. He he he
Thanks for visiting.
Hi Christian
social media optimization, (SMO)
if someone would like to be a webdeveloper or a webdesigner or a man who knows more than a little bit about internet marketing, he has to know something about (SMO).
Maybe you are laughing, maybe you shake your head - but it is reality.
15000Dollar for a place on the homepage from digg.com or something like this of John. ==>marketing is sometimes weird, but it is.
You may think John Chow is a little bit crazy
- maybe - but I'm sure he makes money 
But Christian, I'm reading your articles without a present from you
Monika
Monika: I get it. I'm not that mad at John Chow; he's being unethical but also clever. It's the readers that get me, the ones that give away favorites (which are very valuable) for junk like flash drives.
Maybe one day I'll outdo him by giving away Disney vacations, but if I'm ever that rich I think I won't care about my Technorati ranking anymore.
Hi Christian
<>
laughing
Maybe
Every year is the "Wiener Opern Ball", "the" greatest Event at Vienna and Europe. Federal president is the lowest rank of this event
Mr.MakeMoney the highest;)
Since ten years one of the richest master builder from Austria pay a lot of money to get one of the prominent women performer of the world in his loge.
Everyone is buyable: the one with a stick, the other with 1million,
I don't rent links from webdesign-in.de - but I'm plain (honest, ..?) if someone would pay me more than 1ooooooEuros I will do it
webdesign-in.de is in German Language, technorati is not my preferred search engine, but to be in the top of google, make me proud where is the 'get red' smilie
regards
Monika