Today’s blog post came to mind after reading about a new social networking site that is similar to Digg. I went to the site thinkng I might find something fresh and new but all I found was a copycat and clone site that exhibited my #1 most hated thing on the internet. Immediately I was stricken with the urge to blog about my experience but lately I’ve been following a tip from ProBlogger Darren Rowse, Planning Your Posting Schedule. In particular, I’ve been resisting the tempation for impulse blogging, instead choosing to spend a little more time crafting a readable, original post with a carefully chosen title that will draw more readers. Generally speaking, I’ve noticed an increase in readership as well as conversions on my affiliate programs since I’ve been following the technique of writing blog posts as if I were writing articles for publication in a newspaper or magazine. Considering the fact I spent several years as the Editor of a Travel magazine, it should be second nature to me. However, more often than not, bloggers are known for "quantity over quality". Whenever I ponder the concept of quality vs. quantity, I remember reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert M. Pirsig in which he explores the "Metaphysics of quality".
Now that I’ve given a grandiose introduction into todays meditations, without further ado, here the Top 10 Things I Hate at the Moment.
10. Inline text ads such as the ones from AdBrite, Vibrant Media or Kontera that place advertising links on your content. Link navigation is one of the most important ascpect of internet use and disguising ads as hyperlinks is just lame. I personally blacklist and never return to sites that use them.
09. Blogs with “nofollow” settings on the comments. This is a sure way to stop me from subscribing to a blog because if the blogger is more concerned with milking their PageRank by using “nofollow” on their comments, then I don’t want to conribute. Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger site comes to mind as one such blog that exists only to milk even though Google Guru Matt Cutts has taken the oposite approach. (note: I used “nofollow” on the link to Darren’s blog above, just like I do to Wikipedia links)
08. Blogs that offer a link for scratching their backs. If you read my John Chow article, you’ll know about his offer to remove the “nofollow” on comments for anybody who paid him $10 per month. Once again, ProBlogger comes to mind with his encouraging readers to comment with the offer of giving a backlink to the most active commentors on his blog. Talk about encouraging spam comments.
07. Blogs that offer to “review” your website or blog for a fee. This is just plain stupid crass commercialism. Google already cracked the whip on selling text links to pass PageRank, unfortunately they stated “natural links shoud come from editorial reviews”, which only opened another can of worms for sleazy marketers to fish for newbies wallets.
06. ClickBank and PayDotCom E-Book sales pages. One wouldu think these “savvy” internet marketers would finally come up with new designs and implementations for selling their crummy E-Book products. Most of these troglodytes crawled out of MLM world where evolution means writing a new sales pitch using reworded copy.
05. Viral Marketing gurus who think you want to receive email from them every day. The Death of Adsense comes to mind on this one. I’m still recieveing spam email from the scummy marketer behind DoA, Scott Boulch, who still has yet to reveal any secrets to increasing income although in every spam email email is full of great sounding “lead in” hype.
04. Moneymaker blogs hosted on free blog hosting services. If you can’t afford $10 for a domain name ($2.99 got a .info domainthrough goDaddy) and a few dollars per month for hosting your blog, obviosuly there’s nothing there’s nothing worth reading on your blog. When I search Technorati for topics and I click into a Blogger hosted blog, I almost always immediately click the back button on my browser.
03. Twitter.com and other “social retard” sites that claim they are “social networking” but in reality it’s just a bunch of losers with nothing better to do with their spare time when they’re not watching YouTube videos or playing on MySpace. I’m sorry, but Twitter is just a stupid time-wasting concept.
02. Comment spammers. I will never understand why some idiots think that spamming your blog comments with ads for pharmecuticals or pornography sites will actually ever get posted. Not only are these morons wasting their own time, they’re wasting your time with their stupidity.
01. The DriveCleaner popup that resizes your browser window and pops up a windows that says your computer is infected. This one is the top thing I hate and the reason for todays post. I visited the digg-esque site shoutwire.com and was greeted by a drivecleaner popup. Needless to say I will not be visiting shoutwire or using their services any time soon.
Well, there you it. Just a short list of my peeves with the internet and blogging community. If anybody would care to add some more annoyances and nuisances to this list, feel free to use the comment form. This blog doesn’t use the “nofollow” tag on comments, instead I moderate which comments are useful or helpful in the same manner as Matt Cutts.
Oh, and if you’re wondering about the clever little graphic that’s accompanying this post, it’s a combo from two movies I particularly like. The first is a movie called 10 Things I Hate About You which is a loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew set in a modern American high school. The second image is from one of my all time favorite movies Hedwig and the Angry Inch which is about a fictional rock and roll band fronted by an East German transgendertransgender singer. It’s classic stuff !!!
Footnotes and External Links:
Official Hedwig and the Angry Inch site http://www.get-hed.com/
Wiki on Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
10 Responses to 'Things I Hate (at the Moment)'
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Nice… seems a lot of people have pet peeves…
I hate most of the things you said too. But remember, most people don’t want to hear all the things you hate, but instead love. ;)
awwww, how sweet. I’ll make sure to post the “10 Things I Love” next. It’s going to be hard to narrow it down because there’s so much more good stuff out there on the internet than bad stuff. Maybe I might do “10 Things I Love” and then my “10 Favorite Bloggers” to double the pleasure !!
Well thats what guys like Darren Rowe do, they try to make everyone feel warm and fuzzy. Although I personally can’t stand the guy, he is annoying, I want the truth sometimes, not everything all with rose colored glasses.
posting about something negative?!. Just a little people who’s want tell about it. Almost of people wanna say about somethings their’s love. btw, it’s very interesting!. good posting…
We, at ShoutWire, share your disgust for the redirect and have removed it from our page. It was an unfortunate byproduct of one of our banners. We apologize for any inconvenience’s.
Thanks for replying, I’ll have to come back and check your site out. It looked really cool and I was excited about using it. I’ll check it out more in depth and write a review about it.
btw, do you know which affiliate program pops up that Drivecleaner thing? My friend mike has a site with several affiliate programs on it and one of them is popping up the Driveceaner and he can’t figure out which one. The bad part is that it doesn’t pop uo immediately, it pops up after your on the page for a minute or two. A lot of us websurfers who use Firefox tend to open a site we want to check out later in a new tab and those Drivecleaner ads really stink if you have that habit.
Hi, Great list. We have very similar hates. I especially couldn’t stand the John Chow - write a review and I’ll link to you thing. I think a lot of people didn’t realise that he was benefiting most having the links to his main keyphrase, whilst the link he was giving back didn’t contain the reviewers keyphrase.
I was wondering about the no follow thing. My blog was created from a premade theme. Is there a way that I can tell if it had the “nofollow” tags built in, and if so, how can I get rid of them?
I don’t want to try it without asking someone first as I’ve already made a mess of my blog several times trying to guess, or follow vague instructions. Thanks.
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