Editorial & Opinion
« Older Entries |We Are All Prostitutes - Everyone Has Their Price
[ Add A Comment ]Posted on August 23, 2010 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Monday, August 23rd, 2010And ours is pretty low. Learn how you can peddle influence and curry favor with Dissociated Press for as little as five dollars.
 This is not a prostitute. This is a Hooker. |
We talk a lot about the demise of journalistic integrity here on Dissociated Press. We in fact probably contribute to it daily with our shoddy writing, weak fact checking, re-purposing of content, and lack of an actual editor. In spite of our concern about this issue, that doesn’t mean we don’t like making money, which is why we’re launching a funding drive. In the interest of transparency and serving the public good, we’ve created some donor levels so that you can know exactly where your donations are going, and feel good about them. This whole scenario could of course have been avoided if more people would show support for our sponsors by clicking on their links once in awhile, or buying the amazing things we recommend on Amazon
, but no. Our content is our gift to the world that didn’t ask for it. Unfortunately, as our traffic grows, our hosting company’s bill is their gift to us. Learn below how easy it would be to rent, own, or pwn us. Read the rest of this entry »
Righthaven LLC: Suing Bloggers For Fun & Profit
[ Add A Comment ]Posted on August 19, 2010 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Thursday, August 19th, 2010Although the music and film industries seem to have eased up on suing as a business model, an opportunistic lawyer has filled the gap by doing the same for online news.
 Mickey Isn’t The Only One Shackled By Copyright Law Abuse |
Sometimes I wonder if poor Sonny Bono ran himself into a tree while skiing on purpose, to punish himself for his part in helping drive forward the endless onslaught of frivolous and abusive lawsuits and copyright trolling of the past decade or so. We’ve touched on issues relating to this before, mostly in reference to the RIAA or MPAA, but it appears there’s a new copybully on the block, and he’s here to save the world from all the money-grubbing bloggers that are apparently solely responsible for the continued demise of the news industry, with their felonious linking and article-citing practices. That Wired article just linked to sums up the story pretty well, but if you want to keep up to speed, visit RighthavenLawsuits.com, which is NOT the website of Righthaven LLC, but rather a site set up to track the insane number of lawsuits being served up by these greedy bastards. I say “greedy”, because the main guy behind this all has stated publicly that he’s doing it primarily for profit, and I say “bastard” because I think anyone could tell by looking at the bloated, smug, self-satisfied jerk in this photo that he is one. Interestingly, Righthaven doesn’t seem to have a site themselves, unless they’ve sued into oblivion everyone with a link to it. If you want to be sure you avoid any of the many news organizations being represented in these actions, a list of Stephens Media Newspapers can be found here, and Clayton Cramer’s Blog has a simple Firefox-based solution here. And to “avoid their wrath”, see this blog post by Las Vegas trademark and intellectual property attorney Ryan Gile.
Why 7 Year Old Julie Murphy Should Go To Jail
[ Add A Comment ]Posted on August 7, 2010 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Saturday, August 7th, 2010Lemonade stands have recently become an excellent symbol for everything that’s wrong with America.
Back in July, Terry Savage of the Chicago Sun-Times posted this amusing piece about little girls that were (brace yourself) GIVING AWAY lemonade and candy bars at their lemonade stand in some unidentified “upscale neighborhood”. The gist of what he was saying was summed up well in the sidebar of the piece, which read: “Three girls giving away free lemonade isn’t cute, it’s indicative of the lack of economic responsibility we’re passing on to future generations“. Which I personally disagreed with in many ways; if these were children of today’s nouveau riche who have little sense of how their wealth obligates them to a certain amount social responsibility and leadership-by-example, then the kids were actually teaching their ignorant yuppy parents a lesson in sharing your excess for the good of the community that helped make you wealthy. There’s nothing wrong with being rich, but historically in America, those who have possessed the most enduring wealth have always understood the importance of giving back some of the prosperity they enjoy. All of which may lead you to believe that I’m some sort of socialist hippy tree hugger that would support the recent goings on in Portland, Oregon, in which the local health department shut down poor little 7-year-old Julie Murphy’s lemonade stand (sending her home crying), because it was operating without proper permits. Well, Oregon being Oregon, the public outcry forced the health department to reverse their decision, and now we have former accused criminal Murphy saying she’s not bitter about the whole thing. Not bitter? This is like Karl Rove saying he’s not bitter about the failed subpoenas against him when he hid behind executive privilege in the Bush era. No, I think Julie Murphy and her mom should go to jail. They were not only violating public health laws, there’s a good chance they were violating child labor laws as well. Who knows what - if anything - little Julie Murphy was getting paid, or if appropriate taxes were being levied against the lemonade stand’s gross revenue or the staff’s income. And the local health department bowing to public sentiment is yet another example of what’s wrong with America today. Good governing is based on reasoned public discourse and letting knowledgeable leaders present sensible options to the public to vote on, not knee-jerk regulatory reactions to public sentiment. If you don’t already doubt the wisdom of the crowd theory, just ponder American Idol, YouTube, MySpace, Yahoo Answers, or read this piece by Fark.com’s creator to see where this kind of “wisdom” takes us. Letting these lawbreakers continue to operate unregulated sets a horrible precedent. Soon you’ll have companies like British Petroleum setting up oil rigs without proper permits, manning them with children, and claiming that it was the kids’ idea and that they saw nothing wrong with paying children the several hundred dollars a day a typical rig worker gets paid. Read the rest of this entry »
How To Not Get Rich Developing A Web Site
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on June 25, 2010 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Friday, June 25th, 2010I’ll be back soon to let you know if my failure succeeds.
After two years of writing daily articles, I’m taking a little break to finish some other projects (a book and a small startup, among other things) and working on a long overdue redesign of Dissociated Press. While I do so, I thought I’d share some thoughts about how NOT to create, develop, and maintain a site. We’ll be back with fresh daily linkage and pithy commentary sometime soon, perhaps on a new domain.
How To Not Get Rich Developing A Web Site
1.) Don’t Get Too Clever With The Brand
When you’re naming a media property, you want something clever and catchy, but not too clever. While “Dissociated Press” is indeed a kind of clever name, it in fact fails six ways to Sunday. One of the more amusing things I learned over time was that the people who were most likely to appreciate the name were also the most likely to remember it incorrectly, constantly changing “dissociated” to “disassociated”. For the record, most dictionaries list the latter as an alternate form. But that’s irrelevant. The name is hard to remember, and can’t be turned into a verb like “googling” or “twittering” or otherwise be repurposed easily. And I honestly had no idea what “dp” meant to a lot of people. Yikes.
2.) Stay “White Hat” With The SEO
Early on I generated remarkable traffic and reasonable site revenue with some slightly sketchy search engine strategies. The downside? The site seemed to get “sandboxed” for a while, and has never recaptured the same same volume of visitors. This is actually a no-brainer, but I wanted to see the results of this kind of strategy firsthand. If you’re interested, the site went from zero visitors on June 11, 2008 to nearly 200,000 page views by December of the same year. And then promptly disappeared almost completely from all three major search engines. As of this writing, there are about 30,000 page views monthly, and although that has been increasing, it is increasing verrrrry slowly.
3.) Alternately, Don’t Rely Entirely On Organic Search Traffic
On the other hand, unless your site has very narrowly focused content, and some likelihood of high quality inbound links, don’t rely on simply coding and keywording the site well. Get out there and promote it in every way imaginable. If you don’t use sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, or other sharing sites, tap into your friends who do. Or solicit links from sites that rank for content related to yours. I have done neither, and I’m seeing the lackluster results of relying solely on organic search results.
4.) Use The Usability Knowledge That You Possess
When creating the original layout for the site, I did something remarkably stupid, in spite of knowing better. And paid for it. Or rather didn’t get paid because of it. The original design I used for almost two years presented daily posts in different categories on the front page. The newest article was always at the top, under a heading that said “Featured Today”, but the articles were arranged vertically, so people CONSTANTLY assumed that the site wasn’t updated daily, because they simply assumed the site was a “blog” with posts descending down the page in date order. A painful reminder of the fact that PEOPLE SEE WHAT THEY WANT AND EXPECT TO SEE, not what’s right in front of them. In a decade of web development, I’ve watched people constantly do things like clicking on the word they want to be a link, in spite of it clearly not being a link. And yet I want to believe that “the user” is not a numbnut. Accept it. The user is a numbnut.
5.) Polite Placement of Ad Content?
In the original design, I placed almost all the ad content in sidebars, as a courtesy to the user. I assumed people would occasionally click on ads as a courtesy. HAHAHAHAHA! That’s really, really stupid. I won’t resort to popups that make you click ads by accident or other fishy methods like those annoying “hover ads” that many sites torture us with, but POLITE AD PLACEMENT? What does that even mean? Stick ‘em in there baby, and use the heatmap. You’ll notice that the current layout uses the maximum allowable AdSense ads, placed in standard hotspots.
6.) Fresh Quality Content vs Promotion & Marketing
If you’re working alone, and are forced to make a decision between consistently fresh quality content and marketing, maintain a balance, and favor the marketing a little. The truth is that unless you have marketed the site and know that you have regular visitors from a specific source, your search engine traffic will comprise the bulk of your visitors, and they will have NO IDEA whether you update daily, and won’t care. Spend six months building up some quality content, then MARKET, MARKET, MARKET. When you get the traffic up to a respectable volume, you’ll actually be generating enough revenue that you can afford to write every day. Until then you’re just an underpaid writer, and there’s nothing dumber than being independently broke. I’m kind of an expert on that topic. Trust me.
7.) Quit If It’s Failing
Take the advice of people like Seth Godin and quit when it makes sense
Here are Jimmy Wales’ theories of failure:
Fail faster. If a project is doomed, shut it down quickly.
Don’t tie your ego to any one project. If it stumbles, you’ll be unable to move forward.
Real entrepreneurs fail.
Fail a lot. But enjoy yourself along the way.
If you handle these things well, “you will succeed.”
Dissociated Press Seeks Partners & Contributors
[ Add A Comment ]Posted on June 11, 2010 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Friday, June 11th, 2010If you’re a writer, web marketer, or Wordpress whiz, drop us a line.
I originally launched Dissociated Press in June, 2008 merely as a way to force myself to write each day. I wanted to do something more like a magazine than a blog, so set the site up with specific magazine-like categories. At various times over the last two years, writer friends have said they’d start contributing, but never did. So I kept plodding along, and the site traffic grew, but not to a number of page views that generates significant revenue. With a busy schedule, I had to choose between fresh daily content and marketing, and opted for the former. Unfortunately, the organic search traffic (as one might expect) hasn’t provided quite the oomph I need to keep this up, so I’m making the tough decision to make one last stab at soliciting contributors or partners, or moving on to other projects. I’m almost finished with a book, and am also working on a small startup, among other things. If you’re a writer, web marketer, or Wordpress whiz, drop me a line and we can discuss possibilities.