There’s a little brouhaha brewing on the blogosphere with bloggers Duncan Riley and the folks over at Mashable calling out John Reese for advocating Twitter as a branding/promotion mechanism to aid their marketing efforts.
So what do the bloggers think about Jason Calancanis’ twitter posts that he has 9,000 twitter followers?
Is he “gaming” twitter?
I would think that since Jason’s post is appearing in their “related posts” widget, it’s an implicit show of support for the post.
And correct me if I’m wrong, but if you’re following thousands of your followers, I’m pretty sure you’re not reading EVERY update.
And if you’re not reading EVERY update, isn’t that insincere to follow them in the first place?
But back to John Reese “breaking” twitter.
Blaming John for the abuse of twitter is like saying handguns are responsible for killing people.
Last time I checked, people were responsible for killing people. Twitter is just a tool.
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On another point, I think John is wrong when he calls the 2 bloggers “journalists”.
Journalists reporting news create content based on facts and attempt to present a balanced perspective.
At best, the reply pieces are opinion/editorial pieces, which give you license to go outside editorial objectively and present a wholly subjective view.
I’m not the greatest fan of John’s other project, BlogRush, as you might tell from my previous posts. It’s just a tool, a piece of technology, not any kind of miracle cure by any stretch of the imagination.
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I don’t think John’s tactics are going to break twitter, but there’s certainly a lot of FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) being sowed on the blogosphere.
If 2006 was the year of adsense publishing and squidoo lenses, and 2007 is shaping up for PPC Super Affiliates, 2008 could see viral parody videos take off in a big way.
On a number of forums and blogs like i am jack’s “The Three Big Problems With BlogRush“, there’s concern that “syndication credits” (the social currency earned and used to drive traffic) in John Reese’s BlogRush network is outpacing the rate at which they can be used. Is there a bubble building?
A bubble can develop when the supply outpaces the supply. For example, if a banana republic cranks their printing presses and floods the market with money, it causes hyper inflation, that burger which cost $5 before, might cost $100 now (due to the drop in the value of money). It leads to a crash in the economy.
There’ve been a number of bubbles in history, from the Tulip bubble (where people speculated in tulips), a run on semiconductors, real estate, and more recently the dotcoms in 2000. Is BR headed for the same?
For one, I hardly think a widget is going to have the same level of social impact as the dotcoms. So please drop the doomsday scenarios already.
Secondly, let’s look at the mechanics of the system.
You earn a “syndication credit” (which you can trade for a reciprocal link display on someone else’s blog).
Each time a blogrush widget is displayed, it (more…)
The veteran Internet Marketer known as John Reese has recently launched BlogRush, a blog-specific web2.0 widget which syndicates blog publicity across it’s network. It’s raised some debate among a number of bloggers and more importantly, how effective is it?
The idea is that each BlogRush widget displayed earns you a syndication credit, which in turn earns you a reciprocal ‘widget view’ on another blog within your category. As far as I’m aware, traffic is NOT guaranteed. You’d still need to put some effort to come up with a great headline and quality content.
Jim’s point about low traffic blogs not benefitting from the network (which functions as a type of exchange) is certainly valid (and likely not to get much traffic)…Unless (more…)
