Tech It Like A Man!

Apparently Google has made something else that actually works, and works quite well. I am not talking about Chrome (that thing is at least 35% FAIL). I am talking about their new video and voice chat.  A friend of mine who blogs The Black Tech Report has tried it himself and finished it out with a rave review. Make sure you go and read up about the new flavor of Google.

The official release to the public won’t be until January. It’s an application that brings together the functionality of social networking. Instead of just between friends, advertisers can join in the fun. They are able to see blogger’s profiles without even logging in. Bloggers have friends lists, profiles for each of their blogs, and a way for you to see the posts they place on their blogs, sponsored and not.

It’s very web 2.0! You can find out even more from the people who saw it first. Check out Colleen’s post about what SocialSpark entails.

Technorati Tags: SocialSpark

PayPerPost (IZEA) Announces SocialSpark
The cat is out of the bag. In just a few more minutes this knowlege will hit the blogosphere proper. I just wanted you all to get a heads up beforehand. SocialSpark aims to change the world of blog advertising FOREVER. If you want to see it go live, check out the live feed from Vegas.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: payperpost, socialspark, socialnetworking, marketing, seo, sem

The Bloggers Choice Awards owned and started by the PayPerPost crew has made a few changes of late. Here is the outlined comment from the post that started it all on Pointless Drivel… an official statement by Jamie a coder at PPP:

on April 24, 2007 at 4:24 pm

…just a couple replies and I’ll get back to coding…

1. All of the PayPerPost employee votes have been removed from the site. It didn’t change any of the leader-boards, but we were happy to do it because we didn’t want to be responsible for any kind of skew in the votes.

2. The blog images are pulled directly from Alexa’s cache, which they update every few months (more or less often depending on your Alexa score). Have them (Alexa) update your image and we’ll be happy to grab the latest.

3. The user who submits the original blog nomination gets tagged in every category the site is nominated for. So a PPP employee nominated Dooce for Hottest Mommy Blogger and Best Blog of All Time, but someone else nominated her for a couple of other categories later on. Working on a fix for that little quirk.

4. We’ve explained this several times, but PPP nominations will not be removed because a nomination does not equal a vote. The blogs we nominated are just ones we (and thousands of others) read on a regular basis. I can guarantee you they would have been nominated eventually anyway, and it is unfair to ban them from the contest for that reason. There are over 4800 blogs in the system, a handful of which were used to populate the site before it launched. Keep in mind the number 1 blog on the site was nominated after the launch, not by a PPP employee.

5. The outcome is not decided by us. It’s decided by YOU.

I guess complaining will evoke change within a flawed system after all. Will it be enough to legitimize the contest in the eyes of bloggers? I don’t really think so… scroll down on the original post and see what Jimi said about the contest. I have to agree with him. It’s the Internet, people. When has anything been fair here?

Technorati Tags: Bloggers Choice Awards, PayPerPost, bloggers

It seems that there are a few people who are up in arms about some of the practices of those running the Blogger’s Choice Awards. One blogger has been asking the question : Whats the Big Deal? Another blogger states that the big deal is the preferential treatment that many PayPerPost posties believe certain bloggers have within the system. The fact that some bloggers were given advance notice of the BCA website and were able to test out the system by nominating and voting for different blogs only validates the suspicions as facts, in some people’s opinions. These votes and nominations are in question as well. There is the belief that all the votes and nominations made before the official launch of the site should be stricken from the records. Another blogger also points out that PPP owns the Blogger’s Choice Awards, a fact that is now under scrutiny.

Others, including Ted (the owner of PayPerPost) believe that one day’s notice to very few people is not worth noting either way. Those bloggers who are on the other side of this coin believe that no ill was done and there is no reason that these nominations should not stand. They contend that the votes and nominations would have been going through the system on the official date of the launch anyway, so what’s the difference? Here is PPP’s official statement about that and other controversy surrounding the awards. The controversy was also brought up in the town meeting today and Ted said:

i don’t see any problem with that. a vote is a vote. one day doesn’t change that

What do you all think of the situation?

Technorati Tags: Blogger’s Choice Awards, PayPerPost, controversy