Paul Carr has just released his recent book, “Bringing Nothing to the Party”, for free, online.  Wanna download the book?

Is this great PR?  Of course, people who wouldn’t buy or haven’t heard of Paul’s book can now access his ideas.  Is this link-bait?  Of course, Paul’s getting thousands of links to PaulCarr.com or the TC article.  Don’t think that Paul’s decision is anything but a PR move, but that doesn’t change the outcome.  Think of Leo Babatua, of ZenHabits.net.  Leo has released all rights and claims for copyright to all his work.  His calculation is that people that want to buy his work will pay for it and people who want to steal his content weren’t going to pay for it anyway.

So, I’m a geek.  I:

• Use RSS. A lot.
• I know what PubSubHubBub is.
• I know how to use Posterous.
• I can tell you things about Google, the interwebs, Web 2.0, and computers that you absolutely don’t care about.
• Do a lot of other geeky things that you probably don’t understand.  Like read XKCD.  And I get the hover over punchlines.

Needless to say, being this plugged in is overwhelming.  So I’ve started to ween myself from my technology addiction.  Now, I’m not quitting blogging or going to stop being a geek.  It’d be too hard to disappoint my 2 readers.  (Love you Mom! Hell, who am I kidding, mom doesn’t use RSS.)  Here’s what I did to free my life a bit.

First, I went into Google Reader and deleted about 1400 feeds.  I know that sounds like a lot, but most of them were for Craigslist.org site searches.  I used a site called Crazedlist.org to create a OPML file of searches, then edited the file to convert it to feeds, not searches, and then imported to Reader.  That was probably 1300 of the feeds.  The other ones I deleted because, according to Google Reader, I don’t read them.  Now, I’m taking a firm stance on new feeds.  If a feed republishes or syndicates feeds from other sites, I delete it.  Now, for breaking news, that’s alright.  I understand folks want to be the first to publish.  I get it.  But, and this is especially true in my Web 2.0 feeds, I notice about a day or two lag between the first mention of a story and the time someone else republishes the same story.  If the second publisher contributes something amazing to the article, that’s great, I don’t delete.  If the post is a simple “I found this great article at LifeHacker.org” then that’s ok too, because it’s clear that you’re sending traffic to an article you like.  However, if you are unoriginal and just rehash the existing article, you’re done.  I’ve been guilty of this before, so it’s not a one strike and you’re out thing, but if you have a pattern of republishing content, it’s not going to work out.

Last night, I spent two hours filtering through my Gmail trash folder.  I unsubscribed to 42 email lists.  And that’s just based on emails I’ve received since the beginning of November.

I was worried that I’d feel left out.  Here’s the amazing news.  Nothing important has happened since I deleted all this noise from my email account and Google Reader.  Nothing.  Period.

Coming soon: a Rant against professional internet marketers and bloggers.  Stay tuned.

When I got up this morning, I noticed quite a few new emails marked read in my Gmail.  I’m pretty anal about changing passwords and using non-dictionary words to prevent hacking, but I pretty much freaked out.

I checked my Gmail logs and noticed IMAP access at 1am and again at 7am.  So I changed my password, started checking other Gmail accounts for breeches, checking for deleted or forwarded emails, checked my settings tabs to make sure no one has forwarded my emails offsite, etc.

I found no other evidence of a breech.  Thanks to TechCrunch and LifeHacker for the  articles about the bug, not a breech.

I’m not obsessed with PageRank.  I really enjoy new visitors to my website and I want them to feel comfortable trusting my content.  I also want my customers to believe in my abilities and my advice.  However, most visitors don’t really care about the PR of my site.  There are numerous high value, low PR sites out there, so I’m not that concerned.  Seriously, for a few years John Chow wasn’t allowed in the Google index and didn’t have a PR at all.

Now, since I don’ t play the PageRank game, I’ve never been focused on gaining rank or feared losing it.  Until today, my site was a PR2.  Nothing to write home about, but a respectable PR for a site that’s not concerned about it.  I have a SEO toolbar that tracks PR, links, etc and frequently use it on other sites.  This morning, I noticed that my PR had dropped to 1.  Now, PR2 isn’t amazing to start with so it’s not a huge problem, but it is a 50% decrease in PR.

I started thinking about what could have caused this…and I quickly came back to DoFollow.  If you’re new here, I eliminated the NoFollow tag in my comments section a month ago.  Of course, I had some spam issues to start, you can read about spam on DoFollow sites, but overall, it’s been a good decision.  I’ve seen more traffic, more comments, more feed subscribers, and more meaningful interaction on my site.

Of course, most of these visitors arrive out of self interest, i.e. getting a dofollow link to their site.  But don’t most people comment or visit sites out of self interest?  Even on NoFollow blogs, people leave comments to drive traffic to their site.  Some of my favorite sites drive quite a bit of traffic to my site because I comment on their articles frequently.

So, at the end of the day, I think my site probably got hit by Google because I’m giving away DoFollow links.  Sucks for me, I guess, but I’m not going to loose too much sleep over the situation.  I guess if they remove my site from their index, I’ll have to change something up, since it defeats the purpose of having a website if folks can’t find the site.  But, if my punishment for helping create a more open web is a PR hit, I’ll take it.

I was just doing a bit of housekeeping and noticed that my RSS and email subscriber count has been increasing steadily for the past two weeks.  In addition to visiting the site to check for updates, there are two convenient ways to receive my posts:

• Via Email.  If you’d like to have each article delivered directly to your inbox, you can Subscribe to Eric H. Doss by Email
• Or, if you use a RSS feed reader like Google Reader or Bloglines, you can subscribe to my Feedburner Feed

For those of you not into nerd history, you might have missed the significance of Monday, 26 October 2009.  Ten years after paying $3.5 billion for the company, Yahoo shut down GeoCities, one of the original web properties and the first ‘social network.’

If you don’t remember or never knew the details of GeoCities, you can check out the wiki page on GeoCities.  Not exactly the high point of social networking, but looking back, GeoCities was a great idea, just about 8 years ahead of time.

So, GeoCities is dead, but there are a few folks out there trying to resurrect the old pages, or at least archive them for, well…, I guess for future generations?  Anyway, The Internet Archive was working to back up the Geocities sites, as was a new site, ReoCities.  I just finished reading this guy’s story, and it’s pretty amazing.  He decided on Wednesday to back up GeoCities and make it live again.  Pretty amazing stuff.  No idea how he’s done, but he claims 600K pages restored.

Related articles by Zemanta

• The day the Web sites died: Yahoo shutters GeoCities (macworld.com)
• GeoCities Closes Tomorrow: Goodbye, Old Friend (mashable.com)
• End of an era for early websites (news.bbc.co.uk)
• GeoCities shuttered today (venturebeat.com)
• Roundup: Last Call for GeoCities (datacenterknowledge.com)
• RIP Geocities: We Loved You (techie-buzz.com)

October’s been a bit of a busy month for my blogging.  I made a decision to DoFollow my comments on 1 October.  About the same time, I decided to pony up the whole $2/month to join the ProBlogger forums.  I’ve been using it for a few weeks and I’ll give you a few bits of info if you’re thinking about joining:

1. Just Join.  It’s only a few bucks a month, billed monthly, so if you don’t use if for a month or two, you can cancel and only be out a few bucks.
2. Don’t expect miracles.  The site’s a few weeks old now.  There are quite a few people jockeying to become leaders and some are very helpful.  Many, however, are just posting to build their post numbers and aren’t contributing too much.  I’m probably guilty of this in some cases.
3. You’ll get some traffic, especially if you really get involved, make insightful comments, and participate in some of the challenges, like creating a list post.
4. There are going to be some growing pains.  Right now there are 3K users, plus or minus.  There are 350K users registered at SitePoint.  Be patient.

My overall take is that, especially at $1.95/month, it’s worth the money.  I’ve certainly received decent advice, a bit of traffic, and made a few friends that might lead to guest posting or guest posters.

A few bits before I get started.  If you’re here because you’ve heard my blog is DoFollow, you’re right.  However, please use your common sense.  If you simply say “Hey, thanks for this article.”, I’m going to delete your comment.  If you leave 15 of the same comments on different articles, I’m going to spam your comments.  I’ve decided to DoFollow because I hope it encourages folks to comment and contribute.  The side effect is that folks are going to drop by and leave a shitty comment.  So, if you’re willing to take a few moments to leave a good comment or start a discussion, you’ll get a tiny bit of link juice and maybe a bit of karma.  If you stop by, leave a BS comment, and move on, I’ll delete you and you’ll waste everyone’s time.  Please comment genuinely and thoughtfully.

It’s been a few weeks since I DoFollowed’d the comments section on my blog and I’ve got a few stats, not exact, I’m sure, but a decent overview:

• Since 1 October, I’ve received 48 comments, which is about how many comments I’ve received since I started the blog.  So that’s good.
• I’ve received 25 spam comments, either caught by Akismet or spammed by me.
• I’ve had a bit of ham and a few false positives, but nothing too serious.  I think this is largely because the slightly spammy nature of DoFollow comments.
• My uniques are up 102%
• My pageviews are up 130%
• Pages per visit are up 14%
• Bounces are down 22%
• Average time on site is up 79%
• I’ve more than doubled my FeedBurner subscribers

A few caveats:

• During this period, I’ve also joined the ProBlogger.com Forums, which is driving a bit of traffic to my site.
• One of my posts got a mention on a decently popular site, which drove traffic until it fell off the front page.

I’m really happy with my DoFollow decision.  Yes it takes more time to edit the BS comments and yes the comment quality has taken a bit of a dive.  That’s ok.  All other factors point to increased engagement with my content.  Spam is the price I’m willing to for a more open and collaborative web.  I’ll keep you all updated every few weeks/months on the stats here.

One of the reasons I started with WordPress a few years ago was the plugin community.  There are so many folks out there making amazing and unbelievably useful plugins that I wanted to highlight a few I’ve used or still use that don’t get tons of press.

Comment Redirect:  I’m a firm believer in the “Thank You.”  Comment redirect one way I found to recognize new commenters and say thank you.  After leaving their first comment, my commenters are redirected to my “Thanks for the Comment” page.  Really simple plugin but it pays off.

DoFollow:  This one might not be popular with everyone, but I’m a believer in the openness of the web.  That’s why I have DoFollow enabled on my comments and my entire site is CC3.0-BY-NC-SA.  This removes the ‘nofollow‘ tag from WordPress comments.  I think this creates value for everyone: you provide value to your commenters with a dofollow link and they, hopefully, provide a bit of value by leaving a decent comment.  Not always true, but give it a try.

Easy Picasa:  I’m not really into Flickr.  No special reason, just love the big G and Picasa works well for me.  One of my more popular posts is a little comparison of Flickr and Picasa.  Anyway, this lightweight plugin makes it so easy to insert your photos directly from the New Post screen.

What Would Seth Godin Do?:  Great plugin that came from this one little line in one of Seth’s posts “One opportunity that’s underused is the idea of using cookies to treat returning visitors differently than newbies. It’s more work at first, but it can offer two experiences to two different sorts of people.”

Wordbook:  Being very social is hard.  Wordbook links your blog to Facebook, automatically updating your status when you post.

WordPress Backup: Does backups, on your schedule, and emails them to you or dumps them in a folder on your server.  With 7GB of Gmail space, emailing is the most automatic option.  Does not backup your database.

WordPress Database Backup:  But this one does get the database.  Also emails or leaves it in a folder on your server.

The Federal Trade Commission just updated their policy on endorsements and testimonials and there might be an impact on bloggers.

A few months ago I mentioned that I would love to see the FTC regulate paid and shill blogging.  Most reputable bloggers disclose their paid content, show what benefits and swag they receive, etc.  If you’re blogging about products that you have been given for free or that you’re being paid to write, you should disclose your bias.  Period. Full Stop.

Now, can the FTC really regulate this? Of course they can’t.  But, I wouldn’t want to be the first person caught up in this because the FTC will make an example of the first people that find themselves afoul of this law.

Bloggers should see this as a validation of their hobby/business.  If the FTC feels that blogging needs regulation, they are slowly figuring out that blogs are a huge influence on people, their lives, and their commercial decisions.  In other words, it validates blogs as real, influential and trustworthy news sources.

Libertarian as I might be, I’m looking forward to the implementation of this new rule.