Bloggasm

It’s been two years since I conducted my internet-famous case study: Your Chances of Getting Laid through Craigslist

Just received this press release via email:

Tom Smiley of The Consenting Adults Network researched the popular classifieds’ personals section to determine how many online advertisements were actually legitimate. The results were astonishing.

(PRWEB) November 1, 2008 — The Consenting Adults Network would like to announce the publishing of a very important Case Study which exposes and documents what an issue scammers have become for online personals and dating websites alike.

The Craig’s List Case Study examined personal advertisements posted with pictures in the w>m category from one day in all U.S. cities, with the hope of gaining a better understanding of exactly how big of an issue scammers have become for websites like Craig’s List. The results of the study were extremely disturbing and a blow to hopeless romantics out there everywhere. After reviewing 6,590 personal advertisements, it was found that 84% (possibly even as high as 91%) of the personal advertisements examined were by imposters posting fake ads.

Tom Smiley, creator of OnlinePersonalsFraud.com, had this to say about the results. “Scams and fraud have long been a headache for the online dating industry, and we knew there was alleged fraud in the Craig’s List personals. We just didn’t know how bad it actually had become. To get the full impact of this study you need to go through and look at the data we collected. As you read through the fake ads you won’t be able to help feeling betrayed and disgusted. I can’t even begin to imagine how many victims are out there.”

The methodology and documentation to support these findings can be reviewed at www.OnlinePersonalsFraud.com where the Case Study is published in its entirety.

About OnlinePersonalsFraud.com

OnlinePersonalsFraud.com is a research project started by Tom Smiley of The Consenting Adults Network for the purpose of documenting scams and fraud in online personals and dating websites. He argues that dynamic identity verification is the key to fighting fraud and improving the quality of these services. By exposing online scams and fraud he hopes online personals and dating websites alike will take more pro-active measures to better serve their members.

About The Consenting Adults Network

By integrating current and developed internet technologies into a new software solution, the CA-Network (www.ca-network.org) offers its premium members a better, safer and more discreet online personals experience. Technically an “information screening service”, the CA-Network provides a medium by which mature adults can search for others with similar interests while offering them additional options to be more discreet about their online activities.

Looks like somewhat of a publicity stunt for another online personals website, so take the results with a grain of salt.

Almost two years ago, frequent bloggasm reader Stephen Ward wrote a blog post about his terrible experience dealing with a company called Tiny Details. It wasn’t long before the post showed up on Google and ranked rather highly. Since posting it, he’s had a number of strangers show up in his comments thread thanking him for the post and saying it deterred them from doing business with the company.

Well, it took him long enough, but the president of the company finally did a Google search and found the post. Did he try to address the problems? Of course not, instead he emailed Stephen and threatened a libel lawsuit:

I am writing about the substantively incorrect postings that you have on your
website.

I am asking that you remove this point immediately. Your representation of
Tiny Details is inacurate and libelous.

I have forwarded this information to our company attorney, along with your
domain registration information.

Please govern yourself accordingly.

Kristopher Buchan
President
Tiny Details, LLC

And then after Stephen wrote a quick response asking the company owner to point out which statements were libelous, he responded with this:

Mr. Ward,

You will be hearing from our attorney.

What you have posted is indeed libel.

I am in the process of seeking your address through your domain registrating information. You will be hearing from us shortly.

Kristopher Buchan

Big no-no, Mr. Buchan. If you’ll look in the revised 21st century PR handbook, it says to never send angry emails to bloggers and expect them not to post them. Actions like that tend to come back and bite you in the ass.

1. I always had this hope that the internet age would make the population more informed. Because of Google and Wikipedia, people would stumble upon all kinds of information unintentionally when searching for celebrity photos. Unfortunately, a new survey shows that people know even less about current events than they did before the internet became popular.

2. Before I read this article by Clive Thompson, I didn’t really understand the point of Twitter. But he actually makes sense in his argument for why it’s a good thing. Maybe it’s not just for hipster narcissists after all.

3. After Facebook opened the floodgates, its original user base became horrified and now they’re restricting access to their profiles.

Time Magazine has what it considers to be the 5 worst websites. It really should be called “5 worst widely-known websites” because I’ve come across far worse. Sometimes I think Technorati could be on that list on days when I’m getting a lot of error messages from that site.

During my interviews with lit bloggers, one of my most consistent questions had to do with a blog’s power to promote books. For some reason I’m really fascinated with this discussion, probably because I one day hope to promote a book of my own. There’s something fantastic about the idea of using your blog to have market influence, either on your own stuff or others. You’re essentially a trend-setter, and everyone wants to be a trend-setter.

So John Scalzi links to this Boston Herald article that says that the publishing industry has been too optimistic about a blogger’s ability to sell books. Publishers assumed that thousands of blog readers would turn into thousands of book buyers, but that’s not always the case:

Bloggers, buoyed by site meter numbers and Internet buzz, were the darling of the publishing world about two years ago. But when books hit the shelves, sales fizzled, and now it takes a lot more than a laptop and a blogspot account to make it onto Amazon’s top 100.

“They haven’t performed as well as publishers hoped,” said Boston-based literary agent Jill Kneerim. “It is still a phenomenon that people are hopeful about, but in many cases, people who are fans of the blog have already read the content. So what’s the point in buying the book?”

John Scalzi puts it well when he says:

Being a blogger is a bit like being that lady in the supermarket who hands out free samples. You see her, you stop and have the tiny piece of sausage she’s got speared on a toothpick, you might chat for a second, and then you move on. You like the sample lady — she’s giving you free sausage! — and you may even seek her out (“I could use some free tiny sausage right about now”). But no matter how much you or anyone else likes the sample lady and are glad to see her and her tiny sausage chunks, the number of people who actually reach behind the sample lady to buy the product she’s offering you a taste of is a pretty low percentage.

This should be obvious, though I’d argue that even though the percentage would be small, the blogger would count on that small percentage being a good word-of-mouth campaign for his book. In other words, when bloggers promote their books, they shouldn’t expect to make a ton of money just on their own readers, but use their readers as a seed to gain more readers.

But I think it definitely goes further than that. To me, there are two kinds of blogs I read: Blogs that I read for information and/or breaking news, and blogs that I read for writing skill. The best blogs provide both. But needless to say, both are valuable in their own way. It doesn’t take much thought to figure out which kind of blogger I’d be more willing to buy a book from, though.

Let’s take two recent blogger books as examples. On the one hand, we have Crashing the Gate, by Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, who owns Daily Kos (I assume you guys don’t need a link?). A lot of reports showed that even though Kos is the most-visited political blog, its sales didn’t exactly shoot through the roof, though there was some actual dispute over the book sales. Still, it wasn’t a huge best-seller, like Kos had predicted it would be on his blog.

On the other hand, we have Glenn Greenwald‘s How Would A Patriot Act?. It quickly jumped to #1 on Amazon right away and also made it onto the New York Times’ Bestseller List.

Why did one book perform better than the other? Especially when Daily Kos has a lot more readers? Well, look at the two sites. For Daily Kos, Markos is only one of several bloggers. In fact, if you count all the Kos diaries, he’s one of several hundred bloggers who work together to bring in the readers. Though the front page is probably what gets the most hits, I’m sure there’s a lot of draw to the diaries as well, especially for search engine love. How many of those readers are coming in to specifically hear what Markos has to say?

Glenn Greenwald’s blog, on the other hand, is only written by one person. When you visit his blog, you’re visiting to find out what he has to say. This is probably key for developing reader-loyalty that will transform into book sales.

Now, let’s look at the posts themselves. Most Daily Kos posts look like this one. As you can see, it’s heavy on block-quotes, in other words, Kos likes to spend a lot of time quoting other people without offering much analysis to it. Kos also has a lot of posts that are full of outgoing links, like this one.

Compare this to the meaty, wordy posts of Glenn Greenwald like this one. Glenn isn’t afraid to use blockquotes or outbound links, but he uses them to provide futher reading outside of his own content. He’s a much more prose-oriented blogger who spends a lot of time on his posts.

Though I haven’t purchased either books, I would definitely put down money for Glenn’s book before I bought Kos’. And apparently this was true for a lot of other people too, because a lot more people bought How Would A Patriot Act?

So I’m still a firm believer in a blog’s power to sell books. It’s the ultimate word-of-mouth on steroids. Studies show that word-of-mouth advertising is the most powerful, so rather than being able to spread good vibes about a book to three or four people, a blogger can spread it to thousands, as long as they trust his tastes.

So if you’re a publisher who’s looking to give a blogger a book deal, look for bloggers who are big on content, because it’s not just the readership that’s the key, but rather why the readers are going to the site.

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This is still in the rumor-mill area of internet gossip, but it seems that Google is starting to collect online internet profiles of people.

The reason that this seems important is that in order for a romance site to work, you have to have a huge number of profiles already in place before the launch in order for people to be attracted to the site in the first place. ZDNet has more:

While Google’s latest April Fools “joke” presented an “unfathomable” Google Romance product, Google undoubtedly has its sights set on competing, for real, against online dating and business networking services such as Match.com, eHarmony, LinkedIn…

A lot of critics are claiming that Google is spreading itself too thin, and not focusing enough on their new products before launching a new set of products, and they’re slowly drifting further and further away from search. From all these new services, it seems that they’re turning into a Yahoo, which focuses a lot of time on keeping its readers on its site, rather than leading them away from it.

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