If you conduct a Google search for ugliest person in the world today, you will see Google listing a picture of the late Michael Jackson … As virtually everyone knows, Michael Jackson died on June 25th and the memorial service was yesterday. The popularity of Jackson, especially right now, with how Google ranks documents, has likely lead to Jackson’s picture being listed as the number one result for that search.

That is, its referring to this particular image, hot-linked to the San Francisco Gate (classy!) from the Winamp Forums:

One wonders whether or not Michael Jackson’s been the unfortunate victim of a Googlebomb — my money is on “no” for at least one technical reason (I think): Google Images doesn’t work that way.  As far as I know, for images to get indexed on Google Images, the influence of off-page factors, namely the quality and quantity of inbound links probably doesn’t matter as much as influencing the SERPs for the usual Google web results.  Rather, on-page factors probably do, including the strength of the domain that is hosting, surrounding text of the image, the thematic content of the page, and the meta-tags of the the <image> tag, including the title, alt, and so on.

If I’m wrong, point me to a source.  On the other hand, speaking from personal experience, I happen to own a first page result for “lolcat” with nothing but on-page factors.  At least that’s what I’ve convinced myself is the cause.

The fact that the content of said article has very little to do with how you (or anyone) could sell weed is sort of immaterial, but this also sticks to the third rule of link bait, which of course states that since the headline is 93% of the point, you can write about whatever you like thereafter since almost no one reads that.

Nothing to see here except for non-sequitur humour that passes as “funny”.  I can’t believe Microsoft paid him $10M to star in this dreck.  Or, rather, I can’t believe that Jerry Seinfeld wants to attach his name to this kind of work for *any* kind of money.  Shoes?  Clowns?  Cake?  Is that supposed to be clever or inspired, or merely “Jerry”? <shakes head>

Funny thing is that the comments on most of the blogs come overwhelmingly from from the “Internet Marketing is Good” camp, overwhelmingly supporting John Reese.

Now, I’m not going to debate the merits of the actual issue (Twitter’s coming apocalypse now the Internet Marketers have arrived), but what I do want to comment on — as someone who has observed the Internet Marketing industry pretty closely for over 10 years — is how refreshing it is to have some real conversation on the issue.

Because one of the biggest problems with Internet Marketing is that are very few real conversations about it. Most of it are on the forums, but the even there its hard to find a real opinion on things.

(but if you’re looking for a rare post, look over here)

Why is this?

Because of affiliate marketing.

There was a reason why Mark alluded to the industry and affiliate marketing like spyware. Now of course it is nothing (literally) like software replicating itself; but what he was getting at was that because people are compensated / monetized for promoting something, it encourages people to do it — ad naseum.

In fact, this is an entirely rational response, and billions are made in the affiliate industry doing it.

Unfortunately, because the Internet marketing industry lives on promoting itself *TO* itself, you get very few real opinions and conversations on products *IN* the internet marketing industry, because everyone is too busy chasing affiliate checks.

Let’s be honest — it takes a (VERY) strong Internet Marketer (or blogger) to avoid reviewing a product without throwing out their affiliate link; and if they’re going to do it, its going to make it doubly hard to write a real critical review.

If you doubt me, head on to see the over abundance of folks on John Reese’s side and follow their links. To a man (or woman) they’re all promoting — guess what? — products or services related to Internet Marketing (and its a big industry).

There are many things that Internet Marketing does right. An emphasis on actually selling a product, for example, rather than persuing the freemium model endlessley.

But there are a great deal of things that are fundamentally bankrupt that very, VERY few people acknowledge or even talk about.  And I’m not talking about the exceptions, or exceptional individuals, who John Reese may be.

I’m talking about the average.  I’m talking about the rule.  I’m talking about what ordinary folks see when they try and dip their foot in to the water — and to spell it out, yes, its the endless hype, the endless promotion, and the lack of any critical thinking on anyone’s part.

And I think its a very good thing — at the very least — that perhaps the conversation on this topic has begun in earnest.

What do I mean?  Well, put it more plainly, Mahalo will create a page on a topic that you suggest, populated with links that they find (and self-edit).  How?  Utilizing Twitter, actually.

If you send a suggestion to @MahaloToDo, they’ll create a page in a couple days. 

Out of fun, I decided to suggested a fairly obscure topic: Capgras Syndrome, to see how they’d do with it.  Here’s the actual page, as they got it done yesterday, which is pretty sparse, but to be fair, its a pretty sparse topic.

For those interested (and if you’re not, read on, because its kind of wierd-type interesting), Capgras Syndrome is a condition where people believe that people they know are actually replaced by imposters.

Here is one description, via Wikipedia:

Mrs. D, a 74-year old married housewife, recently discharged from a local hospital after her first psychiatric admission, presented to our facility for a second opinion. At the time of her admission earlier in the year, she had received the diagnosis of atypical psychosis because of her belief that her husband had been replaced by another unrelated man. She refused to sleep with the impostor, locked her bedroom and door at night, asked her son for a gun, and finally fought with the police when attempts were made to hospitalize her. At times she believed her husband was her long deceased father. She easily recognized other family members and would misidentify her husband only.

Although a lot of pages on the web refer to it as a psychiatric condition (i.e. they are “crazy”) associated with schizophrenia (which it may be), it is also associated with damage to the brain in some fairly specific areas; in particular lesions (or changes) in the non-dominant hemisphere of one’s brain, for example because of a stroke or trauma, can cause all kinds of peculiar conditions, some examples might be …

• an increased tendency to experience deja vu and “mystical” experiences (right temporal lesions)
• an inability to understand the emotional content of language (they don’t “get” sarcasm), also known as receptive prosody,
• Reduplicative Paramnesia, in which folks believe that a person, place or object exists as two identical copies.

The worker bees at Mahalo haven’t done a bad job (but not a great job either) of a difficult topic.  If you want to try this “function” of Mahalo’s ‘mechanical turk’, try and messaging @mahalotodo, and see what comes up.  Its surprisingly fast, and maybe you’ll get some free usable research out of it too.

Well … in not so many words, of course.

Matt Ivester, founder of JuicyCampus.com, the “gossip” site for College kids notoriously known for being an unrestrained melting pot of libelous and defamatory remarks, has made a plea for decorum and decency on the JuicyCampus blog (hosted curiously at Blogspot — surely setting up a Wordpress installation at a sub-domain of JuicyCampus isn’t all that onerous?)

While JuicyCampus’s origins may have started out as an anonymous means to discuss all manner of things, whether they be fun, breezy, erudite, or cheezy, it has quickly, and obviously (anonymized identities + college demographic), devolved into a giant bulletin board uniting colleges and Universities coast to coast in gossip and innuendo.

Furthermore, its gotten some national attention as you may probably be aware, with stories being picked up by a bunch of papers, and now, most recently through the Washington Post, as students (and families) are up in arms with the kind of inflammatory and defamatory remarks therein.

Which is why I find Mr. Ivestor’s plea’s so quaint.

In some ways, JuicyCampus is a grand experiment in “crowd-sourcing’s” worst excesses, as it allows people to contribute content — in this case gossip — without any controls or accountability.

One need only saunter over to the most discussed, or most viewed, topics of discussion, and you can find that the vast majority are around observations of who is Hot, who is Not, and ranking which girls of potentially loose moral character (a polite way of saying, as the title of one of these posts are “Who is the sluttiest girl??????“). And lest you think that the targets of such thought provoking discussions are exclusively women, you would be wrong.In a post titled “ALL URBANA BOYS RANKED”, guys *are* ranked, but not, say, numerically from #1 to #50. No, instead, they are grouped according to their different levels of hotness (because clearly there isn’t a linear relationship in this ranking), with pithy descriptions like “Top Tier” and “Party Boys”.

What’s also troubling is the second to last ranking (incredibly, not *THE* last ranking) which describes a few unfortunate gentlemen as “Child Molesters”. [I would happily link to this post, but it seems like its literally impossible as the magic of Ajax makes direct links a hard thing to find].The last ranking, which, is some how worse than being a Child Molester, is merely “Totally Useless”.

No, the only saving grace about JuicyCampus is that they’ve thankfully turned on the “no follow” portion in their Robots.txt file, so that Google won’t be able to index JuicyCampus. So those unfortunate guys who were listed as “Child Molesters” thankfully do *NOT* show up when you google their name, even when you throw the switch “site:http://www.juicycampus.com”.

I think the bottom line is that JuicyCampus will continue to thrive precisely because it is an anonymized means of being … well, mean. And I think its human nature that a small part of us loves their drama, and the cheap, if guilty pleasure, of watching human train wrecks, particularly if there is no emotional cost to you (i.e. being anonymous). To be fair, some commenters do try and argue against the bottom-denominator quality of the content on JuicyCampus, but its far from the majority.

The only way for JuicyCampus to cross the bridge from being a harbor of defamatory remarks to an island of decorum — or at least, having the thinnest, sheerest veneer of it — is if Mr. Iverson decides to radically change the site (say, via the Terms of Service), and have more moderators enforcing it (because, believe it or not, there is a clause in their, under section 7 which states that users are not “is unlawful, threatening, abusive, tortious, defamatory, obscene, libelous, or invasive of another’s privacy”).

But I suspect he won’t, and as such, it will continue being an example of what “crowdsourcing” can do when all the controls and accountability is thrown out the window.

And all the hand-wringing in the world can’t prevent that.

(As an aside, for the love of Pete, can someone make sure that Andrew Keen never hears of JuicyCampus?)