One blog I have started following in my quest for wrangling social networking is Social Web Tools. She covers a wide range of tools and, in particular, Twitter and its analogs. Even with this post, I suggest it as a good read.
A recent article, Promote Your Site The Smart Way With BookmarkingDemon, just plain rubbed me the wrong way. In a nutshell, the tool she is describing provides a means to send out links to your entries, web pages, whatever, automatically to a variety of social bookmarking web sites. Automatically. Daily. While it is termed as an SEO tool, it sounds in the same category as the blog / web site / comment / search engine spamming engines we all dread. I get 5000+ worthless spam pings a day. While they never see the light of day, it still degrades my web site response and chews up traffic.
Rather than rant on again, let me just clip the comment I left on the post, just in case it gets lost in moderation:
To promote yourself, do it yourself. I have no problem with update pings when you make a change, either automated or manual. Using a tool that not only pings, but also creates additional accounts in social engines, is spamming. Sure, we all can have multiple personas on the Internet, but mechanical ones seems to defeat the purpose of social networking.
A recent article, Promote Your Site The Smart Way With BookmarkingDemon, just plain rubbed me the wrong way. In a nutshell, the tool she is describing provides a means to send out links to your entries, web pages, whatever, automatically to a variety of social bookmarking web sites. Automatically. Daily. While it is termed as an SEO tool, it sounds in the same category as the blog / web site / comment / search engine spamming engines we all dread. I get 5000+ worthless spam pings a day. While they never see the light of day, it still degrades my web site response and chews up traffic.
Rather than rant on again, let me just clip the comment I left on the post, just in case it gets lost in moderation:
"It can be such a tedious pain though, to manually submit your URLs to all those social bookmarking sites on a daily basis." "...many features such as ... automated account creation."
Last time I looked, the definition of "social" has an intimate connection to the word "human" as in a person. Call me old fashioned, but I thought social networking was to be... um... socialable. I really enjoy reading your blog, but this post resembles promotion of a spam tool (I know... it is an "SEO tool"). You may not be promoting Viagra or whatever, but it is no different.
As far as automated postings, pings, and such, it is much easier (and free) to use one of any number of plug-ins that already do the same thing when you actually do make an update.
Just my $0.02, guess I am old-fashioned and already swamped going through all the repetitious links and spam out there.
To promote yourself, do it yourself. I have no problem with update pings when you make a change, either automated or manual. Using a tool that not only pings, but also creates additional accounts in social engines, is spamming. Sure, we all can have multiple personas on the Internet, but mechanical ones seems to defeat the purpose of social networking.
Leave a comment