Moving down the list, we had a question about converting twitter traffic. There are certainly more qualified people than me to address this issues, so I will defer – except for a few observations.

When you don’t live in the US, you’re not exposed to US media. One thing that has struck during the trip back here is how much press twitter is getting in all forms of old media.

I can’t remember a time, ever, where a company got their brand inserted so skillfully into so many types of media. For example, the other day I saw a Best Buy commercial on TV. Throughout more than half of the commercial, best buy had their twitter address on the screen. What’s even crazier was that nowhere on the screen was best buys website url!

Then we saw Verizon commercials everywhere that have people talking about how they are using twitter. There was a shot of a father saying that he was tweeting “I’m sitting on the front porch” which is about as interesting as the average tweet. I’m pretty sure I’ve even seen twitter on a billboard for someone else’s product.

Even during facebook’s explosive growth we never saw so much “free” cross brand promotion. Troy Aikman talks about using it for fantasy football; Arnold used it to ask how to close the budget gap (the answer was “legalize and tax it” – obviously). If you check out shoemoney, you see he’s even got a pay per tweet service that’s seems to at least be making some money and everyone seems to want to know how to convert twitter traffic.

So what? Well it’s clear that twitter is getting more traction than I ever thought it could. If I was wrong about that, then it makes sense that I could be wrong about other aspects of twitter potential. Even so, while I’m sure that some people will make money with twitter, my gut still tells me that it’s a fool’s gold rush.

I hope I’m wrong and all you people hunting twitter dogs make a killing. But what do you think? Do you think that as a platform, twitter is going to have the money making potential of the iphone app store, or facebook or even myspace?

Remember that cyberbully case that lead to an absurd conviction? I wrote about it in the post “You Are a Felon if this Myspace Megan Meier Case Sticks.”

Fortunately, the case was recently overturned in federal court:

“MySpace mom” Lori Drew has had her misdemeanor guilty verdict overturned by the federal judge handling the case, the LA Times reports. Violating a website’s terms of use is not, it seems, a federal crime after all.

Sometimes the judicial system works.

I’m starting my journey tonight that will lead me to SEOktoberfest. My flight leaves tonight for the US where I’ll romp around for a month before heading over to Europe. It’s actually a pretty short trip by my standards (only about 55 days). I will be continuing to blog and answer questions, but not at the blog post per day pace.

It finally happened. You know those mandatory commercials you get before a news clip when you go to a site like abcnews or foxnews.com?

Well today I clicked from this discussion thread to this youtube link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMknKXfbyt8

When I got there, I had to sit through a Chili’s restaurant Commercial For 30 Secs before the Video would start. This is the first time I have ever seen this on youtube and it’s probably a trial run. They have all this Geo-Targeting and user information but feed me Chili’s restaurant commercial . . . when I’m surfing the Net from Brazil. I would love to go to a Chilies – but the nearest one is 3000 miles away.

It’s bad enough when you’re watching a youtube spot and you get that annoying adsense ad that covers 1/3 of the video screen for completely irrelevent crap like “Photojournalism Canada” or “Used Printing Machines”. Now those timesuck commercials have arrived to Youtube as well?

It IS a CBS news clip, so it’s possible that Google has struck a deal with this network requiring the commercial before showing copyrighted clips. Regardless, it shows that they are comfortable with the revenue format so expect to see more of this in the future. If this catches on, expect a Tivo-Like application to be developed for tube sites that predownloads all the clips to your computer so you can watch them ithout commercials.

Youtube does need to turn a profit. This is NOT the way to do it. The way to do it is to rank Youtube #1 in Google Searches for every TV show and movie ever made and sell the video download for $1. Give half the money to the copyright holder and make it an “Opt-Out” system like they did with books.

Is that evil? I donno. But it would win and it would be what people actually want.

Back to our questions, stilllearning Asks:

Do you have a favorite type/format for a “2nd Level of Pyramid” site?

To review, the 2nd level of the link Pyramid is where you put your domain portfolio to work. This network of sites is distributed across cheep shared hosting accounts. The more shared hosting accounts you have for this purpose, the smaller your footprint will be.

Wordpress is a powerful CMS who’s footprint is not immediately suspect. It’s a pretty darn good choice because so many great tools are already built for the platform. It’s also a much better choice than rolling your own CMS in the early stages before you’re making serious money with your network.

I’m torn here because I want to be as helpful as possible without shooting myself in the foot. What I can say is that the most important thing for this level (to be able to scale) is to have a console that allows you to manage large chunks of your network at a time from a single login. You can’t be logging into 1000 different blog accounts and 1000 database based sites through 2000 different logins: that just doesn’t work (well, it may work for some, but not for me!).

Seen in the comment section of reddit:

Let’s say you’re 5 and you have a can of frosting in front of you. You really really love frosting. So you start shoveling it into your mouth as fast as you can. Once you eat about half of the can you feel something isn’t sitting right but you continue because you love frosting. At about 3/4s gone you start to dislike frosting very much, but you keep on going for some reason. Now you’ve finished the can and run to the bathroom to vomit. Frosting is ruined for you forever, you can’t even look at it without being filled with resentment and anger. The smell makes you gag and you wish you never met that worthless lazy son of a fucking bitch. I swear to god the first chance I get I am out of that door for good. Who’s going to burn your pot roast now Greg?? You ruined my life and I hate you with every fiber of my being.

Here’s the Google Translated version of the Original French article on how to change get dofollow links from twitter.

On twitter, users post thir tweet from customers for I-phone as Twitterfon, Nambu … others use Firefox extensions TwitterFox to post their message on Twitter, others pass by scripts that use the API and Of course, others go directly from Twitter.
When you post from these applications, as appears tweet posted a statement containing the date of publication of the tweet and at what support you have posted the message with a link to the site of application.

It looks pretty solid but I have not tested it yet. Great find and write up (even if it is in french) by Bob ArdKor.

Update: This whole appears to have been closed.

I’m shocked it’s taken so long for someone to get arrested for this.

Over the years hundreds of stories of domain name theft have been reported, most famous among them of course is the theft of Sex.com. Even as recent as last week, reports of stolen domains sent a chilling reminder through the domain industry as valuable domains Before.com, Adios.com and others were stolen from Warren Weitzman. Until recently, there hasn’t been a case of a domain theft where the thief was caught and arrested. However, on July 30th, Daniel Goncalves was arrested at his home in Union, New Jersey and charged in a landmark case, the first criminal arrest for domain name theft in the United States . . .

This kind of stuff happens far too often because there’s no enforcement.

Their Lawyers thing that using 5 of their words from their article should cost you $12.50. I can’t find a clean link without a session ID, so this calculator link may or may not work.

Will this type of policy make the AP even more obsolete? Will people use it less? Time will tell.

Moving Right down the list of questions, someone wants me to write about Flash and SEO. Now, I know all the search engines claim to be able to read the text inside the flash files. I know they say they can index flash content.

But the only kind of flash content I’ve seen indexed is flash movies. Moreover, the search engines are not using the properties of the flash file (other than the name) to determine what it should rank for.

Now, you may have a client who insists on having an all flash website. If they do, and you really need them as a client, cloak some normal (seoed) pages to the search engines. You don’t even need to do IP delivery. You would be better off seeing if the surfer (or bot) accepts cookies and check for the flash player. If the bot or surfer does not accept cookies and does not have the flash player installer, send them to a normal, SEOed up html page.

Correct me if I’m wrong – (people who work at Google and read this blog), but I’m pretty sure that Google would have no problem with that type of content delivery. I know they’d be better at ranking it for the things you on paged SEOed.