Paid to tweet or sponsored tweets have been something that has popped up majorly in the past year, especially since Twitter has really exploded onto the mainstream. Basically paid to tweet is as it says. Usually you will get the final say on what goes through your own social network stream and all these sites require full disclosures, which is great since the laws on endorsements have changed for both bloggers and social network users. Below I have listed a few sites that offer these services for user looking to make a little cash. Although I may have an account with each, none of them contain my referral. If you plan to join, and like to use my referral, please ask me via my contact form and I will send my referral link.

RevTwt: I have really never been paid by RevTwt, though I do not doubt their services. The problem is that their opportunities come in increments below $1 per tweet. Even their cost per followers is quite low, which makes it almost impossible to make anything with this service.

Twittad: Twittad has both paid to tweet services and also replacing twitter backgrounds with full ads. The user can submit and search topics that are relevant to their Twitter stream conversations and choose ads which best fit. The payout is okay, but nothing to impress. Opportunities for those who stay true to their interests may not be lucky as those who do not give a care.

Be-A-Magpie: Has been promising and is the first paid to tweet system I joined. I was a bit skeptical, but it does pay out and I have gotten a fair amount of opportunities. The thing is that opportunities are usually in groups, or it seems there is a time when more opportunities come through my stream. In the past Be-A-Magpie has been a bit funky with getting tweets out, but apparently that has been fixed.

SponsoredTweets: Opened just a couple months ago and by far is the best program I have tried. It is ran by Izea, creator of Pay Per Post, Social Spark and other sites. The system seems to be great and their support is right on top of anything that might go wrong or if anyone has any questions. I have not had to wait too long for opportunities, but I am thinking compared to other paid to tweet sites, this one gets more business because it has a company with influential and trustworthy people running it. Payouts are not hard to obtain and I like how their system allows you to list your interests and you can even have opportunities in which you decide how your twitter ads will be displayed – of course with a disclosure intact. This company requires full disclosure.

After so many people asking, I thought I would add my experience with these sites.

Any other sites I should check out that I missed? Do you use any paid to tweet services?

Comment spam is definitely something a lot of bloggers encounter, no matter how few or many people visit. Some are geniune spammers, some are newbies who do not know any better, and some are just plain out of the loop. Yeah, that was not very nice, but hey – it is true.

Obviously if a comment is about selling something not even closely relevant to your site is flat out spam. Comment spam focuses mainly on comments that are not relevant to the blog or may seem like it in a way to get a backlink.

Example: “Your site is nice” by Deidre (who has a url attached to that anchor text to a Viagra site.)

The problem is that regular people also may just leave such comments too. The key is to looking into your posts and making sure that it is relevant. Obviously if someone said “your site is nice” in a blog post such as this, it is not relevant and should not be approve, whereas if the blog post is about the site itself, then the comment would be more appropriate.

Recently I had a person leave a comment to a smear campaign toward @AlohaArleen on Twitter, (I think she is a nice person and I will continue to follow her) on a post that was unrelated, and did not even talk about Twitter. Though I am not sure if it was a sock puppet of the real blogger (a person under another pseudonym), it was marked as spam. Although I would have trashed an email with the same message, the message would have been suited more towards email and drew concern because I had a feeling I was not the only one who received the message. I felt it necessary to contact the blogger through several means to inform them of this as it is spamming. Excessive posting of the smear campaign could allow users to report the blog to search engines and the blogger’s own webhost as a spammer, even if it was not the blogger directly.

It is important to moderate comments to keep the topic on track and make sure your visitors are not confused. In allowing comment spam, you could be deterring potential comments from new or regular visitors because it detracts from the value of your blog. For the commenter, this is not conducive in case their blog system, in the case of WordPress, picks up the comment as trackback and it has no real value. In fact, I highly recommend reading my blog post called Etiquette of Commenting. Taking care of comment spam is as simple as looking through comments and especially through most blog platforms, you can mass delete spam. Even though there are plugins to help weed through spam, there will always be a few that get through, so it is important to keep on top of them.

What kind of comment spam have you gotten? How do you take care of it? Any interesting comment spam experiences?

The Fan History wiki has been trying hard to preserve Yahoo! Geocities since it is due to close before the end of October 2009. Although Fan History is covering sites that are within the fandom realm, like fan sites, fan fiction sites, fan art sites, and the like, there are other places too that are trying to preserve more. AboutUs.org even covered this issue, so you know if they mentioned it in their article GeoCities is Closing: Here’s How to Wiki-fy Your Sites , it is important enough to pay attention.

The reason behind this is that there will be a lot of sites lost due to the fact that the owner may have long abandoned their site even though people actually visit it to get relevant information. Although Yahoo! offers paid services for their hostees to move to, GeoCities has been a great tool for many to just be able to have a website. Other than the paid services, Yahoo! recklessly redirects their hostees to choose other sites as if it was no big deal.

Although most of the places like Fan History and the Internet Archive, you can help with this, even if it is or is not your website.

If you did have a site at Geocities that is currently up, put some type of notation that it have moved and provide a visible link in your anchor text. I have done so at my old and ancient site – Petals In The Wind (as an example.) You can then go to the Internet Archive site and have them preserve your site. If you know of any websites that should be documented, but only have time to make a list, you can contact me and share your list, or contact the site owner Laura Hale on Twitter. In at least doing this people will be able to find your content if you have since moved it. Already, I am aware that Fan History has documented over 5,000 websites so far on GeoCities that are fan related.

Have you heard of the GeoCities Preservation projects? What do you think of GeoCities closing, even if you might not have used their services?

This is the first week I am introducing a WordPress blog showcase to the site. I will choose 8 sites each week in that are tied together somehow whether by the blogger’s profession, the layout design, or topics discussed. This week the theme was for Web Designers who have blogs on their sites.

Cozmos Labs has a blog run by Cristian Antohe includes topics on WordPress and other blog tools.

Devthought is the site of Guillermo Rauch. If you view the layout and hover over the moving clouds, they will rain for you.

Douglas Menezes has a unique site that is mostly a portfolio, but occasionally he does blog too.

Elite Nick is owned by Nick Morris, and contains quite a few freebies and contains many subjects including tutorials, free templates for MySpace, WordPress, and then even music.

Justin Cline – It takes a lot to put a pic of yourself on your site. This web designer does it tastefully.

Loon Design is a Very unique and welcoming website by Chan Kai Loon.

Snilesh, no it is not my site even if it has ‘Nile’ in it – do not get the name confused with me. This guy is named Nilesh and shares a wealth of tutorials on his blog.

Super Girl is the personal site of Mimi who blogs about her daily life, but she can really whip up a creatively colorful site too!

Go give them a visit and check around. Also, if you have a site suggestion for a future showcase, feel free to comment or use my contact form as there will be 8 more next week. Please remember to only submit sites using WordPress.

I had been noticing some of the things streaming around twitter involving suing for tweeting something and such. In fact Chris Voss (on Twitter) has a video blog called Rude Tweets or Blogging Can Get You Sued – Video. The New York Times covered the fact that Courtney Love had been sued for saying defamatory things a designer in their article Short Outbursts on Twitter? #Big Problem.

I am not entirely into agreeance with Chris on those, but even the ‘golden rule’ is not used of day by day. Some instances are where the social network user or blogger may say something that is true. In the case that what is said is not libelous or defamatory toward a company, individual or brand, you are within your rights to say what you like.

Forgive me on this, but I will give an example. Calling someone a petty bitch is not libelous. It is a matter of opinion. However, if you say that someone is a liar, like the Courtney Love Twitter debacle, you could face serious backlash: being sued, fired, blacklisted from a career, and overall – damage your reputation.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is a civil liberties group that covers the internet users rights. This includes bloggers. Their section on Bloggers Rights is indepth and insightful. In fact the EFF covers Bloggers Rights well in their article How to Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else) which talk about scenarios for certain bloggers whether they should or should not blog.

So, although you should really not say anything negative about anyone, you really should think about how it is said. If it is not true – do not write it or you could risk your credibility as a respected blogger.

Have you ever gotten in trouble for blogging?

The art of vexeling and vectoring are interesting as each layer created goes toward the whole look of an image. It takes careful attention to the layering, and certain techniques to make an image that draws awe from others. I have gone through DeviantArt carefully and found several amazing tutorials for those who have never vexeled, or those who would like to brush up on their techniques. Some of these are Photoshop tutorials and others are for Illustrator. However, from experience, you can use the tutorials toward either program, or even the concepts to other graphic editors.

Please note that this form of art takes time and patience. I have been known to work on a vexel for over 7 hours, just to give an example.

Vexel Eye Walkthrough-Tutorial by binjoo

VectorTutorial for Illustrator by ChewedKandi

Urban Propaganda How-To by domnx

Real Photoshop Vector Tutorial by donbenni

Basic Vexel Tutorial by photoshop-tutorials

Silhouette Vexel Tutorial by shesta713

Vexel Tutorial – Hair by VAngelLJ

Do any of these tutorials look interesting enough to try?

Recently Weblog Tools Collection published an article called Pinging Your Own Blog Posts? Good or Bad? Basically, it is arguing the side that pinging your own blog is bad.

According to Wikipedia:

A pingback is one of three types of linkbacks, methods for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, or referring to their articles.

That means, you write a post and possibly use a link in reference to another post whether within your blog or to another blog – also known as an internal link or external link. Pinging your own links is not necessarily a bad thing unless your posts are already filled with spam, and linked to other posts with spam within in it. As already mentioned in my article Crossposting: Pros, Cons, and Etiquette, Google penalizes for spam, not penalizing internal linking or duplicate content, so Weblog Tools was not entirely according to Google’s policy changes. Though duplicate content and internal linking is not the same, the principle is. It also makes sense that this is okay as bloggers use some type of related post plugin for their blog, which links to 3 similar topics, not necessarily the one you may have internally linked within your blog.

Though pingbacks really do not deliver any content other than to notify that your post has been referenced either internally or externally as according to the WordPress Codex’s description of a pingback, it can be a great tool to help your readers learn more, especially when your site may contain valuable information that is of interest to anyone (ex – related posts plugin or internal link.)

Matt cuts talks about PageRank sculpting talks more about letting links flow, whether internally or externally. It is up to the webmaster to make some type of balance, meaning that you as the blogger will have to make sure to reference outside sources more (which is great for you and the person you are linking), while also linking internally to posts that are of similar interest and carrying on the topic so readers looking for more information will either stay or go to the sources that you are referencing. So, in using the Nofollow method within your own blog, you are basically saying that you do not vouch for your own posts, right? That does not sound like a confident blogger at all.

Do you use pingbacks? What are your views on using pingbacks?

On October 5, 2009, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) published FTC Publishes Final Guides Governing Endorsements, Testimonials – Changes Affect Testimonial Advertisements, Bloggers, Celebrity Endorsements. Of course, this issue is debatable on the fact that at this moment it has never been officially said that the Internet was medium, as perceived by WebProNews covers in their article Potential FTC Fines Raise Big Blogging Questions.

This issue does crack down on people who blog for pay, or pay to post/ pay to review. And it is right to do so as blogging is steadily being recognized as a medium as news stations are even turning to interviewing prominent bloggers for their experience on certain topics. This is not a single case deal as these are widely seen all over, even in my area – the St. Louis metro east (Southern Illinois.) Bloggers are influencing people with their posts. Some choose to endorse products and that can run into problems if a company has a product that is not up to par as what the blogger said.

With this policy, the company must provide adequate instructions to bloggers to post disclosures making their readers aware that they will write product reviews for monetary gain. This includes places like Pay Per Post and Social Spark, who run between the companies to get bloggers to write about them. This will deter companies with less than honest reputation to avoid seeking bloggers to endorse without a disclosure. By the way, Pay Per Post and Social Spark, who are properties of Izea require site wide disclosures and/or individual post disclosures. You can get a site wide disclosure with DisclosurePolicy.org for free, or create your own. In doing so will establish a more honest relationship with your readers.

As for individuals, it is important to put a notation of some type that the post is either a paid review, endorsement, or something similar. It would be recommended to do this with past posts even if the policy is not to go into effect until December 1, 2009. Violation of this policy could cost a blogger $11,000. Of course, this extends to even advertising in your social networking streams like Twitter and Facebook, but I decided to focus on the blogging aspect in this article.

What do you think of FTC’s policy change? Do you do paid to post? Do you have a disclosure policy for your blog?