‘Nuff said.

These days you can never be sure, and just about everything seems to be LinkBait. Enter PromotionTraders.com

Nice idea, but is it LinkBait? PromotionTraders is a marketng site about swapping services. Write a blog post for someone else, and they write one for you. Swap links (obviously) and also swap SEO for design, or design for coding, etc. It’s a needed function, and I would use it if I trusted it. Do I trust it? Not yet.

I only spent a few minutes on it, but didn’t see any NAME associated with it. Hi. I’m John Andrews and I am an independent SEO here in Seattle. Contact me via the links in the sidebar. Now why is that so hard to do?

We all need to study MySpace.

The MySpace generation needs to study it, because it represents the evolution of the “do your best to fit in” challenge. You are a dork by default, unless you can be accepted by the cool kids. How to be accepted is a cruel game, with no real rules. You have to play, and you have to risk it all. On MySpace, at least you can impress with some geek skillz without being labeled a geek.

The rest of us need to study MySpace because.. well because it exists and it is bizarre. That has to be important. Nothing as busy as MySpace could be unimportant. And so we study it.

I posted earlier about MySpace having a unique culture. I noted how others had classified MySpace as cruel and full of hate, yet hpeful and inclusive. It’s all a mish mash. A reality mashup. And today I saw a banner ad that summed it all up in one line:

Yes, that’s an animated banner ad of a blonde on a Hollywood red carpet, with a paparazzi, camera, and viewfinder cross hairs, and the copy reads “Shoot the pop star and get free ringtones”.

Anything for a ringtone. My if that doesn’t capture MySpace.