Matt over at Wordpress posted “Selling Links” which goes across syndication with this starting paragraph:

“Let’s face it, we’re selling links here. Call it ‘buzz’ all you want, but it boils down to selling links. That skews Google’s index and they’ve come out against that quite publicly. If we’re all given the freedom to disclose in our own manner, we’re a moving target. If we’ve all got disclosure badges everywhere, it’s easy for them to penalize/ban us all.”

Of course if you click thru (and you would click thru), that’s not Matt speaking but a quote from the Pay Per Post blog that Matt subsequently criticizes (and he links to their blogger comments page, as if to avoid passing any link power to their blog. How sad. Hence the nofollow here). Matt Mullenweg, the guy who (desperately?) spammed Google with commercial doorway pages when he was down on his A-list luck (and got caught) is now taking a high-road and saying that link selling is bad for the web. Really?

Sorry, but I thought more of Matt than this. Sure, the conflict of interest is obvious (wordpress.com can’t monetize very well if a middleman like PPP is monetizing out from under him), but to brand it as a benevolent action is below where I expected Matt to be. The web is commercial. Matt is commercial. He’s good at it, and naturally he shouldn’t allow PPP on wordpress.com. (I also noticed an BlueHost advertisement on the PayperPost site that says “Move Off of Wordpress.com”, so clearly these guys are competitors). But really, Matt, to pander to the idealistic half of the audience so blatantly… you alienate the rest, you know? And you need the rest, don’t you? Maybe you don’t think you do. In my book, that’s a bad sign.

It wasn’t long ago we read about Matt Mullenweg spamming Google with 160,000 doorway pages on topics like “debt consolidation” and “asbestos”:

Mullenweg hosted at least 160,000 pieces of “content” on his site wordpress.org which use a cloaking technique to hide keywords such as “asbestos”, “debit consolidation” and “mortgages”. Mullenweg was paid a flat fee by Hot Nacho Inc., which creates software for search engine gamers to use. It’s been dubbed “Adsense bait” - Adsense is Google’s keyword-based classified advertising service…Mullenweg employed “negative positioning”, which uses a CSS directive to place the text offscreen, out of sight of the user, but where search engines can still read it….

This seems way hypocritical. I am reminded of the days when Steve Case and company spammed “the Internet” with AOL commercials. The Internet was non-commercial, and the idealists gathered with pitchforks to “defend the Internet” against commercialization. Who did more for the development of the Internet and web, AOL or those idealist defenders of usenet?  Painful question to answer, but the answer is the truth. Matt is painting the market makers as evil-doers, as Matt quietly protects his share of the market. Puh-lease.

It’s Holiday Blog Tag time, where if you get tagged by another blogger you write five things most people don’t know about you and then tag five others so they can do the same. I’ve been tagged several times over the past week so I give in.. here’s my 5 Things:

1. I worked for Publisher’s Clearing House (PCH) back in the day of the big magazine subscription sweepstakes, before Ed McMann put his face all over an American Family copy-cat. You might say that was my introduction to marketing (although I was just a kid working the night shift for beer money). By the way, Robert H. Treller didn’t exist, and you really didn’t need to buy magazines to have a chance at winning. I learned about corporate spying while with PCH, and alot about the competitive side of marketing. I also got to see first hand how someone working in the mail room gets to know almost everything and every one in a business.
2. I started my first real job when I was 14 years old, working as a dishwasher in a French restaurant on the Miracle Mile in Manhasset, NY (Brasserie St. Germaine). I lied and said I was 16. By age 15 I was a bus boy. I remember when the waitresses would bring me along to The Chalet in Roslyn after work (after 10pm) so they had someone with them besides the fresh-of-the-boat French chef trainees, who were hard-to-handle. Beer, women, and crazy French sous Chefs in bars at age 15… is there any wonder?
3. I have shot perfect 25 while trapshooting twice in my life, both times costing my dad a round for the boys at the yacht club bar. The first time he was happy to pay the bar bill, because he was proud of his kid. The second time, I am not so sure. I haven’t been invited back for a third opportunity yet, but I did get invited on their annual Sporting Clays outing last spring. I shot the high score. And by the way, just to keep it interesting, I shoot trap and sporting clays with a made-in-Japan Browning pump shotgun.
4. I once walked 50 miles in one day. No, it wasn’t for boy scouts, but it was during high school. I earned a patch, but there was no way I’d put that sucker on my junior varsity Lacrosse jacket. I did it to show I could. In case you were wondering, the first 24 miles are the easiest. Oh, and if you ever try that yourself, learn from my mistake and do not pack a salami sandwich and chocolate milk as your lunch. There are better choices.
5. Finally, because the idea of marketers who don’t watch TV is odd but also oddly common, I’ll admit that we tossed TV out of our house almost 3 years ago. Except for pro sports and late night infomercials from which cocktail party jokes are made (”…aw honey, sandwiches again?”), I don’t miss it.

Now to pass the Holiday BlogTag baton to 5 others… I tag Susan Torrico, Chris Snyder, Jeff Loiselle, Steve McArthur, and Hans Kaspersetz.

Out of the “unbelievable” department comes a report that AOL (the company that accidentally-on-purpose released all that private search data) plans to bulldoze the yard of some folks in Massachusettes, looking for gold and platinum bars that an AOL spammer may have buried there. What??

Yes, they prosecuted one of the Spam Kings for spamming, and the spammer didn’t show up in court. So AOL won by default, and was awarded $12 million in damages. Let’s not forget this is Time Warner AOL… the big company that owns all those office buildings, magazines, newspapers, etc. You know the one. The people who mail dozens of CDs to people (expensive and environmentally unfriendly junk mail). Yeah, they sued someone for spamming, and got $12 million, if they can collect it.

Anyway they want their money, and are willing to dig for it. Just like they don’t want to let you cancel your account.