In 7 years in this industry

Nathan posts a good observation on how Weblogs Inc games Technorati with it‘s "Best of.." posts that pop up once a week or so. It may very well not be on purpose, but the result, when you take into account that "best of.." is published on every WIN property is dramatic. Quote: See, the latest one of these “posts” contains 69 links to other Weblogs properties, and Technorati counts every single one. And since these posts are replicated across all of Weblogs properties, getting seven links in the post (as Slashfood did) can translate to well over a hundred links in just one day. For a blog network, the "best of.." post has become almost mandatory, and whilst personally i could care less about them doing this (i mean, hardly a big deal is it?) it is interesting in the fact that it provides (right now) a good opportunity for blog networks to build traffic on new additions.

In 7 years in this industry I now am firmly of the conviction that everyone becomes a search engine spammer, if they stay in the industry. I have seen so many people turn to the dark side in the years. Almost everyone stumbled into this industry and started just making sites so the spiders could find them and adding a few directory links, and the sites ranked. Then they added some more directories and more....but slowly they started to loose their rankings as it became more competitive. They looked to the dark side to help.... Other made lots of cash from being white, but got bored. They looked to the dark side to help relieve the boredom... Others got annoyed with search engines and decided it was a war and looked to the dark side. So how to did you turn?

A quick roundup of some things that have been passed by over the last couple of days: Firstly, Jen reports on some changes to the Adsense for RSS format and sightings of Mirago‘s new contextual stream program. Meanwhile, Blogads have been busy creating networks within networks. The idea is that they allow their 700+ bloggers to form networks amongst themselves and thus grouping their audiences better for advertisers. Kinda neat, provided it‘s monitored closely.. Lastly, somewhat late to the party, but well positioned to make a grand entrance into the fray comes John Battelle with talk of a new contextual ad network launch later this year. Cooking Anything i‘ve missed?