It’s not like bloggers have the greatest of reputations within the conventional media as it is, the latest stunt by a well know tech blog at the just completed Consumer Electronics Show surely won’t help things.

Gizmodo thought it would be funny to use a TV B Gone remote to shut down various displays on the show floor and during presentations. A lot of people put a lot of time and money into making CES go off without a hitch and Gizmodo single handedly destroyed all that work. And the people at CES have a hard enough job as it is without someone mucking up the works.

Of course the CEA wasn’t impressed by the stunt that at one point shut down the monitors in the middle of a presentation at the Motorola booth.

We have been informed of inappropriate behavior on the show floor by a credentialed media attendee from the Web site Gizmodo, owned by Gawker Media. Specifically, the Gizmodo staffer interfered with the exhibitor booth operations of numerous companies, including disrupting at least one press event. The Gizmodo staffer violated the terms of CES media credentials and caused harm to CES exhibitors. This Gizmodo staffer has been identified and will be barred from attending any future CES events. Additional sanctions against Gizmodo and Gawker Media are under discussion.

Looks like there might be an available pass for next year’s CES. Tech bloggers, the line forms to the right, just leave your pranks at home.

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A question came up over at DP regarding whether or not you could sell your Blogger blog. Other than the usual “it’s your blog you can do with it what you wish” comments, wrong by the way (see bullet# 7), or the various other more or less helpful responses a very important question still remains. If you plan to be a serious blogger or to make your blog a brandable commodity should you even consider a free blog provider like Blogger? For me the answer to that question is a resounding, it depends.

While that sounds like a cop-out, the reason for it revolves around what you plan to do. Personally, I have always hosted my blogs on my own domains that for the most part relied on Wordpress for my platform of choice but that might not be the best for some individuals. Registering your own domain name, finding a reliable web host, and then getting your choice of blogging software installed and running is not a task for some people not to mention the fact that it can be a bit spendy for some. Free web hosts take all that hard work and expense out of the equation. Spend a few minutes signing up, pick a domain name and template, and you are ready to blog. Along with the aforementioned benefits of a free Blogger/Wordpress blog, you can add that your site software will always be up to date and you will have pretty much limitless bandwidth (not really but close) which could lead you to believe that your choice is a no brainer. Hold that thought.

Some of the downsides of free hosted blogs.

1. Ownership Part 1 - You spend months/years building up a readership but what happens if sometime down the road that free site isn’t free anymore or what if your site gets shut down for some reason? You either must move it to another free host or rebuild on your own domain.

2. Ownership Part 2 - As the DP poster found out, while you do own your content, you do not own your domain. What good is spending all that time branding your site only to have it be pretty much worthless when and if you wish to get rid of it.

3. Under the Hood - While free hosts like Blogger and Wordpress.com offer many look and feel options, you are limited to what they offer and can only do what your limited access to the “under the hood” functions allow. If you want custom programming or special features, you are usually out of luck.

4. Professional Appearance - This is more of a branding issue but depending on what your market might be, having your site hosted with a free service doesn’t always portray the professional appearance you might hope to present. Blogger/Wordpress blogs have the earned reputation of being a spammer haven. Is that something that would affect your brand?

If none of the bullet points above bother you, by all means go the free route. But if you have the limited resources needed to get up and running with your own domain, save yourself the  potential hassle in the future and start out on your own domain. Like I said, it depends…

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I have just come across a new plug-in that might be of interest to bloggers using Wordpress as their platform of choice. MaxBlogPress Stripe Ad from MaxBlogPress is a very useful text link rotator that has several functions.

The most obvious use would be to offer text link advertising on your blog and for that function this plug in shines. It allows you to setup an unlimited number of different text link ads that will rotate each page view based on a weighted scale that you designate when setting up the ad, the higher the weight the more a particular link will appear.

Of course every blog is different and MaxBlogPress Stripe Ad takes that into account. The plug in allows you to choose the colors as well as the fonts of your ad bar so that it will blend nicely into just about any template. You can also choose font styles, weights, and alignment allowing you to have full control over how links are displayed.

Finally, like I mentioned earlier, it has other useful functions as well. It is also an excellent plug in to use to announce contests or other site news to your visitors. Just set it up to list your announcement and it will show to everyone at the top of the page. You can even set it up to only show at certain times so that visitors aren’t constantly bombarded with your ads or announcements.

Best of all this useful plug in is available at no cost (registration is required). To find out more and to download the plug in head over to the authors web site.

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Anyone that runs a directory is familiar with spam sites. The minute you go live and start accepting submissions the spam immediately begins. Run a free directory and the spam submissions increase tenfold.

In the many months this site has been running, I have had to weed through an untold number of just horrible sites and being a blog niche directory I would say 90% of the sites that are submitted aren’t even blogs. With all that said, a submission I received today has to be the worst example of a web site I have ever seen and definitely belongs as the inaugural member of the Superblog Directory “Hall of Shame”.

The site supposes to be a resource for those with bad credit to enable them to get loans but if you look at the screenshot of the submission I have posted of the site (www dot loans-with-ccjs dot com) you will see that other than the 2 links, it is nothing but a MFA site, and a bad one at that.

Despite what the spammers might think, even though I was born during the day, it wasn’t yesterday. Please feel free to continue to spam the site with junk submissions if you wish to waste your time, just be aware it takes me approximately 2 seconds to hit the delete button and that is exactly what will happen. Thought in this case I must thank the spammer that submitted this site as I really enjoyed a good laugh.

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If you thought that the title was in reference to DMOZ, while true, it is actually in reference to what was once one of the best webmaster resources on the web, Digital Point. I joined almost 3 years ago and throughout my varying web site attempts, it was always a great place to discuss issues with others going through similar situations. Somewhere along the way the amount of relevant and valuable information started to decline and it is now more known as a haven for scammers, spammers, and those trading anything and everything most of which is either against the TOS of the sites involved or totally worthless, or both.

I am not sure when it started down the long path towards uselessness but for me it began early last year on the directory forum where for awhile it became a major pissing contest between several so-called big boys and the rest of those that frequented the forum. It became nothing more than a “mine is bigger than yours” and your directory sucks fest to the point that some of the most helpful posters left altogether. Things have since quited down but now the majority of the posts revolve around different newbies posting their latest and greatest lists of some sort or someone else chiming in on how they believe that directories are useless.

So what is Digital Point good for now? From a blogging perspective, it is a place where many template designers frequent to show off their wares and from time to time there is the useful tidbit posted in regards to SEO and marketing but otherwise unless you are looking for someone to trade Diggs or Stumbles with (against their TOS’s by the way), not a whole lot else seems to be of use there anymore.

Even with all that is bad about Digital Point, I still have a hard time not going there daily to see what is going on. I know that normally it is just a waste of time but I guess some habits are hard to break. In the meantime I am now looking for somewhere else to get my fix of marketing and web related discussions so if anyone has any suggestions, I would love to hear them.

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In my continuing effort to add value for our visitors I would like to welcome you to the new Superblog directory blog. Here I will be adding blogging news, information, tips and tricks related to blogging and the blogosphere. I hope to get up and running here after the New Year and in the meantime I plan on tweaking the template and adding a few useful plugins.

I will also be posting about some interesting templates and plugins we come across that you might be interested in. And finally I will eventually be offering blog reviews to those that would like me to write about your site. Details on that will be forthcoming in the not so distant future.

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