Dss Coolsat File …

Thank you for your thoughtful response. It makes much more sense now.

Tony

But you have piqued my curiosity as to what’s going on. And I think Jay nailed it.

Inman’s RSS news feed gets scraped/parsed/pirated my thousands of sploggers all over the web — it’s a losing battle we’ve all but stopped fighting. And it now looks like through automated tools like Twitterfeed these sploggers are starting to pollute Twitter too.

BTW, like Jay, I think it’s probably coincidence that the third tweet got lumped in there.

But I do think the larger issue you’ve brought to light here is a potential tipping point for Twitter; the spambots and sploggers are starting to arrive en masse just like they did with blogging. That’s a shame - but probably not surprising.

The issue will be whether Twitter can withstand this onslaught without degenerating the overall experience for its legitimate users and forcing them to leave. Users of any social media platform can be a fickle bunch… just ask the folks behind Friendster, Jaiku and others.

“Accusation” was a poor choice of words on my part.

You make a great point about perception. And whether we like it or not, perception is reality in many cases.

I agree that the line between beauty and Achilles heel is very thin.

Well thought out response.

This post was not intended to be an accusation. To be clear - there’s no accusation here because an accusation would need to have some defined rule or standard to break. I may not like it and it may well be unintentional but the perception is what it is - duplicate posts in multiple twitter streams.

The beauty (and possible Achilles heel) of web 2.0 is that bloggers and twitterers are free to market their blog posts however they’d like and through whatever channels they like. Heck, there likely no shortage of people that disagree with my own approaches. But much like the tweet that declares a given approach/functionality/release to be a “fail”, the result is all we see, respond to, and ask questions about.

Tony

That may be the single best definition I’ve heard of something that’s kind of tricky to define.

First, your title is, IMO, a little misleading. “Are Prominent Real Estate Web Bloggers Buying Traffic?” is plural, yet you only accuse one. And it’s really not even Joel’s post getting “advertised” it’s the snippet about it from Inman News (though obviously there is a connection between Joel and Inman)

Did you ask Joel or Inman what was going on before posting this?

Here’s what a couple of minutes of looking into this shows:

The first Tweet in your list (from @jbrealestate) come from a Tweeter that does nothing but send messages linking to other Inman News (and RISMedia) blog posts - and the links go back to his splog, not directly to the titled piece. I can’t see Joel or Inman paying to have a splogger link.

The second Tweet (from @lashemiller) originates from Twitterfeed — a service that distributes RSS feeds via Twitter (as well as a couple more networks). Joining Twitterfeed does not require payment of any form. Personally, I don’t care for the service but some 116,000 people apparently do. Heck, it’s even possible that someone other than Joel or Inman added their feed to it.

The the third tweet is from someone, who according to their Twitter profile, is a “internet video fiend and video ninja”. To me, it’s not that big a stretch to have a “video ninja” retweet a link to a post about video.

I dunno. The whole “vendor slut” thing is stupid beyond belief. But that isn’t used by “some” in the re.net, it’s used by one. And ironically, it’s used by him to attack (primarily) Inman News — the group you are accusing of buying traffic without disclosure.

Should “paid” traffic be disclosed? Absolutely. But personally, I think a post accusing someone of doing it ought to have a little more investigation done before hitting “publish”. To me, part of that investigation would include an email or phone call to the accused parties.