After Groupon’s success thousands of collective shopping websites and deal aggregators appeared online, and every single niche you can imagine. What about Internet marketing and web design? Yep, that’s covered as well.

The most popular deal aggregator on this niche is called MightyDeals.com, and they offer items like ebooks, templates and scrips with discounts up to 90%.

I was talking with the owner of the site last week and he said he would be glad to give away 10 items for DBT readers. In order to participate you need to follow two steps:

1. Subscribe to their email list via the form below
2. Post a comment below stating what item you would like to win (check the items available via the link above).

The winner will be picked next Monday, via a random draw (we’ll be using random.org). I’ll post an update on this same post next Monday with the name of the winners, and if you are among them you should also receive an email from the MightyDeal guys with a code to download your item.

Good luck everyone!

The movement was pretty successful, with many senators reversing their stance on the SOPA/PIPA bills, and making it much harder to get them approved now (i.e., the Internet folks won the first battle of the war).

The day after, however, another blow stroke. The founders and key employees of the site MegaUpload.com (no direct link, to play on the safe side…) were all arrested (in New Zealand), and the domain name was seized by the FBI. The reason was alleged copyright infringement, racketeering and money laundering.

According to Google MegaUpload was the 90th most popular website in the world, with 34 million unique visitors per month. The owners were making millions with it. If you visit the site now you’ll see the following message:

Ouch!

It’s the first time I have seen something like this with such a huge website online.

Will there be more sites following? I am not sure, but it sure will be interesting to watch what will happen over the coming months.

The data exchanged through Fasal has helped more than half a million Indian farmers fine tune their agricultural procedures so that they can get their crop to the right market at the right time and get the best price for it. Bloggers can take a page from Intuit’s altruism to do good and benefit from an overall aura.

1. Align with a customized fundraising site

Bloggers are accustomed to driving traffic to their own blogs so it might sound like sacrilege to direct readers to external sites, but when it’s to URLs like crowdrise.com (an online fundraising platform) there’s a definite upside.

You can create your own fundraising pages on the site, select from over a million charities to determine which one you want your readers to support, and share all this information on your social network presence.

2. Assist a local cause

It’s easy to locate in your local area a cause you can help with, whether it’s serving meals to the homeless or holding a bake sale to get new equipment for the high school’s chem lab.

Local initiatives are far less complex to set up than any national appeals so you will be able to organize it all in your spare time with the help of friends and neighbors both on your social networks and face to face. You might not directly get more readers, but the halo of being a good citizen will pay clear dividends for your blog in the long run.

3. Raise funds for a worthwhile charity

There are very few activities that any blogger can participate in which provide such tangible benefits as being identified as a committed raiser of awareness and funds for a charity with a cause which resonates with your readers. Each blog is different and thus the non-profit organization you align with should be relevant to your field.

If your subject is pets, provide assistance to an animal rights or wildlife charity; if you deal with electronics, raise funds to help poverty-stricken Third World recycling workers who live in unbelievably toxic environments; and if your topic is food, adopt a child through a non-profit which provides nutrition in the world’s poorest areas.

4. Develop an app

You don’t have to write a smartphone blog to know that apps are hot, and the development of a specific, basic app is a possibility for any blogger… even if you don’t have a clue about programming.

There are many sites which allow you to contract freelance programmers around the world to work on a contract basis and you can get an reasonable app developed for pocket money. The app shouldn’t directly promote your blog but do some good for someone. Maybe set aside a penny for a charity each time an NFC payment is made, or show on a map where the nearest donation box for clothes and household effects is located.

5. Convert reader activities to $

A site called bettertheworld.com allows anyone to raise money for any given non-profit organization by simply downloading a sidebar and surfing the web. The bar displays relevant ads on the pages and each click puts much-needed cash into the charity’s coffers. Your blog readers and social media followers are navigating all over the web anyway, so why not help convert this activity to help a valid fundraising cause?

Doing good not only makes you feel good, but it helps your readers feel good about your blog as well. Bloggers everywhere are discovering the value of altruism. Will you be the next blog writing adopter of the philosophy of “doing good is good for everyone?”

Hal Licino is a successful author, award-winning freelance writer, and frequent contributor to a blog hosted by Benchmark Email, an email marketing service for small businesses. He also writes a weekly column for Daily Blog Tips.

The more things change the more they stay the same, as in today’s social media sphere bloggers are facing the same allegations of accepting under the table cash and gifts in exchange for favorable mentions of particular companies in their posts: A stealth practice which not only violates federal regulations, but also corrupts the essential relationship of trust and confidence legitimate bloggers try so hard to establish with their readership.

Hyundai Payday for bloggers

Hyundai Motor America was investigated by the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) Division of Advertising Practices to determine whether its campaign to motivate bloggers to write about its Super Bowl XLV commercials violated The FTC Act.
Due to the fact that the basic tenet of current corporate governance seems to be “establish deniability,” Hyundai was able to duck the federal bullet by claiming that they were not aware in advance that the “unnamed outside social media company” was providing gift certificates to bloggers as an incentive to write about the television commercials, in a modern version of the payola scandals of half a century ago.

Under the FTC regulations, companies are responsible for the actions of the advertising and media agencies they work for, but the FTC let Hyundai off the hook apparently believing the auto manufacturer’s claims of ignorance and incompetence.

Translating FTCese into blogger reference

The language in the FTC’s Revised Endorsement Guides refers to “ads” but it can readily be correlated to blogger terms:

• Blog descriptions of products and services must reflect the truth and not attempt to mislead.
• If the blogger does not believe that the results of their experience will be the same as those which a reader can expect, the blog must disclose the results which the consumer will experience.
• Any value relationship between the blogger and the marketer of the product or service should be disclosed, including: provision of cash or gifts; “review products” which do not need to be returned; and stock holding positions in the company or any related one.

Misshapen blob of porous legislation

The FTC Guides are a misshapen blob of embarrassingly porous legislation which not only feature more loopholes than a knitted sweater, but have no teeth. Bloggers cannot be fined for violating the FTC Guides so the legal incentive to comply is non-existent. Any blogger can happily collect cash or gifts without disclosing the fact to the readership and face nothing more than a raspberry from the Feds.

The true incentive to adherence to the FTC Guides is just how far a blogger can obfuscate the transparency which is a prerequisite to establishing credence and authority with an audience.

Lie in your blog: Lose your readership

The blogger who cashes a check or accepts a free laptop in exchange for writing glowing testimonials about a Solid State Drive which actually bricked within days is not just committing a ghastly violation of journalistic ethics but also doing a vast disservice to the reader who might be tempted to go out and buy that product and lose all their data.

The reader’s confidence in the blogger will be severely damaged by the factual dichotomy between review and reality and the faithful adherence to reading the blog will be terminated. This steady creep of readership loss will eventually lead the blogger to lose their audience and in turn lose their payola. No company is going to incentivize a blogger whose readership is plummeting.
The market dynamics of retribution against payola-accepting bloggers are considerably more powerful than the effectively insignificant slap on the wrist that can be expected from the Feds. No blogger should ever consider breaking their readers’ trust in exchange for a few bucks or a trinket.

Hal Licino is a successful author, award-winning freelance writer, and frequent contributor to a blog hosted by Benchmark Email, an email marketing service for small businesses. He also writes a weekly column for Daily Blog Tips.

According to Jeremiah the 4 trends that demonstrate his point are:

1. Corporate acquisitions stymie innovation
2. Tech blogs are experiencing major talent turnover
3. The audience needs have changed, they want: faster, smaller, and social
4. As space matures, business models solidify –giving room for new disruptors

In my opinion those are all important and relevant points, but they signal that tech blogging is evolving, not dying.

That’s also the opinion of most tech bloggers (not that they are trying to toot their own horn…). For instance, Sarah Lacy responded to Jeremiah with the following article: Golden Age of Tech Blogging Done? I Couldn’t Disagree More. Here’s a quote:

I’m a big fan of Jeremiah Owyang’s market analysis but I think he missed the point on this one, big time. He recently wrote a post on how the Golden Age of tech blogging is over. No way. Unless of course, he means we’re about to enter the platinum age. Because things are far from dead in tech blogging– and blogging in general. In fact, I think we’re poised to enter one of the most exciting periods yet.

I’m a big believer that tech trends tend to over-promise in the short term but under-promise in the longterm. As Jeremiah points out, the last few years demonstrated some of the limitations of blogging– ie, we can’t all make businesses and build big audiences, it won’t replace all older forms of media, and it’s a grind that will wear down all but the most intent. In a lot of ways sites like Facebook, Yelp and Twitter have scratched that itch for self-expression by giving the masses an easier and more painless way to get the endorphin rush that blogging gave in the early days. Scoble speaks to that in Jeremiah’s post. And that’s thinned out the blogging herd– no question.

Anyway if you are involved with the tech/online publishing industry make sure to check out those two articles.