SEO, PHP and Javascript Web Dev

Some of you may have checked out my little Web 2.0 social media experiment Fodder. When Pligg driven Digg clones started churning out I thought I would supply New Zealand with our own socially driven news site. A few of my friends signed up and it was an easy way for us to share the interesting items we found online rather than sending mass bcc’d emails, instead using the RSS feed.

What we have over at Fodder now is an easy way for spammers to get inbound links to their made-for-adsense sites and the like. Clearly not what we intended.

But what is the value? Fodder has next to nothing pagerank. Fodder has next to nothing eyeballs. Fodder has next to nothing spider activity. Fodder has next to nothing apart from spam. Unfortunate but true.

Now that other social media news sites such as Scoopit and Share My NZ have arrived, Fodder has next to nothing niche’s.

Given that Fodder really was a low overhead experiment in the first instance I’m not surprised or disappointed. All that took place was registering a domain name and uploading a Pligg installation, which obviously some spammers have played around with by now.

I like to think the experiment was not totally a loss. I learned that you really need to put a bit more effort behind marketing social networking sites in order to get the public interest in the first place. You need that seed of a few hundred enthusiastic users to get the ball rolling. I also learned that RSS is not adopted as widely as I might have imagined. It has been difficult to explain the benefits of RSS and to get people enthused about the standard, even the technically minded. To the point where I just gave in and supplied the RSS to Email service from feedburner. I also learned that supplying spammers with an early installation of software which allows them to create webpages and add content to these pages is one way to get yourself spammed like a pro.

Lastly I have become a little cynical about the state of social media sites and wonder the ratio of genuine users to clever internet marketers. Now that my Pligg clone has been so masterfully manipulated to artifically demonstrate a trend, I wonder how sophisticated ranking algorithms are at other social media sites. When I follow a link on one of my favourites - Reddit.com - the assumption is that I am following a trend. But is that trend artifical or genuine?

Or does it even matter? While many might think that internet marketers are the sourge of social media, are they in fact contributing and even driving social media?

Nevertheless, I need to do something with my Pligg installation.

Related posts:

1. Reinstalling the InstallShield Engine.