I simply ask this: could I walk into a branch of the National Australia Bank and openly promote my business to those in attendance? I’d encourage EVERY Australian blogger who has an account to the National to close it.

From today’s Crikey (not quite reprinted in full, but as it’s subscription only, reprinted enough so you get the core idea):

Last week, the National Australia Bank “spammed” the comments sections of private blogs in an attempt to secure free promotion for the launch of its new SMS banking service. NAB is standing behind this decision.

Last Thursday, an anonymous message was posted to the comments section of an article about the recent controversies surrounding Sam Newman on the AFL Player Spectator blog…the message was out of context and irrelevant, promoting an event at Melbourne’s Federation Square and a ticket give-away:

“Hi guys, NAB is giving away free tickets to the Collingwood v Carlton game on Saturday afternoon @ the MCG. Hop on down to Fed Square tomorrow… this is all to launch the new NAB SMS Banking! Thank you”….

NAB media relations spokesperson Felicity Glennie-Holmes confirmed that the message was indeed from the bank. The idea to spam the comments sections of private blogs was a recommendation of PR agency Cox+Inall, part of the BWM group, and had been undertaken by Cox+Inall with the bank’s full knowledge and approval.

Cox+Inall had searched for blogs that included AFL coverage and were “well-enough read to attract readers who might be interested in our offer,” said Ms Glennie-Holmes. No-one at NAB or at Cox+Inall had considered approaching blog owners first for permission before posting their promotional messages, she said.

“Blogs are a public forum”, said Ms Glennie-Holmes. NAB and Cox+Inall felt this meant commercial interests could feel free to contribute unsolicited and irrelevant commercial material as comments, placing the onus on blog moderators to reject or delete unwanted comments.

“We identified five or six blogs where we felt we’d give it a try,” explained Ms Glennie-Holmes. “We chose blogs where we thought the moderators would review and decide whether or not to carry our message…it was up to the blogger to decide whether they would leave the comment there or delete it.”

The fact that the message posted to the blogs was “very openly promotional” and not deceptive also justified the bank’s conduct, Ms Glennie-Holmes said.

Despite this openly promotional objective and targeting blogs based on their readership and web traffic, NAB – which reported a net profit of $4.6 billion last year – at no time considered remunerating bloggers, who typically blog in their own spare time and without sponsorship.

On its website, under the heading “Key points to help protect yourself online”, NAB advises its customers to “Delete spam emails and do not open email attachments from strangers. Consider using a SPAM filter.”

However, Ms Glennie-Holmes said she didn’t see anything contradictory in the bank stressing online safety and security and warning customers about spam when it was itself adopting a communications strategy based on spamming private blogs.

Absolute scum bags and a disgrace to the Australian corporate community. Boycott the NAB now.

So the good new is that The Inquisitr got accepted into Google News, least the tech stream did anyway. This is going to be a healthy boost in site traffic, although until we start appearing I don’t know by how much yet. I could be hundreds of page views a day, it could be thousands or even more. Its been years since I had a site in Google News, but I do recall The Blog Herald getting reasonable sort of traffic from it.

Now the bad news: I had to change the URL structure to be accepted. Google News will only index pages where those pages have a min 3 number unique identifier. The Inquisitr didn’t, with me having taken the SEO and simple URL route of inquisitr.com/postname. So I had to change the permalink structure of every post (it’s now inquisitr.com/postnumber/postname), easy, but that means a redirect of the old posts…easy, but because the posts didn’t have anything between the URL and name originally the site is now trying to redirect everything with that structure, including archive pages and static pages. The plugin I used for the redirect has an exception box, but how do you define the exception when there is no unique identifier in the first place other than the name of the page itself (and I tried that…didn’t work, it looks for a broader field). So for now the pages for QMeme, About and Content are now redirecting to posts with the same content until I can find a way of excepting these pages from the catchall 302 redirect. Did I mention that it caused me one hour of sheer panic as well?

Update: before I even hit publish my Google News vanity search email pops up with a hit

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Steve Gilmor is a smart guy, but his inability to focus on more than one thing at a time (or more precisely to constantly seque in a post) is worthy of cult status.

This post translated as best as I can make it out.

Our Home Town
I stumbled across Summize. I did a vanity search. Tim Russert died. There was nothing on TV. Russert covered the Presidential election. Barrack Obama causes Twitter to crash. Steve Jobs’ keynote put stress on Twitter. There was video taken of Steve Jobs. “a bootstrapped symphony of virtualized Steve Reality Distortion Field funneled through the MacBook AIR” (no idea what this means…acid trip maybe). Fanaticism and early adopters. Services like Twitter and Qik are magical. You will be in control. You’ll see dead people.

I’m reminded of Chaser segments like this (Steve’s Seque’s are a lot longer though)

I haven’t used Last.fm since I wrote this post in June noting that Last.fm were not joining the industry wide National Day of Silence. I still think, as a CBS owned company, they are not community players and really not worthy of being lauded by many in the space.

However, everyone has kept using them. A bit like Twitter I guess. You know they suck but they offer the best package…well in Twitter’s case until perhaps recently.

So I’m back on Last.fm and I feel like I need a shower to clean off the dirt. Ultimately I hate missing out on things and Pandora’s still georetarded so Last.fm it is. Not for the on-demand stuff (Grooveshark + Seeqpod does a better job of that) but for the customized radio side. That, and Last.fm is supported in FriendFeed

Congrats to Loren on this deal. He’s one of the smartest, most engaging and interesting guys I’ve ever spent time with, and a pure gentleman as well. I just hope it doesn’t result in too many more fluff pieces like these

Today marks 1 month since The Inquisitr launched. I was going to write something over on the site about the 1 month mark but the last time I wrote a post about the site people used OutBrain to rate it poorly, besides, I don’t do self indulgent well anyway…well my personal blog aside

Having said that being transparent to a point is an important part of blogging/ publishing 2.0 so here’s some numbers from 6pm AEST June 6. Some constantly fluctuate so hence the proviso in terms of when the figures apply to

Page views

Awstats 5 May- 4:15 5 June: 415080
Google Analytics 9 May - 5 June: 136,768 (note missing the opening big 4 days)

Subscribers
Feedburner: 2155 across 4 feeds.

Technorati
Authority: 339
Rank: 12505

Techmeme
Leaderboard 51st
Bloggerboard (30 day rolling) 51st, (7 day rolling) 32nd
Writers: me (30 day rolling) 29th (includes two TC posts), (7 day rolling) 10th

Webstats
Alexa one week: 36,041 3months: 349,347
Compete: 129,714 “people” for May
Quantcast: predicts a monthly unique of 82,426

Services running on the site
Disqus
ValueClickMedia
BuySellAds.com
Adsense (one unit only…and not for long)
Lijit
FriendFeed (via WordPress plugin)

Services tried but down
Pubmatic
Outbrain (subject to review)

Sponsor(s)
The Metaverse Journal

Widgets Running
Display: Techmeme, BlogCatalog
Available for users: iGoogle | Netvibes | Opera | webpage/ blog

There’s probably other things as well I’ll think of later. My thanks to those who have supported myself and the team along the way. After a low second week the site is starting to trend upwards, not huge overnight growth but sustainable, solid growth. More next time.

Might add this to the sidebar. Let’s see if the wave of new members continues first.

We headed into town this morning to see the Australian Centre for the Moving Image’s GameOn Exhibition at Federation Square. The exhibition highlights the history of computer gaming, with displays from various eras and plenty of actual games to play.

Figuring that given it’s nothing more than a big collection of arcade games I took my camera to get some pics, only to be told AFTER I checked the bag that I couldn’t take pics (I was holding my camera…go figure). I grumbled about the insanity of copyright as I usually do, and went into the exhibition.

About 5 minutes in there’s a huge arcade game on a projector wall which you could play. Great, hit the start button, it gives me a list of games to play. Click pacman….and then get a Mame screen telling me that it’s the Z80 version of Pacman. Yep, a display that won’t let people take pictures was using downloaded and arguably illegal ROM’s on a local copy of MAME.

Now to be fair they may have gotten permission from every single publisher of the various ROM’s they were using, but it’s unlikely.

Personally I have zero issue with them doing what they did, but to say that I can’t take pictures due to copyright when they were breaching copyright themselves: FAIL.

Of course the other stupid thing: people were walking around taking pictures with their mobile phones anyway. My iPhone takes poor pics so I didn’t get any good ones, it would appear the ban due to copyright was for dedicated cameras only.

I shouldn’t be surprised by this: copyright has ruined the tourist experience in so many walks of life now. When I was a kid you could go to an exhibition and they’d want you to take photos, now it’s all about control and prevention. The saddest part is this is the world my son will grow up in; and yes, he had his camera with him today as well. Apparently a 5 year old with a Fisher Price digital camera presents a clear and present copyright danger.

JustAddMe offers a simple sidebar widget with links to social networks. My only gripe is that the list is a little limited, but please feel free to add me as above. Also FriendFeed here

If anyone knows of a deeper alternative leave a comment. I’m lazy so I like the idea

It’s interesting that Animoto chose to show Ballmer during the low point in the song