It’s not perfect, but still a nice effort.  WordPress 2 for iPhone

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.

Security

Security, or more correctly the lack of security, is probably wordpresses biggest downside. Because it’s so widely used and open source it’s a natural target for hackers. There are plugins that help you lockdown wordpress a wordpress firewall plugin and ways keep an audit trail to help keep track of changes and even ways to limit access to your admin panel by IP, but at the end of the day, from a security standpoint wordpress is a block of swiss cheese. So you should always make sure you have backups and keep your wordpress and plugins up to date.

Maintenance

Over the past year wordpress has dramatically increased the frequency and complexity of their new releases. In 2008 wordpress moved from wordpress 2.3 to 2.7, with more than one update requiring major changes to database schema. For organizations who are interested in doing business and not being a system admin for the ever changing world of wordpress, all of time maintaing a wordpress CMS, can make it look fairly unatractive. Normal maintenance combined with the required due dillegence for security can and will probably eat up a few man hours every month. If you are responsible for more than one blog the time commitment grows geometrically, often to the point of absurdity. Once you’ve commited to the wordpress platform it’s like getting a tattoo, getting rid of it is going to cost a bit of money, and be very painful. Ignore the maintenance aspect of wordpress and the weak security will come back to haunt you. It won’t be a matter of if your blog gets hacked, it will be just a matter of when.

Lack of Enterprise Features

Earlier this year Wired Magazine published an article saying blogging was dead. While this was probably a well executed piece of linkbait (which worked), one thing the article was right about, personal, and single author blogs are dying out, and being replaced by bigger multi-author blogs. These new blogs bear more resemblance to magazines and newspapers than than to blogs in the classical sense. WordPress has been slow to incorporate and enhance some of the key features enterprise publishers look for and need in a CMS. For example you can schedule posts for future publications with wordpress, but the most recent version removed this information from the dashboard. The post administration screen now shows “post publishes in 9 days” instead of the actual time and date of publication, which is a pretty serious oversight. Other features include a lack of native advertising management, instead relying on plugins, and the absence of built in template editor. IMHO features like this keep wordpress from being given serious consideration by mainstream publishers.

While I’ve painted a pretty grim picture, there is a lot to like about wordpress. You can’t beat the price, and if you invest the time, it can be an amazingly powerful piece of software. But choosing wordpress for your site, or your clients sites, is something you should give serious consideration too. Locking someone into a piece of software that requires a significant time investment for upkeep, isn’t for everyone, especially if there isn’t someone who is technologically savvy with time to devote to the upkeep. Think of wordpress as finicky european sports car, it may spend a lot of time in the shop, but when it’s out on the road, cornering like it’s on rails, it’s hard not enjoy it. If you do decide to move to wordpress Google recently released some tools to make the migration easier.

About the Author

With over 10 years experience in internet marketing and website development, Michael Gray has helped many companies with their SEO, ecommerce and website marketing needs. Michael has been a long time speaker at industry events such as PubCon, Search Engine Strategies and SMX. You can read his blog at www.wolf-howl.com, or his articles in many industry publications. In addition to internal search engine optimization, Michael also helps companies with their product campaigns with ViralConversations.com

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.

Random Pictures Can Make Duplicate Content Look Authoritative (Philip Wilson Steer: The Black Hat)

In the affiliate days of old, you could take a data feed full of product descriptions and slap it up on the net, buy yourself a PR9 link and you were off to the races. Champagne for everyone. It was long tail before the phrase existed. Google got wise, and in addition to de-linearizing PR, they started doing very sophisticated duplicate content filtering.

The cliche term “Add Value” was born sometime thereafter, and augmenting commodity content has become an art form. The key is to add enough new and unique value so that you can have oodles of keyword rich content without tripping the duplicate filters. I’ve said ‘add value’ again and again at conferences, and I really mean it. I really mean add value to my wallet, that is, but if that means making an original site then so be it.

Now, I just started blogging a couple months ago. (I made one post on Netflix several years ago, but abandoned it like so many blogs). I’m really not qualified to speak on blogging, but I do — and I’m not alone. But as I blog, and read more blogs, I can’t help but make the conclusion about SEO Blogs: They take some commodity piece of information, rewrite it, paraphrase, reorder it, and call it their own. It’s crap.

Chop it up, slice it, add a picture you probably don’t have rights to, and presto you have yourself an Affiliate Data Feed Site SEO Blog. Now I didn’t count the steps, but it could be 10, 20, 48, 5, 7 who cares. It’s the same old shit.

Now go think of something new to say.

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.

Lisa Barone: I'm livbloging This T-Shirt

I made a shirt for Lisa to wear at Affiliate Summit West

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.

Turkey Live Blogging

Live Blogging: please make it stop!

Do we really need a live blogged Turkey Day?

I can’t take it anymore

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.

I'm Live Blogging This.

Just like Shoemoney, I too love free shit. Unfortunately, I’m not cool enough to have people send them to me, but I do love free tshirts.

Here is our fake t-shirt of the week. That’s not me, nor is it a real t-shirt. It’s a bit timely since the recent Live Blogging controversy on Sphinn.

If you want your fake t-shirt featured here, just let me know.

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.

For those of you living in a closet, I’m talking about people who try to keep up with a live speaker, or race to have the first post on breaking news.  They just write as it happens.  Have you ever tried it? It’s hard.  And no one is good at it.  There are lots of conference write-ups that are useful, and the authors above are great when they take the time to think about the post, and write clearly and concisely.

I read live bloggers regularly when they aren’t live blogging. I love their writing. I love their insight. I just can’t stand it when they try to be some sort of court stenographer.

Live blogging is shoddy journalism.

It’s a selfish disregard for reporting integrity.

Please stop.

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.