Blogging and the New World of Markets
Permalink |Don’t think that blogs are going to be a bigg deal? Well, check out the “digg story”:1 titled “Abusive New York Camera Store Threatens Blogger” dugg by a pretty famous blogger/photographer named “Thomas Hawk”:2.
BTW, 5870 is a GIGANTIC number of Diggs
Still don’t think this is a big deal? Well, here’s a quick traffic rank comparison I did using Alexa of “digg.com vs. Slashdot.org”:3. Ya know, Slashdot’s famous for crushing sites with traffic, exploding servers, enriching Sun/Microsoft/LAMP/Dell with sales, keeping IT departments up all night, etc., etc. — aka the “Slashdot effect”:4.
Don’t know about the spike at the end of the graph, but it’s the magnitude that counts
Somebody in New York is not going to have a happy Christmas, ’cause Santa knows who’s been naughty — and he reads blogs.
Zoinger says, be a part of the conversation… but assume that everyone is listening.
*Update: 2005-12-1*
Wow, when I said that 5000+ diggs is a lot of diggs… well, it’s the MOST dugg story ever… by a lot. Check out the top dugg stories every “here”:5. It’s not going to be a bad Christmas, it’s gonna be NO Christmas.
*Update: 2005-12-1 v2*
Surprise, surprise… Yahoo! actually seems to be reading blogs. Here’s some excerpts from Thomas’ blog “post”:5 on his ordeal with PriceRitePhoto (the offending store).
bq.. One of the things that troubles me the most about this situation is that I found this retailer through Yahoo! shopping and they were perceived to have positive feedback. Is the feedback mechanism for Yahoo! Shopping broken? How could this horrible retailer have a four star rating with 858 ratings? I’m convinced that there is a possibility that many of the “reviews” for this company could be fake. I should though have sorted through the reviews to the worst to see that many others had fallen prey to similar fraud by this company.
p. Further down his post…
bq.. I also received this email today from Joe Lazarus, Director of Marketing for Yahoo! Inc.: “Tom, I wanted to follow up on a comment I added to your post on PriceRitePhoto. I work at Yahoo! Shopping. I passed your issue along to our Customer Care team who will investigate and take the appropriate action per our merchant Guidelines and Terms of Service. I covered some more details in my comment. Please feel free to contact me directly if you have any questions. ~ Joe”
p. And…
bq.. Update #8: Although I have not heard directly back from Yahoo! or their Marketing Director Joe Lazarus. It would appear at least that for the time being, today, PriceRitePhoto is not operating on Yahoo! Shopping. They are still listed as a merchant there and there is a link to their store but when you do a search by their store for products for sale through Yahoo! you get the following message: “We didn’t find any product results for mid:1016578.” I’m not sure if Yahoo! pulled their listings or if PriceRitePhoto did or if that is just part of what happens when Yahoo! investigates a company. I hope that if after investigating Yahoo! concludes that this company is acting unethically that they will in fact delist them altogether. I will update as I hear more on this.
p. I just did quick search in “Yahoo! Shopping”:6, and was unable to find the PriceRitePhoto anywhere in Yahoo! Shopping (I searched on the store name and for them under a Nikon D50 search and Canon EOS D5 search). So good on Yahoo! for responding, but they clearly need to upgrade their rating system.
Oh, just remember if you are ordering anything online, make sure to use a credit card. If you have differences with your retailer which you can’t resolve, contact your credit card company, and put the order in dispute. I have had great luck in the past getting a refund via this route.
And I am sure that PriceRitePhoto is still in business under other names. Remember it’s cheap to have multiple business/domain names, so watch out out there.
[6(Yahoo! Shopping homepage)]http://shopping.yahoo.com
[5(Top dugg stories)]http://digg.com/topstories/thisyear
[4(Wikipedia on the Slashdot effect)]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect
[3(Alexa digg vs. Slashdot)]http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&compare_sites=http://slashdot.org/&y=t&q=&url=www.digg.com
[2(Thomas Hawk homepage)]http://thomashawk.com/
[1(thomashawks dugg stories)]http://www.digg.com/users/thomashawk
December 2nd, 2005 at 10:53 am
Dude, you know how much I enjoy Thomas Hawk’s photography. Let’s just say I saw his post, shot a quick message over to a mutual friend in Shopping (you know who I’m talking about), and the rest is history. I can’t really take credit, though - they were already on it when I wrote. Amazing the impact this had, huh? PriceRitePhoto is down, but unfortunately, their sister stores, thecameramall.com and empirephoto.com are still up and operating (though delisted from Y! Shopping). Sure would be nice if our ratings system had better accuracy like resellerratings.com seems to have.
December 5th, 2005 at 9:12 am
Jeff,
Yeah, the response to Thomas’ post was over the top! Too bad that there appears to be lots of other “sister” sites out there.
I’ve found that ratings in general on the web subject to abuse and spamming… or just plain inaccurate. Amazon seems to do the best job in their ratings, but even they can be gamed (I saw an article once where authors of books would write favorable reviews for themselves using alias accounts).
Sites like Yahoo! seem to do the worst job on the quality of their ratings and reviews. However, they are not alone. It seems that almost every product on Newegg has a four or five star rating.