Some folks just don’t get the very essence of e-commerce.
Make it as easy as possible for the customer to buy, not as hard as possible.
Today I discovered and wanted to buy a sticker to put on my mail box, to stop junk mail from being delivered.
Here’s the shopping cart.
So far so good.
Then they wanted me to fill out this form for a $1.00 purchase.
Needless to say, they lost my $1.00.
It’s easier to write my own sticker.
One of the most powerful features of Twitter is the @name reply. With it, you can communicate with any Twitter user, whether that person is following you or not.
After having used FriendFeed for a little while, I’ve discovered that FriendFeed comments (and likes) wield nearly the same power, albeit not as direct as Twitter @name replies.
On FriendFeed, if you want to catch the attention of high-profile users like Robert Scoble or Louis Gray, assuming they’re not subscribed to you, here’s how to do it.
Step One: Post an entry that will be of interest to the person.
Step Two: Wait for someone they do subscribe to, to either like or comment on your entry.
When that happens, your entry is shown in their feeds as “So-and-so (friend of so-and-so)…”.
From your perspective it’s obviously less exact than the Twitter approach, but, it has the advantage that your entry is shown to them as having been endorsed by someone they subscribe to, which adds credibility to your entry.
From their perspective it’s actually a better solution because they only see entries that were endorsed by folks they trust and follow. So, for them the exposure to @name reply spam is virtually none.
Blog comment spammers often take a shotgun approach in their efforts. They know there will be a certain percentage of attrition with the spam comments they create, due to filtering from Akismet, Spam Karma, and manual blog comment moderation.
However, they count on the fact that the majority of blog owners don’t pay close attention to the comments that are made on their blogs. This happens due to lack of time, lack of knowledge about spam, and sometimes disinterest.
Hence, a one-time effort by comment spammers can harvest them many backlinks from many different blogs, which remain on those blogs for a very long time, if not forever.
With that as backdrop, here is the true power of Disqus in fighting blog comment spam.
Strike One: Disqus Replaces Blog Comments (on WordPress at least)
With Disqus installed on your WordPress blog, there’s no WordPress comment form that spammer scripts can find and manipulate.
Strike Two: You Can Block Spammers in Disqus
When spammers try to post their spam via Disqus, you as blog owner have the power to block them from ever commenting on your blog again.
I assume that, once blocked, all the past comments made by the blocked entity are also removed from one’s Disqus comment system.
Strike Three: Removal From Disqus Destroys All Their Comments
This is the real “kick in the teeth” that Disqus can hand out to spammers.
When Disqus removes a spammer’s account from their system, all their comments automatically disappear from all the blogs that they defaced with their comment filth.
In other words, all their efforts are erased in one fell swoop, and that gives one that “poetic justice” feeling, doesn’t it?
This holds true regardless of whether the blog owner is diligent or indifferent about the comments posted on his/her blog. The only requirement is that they use Disqus as their commenting system.
Number One: Don’t refresh the page when one subscribes to someone from the pop-up box when you hover over a person’s name.
This kind of “inline” subscribing is very useful, but when you’re way down the page, still reading entries and comments, it’s frustrating to lose where you were when the page refreshes with new content in possibly a different order.
Number Two: Give us the ability to subscribe to someone when you’re viewing an individual entry.
Number Three: Gives us a tab where the “friends” feed is sorted strictly by the time of the original entry, newest entry first.
New (unliked or uncommented) items often disappear too quickly from the first “friends” tab page, if there are very “busy” items being liked or commented on.
Number Four: Sort the “search” results by the time of the original entry, or at least give one the option to sort them that way.
Number Five: Give us dockable tabs.
When one views an individual entry (which is useful when it’s a busy entry and you want to focus on the new comments coming in), you lose the entry when you quickly want to see what’s going on in the general “friends” feed.
