Kicking John Chow to the Curb
It's not often that a blogger loses credibility with me and I decide to do something about it. John Chow is one of those bloggers. I won't even do him the courtesy of linking to him as a reference anymore. I briefly mentioned my decision in my Blog Drive-Bys for 2007-05-22. Read that article for a link to his.
This is only the second blogger to irritate me enough to remove his blog feed and his link from my blogroll. It doesn't bother me to do so because I never fell for his "write a review for a link back" program.
The first one I removed from my feeds was Lifehacker as I detailed in my article, Lifehacker Ignores Their Mistake, where completely bogus information from one of their readers was seemingly endorsed. They did not acknowledge their mistake until AFTER it was pointed out by several bloggers (including me). Read my article for the link to theirs.
John Chow irritated me by usurping the "dofollow" movement. Many bloggers who use WordPress as their blogging platform (as do I) installed one of several plugins to defeat the default "rel=nofollow" tag that's added to comment URLs by the software. I was one of them. The purpose of it was to give commenters (who are also bloggers) a link back to their blogs with no penalties from search engines. Not only did John decide not to install the plugin, he decided he would make money from other bloggers by creating a program where bloggers could pay him to have the tag removed from their blog comments.
I may not have the best blog in the world (far from it) but I refuse to have it even remotely associated with bloggers that use or abuse their readers in any way, shape or form. Sure, their blogs are their blogs and they have the right to use them anyway they want. I'm sure it won't bother them to lose just little old me as a reader, but if more people know and more people follow suit, I'm sure it'll bother them a whole lot more.
Acknowledgment: I was inspired to write this by a comment from Comedy Plus in response to the aforementioned drive-by article. Thank you Comedy Plus.
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Preach it RT, preach it. Excellent article. You're welcome (and I am humbled).
Had I already decided I wasn't interested in his content before ever reading any of it (from you and the others constantly talking about him) I'd probably stop reading too.
I think this is an example of the power of your drivebys and whatnot. Even though you're saying something positive, some of us who aren't interested will know NOT to read something in addition to when TO read it.
Of course, 99 percent of what I write is nonsense. But as long as someone understands my point of view for the remaining 1 percent, I feel like I accomplished something.
What Jer said (I think!)
He's definitely misread this one I think, he may make a couple of hundred dollars from gullible fools, but
a. That's nothing to his income
b. The damage it does to his readership will far outweigh the financial gain.
Will he notice? Probably not, but stranger things have happened….
I won't ever know because I won't be reading his blog to find out.
RT I pulled my feed as soon as I read that post.
You do know that by linking to him on your blog could drive potential visitors there making a comparison to his and yours? =P (there ARE people who aren't famaliar with his blog…)
Anyways, I agree with you. But I also think that he's very smart; he's making money and making his readers happy. People blog about those things!
I meant to answer this. I won't remove old links from any blog post unless the old links are dead (pointing nowhere). I just won't point any new links in that direction.
I avoid all these blogs that talk about blogging and money-making in the same breath.
I still think that what John Chow did is stupid. He discourages readers comment. And he don't even realised that the page where the comment appear is not even rated (most of the new post page). Main page is PR6 but not individual post where the comment appear is NOT. So, whoever subscribed to that $10 a month is doubly stupid. Is these people would dig to older post of one year old simply to comment and get a back link ? Hahaha .. That's very funny indeed.
Secondly, by removing the DoFollow plugin just for the sake of money is totally unacceptable. Its okay if he started that way. But reverting it halfway for a wrong reason is very unprofessional.
He never installed the plugin. It appears he created another plugin to make it a selective dofollow for those who pay. He stated in his post that he already received enough comments and didn't care about dofollow for what it was designed for.
My first point still valid though.
Not many people realise that.
Your first point was indeed valid. I just wanted to clarify the other point.
who is John Chow again?
Somebody you don't need to know about. If you're really interested, Google for him.
OMG I was totally gonna write up a post on how overrated John Chow is!!! Love it! I didn't even know about his anti-do-follow post because I've stopped reading his blog ages ago. Thanks to you, I can definitely say BOOOOO to John Chow!
not sure why you got kicked off my feedreader, i subscribed
i no longer link to john chow anymore either… great article
[...] paperbull.com Blog-op Untwisted Vortex Websubtractions Andy Beard John Chow. Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking [...]
That's exactly where he's heading for me too. I've been getting his feed for a while. Though truthfully, I hardly look at it any more. This gave me a great excuse to clear out my feeds by one.
[...] John's decision to charge his readers money to remove the do-follow links. This topic has been beat to death, but I wanted to voice my opinion on the issue since this is after all the place [...]
[...] Untwisted Vortex – Updated several times a day, there's always something interesting you can find here. And what I really like about RT is that he's not afraid to voice his opinion! [...]
[...] At Twenty Steps I only link out to other sites that I believe will benefit my readers in some way. Some of them I get paid for but that's not the reason for including them. I would never link to something or do something on my site just because I get paid a couple of bucks. That's the quickest way of losing readers as John Chow is finding out. [...]
Wow. Charging people to have their "no follow" tags removed is bad. I am simply grateful to have visitors stop by my blog — to think of charging them for leaving a comment is something beyond comprehension.
I pulled my feed too. Thanks for pointing this one out.
I know I'm a bit late to this party, but when I read your entry, my eyes nearly popped out of my head and I'm almost certain my heart stopped for a split second.
He really did that? (I only read one or two of his blog entries, but never actually subscribed.) If that's not biting the hand that feeds, I'm not sure what is.
Yeah, it's his blog and he can do whatever he wants, but what he's doing just seems so unconscionable. Ick, I feel dirty just thinking about it.
~ Teli
hmm, strange, we know each other in forums, but I still dint care to check out your blog? how rude of me!.About this issue, Love the post, what he does is nothing short of the greedy midas who wants money more than anything
I might as well kick him out of my reader too, and still feel no difference, since what ever he writes is common content, found all over the net, nuthing original or earth shattering. and y is the word s.o.r.r.y being moderated?
Because spam comments are getting through with single words like sorry. nice, cool and interesting.
All you have to do is click that button that spam bots can't. Perhaps I need to change the message (it's hardcoded).
"who is John Chow again?"
"Somebody you don't need to know about. If you're really interested, Google for him."
Ha! But you won't find his site in Google because like RT, Google "stopped reading" his site, too!
I heard about that.
[...] at that (but I will offer a hint – it has to do with his no-follow tag approach, see this post on Untwisted Vortex!). Here's the required text from emonetized to get some bonus entries to win the ad spot on [...]
I'm pretty new to the whole niche, and as everyone who is new i read John Chow's blog, btu then i never knew his whole history, this idea of his sounds pretty lame, and so see the extent he would go to earn money is appalling.
Not that i'm going to stop reading his blog right away, but this post made me know better about someone .. Thats pretty much all ..
And right now i guess JC does nothing but sponsored reviews ..
Guru's last blog post..21/12/2007 – Tidbits
That was very ugly of him to do. But som epeople just have it for money.
That's crazy that someone that is supposedly one of the leaders of "making money from a blog" has turned his back on fellow bloggers. He deserves to see his subscription list dwindle.
Bye bye to John Chow's feed for me! Seriously, with all the money he is making, must he squeeze some extra pennies out of his readers like this?