I've received a number of emails to not only my personal account but also to the email address assigned for Perfcast from individuals asking to exchange links. Each time I read an email like this, I get a nostalgic feeling because this is how links were exchanged 3-5 years ago. In this day in age, exchanging links in this fashion doesn't work anymore so please, stop wasting your time.

Instead, create an awesome guest post for a popular site that is either within your niche or is on the fringe of a related niche. This technique is a win-win for both the publisher and the post author. Generally, the blog author will allow you to place a link to a blog of your choosing either at the beginning or end of the article. This means your link will be displayed within the content of the post and not in some obscure location such as the sidebar or the footer. This my friends, is how to exchange links in 2008.

If you don't feel like guest posting to get links, you could always create accounts on a wide assortment of sites and services with each account having a link pointing back to your own site. That way, you are in full control of your linking structure and you don't need to rely on someone to publish your content. In fact, if you are just starting a blog or have recently launched one, you would be smart to grab yourself a Twitter account and at least publish one tweet with a link to your blog. Twitter is being crawled by Google Search engines what seems like every second of the day. Who needs SEO buffs to get listed in the search engines when you can use this technique and be listed in sometimes, under 15 minutes.

Ever find yourself in a situation where you need to publish a test blog post to see if something works or not but you're afraid to thanks to the post being seen by your RSS subscribers? I have, but that is no longer an issue thanks to a WordPress plugin called Simply Exclude.

Simply Exclude enables you to configure whether or not to include/exclude categories, tags, pages, and authors from the WordPress RSS feed. In fact, this plugin provides an entire level of inclusions and exclusions which also means that using the plugin is a bit complex.

After the plugin is installed and activated, browse to the plugin settings page. At the top, you should see four distinct tabs. Manage Categories, Tags, Authors, and Pages.

The top four settings are WP Actions made up of Front, Archive, Search and Feed. For example, if you don't want a certain category of posts to show up on the front page of your blog, you would select EXCLUDE from the top for the FRONT action name and then from the list of categories below that, you would find your category of choice and check mark the box for FRONT.

The plugins home page has a better explanation on how to configure this plugin but one things for sure, it provides a wealth of configurations for including or excluding specific content from displaying on multiple areas of your blog.

I remember on the day before Thanksgiving, I was in my office working on a few blog posts when I looked at my notebook and noticed the large number of tweets that were appearing discussing the attacks that were taking place in Mumbai. A couple of people sent links out on Twitter of various live video streams covering the event, including one source which was streaming live from an local India news station. Later, I watched some mainstream news coverage through the likes of CNN.

NDTV has a great story which details the use of Twitter and live blogging during the attacks on Mumbai. According to NDTV, when the initial reports began to come in via Twitter, the tweets were filled with detailed information. However, once the attack was in full swing, there was so much information to digest, you couldn't tell which tweets were true and which were false.

The title of the article asks, is live blogging the future of media? Using the attacks on Mumbai as an example, live blogging still has a long way to go. One of the biggest problems with live blogging is that, readers ultimately have to take everything they hear on a social network with a grain of salt. In terms of mainstream media, they become relevant in the fact that they have the time, resources, and man power to ensure a greater degree of accuracy. NDTV makes a great point in that, as time went on, live bloggers ended up making the story more confusing.

To sum things up, NDTV says it better than I ever could regarding mainstream medias relevance when compared to live blogging or social networks:

So, what twitter has done is to provide instant information to millions. No one doubts the fact that it's one of the best things to have happened to the internet. But as Cellan Jones says, that what it doesn't do is, tell us what is true, and what isn't. That makes the work of mainstream media outlets and professional reporters all the more relevant.

What do you think? Is mainstream media still relevant or has live blogging and the likes of Twitter replaced the mainstream media?

Six Apart, the creators of Movable Type have announced that they have released version 4.23 of the software. This latest version is a mandatory security release and it's strongly recommended that you upgrade as soon as possible. On top of the security fix, there are also a number of bugs that have been squashed. The MT post does a good job highlighting the specifics regarding the update.

• Release Type: Security Release. This update fixes a potential vulnerability which has not yet been exploited in the wild.
• Mandatory? Yes, this is a mandatory security upgrade.
• Performance Implications: None.
• Plugins Affected: None. Your current plugins should continue to work as expected.
• Templates Affected: An update to the profile view template is required for those customers who use the community template sets and user profile feature.
• System Requirements: This release has no new or additional system requirements.
• Licensing considerations: None. MT 4.23 is a free update for users of any version of MT 4.x.
• Upgrade Fatigue: No further mandatory updates are planned for Movable Type in 2008.

By the way, there is a little editor's note at the bottom of the release post which states that there was no MT 4.22. The previous version of MT was 4.21 and now the latest version is 4.23. How weird is it that both Movable Type and WordPress released security updates which skipped a version number. Hmm, maybe the two are more related than I thought.

Our Ask Performancing feature for this week is about filing taxes. The question was posted on the Hive by none other than my fellow contributor Jeff Chandler.

During the year, I received payments through paypal for contractual work for one site while receiving more payments from another site for contractual work. However, I am beginning to wonder how I am going to pay taxes on the money I am making through writing.

...

My question is, how should I file taxes? Should I report the money that I have received through paypal from the various sites I have written for as income on my income tax filing or should I file a 1099 e on my own behalf? Or, should I not file anything and considering the payments through paypal as under the table? I've been told by others that I have asked that the money that goes from paypal to my account which is not taxes will eventually come back to haunt me if I don't report it.

The short answer here is that it's best that one consult with an accountant or the tax authorities in your country, state or locality. The problem with running a business that's not necessarily limited by geographic boundaries (like a blog network, and like writing for blogs) is that it might be difficult to determine tax jurisdiction or responsibility. And what applies to one person might not necessarily be applicable to the other.

For instance, a blog network may be a registered corporation in country A. But most of its staffers and writers reside in countries B, C and D. And most of the advertisers or sponsors come from country X. That's a lot of money floating around in cyberspace, and who knows which taxman you should be paying money to.

I'm an economist, but taxation wasn't exactly my best subject back in college and grad school. But here are a few suggestions from our fellow Hive members.

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An interesting article on the Valley Advocate website based out of Massachusetts caught my interest today. The article highlights an individual who had reached the peak of their blogging output. This individual got together with another local blogger to discuss the prospects of working together rather than working alone. An informal network developed and after reaching out to even more local bloggers, a collaborative website was created which became a clearinghouse of writing by local bloggers.

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Having handled publisher support for Performancing Ads for quite a while now, I could say that much of the inquiries revolve around affiliate payouts. Frankly, the way the affiliate system was originally setup, we were worreid about fraud, and we've had to implement measures to mitigate this. This came at the cost of having our users wonder what the heck was happening with their referrals, though. Raw referrals did not guarantee the $10 affiliate fee, but rather those who have installed their ad code for 30 of days were considered eligible referrals, and were credited to the referring account.

But this was still open to fraud, and legitimate users were still inconvenienced by not knowing how and when exactly they could get their money earned. So Performancing Ads is now implementing a new, easier-to-understand affiliate scheme. As Chris Garrett explains:

So the new system is much easier to understand and has fraud prevention built-in.

Rather than a flat $10 you will get 5% of whatever your referrals buy or sell, ongoing while they remain a member.

So if you refer someone who sells an ad worth $100 you get $5. If you refer someone who buys a $100 ad you get $5. And you keep getting those commissions for each ad they renew or continue to sell.

In short, there will no longer be that per-referral commission of $10, because this was inherently unsustainable both on our part and on the users'. If fraud were prevalent, then we'd be liable for paying out commissions for non-performing accounts. This would later on force us to go under and eventually shut down. That way, nobody wins. But our motto is Everybody Wins! So we would want everybody--that is, legitimate and productive members of the system--to benefit.

What's great here is that if you get to refer a really active publisher or advertiser, then you would earn really well, in terms of commissions, instead of only earning a flat one-time fee for a single referral.

And so, we're hoping our users and patrons would like this new scheme.

We would, of course, still pay out all eligible referrals left over from the old system (or have we already done so via our automatic end-of-month payments?). Starting this month, we're hoping our users would then net more from new referrals.

This week, Anderson Analytics' GenX2Z released partial findings from their 2009 US college Student report. According to their findings, Facebook remained the number one website this year overtaking MySpace in 2007. MySpace finds themselves in fourth place after Google and Yahoo! Among the top ten sites, three new ones have been included (LiveJournal, Amazon, CNN).

The study finds that the popularity of blogging amongst Gen Y is largely attributed to college women who are three times more likely than males to maintain a blog. Also worthy of noting is that students are four times more likely to blog. In terms of Social Networking Services, it is no surprise that Facebook leads the pack with over 80 percent of the respondents use the service compared to 40% for MySpace. Looks like the wow factor of MySpace with college students in gone.

Information about the study: Anderson Analytics – GenX2Z College Study is conducted every year in the Fall semester among 1,000 US college students. All participants have confirmed .edu emails. Sample provides statistics with a +/-3.1% confidence interval at the 95% confidence level.

I love it when people send in questions to me and for this edition, Brian asks:

If I change from the date-based to just /%postname%/, will my old permalinks convert over to just postname?

The short answer is no. What ends up happening is that, all of the permalinks on your blog will be changed to represent the new configuration. This will cause all links that were created before the change to be broken. Also, any links that have been indexed in Google with the old permalink structure will be invalid and will need to be re indexed. If you really feel convinced to change your permalink structure, I recommend using the Permalinks Migration plugin. This plugin will generate a “301 Redirect” when users or spiders visit your site through old permalinks, and redirect them to the new permalinks of the same post. After that, I recommend using the Broken Link checker plugin to discover links on your site that are producing 404 errors.

If you are just starting out, take a good hard look at how you will be using your blog in the future. This will help you to determine which linking structure works for you. As far as am I concerned, setting up permalinks in WordPress to %postname% is all you need and this helps to keep the link short and sweet. I've been told that in order for links to be added into the Google News engine, a link needs to have at least 3-5 numbers within it. I don't know if that is true or not but I'd rather just stick to postnames.

For more information regarding the configuration of permalinks, please read this post which goes into detail regarding the different ways in which to configure pretty permalinks in WordPress.

The latest and stable release of Fantastico has been released to webhosters. The new version contains the following script updates:

• phpBB: 3.0.2 -> 3.0.3
• WordPress: 2.6.3 -> 2.6.5

Be sure to keep an eye out for upgrades to these scripts if you have installed the software via Fantastico.

Most believe that by continuously linking in, you'll decrease bounce rates, increase the average amount of time a visitor spends on your site, and increase traffic. While at the surface this may be true, I believe that linking out is twice as good as linking in and here are my 9 reasons why.

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Back when writing was my sole blogging-related job, I often spent countless hours in front of my laptop writing feature-length posts. Sometimes I spent this time at cafes waiting for my daughter to finish her preschool class (about three hours). Sometimes even more--when I'm just not satisfied with an article, I save it as draft for later editing and publishing. This lets me have more time to

On a recent Blog Herald article, Thord Hedengren wonders why some folks from traditional media often relate blogging to rapid-fire writing akin to being a shoot now, aim later approach. And so when a blogger takes time to write, edit and publish a post, it's called slow blogging.

Sure, blogging does have the benefit of skipping a few editorial steps, and so bloggers often get to post news earlier than most mainstream media outfits. You can catch wind of some news or nasty rumor and post about it in the next two minutes. That can be good blogging, if it's your intent to spread the news as fast as possible. But then good blogging also entails research, painstaking editing, and even thinking twice or thrice whether to publish an article or not.

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While those in the U.S. were celebrating a day of giving thanks, David Peralty was stuck with going solo on the show. However, after listening to the episode, I think David did a great job despite the one or two technical snafus. In this episode, David discussed WordPress Direct and it's shady way of operating, GawkerMedia cutting back jobs but showing record traffic levels, a small discussion on podcasting and much more. Don't kid yourself David, you held down the fort quite well!

LENGTH OF EPISODE - 1 Hour

NEXT EPISODE - December 4th, 2008 at 7 P.M. EST

ITUNES - Click here to subscribe to the show via iTunes

DOWNLOAD THE SHOW: PerfcastEpisode14.mp3

LISTEN TO EPISODE 14 OF PERFCAST:

Blogging has seen the rise from the obscure to the mainstream and popular probably because of one thing--the ability of just about anyone to get published online without the need for expensive and restrictive mediums. And we've also seen some evolution here. What used to be a popular platform for online diaries has now become a tool for marketing, a means of idea exchange, a social medium.

While a number of blogs today deal with matters that may be considered not too personal (business, marketing, money and the like), much of the blogging world still involves writings on personal matters. After all, this is what makes blogging click. Content is not some web copy that the PR agency wrote for your company. Even if a blog were about business or other such matters, there's always that personal voice. Seasoned blog readers would know what's real and what's not.

But in this sense, there are also lines that can be crossed--more particularly privacy lines, whether one's own or others'. My question here is this: how far do you go, in terms of crossing that privacy line?

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