Social Justice and Moral Uncertainty

[Note: This entry spoils portions of the most recent season of The Mandalorian, as well as the excellent rational story Metropolitan Man. Please only read this entry if you don't mind casual discussion of spoilers. I also spoil a few other pieces of fiction, but as most are over 100 years old, it's honestly your fault if you haven't read them by now.]

Well worth the read.

As I work through my understanding of representativeness, equity, and inclusiveness and how they should apply to my work, I find myself thinking back to Milton’s Paradise Lost, Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, & Wales’ Metropolitan Man. Lopsided power differentials make for poor relationships, even with full good intent. Satan’s argument that God is tyrannical despite his benevolence, purely because he has the final say is paralleled by Nora’s unease with Torvald and Luthor’s fear of Superman.

The power and fear you feel from Anakin in Rogue One is one-upped by Luke in The Mandalorian. It does not matter that Luke is a Light side user; his power is so overwhelming in that scene that his intent does not matter. No one should wield that level of power. Lex’s argument applies: he is just too dangerous to live in our world.

An unequal power dynamic.

These are all fiction, but it reminds me strongly of the power dynamics that exist within our culture of white supremacy. (I'm using the new definitions here, not the old ones that required a higher standard for deeming something white supremacist.) Social justice demands corrective action — the question, for me, is not to question its need, but to what extent should corrective action be prioritized. Satan abandoned paradise; Nora left her children; Lex committed murder. How far is it appropriate for us to go?

It is too easy to say that free open discussion norms trump the outright ban of certain topics. It is too convenient to claim that the needs of tortured animals are so immediate that they take priority over making the animal advocacy community a safe space for disadvantaged members. We can accomplish our goals of doing good without trampling on the needs of other communities. There is no need to take the position that Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton did when they opposed the fifteenth amendment. Frederick Douglass stood with them from the beginning, but was abandoned when the right to vote was being proposed for black men. I look back upon such decisions in disgust; why did the leaders of these causes break ranks so readily? Why could they not stand together? And then I think of the work that Animal Charity Evaluators is doing and wonder: to what degree are we justified in trampling over others' rights and needs?

ACE holds the position that corporate campaigns to help animal advocacy are good. They may or may not be effective at reducing the total amount of suffering undergone by farmed animals in industrial agriculture, but regardless they are considered as accomplishing good. Yet by working with a company like Burger King, praising it for introducing the Impossible Burger, for example (in 2001 PETA's campaign caused BK to release a veggie burger; then PETA targeted them again in 2006, showing that working with orgs like PETA to reduce bad publicity is a waste of time), we are trampling over the needs of the animals that Burger King kills. Is this justified? I want to say yes. I think that it is still good to endorse corporate campaigns because they reduce real suffering in expectation, even if other animals are tremendously harmed by the organization that we are working with and effectively praising.

Similarly, I recognize that there are black, indigenous, and people of the global majority (bipgm) that are actively harmed by some of the organizations that are doing effective animal advocacy work. They are not harmed nearly as much as the animals are in the previous example, but they are definitely harmed significantly. Is it justified to trample over their needs in order to effectively help the massive number of animals being tortured? I argued for 'yes' in the previous paragraph. Shouldn't I also argue for 'yes' in this one? The harms being incurred in the former paragraph are certainly higher than those being incurred in this one. And yet I find myself leaning toward 'no' instead. It doesn't feel justified to me, but I'm having trouble identifying why this is.

PCRM's reprehensible campaign.

When the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine ran a campaign aimed at convincing people to be vegan in 2012, they used fat shaming images in their videos and images. I was horrified. It bothered me that the PCRM was okay with using PETA-level tactics that actively hurt another disadvantaged group. When I learned that Ginny Messina, a member of their board, had spoken against it in their board meetings and been ignored, I lost all respect for the organization. (Messina resigned from their board over their insistence on (and lack of regret for) running this campaign.) I thought to myself: we can do animal advocacy work without actively harming other communities. We should aim to do good in all its forms, even if it sometimes reduces the effectiveness by which we can work on our core mission. This is especially true when our beliefs on which are the most effective interventions have low resilience. I remain convinced that running such ads is not only a bad idea, but that doing so is wrong, regardless of if the inclusion of fat shaming results in convincing more people to go vegan in the short term. I think this not just because I believe that in the long term we must be truthful for marketing and trust reasons, but also because I very, very, very strongly do not want to trample on the rights of fat people while doing the work of saving farmed animals.

Similarly, I want social justice for BIPGM while we work toward effective animal advocacy. I do not feel that it is justified to trample over fellow humans' rights while we do our work. So why am I seemingly okay with trampling over the other animals' rights while endorsing corporate campaigns? Am I being speciesist? Am I undervaluing the needs of the animals being harmed in the former paragraph? Or am I overvaluing the needs of the humans being harmed in the latter paragraph?

Moral Uncertainty

These are very difficult issues that I'm still working through. I'm not sure what is best. I find myself resorting to a Ord/Bostrom-style parliamentary vote of my inner credences and continually wishing that I had a better familiarity with updating on new evidence repeatedly. At subsequent moments, I keep thinking that each side's vote is getting more than its fair share through what seem to be rather one-sided deals — only to then think the same for the other side.

Currently, I just don't know what to think, other than to emphasize that figuring this out is a relatively high priority path for me to be on. And so I will continue to discuss these issues with others until we can come to an appropriate and justified solution.

Effective Advertising and Animal Charity Evaluators

This entry was originally posted on Effective-Altruism.com. It is reposted here for reference only.

[Summary: Animal Charity Evaluators wants to address feedback that we've heard from the effective altruism community regarding our online marketing practices. Although we follow best practices in the advertising industry, some EAs feel that we sometimes use advertising which glosses over details and is potentially misleading to the public. As the communications data scientist for ACE, I explain why we feel these advertising practices are not only net beneficial to the EA community, but also should not be considered to be misleading.]

Our mission at ACE is to find and promote the most effective ways to help animals. One of the ways in which the promotion part of our mission is fulfilled most effectively is through reaching those who are most passionate about helping animals but who have not yet been introduced to the concept of effective altruism.

While some of our ads are aimed at existing EAs, the majority of our advertising efforts focus on the above audience for three reasons: (1) the large scale of this audience compared with the size of the EA audience, (2) our belief that they have the most potential for change once they learn about effective animal advocacy (EAA), and (3) the fact that their counterfactual donations seem likely to be less impactful than those of EAs.

We have received some feedback on a few of these marketing practices—specifically, we have received feedback suggesting that we might not be advertising in a way that the EA community would most like to see. I will go over a few such examples before sharing why we use our current methods of advertising.

Double Donations

In late 2017, we held a donation-matching campaign. A generous donor offered to match any donations we received to the ACE Recommended Charity Fund. This Fund is not used for ACE operations; the entirety of this Fund goes toward our recommended charities. (We now have a checkbox indicating that users may choose to donate 10% of their gift directly to ACE, but at the time we had already reached our funding cap for the year and were not accepting new donations.)

We know that the EA community is generally not in favor of donation-matching campaigns. There are four main reasons why this is so:

1. Most donation-matching campaigns are illusory
2. Non-illusory campaigns may do harm via double-counting
3. Matching campaigns encourage dishonesty
4. There may be better ways for large donors to leverage their money

Most donation-matching campaigns are illusory

At ACE, we are careful to ensure that any matching campaigns are entirely non-illusory. GiveWell has pointed out several problems with illusory matching campaigns. We agree with their reasoning. For example, last year a donor approached us asking about doing a matching campaign to benefit ACE; we declined it because their donation was going to happen whether we set up a campaign or not.

However, not all matching campaigns are illusory. For our year-end donation-matching campaign in 2017, we had a donor who would not otherwise have given to our Recommended Charity Fund but who was interested in doing a donation-matching campaign with us. We discussed how a non-illusory campaign might very likely reach a broader audience, inspiring hundreds of new people to participate in effective giving for the first time. We believe this type of influence matching is especially effective with non-EAs. However, as Karnofsky points out, it may be better for existing EAs to ignore the influence matching aspect when making decisions on where to donate—even if we prefer non-EAs to be influenced by them.

ACE’s commitment to non-illusory matching campaigns alleviates the concern raised by Jeff Kaufman about counterfactual trust and contradicts the assumptions made by most polled EAs on Facebook. Sometimes even illusory donation-matching campaigns can be beneficial (as Avi Norowitz points out with the Facebook #GivingTuesday retrospective) but this requires special circumstances.

We are careful to explicitly note our position on these influence-matching campaigns in our FAQ, and we believe that using them has been a net positive for our non-EA audience.

Non-illusory campaigns may cause harm via double-counting.

Ben Hoffman has rightfully pointed out that overassignment of credit can obscure opportunity costs with donation-matching campaigns. Given two rational EA actors, believing that each is causing the other to donate may result in a scenario where each is giving less optimally than they’d otherwise choose. However, this example only causes harm if both sides are changing their mind on where to donate due to the existence of the donation match.

At ACE, we only accept matching campaigns where this does not occur. While we don’t have full certainty of their counterfactual actions, we believe our matching donor not only would likely have counterfactually given a smaller amount elsewhere had we not done the campaign (thus making our campaign non-illusory), but also that they would have counterfactually funded a different non-EAA donation-matching campaign. This ensures that, at most, only one side is influenced by the matching campaign—and so evades the situation Hoffman describes where double-counting causes harm.¹

Matching campaigns encourage dishonesty

Overassigning credit isn’t the only way that matching campaign incentives reward dishonesty. In 2016 Benjamin Todd reported that 80,000 Hours had previously run partially counterfactually valid donation matching campaigns, by allowing the donor to commit to delaying funding rather than ensuring that the funding is completely counterfactually valid. Ben Kuhn ran a survey that found that most donors expect matching campaigns to be entirely counterfactually valid, so this remains an issue.

At ACE, we’ve tried to maintain a balance of being intellectually honest and using copywriting that isn’t overly wordy. During our year-end donation-matching campaign, we initially used advertisements that contained the phrase “Double Your Impact”, but then switched to “Double Your Donation” after receiving feedback about where that balance made the most sense.²

We believe using “Double Your Donation” as an advertisement headline strikes that balance well. It is an appropriate shorthand for what is actually occuring: the amount of money that would go to this fund was indeed doubled, and, had the donation match not occurred, our matching donor may have given to a different non-EA cause.

As further evidence that these are real counterfactual matches where influenced donations are legitimately doubled, in 2016 and 2017 we surpassed the agreement of what the donor had originally offered to match, after which the donor followed up by continuing the match through these additional donations to more than double what they originally offered toward the matching challenge.

There may be better ways for large donors to leverage their money

Ben Kuhn performed a survey of research on the effectiveness of matching campaigns, concluding that matching campaign effects are generally smaller than we might at first expect, and suggesting that there are more effective ways for large donors to leverage their money. We have no reason to doubt the validity of his analysis, though we do have limited conflicting anecdotal data from our matching campaigns.

When we are approached by large donors, we generally try to steer them away from the donation-matching campaigns they are ordinarily used to, advising them to fund general unrestricted programs and administration instead. However, last year we set a funding cap for our own operations; once met, there are only so many other ways that large donors can leverage their money. When a legitimate influence-matching campaign opportunity arises, we don’t think it is inappropriate to take advantage of it at the 1:1 rate, even if the returns may not be as much as you might expect.

Anecdotally, we’ve found that our matching campaigns have brought in a disproportionately large number of new donors—the majority of whom were not previously involved with effective giving. While we did not set up a control group, we can report that 73% of the donors to our 2017 matching campaign were first-time donors with ACE, and our post-donation survey showed that over 80% of respondents reported being motivated to give specifically due to the matching opportunity. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of dollars raised by this new audience,³ we were able to teach them about effective animal advocacy and to support them in effective giving elsewhere in the EA movement. The amount that these donors will give to effective charities during their lifetime is significantly higher than the donation-matching campaign that attracted them; we continue to build relationships with these new donors. So while we concur with Kuhn that the raw donation amounts might not be as influenced by a donation match as we may at first think, in our case the flow-through effects seem to more than make up for this difference.

Utilons Versus Fuzzies

Another advertising example that has received some limited criticism from the EA community is our tendency to use cute pictures of animals and catchy messaging in many of our ads. We’ve heard this critique several times in person at EA conferences, although it’s rare to see the argument explicitly laid out online. The idea is that advertising in a way that tugs at people’s fuzzies may be appropriate for direct-level EAA organizations such as The Humane League, but that a meta-charity like ACE should focus solely on arguments for maximizing utility. By posting cute pictures or clever one-liners, we may be misrepresenting the type of work we do. After all, GiveWell’s Facebook feed rarely uses pictures other than to show graphs or their logo; and MIRI’s feed focuses on showcasing data, not cute pictures.

We feel that these lines of argumentation misunderstand the role that ACE plays in the EA movement. Yes, we have a core audience of EAs who use our charity recommendations—and yes, those recommendations are based on what we find to be most effective. We fully identify as an effective altruist organization. However, a large portion of our intended audience is comprised of animal lovers who are not yet aware of EA principles. We strongly believe that this is the audience that is capable of making the largest positive change once they learn about effective animal advocacy. Catching their attention via cute animal pictures is the best way we’ve found so far to get them to read more about why effectiveness is important.

We have data to support this. We’ve experimented with pushing out various types of Facebook posts to both our current audience (to increase engagement) and to potential new followers. Although we make a point to post a combination of EA-oriented messaging alongside posts that showcase cute animals, the only posts that receive traction significant enough to generate engagement and reach a larger audience are the ones that use fuzzies, not utilons, as the main hook.

Facebook in particular has a positive feedback loop where the posts which garner the most reactions and engagement tend to be shown to more followers, whereas the lower-performing posts only get shown to a subset of our Facebook audience. This results in the average Facebook user getting the impression that the majority of our posts are fuzzies-centric on trending topics, when in reality a considerable amount of our posts are utility-centric on data-oriented news.⁴

This feedback loop works to our advantage. Over time, the best performing posts reach non-EA audiences who are likely to be sympathetic to the cause of effective animal advocacy. This allows our brand to grow consistently, introducing new people to the ideas of the EA movement.

Graph Accuracy and Completeness

We’re currently in the process of improving some of our graphs in order to make them more easily shareable. For example, our donation impact page includes a violin plot that shows how many animals we estimate are spared by a $1,000 donation. While the data is accurate, the resulting graph is very difficult to interpret—and is therefore not ideal for sharing at animal rights conferences or on social or journalistic media. The amount of time it takes to explain probability density to passersby at non-EA conferences or to general online audiences looking for a quick picture that explains ACE’s thoughts usually exceeds their (understandably limited) attention span. If we want to reach these audiences, we need to produce graphs that illustrate the point much more efficiently.

However, sharing just the average estimates (seven animals spared for shelters and 4,056 for ACE recommended charities) could be seen as deceitful, as it doesn’t take into account the uncertainty involved in making these calculations.⁵ Clearly, there is some compromise between a full violin plot and sharing just the mean as the best single estimate for each category. We are still working out where that balance lies.

A similar issue comes up with our donation allocation chart.⁶ The data on the left omits wild fishes, who receive almost no portion of animal charity donations. The data on the left also includes animals used for clothing, but the data on the right replaces that category with “mixed or other activities.” On the page, we explicitly point out how the “mixed or other” category was put together, giving an example of guide dog training as one component. This matters because some advocates may consider subcategories like guide dog training as a primarily human-centric charity, not an animal charity, and this might affect the relative size of the chart regions. However, when this chart does gets shared online, it’s generally just the image portion that people will copy and paste. Although these shared images will not include the surrounding text, we believe it is sufficient to include the extra information on our website. We feel similarly with regard to the analogous donation impact chart; including the probability densities as additional information on our site is sufficient, so long as the chart itself includes ranges for our cost-effectiveness estimates.

Marketing Best Practices

The above marketing practices are specific to EA organizations. Most non-EA organizations do not object to setting up illusory donation-matching campaigns, nor reaching out based on fuzzies, nor ensuring that graphics are as accurate as possible. We care about these issues because we are committed to the norm of being extraordinarily honest.⁷ As Ben Hoffman rightly points out, “When the activity of extracting money from donors is abstracted away from…other core activities of an organization…, best practices tend towards distorting the truth.”

This doesn’t mean we should shy away from all nonprofit marketing best practices. To the extent that we can reach out to new audiences, increase the number of donors who are giving effectively, and grow our brand without compromising what we believe in, we feel that using best practices is both acceptable and desirable.

One of our goals is to continually be better able to introduce non-EA animal advocates to effective animal advocacy ideas. We accomplish this through several methods:

• We try to speak in language that non-EA animal advocates already understand when in an appropriate context. This not only means using cute pictures in social media posts, but also talking about projects and interventions that may not be a currently understood top intervention, so long as it reasonably could apply.
• We use multivariate testing on social media adverts and email campaigns, but we are careful to only test messaging that matches our brand and to only use subject lines that accurately convey the content of each email.
• We segment our audience, showing different information to different audiences, while being careful not to cut information sent to various audiences in a way that might be seen as deceitful. Specifically, we take care to only show different content based on the different interests of our audience; we do not alter the meaning behind our messages when segmenting our audience.
• We use a Google ad grant and SEO efforts to gain traffic from audiences not yet familiar with effective animal advocacy, without deceiving visitors as to what they will see once they visit.
• We track key performance indicators to judge how effective our communications strategies perform, but are careful not to focus on quantity at the expense of quality.
• We create videos that appeal to a general audience through fuzzies in addition to posting videos of webinars and symposium talks.
• We take advantage of opportunities to direct more funding to effective animal charities, such as running a non-illusory matching campaign that is very likely to inspire new people to give effectively.

While we are careful not to blindly follow marketing best practices, we nevertheless utilize them when they don’t interfere with our values. We prize integrity and take care to exhibit norms of honesty when following accepted marketing principles. We do not use “rhetorical tricks” nor “sales techniques” to convince others; our use of imagery is solely used to gain attention. Arguments for EAA on our site are fully transparent, and we both accept and encourage feedback on the research we perform.

I’m proud to report that we are continuing to grow our brand, increase the number of donors who are giving effectively, and introduce new audiences to effective animal advocacy. In December last year, we raised over $1.26 million for our Recommended Charity Fund⁸—a significant portion of which came from extremely generous first-time donors not already identifying themselves as EAs. Of course, we couldn’t achieve these results for our recommended charities without the support of EAs, who so generously helped to fully fund ACE directly last year, but the larger point is that these strategies are encouraging non-EAAs to donate to more effective causes and are making a subset more aware of effective altruism in general.

If you work with an EA organization, we would love to hear about the marketing/communications techniques and/or successes that you’ve had when promoting EA organizations. We’d also like to hear if anyone has any concerns about ACE or any other EA charity using these kinds of marketing techniques. Are you comfortable with ACE’s methods of using donation-matching campaigns? Do you agree that marketing with fuzzies is acceptable even for a charity evaluator like ACE? What’s the minimal amount of information our shareable images should convey?⁹ Do you feel that the way ACE follows nonprofit marketing best practices is appropriate?

We look forward to hearing your thoughts.

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¹ This donor decided to give to our Recommended Charity Fund on the basis of our recommendation, not by calculating the additional effects of the matching campaign, because they counterfactually would have done a different donation-matching campaign anyway. This means that while an overassignment of credit may have occurred, this overassignment did not change how the donor would have counterfactually acted. ↩

² In November 2017 we initially used the phrase “This means that you can double the impact of your donation from now through the end of the year by donating to our Recommended Charity Fund” in at least one marketing material, but after receiving feedback from both ACE staff members and outside EAs (including Remmelt Ellen and Marianne van der Werf—thank you to both!) we standardized to the “double your donation” language instead across all marketing materials.

In previous years we were less strict about our language, using “Double Your Impact” in several advertisements during the 2015 and 2016 giving seasons. We did not make this choice blindly; at the time, we felt that “double your impact” and “double your donation” were different mostly in what kinds of audiences they attract, and that this overrode any concerns about one being more strictly accurate than the other. “Double your impact” emphasizes the effect of helping others, whereas “double your donation” emphasizes what one can personally accomplish.

Note that these terms are regularly used interchangeably in fundraising campaigns outside the EA community, and we then felt that most people wouldn’t take campaign headlines literally. In 2017, we updated to believing that it was not enough for our FAQ to describe our commitment to non-illusory matching campaigns, and we standardized to only use “double your donation” language going forward. ↩

³ New donors made up 56% of the pre-matched amount raised during our 2017 matching campaign. ↩

⁴ This positive feedback loop means that the majority of our Facebook post views are of fuzzy-style content. However, this is only true for posts that get pushed out to users; for those who actively come to the ACE Facebook page for content, the ratio of fuzzy-style to utilon-style is roughly one-to-one. ↩

⁵ This is also explicitly why we do not publish cost-per-animal-spared numbers in the same way that you may see for QALYs or DALYs elsewhere. ↩

⁶ We acknowledge that there are limitations to this chart and are working on an updated version that will include both data on wild animal suffering and more clear proportions that indicate how limited animal charity donations are overall. ↩

⁷ ACE has publicly endorsed and acts in accordance with CEA’s guiding principles of effective altruism. ↩

⁸ In total, we influenced over $6 million to our recommended charities in 2017, including the $1.26 million that flowed through our Recommended Charity Fund. ↩

⁹ We are currently working on creating several more charts for non-EAs that are more shareable, and we would especially appreciate any remarks that express what level of simplification the EA community would be comfortable with. ↩

The Horrors of Installing Facebook Connect

Although it’s been a number of weeks since I integrated Google’s Friend Connect on EricHerboso.com, I never bothered to write about it because it was by far the easiest install EVER.  Installing it literally consisted of going to Google’s web site, hitting a few buttons, typing in a few characters, and then it was over.  Google made things super easy.

Installing Facebook Connect, on the other hand, has been an immense pain.  Every step I took in getting it to work has been a step lined in tears of sweat.  Everything that could possibly go wrong has in fact gone wrong, and it was the most irritating install ever.  Horrifyingly, on my second attempt, I even followed an inane video entitled “Add Facebook Connect to your blog in 8 minutes!“.  And while following their directions were not hard, it took more like 45 minutes, and at the end of it, it didn’t work at all.  Which is severely fucked up, since the video was literally posted only three days earlier.  (The sticking point was their usage of uid=’loggedinuser’ — it turns out that ‘loggedinuser’ cannot be called by uid through xfbml.  Which makes the entire video pointless.)


I also tried a custom installation by modifying some code I found at a spanish-only site.  It was a terrible mess by the time I got through with it, and has since been removed completely.  (I don’t speak spanish.)
But today, during my lunch hour at work (okay, I used 1.75 hours), I finally got facebook connect to work on my WordPress install.  And it’s all thanks to some helpful code supplied by Adam Hupp.  You can see a partial documentation of it on the facebook developer’s wiki.  (I’ve already edited a few bits in the Q&A session and plan on fleshing out the article a bit more later on to clarify some of the more complicated parts used to customize how facebook connects to wordpress.)

Anyway, thanks to Adam Hupp, it’s now a pretty seamless installation procedure.  Just follow the directions at http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php?title=WP-FBConnect if you want to add it to your own wordpress installation and you’ll see what I mean.

So please try out the new system.  If you’re already logged in on my blog, log yourself out and come back to this page.  You should see a ‘log in with facebook’ button right above the comment section.  You can log in that way, or, alternatively, if you’re already logged in to facebook, you should see a box in the top right of your screen that asks you if you want to log in with facebook.  Either login method should get you set up, and then all you have to do is enter in a comment and it should connect directly to your facebook account.

However, there a few caveats.

First, it breaks in IE.  After numerous investigations, I’ve come to find out that this is an issue on facebook’s end, and not an issue with the code I currently have on my site.  Facebook connect does not currently work in IE no matter how you try to make it work.  I think this is an xfbml issue, though I may be wrong.

Second, it’s fussy in firefox.  It doesn’t seem to like the way the code is being executed.  Sometimes it works right away, and sometimes it logs meout unexpectedly for no apparent reason.  I can’t seem to find the error here, even though I’ve combed through everything.  If you’re using firefox, and it won’t let you login, try refreshing the page.  It should work then.

These browser issues aside, it works perfectly in Chrome / Safari.  So if you really want to see it work seamlessly, I suggest opening this page in one of those browsers.  I know that’s a terrible way of getting code to work, but it’ll have to do for now.  I’ll let someone else do the legwork on figuring out what’s causing the firefox issue and get it fixed as soon as I see the corrected code posted online.

Anyway, please leave a comment and help me test to see if this works.  Oh, and let me know what browser you used to post the comment with, too.

Be well.

Are Porn Links Good for SEO?

Ever since I started becoming more knowledgeable about search engine optimization, I've started trying out different things to see how it would affect my traffic. I even did a test run of doing nothing but gathering links to a static blog that wasn't updated (amazingly, the traffic generated was quite impressive, given the fact that the blog had no new content).
But perhaps nothing I've done thus far is quite as noticeable as getting a link from Fleshbot, a fairly popular porn site with a pagerank of 7. (Even the nonprofit I work as a webmaster for (Share Our Strength) only has a pagerank of 6.) As of now, I'm linked from their front page, which is actually pretty cool. (Although the anchored keyword they linked with is pretty lame.)
Of course, it's the search engine spiders' view of the link that's important to me, so it doesn't even matter that no one who reads fleshbot will bother clicking through.
Which makes me wonder: Has anybody from fleshbot actually clicked through? If so, please post a comment. In the meantime, I'll update later with stats on how many referrals one can get from a porn site.


Oh, and also, I think the images fleshbot used were very poor. Here are two better ones I found with a quick google search:

Thanks to KNX News Radio and Progressive Alaska for the photos.

Feedity: Unethical RSS?

In my position as webmaster of Share Our Strength, I am constantly on the lookout for better and easier methods of generating content to drive visitors to our many websites. One exceedingly easy method is to grab content from outside RSS feeds, allowing a page on our site to have constantly updating content from another site. Working with RSS is so easy that when I'm in a rush, I sometimes grab our own content through RSS, just to save time.
Grabbing rss content to post on your own page is perfectly permissible, both legally and ethically. Firstly, because when you grab a feed, you are not only linking to them, but also driving visitors to their site, but, more importantly, because by publishing an rss feed, they are inviting users to use that content. (People can even monetize their feeds by using Google Adsense for Feeds.)
But what if you find regularly updated content that doesn't use a feed?
I recently found a site that had data that I wanted to pull, but no RSS feed existed of the content I wanted. The webpage is American Towns, and it shows regularly updated local events content for a specific city. (The content in particular that I am interested in is "Local Events", on the left.)
So, after a bit of thought, I did a quick google search and found Feedity.com. In less than five minutes, I had created an RSS feed that takes JUST the info I want from the American Towns site.
Feedity allows you to define the opening and closing tags of anything yo want turned into RSS; in this case, I chose <div class="event"> to begin each RSS link, and </a> to end it. This allows me to get just what I want in the feed I'm creating: the event name with a hyperlink to more info on the event.
From there, feedity did the rest, and I had an RSS feed ready to go.
Had I been making the feed for my private use, I would not feel s weird about it, but since I was creating this feed for the purpose of making dynamic content on one of my sites, I realized that perhaps this kind of feed was not quite as ethical as feeds that are put out by the content owner. After all, the feed I am pulling here was not intended to be pulled by the content owner. Even though I am linking to their site while pulling the events list American Towns publishes, at no point did I get even an implicit nod concerning the usage of this data on my own site. I was, in a way, just framing their content without their permission.
Because of this moral quandary, I decided not to go through with using feedity in this way. But now that I am aware that the possibility exists of taking content straight from other sources like this, it occurs to me that one could mass produce sites that could be automatically generated from ANY site, just using completely customized RSS from feedity. Each site would literally take less than thirty minutes to create, once the general design was chosen. Pop a few adsense fields on the page, and tailor it to a specific audience who would find the info useful, and profit inevitably results. Hell, I've done testing on this site where I go for multiple months without posting a single blog entry, and I STILL take in a few dollars each month from adsense. Yet what I'm describing through feedity is upwardly scalable in terms of the number of sites, and requires absolutely no upkeep to maintain.
In short, Feedity makes it possible to easily create completely unethical sites that can consistently generate income in the aggregate without maintenance. This makes me almost want to mark my link to them as nofollow, but since most users of feedity probably use the feeds for their personal use rather than for website creation, I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt. After all, I use feedity to keep track of my thirteen year old sister's fan website, TwilifyMe.com, and that's a lifesaver all in itself.
Also, in case you're interested, I did NOT get paid to write this entry.

Feedity: Unethical RSS?

In my position as webmaster of Share Our Strength, I am constantly on the lookout for better and easier methods of generating content to drive visitors to our many websites. One exceedingly easy method is to grab content from outside RSS feeds, allowing a page on our site to have constantly updating content from another site. Working with RSS is so easy that when I'm in a rush, I sometimes grab our own content through RSS, just to save time.
Grabbing rss content to post on your own page is perfectly permissible, both legally and ethically. Firstly, because when you grab a feed, you are not only linking to them, but also driving visitors to their site, but, more importantly, because by publishing an rss feed, they are inviting users to use that content. (People can even monetize their feeds by using Google Adsense for Feeds.)
But what if you find regularly updated content that doesn't use a feed?

Feedity is a service that creates an rss feed from a regularly updated page that does not utilize an rss feed. This means you could grab another site's content automatically without their consent.

[EDIT: Entry never finished, but I'm publishing as is anyway, in case it helps others flesh out this concept.]

How to Promote Your Website

This entry was originally posted on the omnistaretools.com blog. It is reposted here for reference only.

One of the most important things any webmaster has to do on a regular basis, other than, you know, master the web, is to advertise his or her website using the best possible methods.

The process of promoting one’s site consists of three fundamental steps:

Step 1: Brainstorm good promotion ideas.
Step 2: Initiate good promotion ideas.
Step 3: Go back to step 1.

Thankfully, with my help you can all skip step 1 as many times as you’d like. That’s because I’m about to show you a few of the greatest methods you can use to promote your website. (The following were all stolen from omnistaretools.com, but since I wrote the page in question myself, I don’t mind the blatant plagiarism. Though you should note how I’m careful not to mirror my own content, since both of these pages are indexed by search engine spiders.)

1. Publish An Article

Write a really good article in your niche and e-mail all the bloggers in that field to let them know about it. You’ll be surprised at how many may link to you. Just remember to make sure your article is good, or you may get some bad press. (On the other hand, even bad press still counts toward your pagerank, unless they link you with a nofollow tag. But really, who takes the time to do that (except Matt Cutts, of course)?)

7. Be Opinionated

If you happen to notice a blog entry or forum topic where the majority opinion seems to be completely incorrect, be very opinionated on letting them know that you hold the opposite opinion. If you’re lucky, you may get a few links back saying that you’re wrong. (In fact, why not just hold the opposite opinion every time, even if they’re technically right? After all, in the SEO world, any link back is a good link back.)

18. Create a Great Favicon

A good favicon image accomplishes so very much: it increases brand awareness, makes your site stand out from the crowd, and gives you that street cred that comes along with every well-made favicon file. Just don’t make it animated gif style, you may think it makes you stand out even more, but users have been known to delete a bookmark or close a tab solely because of an animated favicon. Just don’t do it.

You can, of course, find many more great tips at the best ways to advertise your site page, hosted right here at Omnistar. (c;

Oh, and as a reward to my faithful blog lurkers, I’ll even add in an extra tip that has yet to make it on that other page:

0. Advertise Your Webpage Through Your Blog

When you finally make that great webpage that you want to spread the word about, don’t ever ever forget to write a blog entry about it, with lots and lots of links pointing right at it. Preferably with good keywords, like Web Promotion Tips You Just Can’t Ignore!.

If you have any tips of your own that you’d like to contribute, feel free to leave a comment. I’ll gladly post any suggestions that make me smile. (c;

Posted by Eric Herboso.
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Google.org Announces Aid for Climate Change, Poverty, & Other Emerging Threats

This entry was originally posted on the omnistaretools.com blog. It is reposted here for reference only.

Today, Google.org announced its new core philanthropic initiatives: Climate Change, Poverty, & Emerging Threats.

Google.org is the public service component of the Googleplex machine. In the past, Google.org has helped in many different areas, but without a real specific focus. But today (17 Jan. 08), Google.org’s mandate to make the world a better place has decided on a few very specific foci, by zeroing in on five core initiatives.

Predict & Prevent

Google.org’s Predict & Prevent initiative focuses on empowering local communities to predict and prevent events before they become crises by identifying hot spots and enabling a rapid response. The first step of this new program is targeted in Southeast Asia and tropical Africa, with grants given to Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disasters, Global Health and Security Initiative, and Clark Labs.

Inform & Empower to Improve Public Services

Google.org’s Inform & Empower initiative is aimed at improving the flow of vital information to increase basic services for the developing world. The program is at first targeted in India and East Africa, with grants given to Pratham, the Centre for Budget & Policy Studies, and the Center for Policy Research.

Fuel the Growth of Small & Medium-Sized Enterprises

Google.org’s SME support is intended to lower transaction costs in SME investment and to create opportunities to access larger financial markets. The program is initially focused on the developing world, with initial partner TechnoServe.

Develop Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal (RE

Google.org’s REeSolar

 (pdf), a solar power oriented power plant technology company.

Accelerate the Commercialization of Plug-In Vehicles (RechargeIT)

Google.org’s RechargeIT initiative aims to reduce CO2 emissions, cut oil use, and stabilize the electrical grid by accelerating hybrid electric vehicle adoption. Unlike the other four initiatives announced today, Google.org specifically mentioned that its investments in this area will mostly go to for-profit companies that are working in this area.

Google Giving

It’s refreshing to see a company so dedicated to giving back. Google sometimes has to deal with a number of critics, but their Google.org division seems to be fully intent of fulfilling their mandate of “making the world a better place”.

Posted by Eric Herboso.
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Free Templates Providers

This entry was originally posted on the omnistaretools.com blog. It is reposted here for reference only.

So today I came across a great site I wanted to share with all of you: FreeTemplatesProviders.com. They have a number of links up on their site for pages that provide free templates for download. I happen to like this sort of thing, as it certainly makes my day a whole lot easier when I have a good template to work from. (c:

Another site you might want to sneak a glance at for free website templates (if you’re as into this stuff as I am, of course) is FindMyTemplates.com. They have a number of good templates available for download, too.

But most of all, I really want you to check out our free templates. That’s right, we here at Omnistar post new free templates monthly on our site. It’s just another great service we provide.

Posted by Eric Herboso.
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BREAKING: Google announces war on subdomains

This entry was originally posted on the omnistaretools.com blog. It is reposted here for reference only.

BREAKING NEWS:

At pubcon, Matt Cutts of Google just announced that they will start limiting search results to two subdomains for any one web search. This is a drastic revision, and may very well affect your site, possibly very negatively. Thankfully, the announcement specifically stated that the changes would be rolled out only in the next couple of weeks, so you still have time to prepare.

What This Means

In the past, search engine results have treated subdomains as though they were different sites. If your company is QWERTY, Inc., for example, and you sell widgets and fizzsnaps, then you might use widgets.qwerty.com as your widgets site, and fizzsnaps.qwerty.com as your fizzsnaps site. In this way, you could keep using the same branding for all your sites by using the same domain, but use different sites for each product.

But now, that logic has been perverted by google’s recent announcement, because now, no matter what the search is, your domain can at most occupy two slots on any search engine result. Which means a search on “qwerty”, for example, would at most show the www subdomain and your most popular other subdomain. Other slots will go to other people’s sites.

Even worse is if you do not own your own domain, but are just renting out a subdomain–now, for any given search, you are almost GUARANTEED not to get into the search results AT ALL.

How To Make Sure Your Site Does Not Take a Hit

If you are currently relying on subdomains for the different departments of your site, now is a good time to start thinking about setting up different domains for each of your departments. Do not abandon your old sites, especially if you have long term seo investment already in them, but start up new sites with unique one-page content on each, that links strongly back to your old domains. Once these pages reach sufficient pagerank, they should be able to replace the positions that you will have lost from Google’s drastic change.

If, however, you unfortunately are hosting your site under a mere subdomain, then this is the call for you to get your own domain. When this new policy rolls into place (Matt Cutts said it would be “in the next couple of weeks”), your site will be effectively dropped from all search engine results, period. The only way to fix this, unfortunately, is to get your own domain.

Posted by Eric Herboso.

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