I have been a member of SocialSpark for two weeks now and I see many possibilities and a few drawbacks.
Of course the biggest plus is the chance to make money from your blog posts. That’s a no brainer. It’s really all about the networking; making connections. Increase your link popularity by taking the blog u back offers from other users.
What’s a blog u back offer you ask? Pretty self-explanatory really. You take someone up on their offer and write a post or review linking back to their blog and they will in turn do the same for you. It is a win-win situation.
The SocialSpark Code of Ethics is clear and concise. Making SocialSpark a pleasure to deal with and search engine friendly unlike other paid post opportunities out there.
So what are the drawbacks? As I mentioned before all the bells and whistles on the site do not allow for users with older browsers. So update your browser or forget it.
Even more annoying than that is the fact that the opportunities are generally not available and you need to wait for a slot. Not too bad as long as you can get to your email ASAP and write the post within the 12 hours allotted to you once they send you a reservation. In my case I get these emails at 12am Eastern Standard Time. Being on the east coast I lose 8 hours right off the bat and cannot always read my email or log into the website before lunch time so I miss out completely. Personally, I don’t think this is fair. They should send these reservations out later giving people 12 usable hours. (The only reason I was able to get this opportunity to write about them was because I just so happened to be up tonight when the email came in, but that is a rare thing for me.)
Then once you get a reservation what do you do with it? The email does not tell you how to proceed. There are no instructions on how to get to the opportunity nor is there a clear indication once you log in on what to do. I had to search to find the opportunity then take a wild stab at what to do next. They don’t seem to want to make this easy on a person do they?
When I think of Spock my mind Immediate goes to Star Trek’s most famous of Vulcans, Mr. Spock played by the venerable actor Leonard Nimoy. From there my mind wonders to the Star Trek themed pop bank called S.P.O.C.K. (their music is pretty good by the way). I don’t think I would ever think search engine, but that’s exactly what Spock.com is, a search engine. It is a people and information search engine. You can search for your friends, co-workers, models, singers, or even your favorite Star Trek actors like Mr. Nimoy.
Spock says they are not a social networking site yet it certainly acts like one. You can use the site to make your searches without signing up, but if you join you get to contribute to the site and hopefully help improve those search results. You do that by inviting friends to “trust” you and then vote on your tags, any one can add tags to any profile so there is the potential of misguided results due to abuse by the users. I can only hope that people that do sign up and claim their profiles have control over the content people add to their profiles. I would hate to come up in the top results for some thing I am not like republican. The site is still in beta so hopefully all the concerns people have will be addressed. Until then enjoy the new search engine and behave yourself.
The hope is that Spock could become the Google of people searches. But do you think you will be hearing the term “have you Spocked yourself” in place of the now familiar “did you Google yourself” any time soon? I don’t think so. Personally, I have not Googled myself in a long time, but felt the need to see if the Spock results were similar to theirs. And they are pretty darned close especially since the web result portion of Spock.com is pulled directly from Google. So head on over to the site and run a search or two on Spock.com to see where you and your friends stand.
Google is trying to take over the wikipedia market with their new Google KNOL [unit of knowledge] site. The new site seems to be a cross between wikipedia and about.com’s formats. It will contain numerous articles on topics written by experts on that topic. Unlike wikipedia the public at large will not be able to edit the information in the article only comment on it. This good news for us as it makes the information on the site more reliable than wiki’s. The author is now held responsible for what they write as they should be. Share your knowledge with the world but beware everyone else is too.
Which brings me to the big problem. Google will of course be ranking all these pages in their search engine so everyone and their brother will be writing half-assed articles to eat up the keywords. So while this might take something away from wiki I don’t think it will hurt About.com as the test their writers and actually hire them to do the writing with only one writer on one topic they control the potential onslaught that Google will be facing. As Rachel Luxemburg has said this is going to get ugly.
There are lots of sites out there to help you with site submissions. Most will cost you but a lot of them are free. Do a simple google search to weed them out.
I just stumbled on StartRanking.com which is a slightly different model. It asks for a text link instead of payment. Believe you me the best way to get a good google rank is to get a lot of text links back to your site or blog. I am willing to link to those who link to me so send me your requests or write a good comment on one of my topics and I will approve it and your site link too.
What’s a blog u back offer you ask? Pretty self-explanatory really. You take someone up on their offer and write a post or review linking back to their blog and they will in turn do the same for you. It is a win-win situation. 
