Last week I attended BlueGlass LA, a new online marketing conference put on by BlueGlass, the newly formed agency based out of Tampa, FL.

Wait, you’re blogging about and linking to your competitors?

Yes. We love competition. It drives us to be better all the time, and there are more than enough companies that need good search marketing help. In fact, heard about Portent Interactive? They are another great agency in Seattle. See how that works? Chris, Brent, Loren, and Dave are awesome guys. We all talk regularly and consider them good friends.

Did we really need ANOTHER conference?

I know, like a hole in the head right? Just wait. This conference, like SearchExchange and the SEOmoz PRO Seminar, is focused on a geographic region and smaller. These new breed of conferences are focused on business owners and entrepreneurs and their needs.

BlueGlass covered everything from VC funding to SEO site reviews. It was refreshing to hear new ideas as well as new material. Here are my 3 takeaways.

1. Title Tags and Your Audience (Vanessa Fox)- This is one of the oldest tips in search engine marketing, but understanding your audience is crucial. Using terms for your title tag that they are using to search for your product is best. Your internal verbiage is of no matter to end users. Use your title tag for three things: a) optimization (letting the robots know what the page is about) b) relevance (identify the page topic to draw the right traffic) and c) marketing (think of it as your headline, get their ATTENTION!)

2. When community building, leave your shoes at the door (JR Johnson)

Courtsey of New Green Housewife

JR made an excellent point in that your community is what you make of it. If you don’t want spammers, be vigilant about logins and linking. If you don’t want trolls (impossible really) then make it known that it won’t be tolerated. People will do what they are shown. JR used the shoes at the door example, I use the public transportation example. When getting on a new bus, train, etc., people will follow those in front of them setting the example. Set the best example and most will follow that example.

Be the change … and all.

3. The Data in Webmaster Tools is not 100% Accurate (Marshall Simmonds) – As we have mentioned before, the more we explore the data within Google Webmaster Tools, the more we see that it is good to monitor, but not to take seriously. Marshall gave the best example for client by discussing how they saw a marked increase in 404 error reports in Webmaster Tools that were totally false. We have seen clients with this exact issue and it is nice to say that the New York Times has seen the same thing. Online marketing is metrics based, but the metrics out of WMT are just flaky sometimes.

Other Coverage

It was a great conference and a great time. But going over every session just isn’t possible. Instead here are some links, 2 being different live blogging threads. If you missed it, these two streams caught just about all of it. You can’t duplicate the fun times and contacts from a conference, but because of wonderful live bloggers, we do get to read the notes from just about every conference.

• Entrepreneur.com
• Bruce Clay Liveblogging (Great Coverage!)
• Search Engine Journal Liveblogging

My name’s Ed Fry, I’m 16 years old and I’ve had the opportunity to spend two weeks in the Distilled office in Cannon Street, working with the SEO team. Besides learning more advanced search optimization skills, just commuting across London at rush hour was a mission in itself – I ended up hopelessly off-course on my first day – oh, and mastering underground etiquette was another new and alien experience.

Anyways, this post is a lil’ documentary of what I did and learnt.

Day 1 in the Distilled Office: “Lost in London”

Late, sweaty and slightly lost, I arrive at 72 Cannon Street and press the buzzer. A click announces the door hath been opened and I made my way up the stairs. Lynsey, who handles most of the HR at Distilled, meets me in the stairwell and welcomes me with a smile.

Walking through the doorway, the SEO team are sat on the sofa’s brainstorming this weeks blog posts. Distilled spend some of their time creating content for the Distilled blog but also for SEOmoz blog and recently Search Engine Land. Tom Critchlow, Head of Search is first to jump up and introduces himself, with the rest quick to follow.

The Distilled folks have an awesome office. As you walk in, there’s the sofas with an array of web-related magazines. To the right lies the boardroom and to the left, the main office space. Going round the corner, you pass the web dev team and enter the kitchen – when plentiful supplies of tea, coffee and fruit can be found.

A mockup of the Distilled Office

Next, I get shown to my desk (yeah, my own desk!). Basking in the morning sunlight lay a souped-up dual-screen computer – my home away from home for the next two weeks. Meanwhile, a glass of water and stationary appears on my desk. So far, not too bad right?

Later that first morning, after setting up dozens of Google apps Distilled use, we got a two-hour ‘SEO training for n00bs’ from Tom. I say ‘we’ – Distilled had taken on two trainees, Mark and David who were learning SEO from scratch, and they were starting on the same date as me. So we bunkered down in the boardroom to learn how to do SEO, and how Distilled do SEO – yes there is a difference.

The afternoon brought about a talk in the boardroom with Duncan, where he sort of asked me what sort of stuff I had done before and what I wanted to get out of the two weeks. It was then also I asked about SEOmoz PRO membership. Moments later, I was staring at the SEOmoz PRO dashboard on my own account. If you’ve read about SEOmoz PRO before, you can see why I was excited about this.

So I sat around and played with the Moz toys (I love the juicy link finder)… until Tom approached me. He was planning an SEOmoz blog post on conversion rate optimization for newspaper paywalls and he needed to enlist some help in acquiring data to make an interesting and awesome post. Paywalls are a hot topic right now, especially since The Times Online has only just started charging for content here in the UK.

Finally, before I left on that last day, Lynsey comes up to and very politely suggested I take Exit 8 at Bank in future. Thank you! (more…)

In our effort to continue to make Distilled a great and productive place to work, we have decided to trial a summer hours scheme. The summer hours scheme is a form of flexible working time that is currently offered at a number of agencies and large corporations across the UK and the US. For example, Kellogg’s have run a similar scheme for more than 6 years and have seen a great success from it.

Distilled has decided to try out our first summer hours scheme for 8 weeks, from 9 July to 27 August.

The basic equation:

An extra 45 min of work Monday – Thursday =

½ day on Friday (afternoons off)

What this means to clients:

We’ll still be working the same numbers of hours each week, and we are still as dedicated as ever to meeting all deadlines and project objectives. The summer hours scheme is optional, is a privilege for our team and will not get in the way of our service or dedication to our clients.

The only real difference will be that our offices will be shut from 1pm on Fridays.

What this Means to Distilled:

We strongly believe in a work-life balance, and we feel that this will help us to keep up office morale, encourage strong time management and lead to an overall decrease in stress across the team. We are giving everyone the choice to opt in or out of the scheme, and we have made it very clear that this is just a trial to see how things work.

All in all, we are very excited about the possibilities that come with flexible working hours. We will carefully manage its effect on our utilisation of resources, and we expect some very positive returns.

We welcome all feedback from clients, and we would be more than happy to discuss this with you further should you have any questions or concerns.

Photo credits:

Brockwell Lido on http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brockwell_Lido_1938.jpg

Closed Sign by  www.flickr.com/photos/lwr/144004119/

Cat Photo: flickr.com/photos/ryanjunell/763835380/

The background: in 2009, Google Analytics added a feature – Multiple Custom Variables – which allows you to store additional data in Google Analytics – specifically name/value pairs at a visitor, visit or pageview level. You can then segment and report based on these custom variables (CVs), to discover new things about your visitors that would not have previously been possible.

The implementation: there’s information about actually storing information in a CV on the Google Help pages, and there’s a very readable post on the Actual Metrics blog.

So what are the 6 Cool Things?

Well, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about new things to do with the CVs, so this list is a variety of ideas for things that YOU might be able to implement on YOUR website, and start discovering new insights TODAY.

1 – User Type

Many sites have users who are there for different reasons – our friends at Rated People have visitors who are either tradesmen, or home owners looking for a tradesman, and Care.com has users who are child carers (nannies, babysitters, etc) and others who are in need of child care services.

It’s often possible to categorize a user based on the pages they visit or the actions they take. By storing their user type in a CV, you can discover more about the effectiveness of traffic sources and content on different user types. It can also shed light on the traffic arriving through generic sources.

For example: if Rated People saw a spike in traffic arriving through searches for their brand name, they could investigate the traffic, to see if it was an influx of tradespeople or homeowners – and could then find out what drove the traffic spike.

Likewise, Care.com could look at the people who arrived using a search term such as “babysitter listings” to see if it was babysitter or parents who used that term, and alter the content on that landing page appropriately.

2 – Cumulative actions

You could create a CV called ‘Comments Posted’ on a per-visitor basis, and increment the number each time a user posts a comment on your site. You could then use this, or similar metrics, as a measure of engagement – this might be something that you use directly as a conversion measure (eg: commenting on 3 or more posts is a conversion) or you could use it to segment your audience (eg: finding the conversion rate of users who performed three or more site searches, versus those who did not.)

There may well be issues of cause/effect vs correlation, but if you discovered that users who watched two or more product demo videos were significantly more likely to buy a product, then you might want to consider making such videos more accessible.

3 – User specific info

To step away from data which is useful in aggregate, this is useful only on the level of each individual: simply create a CV called ‘username’ and store the name of each logged in user here. This then allows you to use GA to quickly see the content viewed by a particular user – which might be helpful from a sales or a customer service perspective.

(I was worried that this might break GA”s terms of service, but I asked the team about it recently, and they had no problem with it.)

4 - Testing the impact of your social profiles

Do you wish you knew more about what happens after people interact with you on social networking sites? Or would you like to demonstrate to a cynic that all that time your team spend on Facebook has some bottom line impact? Here’s the answer you were looking for:

Wherever you have a social media profile, fan page, etc: check to see if you can include Google Analytics there, either by directly using the Javascript, by iframing in a secret page (eg: example.com/OurFacebookFanpage) , or by hacking it with a fake img tag. (Webdigi’s most popular post ever explained exactly how to do this.)

You should then make sure that the name of the social site visited is stored in a CV. You could then segment your visitors by those who ever visited your Facebook fan page, or by those who discovered you through a social media profile, etc.

5 – Categorize your content

You can use CVs on a pageview level to bundle together different types of page. For example, a site like Nileguide might tag pages as being either country, city, attraction, bar, resturant or hotel, etcetera. They’d then be able to very quickly see how different page types perform from an SEO perspective, an engagement perspective, a conversion perspective, etc.

6 - What didn’t they buy?

If you have an ecommerce site where users add items to a basket before checking out, try creating a CV along the lines of ‘removed from basket’, and each time an item is removed, don’t throw away that information, but add it to the CV. You may want to complement this with a variable containing the items the user did evenutally buy.

Comparison of the two would be interesting on a micro level, but absolutely facinating on an aggregate level.

Bonus - First Touch Tracking

Lest we forget, Distilled has a great post about tracking how visitors first discovered your site, rather than how they most recently discovered your site – for more info read Will’s post about first touch tracking in Google Analytics.

Go forth and conquer your Analytics.

You might be able to tell that I’m encouraging you to go and try some of this stuff (or better still, any ideas you came up with whilst reading the post) as soon as possible. If you have any other ideas, or you’ve tried something similar and would like to share your epiphanies, please do so in the comments!

A friend recently asked me about press releases versus a company blog. He was arguing that the company blog is a more trusted source of information about product releases and other company information. Please note that the idea was spurred by this blog post by Jeff Bullas.

I disagree, but want to check first. I am wrong when it comes to assumptions like this, a lot. It’s always best to ask. So I sent out a very quickly written survey to Facebook and Twitter. The results were interesting at first, and so I took the next step and sent the same survey to an email list of personal, non-Internet related friends and family. All responses were recorded in Survey Monkey. Below is the breakdown of where the responses came from and questions.

For those that care, I have over 3000 followers on Twitter, over 600 Facebook friends, and sent the email to 111 people.

Survey/Overall Results

1. Do you subscribe to or regularly read any company corporate blogs?

• No (70%)
• Yes (30%)

2. Do you ever read Press Releases when researching new products?

• No (61%)
• Yes (39%)

3. Think about the different forms of communication a company might use online to push information out about itself or new products. Please rank them in terms of perceived trust with 1 being the most trustworthy, and 6 being the least trustworthy.

1. Third Party Review (2.11)
2. News Section of Website (3.27)
3. Company Blog (3.57)
4. Press Releases (3.8)
5. Twitter Stream (4.09)
6. Facebook Page Wall (4.35)

Who can spot the boo-boo in here? The red herring I placed of sorts? I’ll give you a minute to look …

Got it yet?

What’s typically in the news section of a company’s website? Press Releases. But it is different, some place third party mentions. So I had to throw that in there too. To be fair, some of them have been replaced by company blogs, and press releases are on the blog. So it’s all convoluted. This isn’t a scientific study, k?

Remember, the lower the better.

When taking in all responses, the most trusted source of company information is: Third Party Review. Hold off on the “Well, Duh!” comments, there is more cool information coming.

So news from the company website outranks social media in this study. But the closeness of the top three made me think. So I broke everything out by response collector (Twitter, Email, Facebook).

Remember, the lower the better.

Twitter

With this subset, which is largely more Internet focused influencers, the results changed substantially when it came to trust. The majority of responders still didn’t read Press Releases (~56%) or subscribe to company blogs (~66%) though, which I find fascinating.

In this subset, the following results were found about trust in corporate communication methods:

1. Third Party Review (1.98)
2. Company Blog (3.45)
3. Twitter Stream (3.63)
4. News Section of Website (3.67)
5. Facebook Page Wall (4.2)
6. Press Releases (4.45)

So Twitter based respondents (discounting the “Duh”-answer of 3rd Party) trust a company blog more and press releases the least. And of course Twitter was more trust worthy than Facebook. No surprise there.

Facebook

In the Facebook subset, there were fewer respondents, but still some interesting answers. Facebook was like both other sections in that they generally don’t read press releases (53.8%) or subscribe to company blogs (61.5), but this side is more likely to read press releases. This seems to be in line with the fact that Facebook users are more on the cutting edge, but lean more on the side of your “typical consumer.”

1. Third Party Review (2.15)
2. Company Blog (3.00)
3. Press Releases (3.38)
4. News Section of Website (3.46)
5. Twitter Stream (4.23)
6. Facebook Page Wall (4.38)

The interesting thing here is that they trust posts on a Facebook Wall the least!!! Wow. There are some trust issues there. But what I am more interested in is the fact that the blog still out ranks the press release, but still by a small margin. So the third group was selected of people that are not on the internet all day for the most part.

Email

The email user list, as mentioned before, are NOT internet people. They are my friends and family that have “normal” jobs and don’t obsess over metrics like these. They overwhelmingly do NOT subscribe to company blogs (88.9%), and with little wonder as most don’t know what RSS even is. They don’t generally read press releases (57.4%), but that is still average for the whole group. There is very little play there.

1. Third Party Review (2.26)
2. News Section of Website (2.76)
3. Press Releases (3.13)
4. Company Blog (3.85)
5. Facebook Page Wall (4.52)
6. Twitter Stream (4.61)

With this group, here is the highly fascinating thing, the “News Section” of a website ranks almost as high as the third party review. Fascinating! Remember though, the “news section” of a website is typically filled with press releases. But this was all based on perception, so they might not have made the connection.

What is more telling thought is that the third most trust worthy communication for these “everyday consumers” are press releases. At the bottom are blogs and social media.

The New Media Disconnect

My point in this study was not only to show what people “trust” more, blogs or press releases, but also show the disconnect. What we think as new media purveyors is not always accurate. We live and breathe this world, but not everyone does. Always keep in mind the Browsers Video (below), regular people don’t think like we do.

The marketing choices we make cannot be centered around our own choices, but those of our customers. If your customer is a heavy Twitter user, then yes, using a survey asked of Twitter followers is fine. But the answers change when you get offline. Always know who your customer is, and how to best communicate with them. Don’t let the “feelings” of a social media consultant (yes I am included in that) force your hand in a way that isn’t best for your business.

Tracking Goals in Google Analytics is vital to tracking conversions and having a grasp on your performance over time. However, it’s important to remember that Goals can apply to so much more than simply a sale or page view. A client of ours measures a conversion as simply an email being sent to one of their specialists,  whose email details are displayed on relevant pages as the users browses around. Currently tracking and measuring these emails can only be carried out by cc-ing another email address each time an enquiry is sent. With the client’s service being of extremely high value, and an email being the first step to a sale, this primitive way of tracking in not sufficient.

A quick Google Analytics goal creation, followed by some Javascript reworking in your code means ten minutes work can ensure you’re tracking email conversions in a much more sophisticated way.

Step one:

Assuming Google Analytics is installed on your website, head over to the ‘Goals’ section and hit  ’Add Goal’

We’ll need a name that describes this Goal correctly for future reference and the Goal type must be set to ‘URL destination’.

In Goal Details we need to set the ‘Goal URL’. This is essentially a fake page simply in place for tracking, and can be anything you like as long as it remains the same in your JavaScript code (see below),  for now we’ll just stick with a variation on the Goal Name. Goal Value is optional and can be left blank, however if you can apply a Value to each email enquiry sent for yours or your client’s business – then stick it in here.

Step two:

With the Goal in place we need to apply some simple JavaScript to our email address html to ensure each email click is tracked. So where a typical email address might appear like this:

<a href=”mailto:johnsmith@email.com”>Email John Smith</a>

We need to apply some javascript so the code looks like this, ensuring the URL in the javascript code is exactly the same as the Goal URL set in Analytics:

<a href=”mailto:johnsmith@email.com” onClick=”javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview(’/mailto/email’);”>Email John Smith</a>

Ok, so now for the hard part – applying this code to every email address across your site. Our client literally has hundreds of different email addresses across the website and editing the html code for each of these manually would be a colossal waste of time. By putting our development hat on for a few mins and learning a little jquery, we can edit all these email addresses across the site in no time!

Sticking the following code into the header of each page ensures each anchor with a href that starts with ‘mailto:’  has the page tracking code appended to it:

$(document).ready(function() {
$(“a[href^='mailto:']“).each(function(){
pageTracker._trackPageview(’/mailto/email’);
});
});

Read more about the attributeStartsWith selector here.

Step Three:

Sit back and watch your email conversions being tracked!

If you recall, I posted Fables for the Internet Generation. There I recanted some of the many fables my mentor, aSEOp, told me as he guided me through the often treacherous internet.

Today, children, I shall share some more.

The Ants and the Grasshopper

THE ANTS were spending a fine winter’s day bringing their code up to the HTML 4.01 standard, fixing bugs on the site and implementing SEO strategies based on the analytics data they collected in the summertime.  A Grasshopper, whose site was perishing with a lack of users, passed by and earnestly begged for a little cross-promotion to drive traffic to his site.  The Ants inquired of him, “Why did you not update during the summer?’  He replied, “I had not leisure enough.  I passed the days in singing.”  They then said in derision:  “If you were foolish enough to sing all the summer, you must dance user-less to bed in the winter.”

Prepare today for the wants of tomorrow.

The Milk Woman and Her Pail

A FARMER’S daughter was starting up a new e-commerce site, when she fell a-musing.  “The money  this site will generate, will buy at least three hundred ads.  The ads, allowing for all mishaps, will produce a two hundred and fifty percent rise in traffic.  The traffic will result in the highest amount of conversions, so that by the end of the year I shall have money enough from my share to buy a new gown.  In this dress I will go to the Christmas parties, where all the young fellows will propose to me, but I will toss my head and refuse them every one.”  At this moment she tossed her head in unison with her thoughts, and she dowloaded a virus which crashed her server, and all her imaginary schemes perished in a moment.

Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.

The North Wind and the Sun

THE NORTH WIND and the Sun disputed as to which had the most popular news site, and agreed that he should be declared the victor who could first get a wayfaring man to sign up to his site.  The North Wind first tried his power and locked away all his content until the man signed up, but the more he insisted on signing up for content, the more the Traveler simply looked at TMZ, until at last, resigning all hope of victory, the Wind called upon the Sun to see what he could do.  The Sun suddenly shone out with all his warmth.  The Traveler no sooner saw the fantastic content  than he read one article after another, and at last, wanting to comment on an item, signed up and posted simply, ‘lame sauce’.

Persuasion is better than force.

The Silkworm and the Spider

Having received an order for twenty websites from Princess Lioness, the Silkworm sat down at her computer and worked away with zeal. A Spider soon came around and asked to hire a room near by. The Silkworm acceded, and the Spider commenced her task and worked so rapidly that in a short time she created a hundred scraper websites. “Just look at them,” she said, “and see how grand and filled with links they are. You cannot but acknowledge that I’m a much better worker than you. See how quickly I perform my labors.” “Yes,” answered the Silkworm, “but hush up, for you bother me. Your labors are designed only as base traps, and are destroyed whenever they are noticed by Google, and brushed away as useless dirt; while mine are ranked highly and viewed daily, as they are the sites of Internet Superstars.”

True art is thoughtful, delights and endures.

The Lion, the Mouse and the Fox

A LION, fatigued by having shot a music video featuring choreographed treadmill dancing that quickly became a hit on YouTube, fell fast asleep in his den.  A Mouse ran over his mane and ears, ripped off his idea in a television commericial for fizzy vitamins and woke the lion from his slumbers.  He rose up and shook himself in great wrath, and searched every corner of his den to find the Mouse.  A Fox seeing him said:  “A fine Lion you are, to be frightened of a Mouse.” “‘Tis not the Mouse I fear,” said the Lion. “I resent his familiarity and ill-breeding.”

Taking little liberties causes great offence.

If you enjoyed this, check out my original Fables for the Internet Generation post!

One day many years ago, I was wandering around alt.forest.urban when I saw a mysterious thread. I followed the thread down a long, winding, very dark path, the recollection of which sends shudders through me. Just when I felt most lost and desperate, I posted, “What kind of morally depraved place is this?” A kindly veteran user saw this and, taking pity on such a n00b as I, replied, “Do not worry. The internet is a vast place, filled with all manner of man and beast, but remember: it, too, has its own morality.” He then shared with me many a fable, demonstrating the internet’s nature with the wisdom and patience of the most learned of users. His handle was aSEOp, and what follows are a few of his tales:

The Quack Frog

A FROG once upon a time came forth from his home in the marsh and proclaimed to all the beasts that he was a learned site designer, skilled in the use of scripting, markup languages and Flash and able to create beautiful pages for any type of client.  A Fox asked him, “How can you pretend to design for others, when on your site you have animated .gifs?’

Physician, heal thyself!

The Hare and the Tortoise

A HARE one day ridiculed the slow pace at which the Tortoise’s band’s MySpace fanbase was growing. The Tortoise replied, laughing:  “Though you have courted controversy to gain fame swiftly as the wind, I wager I will beat you in long-term career sustainability.”  The Hare, believing her assertion to be simply impossible, assented to the proposal; and they agreed that the Fox should choose the terms and the timeframe.  On the day appointed the two started building popularity together.  The Tortoise never for a moment stopped practicing and writing songs, but went on with a slow but steady pace straight to a single-record contract but a lucrative career as a jingle writer.  The Hare had one of those tapes stolen and released following token legal resistence, got into fistfights with paparazzi and got a multi-record deal, though none of the records sold well, nor were any singles downloaded.  At last, he bounced from one celebrity reality show to another, while Tortoise earned massive royalties for writing the shows’ theme tunes.

Slow and steady wins the race.

The Vixen and the Lioness

A VIXEN who was checking how her investment in link farming was paying off in her Google rankings, came across a Lioness’s website which ranked higher, though it only had a few links to it. “Why such airs, haughty dame, over so few links?” sneered the Vixen in an email to the Lioness. “Look at my numerous links here, and imagine, if you are able, how a proud website author should feel.” The Lioness gave her a squelching reply, saying calmly, “Yes, just look at that beautiful collection. What are they? Spam! I’ve only a few, but remember, those few are from pages that pass a lot of juice.”

Quality is better than quantity.

The Peasant and the Apple Tree

A PEASANT had in his garden website which made no money but only served as a social networking site for the sparrows and grasshoppers.  He resolved to shut it down, and made a bold announcement to that effect.  The grasshoppers and sparrows entreated him not to remove the site that gave them so much pleasure, but to spare it, and they would in turn big him up in various other online communitites and lighten his labours. He paid no attention to their request, but set a deadline for the site’s termination.  When he looked at the site carefully, however, he found a massive user database.  Having looked at the in-depth information contained therein, he threw out his plans, and looking on the site as sacred, took great care to exploit the database for marketing purposes.

Self-interest alone moves some.

The Hart in the Ox-Stall

A HART desperately wanting free internet access discovered an unsecured wireless network signal coming from a stable, and buried itself in the connection, leaving nothing to be seen but the bandwidth he was using.  Soon after the neighbours  asked why the internet connection was so slow.  The stable boys, who had been resting after their dinner, looked round the computer files, but could see nothing and went away.  Shortly afterwards the master came in, and looking round, saw that something unusual had taken place.  He pointed to the bandwidth being used: “Who’s using the connection?”  And when the stable boys came to look they discovered the Hart, and soon made an end of him.  He thus learnt that…

Nothing escapes the master’s eye.

A PEASANT had in his garden website which made no money but

only served as a social networking site for the sparrows and grasshoppers.  He

resolved to shut it down, and made a

bold announcement to that effect.  The grasshoppers and sparrows

entreated him not to remove the site that gave them so much pleasure, but

to spare it, and they would in turn big him up in various other online communitites and lighten his labours. He paid no attention to their request, but set a deadline for the site’s termination.  When he looked at the site carefully, however, he found a massive user database.  Having looked at the

in-depth information contained therein, he threw out his plans, and looking on the site as

sacred, took great care to exploit the database for marketing purposes.