* Jake – the Community Guy

As many of you probably know, I’ve been on the American Marketing Association’s (AMA) board for the past year or so. Recently, Jake McKee had a couple of posts where he talks about his experience joining the AMA as well as his more recent experience dealing with the local chapter and the national chapter (Yes, there are two components).

My real beef was with the AMA national organization itself. There’s a staff there whose full-time job is helping to support and growing the marketing industry and when you accept money for membership, you have an obligation to reach out to new members/payees and make them feel like something larger than an email list.

Personally, over the past year, it’s been great working with teams of volunteers at the local chapter (Silicon Valley). However, I’ve never been able to figure out the value proposition to me from the national organization. Maybe I too am missing something here.

* Guy – the Truemors Guy

I’m a fan of “the Guy” (see my posts here and here); and I’ve been intrigued by his recent launch of a site called Truemors — a clone between WeSmirch (Automatic Dirt Digger) and Digg (User generated dirt digger). Unfortunately, Truemors has been buried under an avalanche of bad reviews, with the two most recent ones drawing particular attention:

1. Tim Faulkner —

We are supposed to take from “the numbers” that Guy was just trying to learn some lessons about Web 2.0 startups, but Truemors does not reveal new lessons, it shows Guy needing to rationalize bad PR.

2. Matt Ingram —

The only thing that could possibly give Guy’s site some value is if it spontaneously developed a thriving community the way Digg and Slashdot and Metafilter have. Is Guy’s name and a couple of nasty blog posts at TechCrunch enough to do that? I doubt it.

Matt’s point on community is well taken. Here are my top 3 reasons truemors doesn’t interest me at this moment:

-lack of community (which was Digg’s strength), lack of focus (digg started off tech focused and maintains that niche), lack of a chief truemor monger (Gossip sites like Perez Hilton have a chief-blogger/gossipper or dare I say “evangelist”)

As Guy says, there’s no such thing as bad PR but unfortunately at this point of time it may not be possible to evangelize Truemors since it does not seem like a product worthy of evangelism (The Art of Evangelism by Guy). What do you think?

* Robyn – The MyBlogLog Gal

My good friend, Robyn Tippins, over at MyBlogLog, seems to be having an interesting problem with her personal blog. Apparently, the pages of her personal blog were removed from Google’s index since they violated the webmaster’s guidelines. Boy, I wonder what those guidelines were? But, this now puts Robyn in a predicament:

This isn’t really a huge deal to me, as the site isn’t really monetized well and most of my readers come from bookmarks, links to me or are RSS subscribers, but I can’t help but be a little pissed that it’s happened. I mean, what if I depended on my site for income, as so many of you do? The only recourse is to admit wrongdoing and ask for reinclusion? How am I supposed to know what I’ve done?

Anyone of you readers with some insight into this space? Any suggestions?