Google recently released SideWiki, a commenting system that is available for every site on the Internet, without the approval or participation of the site owners. I fear that SideWiki may be a royal pain for webmasters, marketers and people concerned with online reputation management.

Your website is the one place on the Internet that you have control. People can do and say crazy things out there, but on your site what you say goes. You pay for it, you put effort into, and you get to decide what visitors see and read,  right? Wrong. Google’s SideWiki provides visitors a mechanism to contribute content and comments to your site that are completely out of your control.

As a recent blog post points out, Seth Godin purposely does not allow comments on his blog. Now Google has forced comments on him. Other famous bloggers like Jason Kottke and Andrew Sullivan purposely and by design do not allow commenting on their posts as well. Now they all have comments and its out of their hands.

There are some SideWiki defeats techniques already available, but I really don’t want to bother with a work-around. Google should make SideWiki opt-in for site owners. It should only work on sites that give an explicit approval.

Now, please comment using MY commenting system below.

The success of WordPress as the de facto self-hosted blog platform is partially due to the great abundance of free and paid-for themes and plug-ins that are available. As evidence that our cups runneth over, see this insane list of more than 300 resources for WordPress users.

Great huh? Well, there are some downside to using a themes. Many of them, as described by Brian Williams in his post 10 Hidden Problems with Most WordPress Themes, your site may suffer after installing an under-developed or poorly written theme. A decent WordPress developer can overcome most of these themes with customization. But the vast majority of WordPress theme users are non-developers, so what should they do?

Maybe the WordPress community can help. It would be extremely helpful is there was a list of standard features that theme developers would self identify that they include. For example, if a theme includes the basic features of widget enabled, certain page types included, and W3C validation, it could claim a bronze standard stamp, or some sort of certification. A theme that included bronze standards plus complete header/footer templates earns silver. And so on. (These are just examples, please leave a comment on how it should be setup!)

Theme standards would obviously benefit the theme user and buyer. But would theme developers go along? If a few of the big theme developers and framework makers adopted this idea I think it could take off. The serious developers would use theme standards as a differentiator. Users would eventually rely upon the standards to ensure they are getting a certain level of features and quality. WordPress would certainly benefit with a more mature marketplace for themes.

Discuss!

In the online and search marketing work I’m doing for Sundog Trading Company, we are leveraging a great asset that the company has: two locations at the Mall of America, the premier retailing center in the United States. Most of the work I’m doing is to drive sales at the online store, but I make sure we mention the company’s MOA stores every chance I get. This broadens the appeal of our messaging to people interested in the Mall and in Twin Cities retailing. Operating stores at the biggest mall in the country helps with customer service and online credibility, both essential components in online buyer choice. Additionally, the top-notch PR staff at the Mall has helped Sundog Trading with numerous media mentions, and we’re looking for ways to use them more and more.

Sometimes online operators aiming for a national audience shy away from localizing themselves. Every e-commerce operator can benefit by grounding their business to where they work and live. It doesn’t have to be a headline, but it should be there somewhere. People that are familiar with the locality will identify more with the company. And you can get great local search results – and fast growing part of search – because the pool of competition is much smaller, especially for competitive keywords.

If your company has retail locations, mention them often in your online marketing. Get local! It will help both your online and offline marketing efforts.

Resources:

• Google Local Business
• Yelp local business reviews
• Yahoo! Local
• Bing Local
• Links to promote your local business online