I should have posted this earlier, but it actually slipped my mind. The excellent accelerometer-based action game, Tilt to Live, is being offered for free this weekend (thanks to FreeAppADay.com). It’s a fantastic game with a lot of replayability, an amazing tilt control scheme, and some very entertaining in-game music and graphics — a worthy addition to your gaming stockpile.

Stanza, my favourite e-book reader on the iPhone, has been downdated. It’s hard to call this newest version of the app an update when all it does is remove one feature. Granted, I’ve never actually synced a book over USB (wi-fi is fast enough), but that option will be gone for new users from here on out. Existing users don’t have to update, but since there’s no “ignore app update” button in iTunes, they’ll have to deal with the app update badge always teasing them about one more update.

TechCrunch tried to do a bit of follow-up with Stanza about why the change was made, but they hit up a legal brick wall pretty quickly. Stanza can’t seem to talk about anything that goes on behind the curtain. This news could simply be Apple being a little grumpy about USB syncing (they don’t really like apps doing this), but when you consider that Stanza is now owned by Amazon, it does sound a little fishier. Then again, there’s also the John Gruber school of thought, which argues that Apple is in this for the hardware game and doesn’t really give a hoot who is selling the books – as long as they’re being read on iPads. Amazon does make the Kindle, but they also have a Kindle iPhone app.

Honestly speaking, most of this is just news to me. Little bits of info to post about. As long as they don’t mess with Stanza’s amazing wi-fi syncing and great in-app bookstore, my Pitchfork of Righteousness and Ranting is going to stay in the shed.

For a link bait to be successful and to get the expected result of generating more traffic, a link baiter can make use of several hooks. Link baiting can take the form of news, informational, humor, contrary and fear contents.

News hook – making your site the source of news tidbits and fresh information is one way of generating the much coveted traffic. Being the first to make a scoop on a current event will entice other webmasters to make a link to your website. News readers will turn to your website every time they want to know what is happening around the community and around the world.

Informational hook – the internet is an easy, fast and inexpensive means of access to information. Providing this useful information will encourage readers to make a link.

Humor hook – many people are looking for an outlet to break the daily routine. By providing jokes, funny stories and videos readers will be enticed to click on your site. Surfers will come back often in the hope of finding amusing content and will click on a link referenced link to see if other funny things are provided as well.

Evil hook- negative or mean statement about a person or a product will encourage a reader to click on a link to verify the validity of the statement.

Fear hook – is possibly the most effective link bait. A headline that stimulates the fear of the reader will have the effect of an influx of traffic. Readers will click on links to search for explanations.

Link bait may generate the desired traffic until your server crashes but after all is said and done, good quality content will push a website to the top of a search engine ranking.