We’ve sold our iBegin city sites to another company, who will be moving the sites off of our domain in < 90 days.

Sad to see them go, but since we haven't actively done anything with those sites in over a year, it was due time we made this move.

More information as the new buyer is ready.

UPDATE: Should clarify as I got a few slightly confused emails. www.ibegin.com will mostly remain as it is (an open listing of the data we sell). We will continue to sell data via iBegin Source. What we no longer own are the city sites - iBegin Toronto, Ottawa, Nashville, and Kalamazoo.

Further Update: Still a bit of confusion. Lets try again. There were five main parts to iBegin:
1. www.ibegin.com - a simple local directory for US & Canada. It basically lets people view our data
2. source.ibegin.com - where we sell business listings for US & Canada
3. weather.ibegin.com - weather info for US & Canada. We sell enterprise feeds to customers
4. www.ibegin.com/labs/ - where we release random things we have worked on
5. City sites - toronto.ibegin.com ottawa.ibegin.com nashville.ibegin.com kalamazoo.ibegin.com - city guide sites that had reviews, pictures, and other user generated content.

We stopped working on #5 over a year ago, and removed all links to the city sites over 5 months ago

What we have sold is #5. #1 2 3 4 are still a part of iBegin. The city sites were sold as we were no longer working on them, and they were basically just lying around. We decided it was a better move to sell them to someone who can actively work on it.

It is unfortunate that more and more nowadays, the ’solution’ to everything must be along the lines of elegant, simple (ie no brain power or activity required), and some sort of advanced systems.

Great example are air fresheners. Five years ago we had the simple aerosol can solution. Nowadays we have battery powered solutions, dual-smelling systems, plug-in modes with fans, and other feature-rich systems that all promise to make your house smell good.

But what smells good? Yes I like fresh mountain air, but that crap isn’t real mountain air - it is emulated junk. Technology is trying to push a solution that really doesn’t cut it.

I ran into the above problem. My wife had been gone for 8 weeks, and was coming home soon. The apartment didn’t smell bad, but I wanted to make it smell good. And I thought - what smells good? What kind of smells do I like? Smells I could possibly emulate?

The simplest answer possible: baking.

I baked three flourless chocolate cakes. And then I left them on the counter. And then I left to go watch a movie.

When I came back roughly three hours later I could not believe how delicious the place smelled.

This little personal story is just a simple example - we seem to have this need for tech-oriented solutions when good ol’ fashioned solutions work way better.

1. Write article on Subject XXX
2. Search for posts on Subject XXX via Technorati Authority, BlogSearch Relevance, etc
3. At the end of your article, make a list of ‘More Information on Subject XXX’ using all of the links above
4. With 100+ links you have now successfully gained quite a few links with minimal effort

DDL:08 was a good experience for us - it was the first time we ever had a booth (though we have sponsored other events), and it was a good experience (more on that later).

Right now though I want to point out to a bonafide ass.

Part of our sponsorship was us sponsoring a Cyber Cafe. At the conference they have two sets of three computers connected to the internet. Two companies sponsor the cyber cafe, setting the homepage on the computer to a site specified by the sponsor. As such, three of the computers were set to www.ibegin.com and the other three were set to www.homes.com.

We noticed this earlier on, and it happened non-stop - some ass kept going over to the six computers and kept setting www.bizclip.com/portfolio/ as his homepage. And by non-stop I mean he would come by every 30 minutes to do this.

I never actually saw the bugger doing this as I was too busy to wait to catch him, but quite a few people let me know what was going on, including one of our employees.

I can only imagine the kind of service and product you would receive from someone who would stoop to such a level. Consider yourself warned.

Update: I should note that quite a few people did this. This one particular individual did it multiple times. At the same time - other than human decency I cannot imagine a way to ’solve’ this kind of behavior. Timers, perma-frames, etc - they all have drawbacks. So really nothing Kelsey nor we can do about it.

Drilling Down on Local 2008 starts tomorrow, and if you are coming, be sure to come say hi to us at our booth. Always happy to meet people who read this blog and/or follow iBegin.

I would have posted this a while ago, but I was hit with a stomach bug/fever like I’ve never been hit. It literally conked me out for the past five days or so - never had something hit me so hard

Anyway - if you do come, be sure to come say hi!

Post on why not submitting to iBegin.com is a bad idea!

So with iBegin Share v2 coming out soon (stat tracking), we thought we would go ahead and support the Open Share Icon project. But one thing is off - the official website.

The Feed Icon has the pretty feedicons.com site, OPML has an equally purty opmlicons.com, and even the Geotag Icon has a functional geotagicons.com site. And I am quite sure that Sharing is a far more common activity than using OPML or geotags.

If you guys want, we can gladly make a website for it

Yesterday, I was out and about doing some chores, when I got hit with a hankering for a grilled chicken sandwich. Heading on over to the nearest fastfood joint, I opted to park and go inside instead of going through the ridiculously long drive-through.

When I got out I looked at the line and realized I would still have been #4 if I had gone through the drive-in.

But it got me thinking - there are all these articles on reducing pollution and being smarter about using gas - isn’t the idling in a drive-through a lot of wasted gas? At lunch time those lines become long - cars just idling with their AC on (hey its hot) must not be the greatest use of gas.

So am I onto something? If everyone parked and went inside, would there be a noticeable impact on pollution?

And please I don’t want to hear about global warming in the comments. Pollution is disgusting, and cutting back on it is just good for our lungs, plain and simple.

So finally - after months and months of slogging, writing, re-writing, and whole lot of annoying, we get to release the latest version of Blog Flux.

There were two main things we were targeting - bringing more cohesiveness to our separate ‘parts’, and to start building a proper community. With over 150,000 registered users, we should have been doing more than we were.

One of the most time-consuming elements of this was the design. There are almost a hundred ‘unique’ pages in terms of design, structure, and appearance. All of these pages still need to keep a cohesive look to keep the user experience simple.

So what is actually new?

Blog Flux Talk - custom built message board system from the ground up.

Blog Flux Articles - name says it all.

Quizzes - always a favorite with bloggers, about time we launched our own

Still more to come (as always), including a hosted version of iBegin Share, but right now I think we are on the right track.

I constantly run into an obviously stupid design element - the lanyard.

Too often you see someone and you have no clue what their name is or who they work for because their damn name tag has flipped around. The two solutions are: 1) Ensure the name tag doesn’t flip around [impossible] or 2) Have the name on both sides of the damn lanyard [the stupidly obvious solution].

It absolutely stuns me how an obvious $5 solution (double sided plastic, or just tape the damn name on the other side) eludes the otherwise-brilliant people who run some of these conferences.

Come on organizers …