It has spread to every nook on the internet - Google picked up Doubleclick for a sweet $3.1 billion

With it, Google gains access to some big-name clients of DC - brand managers for major companies that have a lot of money. PPC is just a facet of internet advertising - there is also banner advertising (which Google has a small share of, and DC a large share of), CPA (which Google is expanding into, and DC has the highest quality network for), and email (which I don’t think Google is going into any time soon).

Anyway, the story goes that Google beat out Microsoft (again). And by beating out Microsoft, they also beat out Yahoo (after all, all three are going after the same - internet advertising).

Yahoo is looking especially vulnerable. Since picking up Flickr (which I still argue was mostly for guaranteed ad-inventory), and Delicious/MyBlogLog (both for user behaviour/tracking), they’ve been relatively silent. There was suppoused to be a deal for Facebook, but that has not produced anything.

If there is one product that I think Yahoo is pushing ahead of Google is local. Local is more than just local search though - it is about a presence in the local area. And while I argue Yahoo! Local is superior to Google Maps, Yahoo has really pushed ahead of Google with key partnerships with newspapers, the latest being with McClatchy.

So while Yahoo continues to sustain PR black-eyes, what can it do?

Buy up companies in the emerging local market.

With that in mind, and a way to get a leg-up on Google (for once), Yahoo could go and buy out (for relatively cheap) both Local.com and Yelp.

Local.com keeps making noises about how much traffic it pushes (roughly 11 million unique visitors a month). They claim $35 RPM (revenue per 1000 pageviews), and ~$90 per 1000 daily visitors. While their CPM doesn’t compare to Google’s, it has gone up significantly, and by utilizing Panama, it should be able to make even more. As Google and Yahoo jostle for the local market, Local.com and its 11 million unique visitors a month make perfect sense. There are some other things to consider (eg Local.com heavily invests in PPC), but a great domain with steady traffic could be a good call. And local.com needs money - it just received $8 million in funding.

The other site would be Yelp, which simply fits into Yahoo’s strategy of user-generated content: Jumpcut, Flickr, Upcoming.org, and Del.icio.us. User generated, active participation, without too much butting in by Yahoo (though I am sure quite a few Flickr fans would disagree). They would get their hands on some of the most loyal visitors in the local area (you don’t drop 400 reviews on a site and then just get up and leave). Yelp struggles with their ad-sales, but few sites get as much attention as they do (especially considering how much real traffic they do get). But that attention has helped them skyrocket, with Hitwise reporting that Yelp’s traffic has increased 91% in just six months.

Get the top independent local search site, and the top local review site - I do wonder what the valuation would come out to, but I am sure Yahoo has enough cash to scoop them both up.

If you run a company, you need to bust balls (when needed).

In this new-age of excessive lovey-doveyness, too many bosses are too shy to upset anyone. I know you want a workplace that has positive morale. I know you want a strong relationship with employees. But sometimes you need to lay down the law.

Business isn’t a happy go lucky thing. Ultimately you are responsible for the success of your company (or division, or whatever segment). And no relationship is perfect all the time. If you’ve ever been married/long-term commitment, you know it ain’t always easy. There will be arguments. Disagreements. Its part of the relationship (it becomes unhealthy when it becomes too common).

I value my employee’s opinions a lot. New employees really need to be goaded before they open up - disagreeing with me is perfectly fine (as long as there is reasoning behind it). I’m wrong frequently - sometimes I am focused so on the bigger picture that I miss the nuances that could spell disaster. But the opposite is just as true - as an employee, you are usually focused on one aspect. You can lose sight of the bigger picture on what is going on.

I’ve yelled at my employees. I’ve told them I’m not happy with their work or effort. I’ve overridden them on a smorgasboard of things. I don’t want to sound like a dick, but there is a fact of the relationship - you are the boss.

I’m now at roughly employee #25. We incorporated over four years ago, and I’ve been working with my #2 (think Austin Powers) since 1999.

I’ve had one employee quit. In over 50 months of being a business. I’ve fired half a dozen people and I’ve sold off a division (the purchasing company, with a lot deeper pockets than me, gave the employees more money and even hired 4 volunteers). But by-the-by, my employees stick around.

It’s easy. I treat them with respect. I value their opinion. But when it comes to crunch time, I am there to make the decisions (when it comes to decisions, a team has to be behind it, or things start to breakdown). And if the team isn’t behind it - ball busting ensues. No other way around it.

Jacob mentioned to me that some people might be confused by the numbers I pull out.

There are two ‘we’s I refer to.

The first is Bloggy Network, of which I am a co-owner of. It does roughly 4.5-5 million pageviews a month

The second is Enthropia Inc, which I own wholly. It is older than Bloggy Network (over four years now), and much bigger. It pushes (including BN traffic) ~250k unique visitors a day. Enthropia Inc + Bloggy Network = 25 employees.

It depends on context as to which ‘we’ I am talking about - eg my comment reply referred to Enthropia as the ‘we’.

Unless I’m specifically talking about Bloggy Network, you can assume I mean Enthropia when I say ‘we’.

Yep, I just cursed.

I had written a post on how to monetize a DUGG site (basic idea: setup a new website, get it to the frontpage, re-sell). A few sites picked it up, including this post by Blog Herald.

If you read the Blog Herald post, it adds a bit of analysis, but by-the-by, the meat of the post is what I posted.

So it eternally grates my nerves when the Chitika blog added a link to the end of their post about monetizing Digg traffic, only linking to BlogHerald, not here.

This stuff really pisses me off. There is a big difference between posting news and writing something a bit deeper. When companies like Chitika short-change the source and instead link to the ‘better known brand’, it just dilutes the web.

This isn’t anything against BlogHerald (J Angelo is especially good at taking something and running it in a totally new direction). But what Chitika did (and innumerable other big blogs do) is quite insulting and annoying.

UPDATE: Alden DoRosario (who wrote the post over at Chitika) added his comments - he apologizes for the slipup, and explained how he ended up on BH (Google search). He has since fixed it, so a huzzah for him on that. The general rant still stands though.

I used to be quite snarky about ’start-ups’ over at AJAX Review. I intended to do the same here, but somehow lost my way in between posting …

So first up: Flock replies to Mozilla’s Co-op. For those that don’t know, Flock adds some ’social-network’ features on top of FireFox (it is a complete separate download, not an extension). Mozilla (makers of FireFox) recently announced Co-op, something very similar.

Conventional wisdom makes this a no-brainer: chance of company that requires a separate download vs primary company bundling co-op?

Personally, I hate the idea of such crap. Give me a browser that doesn’t choke, not one trying to be hip-and-happening.

Mozilla will likely beat them into the ground. The number of people who know about FireFox versus the number of people who know about Flock should be roughly 90% of the battle. Throw in the ‘actual developers’ of FireFox vs ‘external developers’ of Flock, and it just makes sense that Flock is going to be crushed (the FF product might not be great at first, but it will catch-up in iterations).

Two part argument by Flock, neither of which make much sense:

First, Flock shares with Mozilla a passion to innovate and provide choice to online users around the globe. Mozilla’s interest in this specific area is an enormous validation of the premise upon which Flock is based: that there are today massive opportunities to truly innovate the browser…

That is nice. But last time we checked, you are in the business of making money. Yeah passion is a key ingredient, but all your passion doesn’t change the fact that Mozilla will be bundling in 90% of what you offer. I don’t see a single killer feature, so all that innovation doesn’t really matter right now (sorry).

Second, rapid prototyping and visualization is an important step in imagining new products and services, but the hard work is what follows. That hard work is all about making compelling new capabilities Dependable, Discoverable, Usable and Fun for average, active Internet users.

The hard work for Flock was convincing users to test them out. Inertia is an absolute bitch, and it takes a lot of effort to overcome it. FireFox does not have that problem - Co-op simply becomes another installation option. Comparing apples and oranges in terms of challenges (Mozilla’s only ‘problem’ is making the product decent).

Sorry Flock, but your goose is cooked.

Two different types of acquisitions at play here - 1) services (for a site like Blog Flux), and 2) original blogs we acquired (eg Money Crashers).

This post is about the former - I’ll have one for the latter soon.

As I wrote in a previous post on re-write or assimilate?, acquiring a site is not a fun job as most of the code is rather shabby. But Blog Flux adds an extra dilemma - scaling headaches.

Commentful was written by Kailash Nadh, a smart fellow going through university. He writes some interesting code, and I often hire him to write snippets of code. When he showed me Commentful, I was very impressed - I had no interest in the other comment trackers (who tend to be rather bloated) - this was simple and it worked like I wanted to. It took a while, but we eventually acquired the site.

So the code he writes is good - it isn’t a headache to go through it. One thing Kailash didn’t do was for the possibility of tracking 100,000 URLs (something we could hit within a week depending on uptake). The simplest example is www.techsoapbox.com/some-post - if you and I are both tracking it on commentful, it will check the URL individually. Furthermore, (when we originally acquired it), its throttle wasn’t optimal (eg after 5 days of no new comments, you need to slow down how regularly you check for new comments).

The other issues here was the setup - we have our own Blog Flux login, and internal table structure. Porting it over wasn’t a simple exercise. So we decided on a re-write.

The re-write served two useful purposes:

1. It got the programmer upto speed quickly on how things work. He had the code to compare against, but any bugs in the future are much easier to tackle - there is afterall a ‘cost’ involved with the programmer having to understand how the old code worked.

2. Ability to revamp UI and add features. While Kailash implemented many improvements when we originally acquired it (making it from a so-so product to a useful), there were still a few things we didn’t like. These have been all dealt with. Again, while there was a time-investment in the re-write, there was also the time-investment in the programmer getting acquainted with the code. Furthermore, the programmer has gained extra experience in remote-url manipulation and Firefox extensions - both a positive play for future developments. While he could have read the code, actually writing it out is the real experience.

There is one further headache - importing data from Commentful.com to Blog Flux. A pretty simple process - once Blog Flux Commentful goes live, shutdown new users and new urls. Copy database data to Blog Flux server. Ask user on Commentful.com to visit a specific page on Blog Flux (need to be logged in there, otherwise register first). Enter your Commentful.com login, and the data is instantly transferred. As painless as it can get.

If you want, you can beta test it here. It isn’t ‘released’, so play at your own risk. It also tracks much more than blogs (that list itself has to be updated to include entries like Blogspot and other forum software).

I had posted earlier about a service stealing our bandwidth because well - they were bastards.

The latest goes does the trifecta: Tagspage.com.

First off, they were using our PageRank Checker without linking back. Strike 1.

When we forced a PR3, they decided to simply rip our image. Yes I know PageRank isn’t ours, but dammit that image is ours, whether you like it or not. Strike 2.

Worst of all, they aren’t even a PageRank7. The real PR: Strike 3.

I feel sorry for the people that fell for this scam. Talk about mis-information.

A picture is worth a thousand words:

I understand that some stories get more diggs than others on the frontpage. But how can you not notice the obvious abuse for a frontpage story to get only ~150 diggs and ~10 comments?

Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn’t mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar. Edward R. Murrow

If there is one thing we struggle with, it is the amount of misinformation out there. As an organization, we are subscribed to blog results from both Bloglines and Google Blogsearch on every domain and sitename we operate (Technorati RSS feeds seem to update without any new updates, so those are manually checked).

It is absolutely stunning how people can get simple things totally wrong. Not only that, but many people somehow equate all websites with free-speech. It simply boggles their mind that www.whatever.com is my site - I can do whatever I want with it.

But my two points here are different. The problem I am talking about is bloggers often times would rather be loud and wrong than anything else. Too often stories spread that shouldn’t have been even repeated. And not only do they spread, but they get more sensationalist as people try to drive traffic to their site. Case in point: Muslims & the Apple NYC cube. The original (unsourced) story was some muslim was suppousedly offended by the apple cube story. It suddenly morphed into ‘Muslim community offended by Apple NYC cube. Our subtle jab and the stupidity of the story and sensationalism was met with incredulity, as if we were promoting an agenda. In the end, the source turned out to be a forum posting. Some random idiot on a random forum morphed into the Muslim community. And I still see this bloody story mentioned.

While politics is the breeding ground of misinformation (eg Barack Obama was raised as a radical Muslim), its disgusting how this has spread into every facet of our lives.

A recent blog post (which ended up with 20+ comments) recently insinuated that Blog Flux deliberately does not have categories for ethnicities. That we were deliberately stifling people who blog around ethnicities.

I was absolutely floored. Hell, I’m an ethnic minority (and have received my fair share of racism). Instead of even bothering to ask us (or suggest), they instead decided to publicly suggest we were just a bunch of stifling racists. Fantastic.

There are far too many prominent bloggers who spout out ‘facts’ without even doing more than a cursory look at what they are talking about. Frankly, its gone on too long.

This is post #100. A total of 293 comments, and 2,304 spam comments. 211 subscribers.

Just a status update.