So it seems like Google is acquiring FeedBurner for a smooth $100 million.

I like FeedBurner. They provide a useful function. Their support is fantastic. Even had the president email me when we had a few issues. The site exudes charm that is missing from most companies (including quite a few of ours, I will be honest).

So everyone has covered how Google is acquiring a very large audience. Just like Yahoo! locked in Flickr into its ad-network, Google is basically doing the same.

But while that is all obvious and what not, the other benefit is the ton of data that Google is getting (again - similar to what Yahoo did with MyBlogLog, but on a larger scale imo).

Google’s two big pushes in search have been relevance [removing spam] and personalization [give people what they want]. This is why products like Google Analytics and Google Reader haven’t been directly monetized - the entire point is to find out what people find useful and what they like. Google Analytics especially is scary - they know what pages people are visiting, what links they are clicking on, etc. Lets say someone is searching for ‘food’ and two pages come up with near identical relevancy internally. Using Analytics, Google knows Page 1 is on a domain people find more sticky, and that people spend 3x the time on Page 1, while also clicking on 2x the links. So what is better for the user? (both can be argued - Page 1 in terms of longevity of user on the page, Page 2 in terms of user coming back quicker). I’m still surprised Yahoo beat Google to the punch when it came to Del.icio.us.

So the acquisition of FeedBurner gives them a ton more information. They know clickrate. They know the subscription # of a lot of sites. They can find information/data they previously did not know existed (which I touched on briefly).

I talk about covering the A to Z process for our properties - Google has done the same. They know what end-users are doing (via Google Analytics). They know what end-users are reading and finding interesting (via Google Reader). And now they know how popular blogs are, and what people find interesting on those specific blogs (via Google FeedBurner). And don’t forget they can trick your ad habits now - not just via AdSense/Adwords, but also through DoubleClick now.

Scary.

We’ve been gearing up to launch our own wiki-system for places soon, but have run into a few issues.

So I wanted the time to showcase two places:

Wikimapia - the grand-daddy of map/wiki sites. A ton of rich content. But unlike more traditional ‘wiki’ sites, everything is locked in. As of right now, the site claims 3,703,330 places.

ShapeWiki - A lot cleaner in approach, I really like this website. Has some fantastic export options. Especially intelligent is how they do their mapping - adding a point between two points allows for a lot more flexibility, and was a very intelligent design choice.

I came across Mini Cities late yesterday, and it is an interesting model.

The basic gist is simple. Properly covering a large area of local is difficult - the manpower required is quite intensive. So - why not build a stable platform/system that allows a person to quickly setup a website for his/her local area?

The definition of local seems to be amorphous here, as ‘New Tampa’ is not really a city per se, more of an area/locale (if you live there, you know what it is). As such, this means it is exclusively geared for local residents (about 25% of our traffic on iBegin Toronto are tourists).

The sites themselves are not bad. They have made the urls fully search engine readable (though the actual url structure is odd - eg seems to include ‘restaurants’ and ‘coupons’ in all of them). The standard items of local interest are here - events, business listings, coupons.

The ads (where I expect most of the revenue will come from) are all on-site links to locations with coupons. I think of this as a shrewd move - having people using these coupons with local businesses proves to the business that there is viable traffic and leads - much easier to sell ads later.

I do wish the sites were more customized design-wise. I did notice that the logos are unique, but otherwise the designs are identical. I think it would be a great idea if they had a dozen or so templates - franchises will want a bit more control over the design, and being locked into one standardized one isn’t that. The events also need a calendar - a listing is nice, but I (along with many others I am sure) prefer a calendar-view.

Regardless - the question at the end is how well the company will be able to sell franchises (and for how much). I am sure people are itching to try their hand at making money from a website, and the ability to do it locally seems very appealing to me. Time will tell if they have the right ingredients.

I said I would come back to this.

We released iBegin Weather on May 10.

The site isn’t amazing. It isn’t ground-breaking. What it is is useful. It is clean, fast loading, and gets the damn point across (the weather) with a minimal of intrusions and confusion. I’ll do a comparison with other websites another day

So to me it is a form of evolution - taking data and presenting it in a more viable way.

So on the first day of operations we got 148 unique visitors. These were greatly driven by my own sites - from blogs like ForeverGeek and Blogging Pro, to our own iBegin Blog. The next few days it leveled off a bit (~125 unique visitors a day), after which it has gone up every day since. Yesterday it did 421 unique visitors.

I realized early that weather is a personal thing - people not only want to read it quickly, they want a quick way of getting it (be it RSS) or even displaying it on their site (widget).

So we spent quite a bit of time on the widget. We made sure it was fast (cached). We made sure it was customizable (a lot of options). And we made sure (again) it was simple - no flash interface, no heavy-graphics loading, none of that crap.

And then we promoted it. We emailed a few bloggers. We bought a few paid reviews (which led to a crappy experience). We did PPC.

In 9 days, I can only chalk this up as success. The widget is driving traffic and searches to the site. Yahoo reports 28 backlinks to the frontpage, but 1156 links to the entire domain. We have almost 150 sites using the widget (most of which don’t exist to Google). Our #1 referer is a high school in Kentucky!

This post is powerful. Stop for a moment and think about it. We found an enterprise provider of some essential data, we put up a clean website for it, we built an intelligent widget system that is both customizable and loads blazing fast, and then spending a little time emailing/paid reviews (~5 hours) and PPC (very little ongoing cost - I am stunned by how little widget promotion is done through PPC), we are building backlinks and traffic at a fantastic rate. The site almost has 10,000 pages in Google (in 9 days, no sitemap).

If you wanted a recipe for a site where you drive non-SE traffic while also driving SE-traffic, this is it.

The iBegin Weather Widget is doing pretty damn good, already on 100+ pages (more on that for a future post). But what is amazing is that while a lot of new sites are using it (ie < 6 months old), but that Google doesn't know that most of them even exist (site:domain.com yields nothing). I'm talking about an eclectic mix - school pages, personal pages (both ISP hosted and university hosted), real estate pages, and even municipal pages (eg police department).

If in only 8 days I have come across dozens and dozens of pages that don’t ‘exist’ (in Google … or any of the other SEs for that matter) - how much of the web isn’t found? I’m not even talking about semi-confusing sites with frames and redirects - these are straight-up extremely simple HTML pages.

Perfect time to remind that unique content is not enough - promoting it is equally (if not more) important.

Thought some of my readers would be interested in the upcoming iBegin v3.

I’ve been around for a while. I’ve dabbled in many many markets. And by far the worst market I worked in was games (the one except being virtual items/currency).

Game sites pull some horrible CPM rates. The reality is that it is a perfect storm of crap-traffic - skews young, skews ADD, skews impatient, skews banner-blind. This translates into poor, tons of pageviews, little clicks. Branding may work best here - if they notice the ads.

The problem becomes simple - so much bandwidth is sucked up that the amount of revenue generated by ads doesn’t cut it.

So I shake my head when I see all these IM sites popping up. Not only are they piggy-backing (in a back way) on other networks, the ad market simply won’t support something so spastic as IM. I was recently at Kool IM and all I saw were Google Adsense ads (where do you get contextual relevance?) and annoying flash-banner ads.

You want a recipe for disaster? Start up a web-IM company that piggybacks on AOL/Microsoft/Yahoo/Google’s networks.

Between the BlogFlux/BlogTopSites merger and a stomach bug, I haven’t been able to get much done.

And yet - while I wasn’t doing much directly, the system itself was working flawlessly. The best example: widgets.

Lots of talk these days about how awesome super fantastic widgets are. Yet very little of that talk has been spent on the downsides - how it is a JS call (and thus extra HTTP calls), how it basically hammers the widget-server, how it going down can make your website unusable (do you really trust the widgets you are using?), how you have no control over what data is acquired.

If the path from ‘Visitor’ to ‘Customer’ (ie makes you money) is from A to Z, the widget itself is somewhere in the middle.

Widgets are also useful in two ways:
1. Generating direct traffic to your website.
2. Generating backlinks to your website.

What I’ve done (with great success) is let #1 be optional, and let #2 be mandatory. The benefit in this way is that the webmaster (who will implement the widget) - he has the power to do what he wants. When it comes to compelling reason to using a widget - not having to link back (in any noticeable way) is way at the top.

We advertise quite a bit. Be it Adwords/Overture, or sponsoring sites (ie becoming the sole advertiser), newsletters, forums, etc - advertising is an important part of how we keep our profile up.

I was quite excited when sponsored blog posts came out. Not the PayPerPost crap (it didn’t allow you to control who did the review - how absolutely retarded. Maybe it has changed since then).

The thing many people fail to understand is scale of a business. Lets say I have something tech-related that tech-bloggers would find interesting. We will try to build relationships with 10-25 bloggers, but it is impossible to build a relationship with the 500+ tech bloggers (who have traffic we are interested in). $5,000 is not that much. It is far easier (time efficient) to simply nurture relationship with a dozen bloggers, but pay the rest. With contextual relevance - we have a product that makes sense for their audience.

In an effort to save even more time - Sponsored Posts allows you to create an ‘opportunity’ and let bloggers bid. You don’t even need to go looking for them now (both SR and ReviewMe have medicore search capabilities).

While they were originally decent, both of them now suck ass. Two primary reasons:

Firstly - laziness. Most of these bloggers are horrible at doing any sort of decent look through (one great exception that quickly comes to mind is Michael Gray - his reviews are intelligent and meaty). We bought about a dozen reviews for iBegin Source. I’ll admit people have a hard time understanding the significance - local data is expensive, and that is why we keep seeing the same re-hashed sites. Plus - local data is inaccurate. Horribly so. It is relatively technical, but still an issue any tech blogger should be aware of (accuracy of local search sucks today).

I actually stopped using ReviewMe (their horrible ordering system didn’t help) after those reviews. It ground my bones that here I was, paying hundreds of dollars, and they couldn’t even be bothered to fix these inaccuracies - trying to contact the bloggers and explain their factual errors were blown off or entirely ignored.

With Sponsored Review’s opportunity system, we’ve gotten at least 75+ bids. I think less than 5 actually met the requirements I had clearly spelt out (ie must be tech-related, must be in english). For example - I had a spanish parenting blog apply for the bid. Thanks dumbass.

Secondly - utter shit. These bloggers are basically whores, willing to review anything that pays. Both ReviewMe and SponsoredReviews suffer from this - blogs full of paid reviews. SponsoredReview’s opportunities make it even worse - I love how a tech blog can talk about drug rehab, credit card debt, and fashion shopping all on the front page. What makes it even more annoying is not only are people basically doing a ‘drive-by’ and applying for every single opportunity they can - they have multiple blogs all with no focus, no quality, just filled to the brim with absolute shit.

A few of them even went ahead and did a review! This just helps elucidate my earlier point about paid links -I definitely did not pay for those, and I have no desire to be associated with those neighbourhoods. What is to stop a competitor from buying 100 (shit) paid reviews at $5 a pop? When being at the top of a keyword search can net thousands of dollars in profit a day, $500 is but a walk in the park.

I do want to state that there are some decent blogs out there doing intelligent and relevant reviews out there. Unfortunately there is so much shit out there (making it hard for me to find that) that you can count me as an advertiser who is pulling out.

So we launched iBegin Weather today. Focus is on clean and easy.

We also have a weather widget. Again - focusing on clean, you don’t even need a visible link to iBegin (or any branding). The hard part of course is promoting it - maybe I can put my earlier look Coupon Looker’s widget to good use.

This is half feature/half site - I don’t think we could run with it on its own, but as an extra feature of iBegin I think it becomes more powerful.

And you could always digg this.