It’s Halloween today, which means I’m busy gorging on the chocolate we are suppoused to be giving out [those Twix are so delicious].

With user accounts as hundreds of sites (I’m sure we can all attest to that) - ‘forgot password’ is a process I go through again. So - pick on Compete again - email addresses are easy to get to. If I put in my email address - you shouldn’t reset the password immediately. You should make sure it is the right user by sending a ‘click this link’ request to that email.

Simple usability stuff like this boggles my mind. I know Aaron likes Compete - time to reset his password ceaselessly

[I’m kidding, don’t actually screw with other people’s passwords. Just a dumb move by Compete]

I had also promised some stats on releasing freebie themes - that is delayed until next week (we have a decent-sized announcement tomorrow).

One of the first things I was taught in Discrete Math in university was that just because b happens after a does not mean a caused b.

So when I saw Matt trumpeting that by removing sponsored themes, he had saved newbie bloggers - I shook my head.

Countless blogs could have been penalized just for the theme they were using, not related to anything they did or did not do on their blog. It was a tough decision at the time, it probably drew more criticism and personal attacks against me than anything we’ve done before, but time has proved us right.

1. Beyond the smug factor, the FUD being spread is insane. There is absolutely no proof that having a sponsored theme would make you rank lower (and point #4 proves the opposite). Or de-ranked. Or anything of that sort. The usage of ‘could‘ is a nice touch - reminds me of Fox News with their ‘?’ after every preposterous idea. Fear, uncertainty, and doubt - you hit all three letters of FUD here Matt.

2. From anecdotal evidence from sites my friends operate that did get dinged (not a single one of our sites got dinged), the only thing that got ‘hurt’ was PageRank. The actual amount of traffic going to these sites has remained the same. It is obvious that lowering the PageRank was to simply hurt text sales. So - if a blogger downloaded a sponsored them, liked it, used it, and lost no traffic (other than the public value of PR) - what is the problem again? The perceived ‘penalized’ problem that has no basis in reality?

3. Sites like Engadget got hit. That is a heavyweight site that pushes a ton of traffic (we get comscore numbers). Even niche but high-pagerank sites like Daring Fireball got hit. So where do Engadget and DF fit into the schema of ‘paid links’? Obviously they don’t - this update was more than just ‘having a link in the footer’

4. No better data to look at than blogs using our themes we’ve released for free. We have released five wordpress themes for free, with every single one getting a ton of accolades (all of them have been converted to other blogging platforms by end-users). Each of our themes has a link to Design Disease (our webdesign arm) + another site. Our license requires you keep the link to Design Disease, but you may remove the secondary link. About 95% of people keep the secondary link. Looking over stats on blogs using our themes (over 1000), less than 1% had a PageRank drop (of which a few of them I am sure had a PR drop coming regardless of ’sponsored links’). I guess the ‘less than 1% of blogs affected’ needed Matt’s help there.

I would hope someone like Matt in his position would be a bit more responsible with his comments. I thought he was above FUD.

Update: My favorite two quotes in the comments:

IMO it best if theme designer used microid,rdf or cc-publisher etc .. as signature for their work.

-chaoskaizer

This coming from someone using our Illacrimo theme and not linking back (as required).

And again:

Well, i’m against sponsored themes but not so with paid links. Paid links can be a good side income for web publishers, why penalize that?

-Young Engineer

And this guy is ripping off our Blogging Pro theme.

Two people whining about sponsored themes (in just one blog post), and both of them stealing our themes. I like how moral-superiority can be so hypocritical.

Update 2: My post tomorrow should be on our own results on giving away quality free themes. Mind you - quality is the key word here.

For those that read TechCrunch, you are obviously aware of the ugly infestation that is Crunch Base.

The idea is simple - while TechCrunch covers the news, Crunch Base is where they keep persistent profiles on each company. This profile includes investors, revenue, press releases, etc. A decent idea. But what TechCrunch decided to do was every time a company name was mentioned, it linked to the Crunch Base site (instead of directly to the company).

Now there would be a simple solution to this - every time a company was mentioned, link to it directly, and then have a ‘(profile)’ link after it. But the dirty little secret was that it was a no-go due to search engines. Most of Crunch Base’s traffic is from people searching for company names. Linking using ‘(profile)’ wouldn’t give it the linkjuice it needed. I just bought a search analysis for Crunch Base on Compete.com - and other than their own brand being #1, all of the other traffic-generating keywords were company names. Point proven.

But there was a lot of angry feedback. People were not happy. So they created a widget. While you read the blog post, you would also see information on each company. You can also minimize it so that you never have to see it again. Good idea.

The problem of course is that the underlying HTML still contains links (for search engine purposes) to Crunch Base. Not that I find anything wrong with. Except that it absolutely uglifies the RSS feed.

Thankfully, there is a simple solution. Add tags around the widget HTML. Then create a WP hack that makes sure none of the HTML in between appears in the RSS feed.

Voila! This way TechCrunch gives its (well-deserved) SEO juice to Crunch Base, all while sparing their RSS readers the HTML eye sore.

Why is it that in every niche, any time there is any news/post about their niche, certain companies feel compelled to say ‘oh look at us.’ It doesn’t contribute to discussion. It doesn’t do anything for anyone. It is a self-appraising ‘look at me’ cry for attention.

Case in point: TechCrunch’s post on Judy’s Book shutting down. There are six companies plugging themselves. Without really saying much. Kudos to JD Amer from Lopico for saying how Michael is off (without having to plug his own site).

And then of course you get the more extreme version - multiple employees all plugging the same damn company.

After my post on how much I love Gothamist, I emailed Greg Sterling saying that he is totally overlooking the local-blog scene. He emailed me back asking for the players to note - and the only two I could really think of were Gothamist and Metroblogging. Sure we have our own - but it is not important enough to warrant inclusion in the discussion.

Sheesh. The world doesn’t always revolve around your website. Let other people have their moment in the sun.

What is going on - the results seem uncharacteristically out of date.

Yesterday we hit Digg’s frontpage, and got at least a dozen blogs with PR1+ linking to it. And what does Blog Search see? nothing since August 10.

Rather odd.

First off - the Dallas Cowboys blundered Cowboys.com, and a bunch of domainers (lead by Eric Rice) picked it up (for a much higher price) during the ensuing silent auction.

So when I see posts like this which somehow make it as if Rick Schwartz put the domainers together - I shake my head. It was Eric Rice, not him. But that isn’t the real point - it’s the hidden move by Rick Schwartz.

According to his blog post, he chipped into this consortium, putting up 11% of the amount. 11% of $370,000 = $40,700. A sizable investment.

However - Rick Schwartz gets 10% of the net sales during the auction process. At $370,000 that means he gets $37,000 back. So really for under $5000, he ended up owning 11% of Cowboys.com.

Congrats to this new team of investors. They saw opportunity and seized it. The American dream is alive and well and this will go down as one of the worst decisions in corporate history.

Beyond the typical hyperbole, if this was an opportunity for anyone, it was for Rick. Well played.

Lots of ruckus about Microsoft’s $240 million investment, supposedly valuing Facebook at $15 billion.

Microsoft’s original ad deal was for 3 years (ending in 2009). That was their original relationship with Facebook.

So Microsoft spent $240 million and got 1.6% of Facebook. That means $240 million / 0.016 = Facebook valued at $15 billion right?

To rip from Techcrunch (with added emphasis):

It will invest $240 million in Facebook and expand its existing relationship to international markets, according to the WSJ. (The previous advertising relationship was only for the U.S., now Microsoft is Facebook’s exclusive advertising partner both in the U.S. and abroad until 2011)

So not only was there 1.6% of Facebook given up to Microsoft, but (which everyone seems to miss) - the ad relationship was expanded and extended to 2011.

Microsoft doesn’t value Facebook at $15 billion. It values 1.6% of Facebook and an expanded and extended ad deal at $240 million. That’s it. You can’t ignore the ad deal and magically come to a $15 billion valuation.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed.

It has taken time for me to truly appreciate how much blogging can affect your work. While I was pretty non-serious about blogging for the past few months, I had quite a few customers/fans of iBegin Source mention how they loved the blog.

It was sort of an eye-opener. I wouldn’t say these people were fans - but I would say they were people who respected and valued my opinion. If you sit down and really think about it - it is a hard task. Yes you can impress, yes you can wow - but when your mere opinion on the possible mundane is valued by someone else - that is quite something.

So - any large site really cannot afford not to blog.

Case example: Anonymous large site. The dominant site in a category. I convinced the owner to add a blog about 4 months ago. They’ve been posting semi-regularly. Not the most amazing stuff - just solid decent stuff. They are getting a few comments. Beyond adding a link in the menu bar, and a little announcement (you can see the bump right around the Sept 28 weekend dip), they have not promoted it at all. No emails to anyone. No linkbait. No submissions to social sites.

Their feedcount:

It isn’t the largest # (482 as of today). But (discounting the bump), you can say they are averaging 100 new subscribers a month. In a year they could have over 1200 receptive and tuned in users interested in what they have to say.

They’ve done the hard work in promoting the overall site. Now they are leveraging that hard work. A more dedicated user base.

I’ve talked about how awesome local blogs are, but Gothamist continues to impress me.

Check out their Quantcast numbers. 80,000 unique visitors a day. 7,000,000 US pageviews a month (yes I went from day to month). Over $3 million in revenue a year. 30% of their traffic are regulars. With highly educated and rich visitors.

Even more stunning - 60% of their traffic is just two areas - New York and Los Angeles. Imagine if they could fully replicate their success in other major metros (I’m looking at you Chicago and Toronto).

All from the ground up. All with nothing but a focus on blogging about their locale.

Why do all the local analysts ignore this fantastic homegrown success?

Why - Delicious of course.

Example: iBegin Source. I can immediately see what people associate the site with. Notice how no one mentions ‘yellow’ for localeze, but mentioned multiple times for Amacai.

So - thats my little secret of the day. Doing keyword research? See how your competitors are being tagged. And the tag cloud sums it up nicely for you.

Yes - this isn’t a direct relationship between user search phrases. But it helps you get into the mind of (a lot of) potential users.