I’ve been using StumbleUpon (for advertising) since roughly May/June of 2005. I’m very happy with the quality of traffic coming in, and it is also nice seeing feedback from end users.

At the same time, the system is a bit convoluted. It isn’t easy picking one category out of a hundred (figuratively), and so my monthly spending is likely around $20-$40 (when I am willing to spend much more).

So I was actually glad when about a week ago a Ms. Brooke from StumbleUpon emailed me yesterday. She said that she sees that SU users like our websites (we have a roughly 70-80% approval rating), and that she has extra SU categories to suggest that would be a good fit.

That made me happy. I was willing to give them more money, but I had no desire to go through their crummy interface. So after a bit of email back-and-forth, I basically said I was willing to spend $500 a month on SU advertising and we can go from there.

I didn’t hear anything for a few days, and then I got a nice little generic message from their VP of Marketing. He let me know that Ms. Brooke was no longer with SU, thanks for your business, and continue to use the self-advertising system.

I was absolutely confused. Here was a chance to increase your revenue from a single advertiser from a paltry $150 a year to $6000 a year (or even more, $500/month was just a testing amount). The effort on their part was minimal. And its not like they didn’t read our email correspondence - it was a straight reply from my last email.

Stuff like this just makes my shake my head.

UPDATE 15 minutes later: I had emailed back conveying my confusion. I got a nice little one line reply again telling me to just do it myself.

I keep hearing about how great and fantastic and wonderful Yahoo! Answers is.

I have to ask - has any of the lauding pundits ever tested the site out?

First off, a lot of the ‘questions’ on the site are not even questions - just random musings or inflammatory trolls. A real question? Quite a few aren’t even close to that.

Of the remaining legitimate questions - the answers have nothing to do with the question (or they get it completely wrong). People are absolutely stuck up on getting more points and points and levels and levels. Case in point - Is there going to be a baseball game for the nintendo wii not including wii sports? The two answers are totally off base. The first one is nothing more than a comment. The second one is offbase. It took me literally 10 seconds to find Wii Sports games - and there it is, listed by Konami.

This isn’t the first time. Yahoo! Answers is less Q & A and more ‘Post random thought/question and watch everyone pile on to boost their points’. My favorite question was someone asking how tall the CN Tower was - 11 people answered exactly the same. Nevermind Google has the answer as the description in its first result, I can only imagine what the 10th person who answered was thinking.

I will concede there are some legitimate questions. But by and by, most of the answers are absolutely retarded and contribute zilch to the actual answer. Yahoo! Answers should just be renamed to Yahoo! Messageboards

I’ve been mulling over this for a while - a way to give to charity. But also a way to inspire others to contribute too (every cent counts).

A friend of mine and me bought billion.org a while ago. The name says all about our lofty goal But while brainstorming on how to raise money (amongst other issues), one thing that keeps coming up - do people really care?

Eg lets say I made a website - lets call it ‘CharitySearch.com’ The results were directly from Google, and all AdSense (minus the hosting fees) revenue went to charity. Personally, I would find that a no-brainer. Just change my top right search to CharitySearch.com, and done! That has to make some money. But would people do it?

We also talked about using an Adsense ID for charity. We could make one day of the month ‘Charity Day’ where everyone would change their AdSense ID to this specific ID (got approval from Google). But how many people would actually do that?

Another idea was to find some corporate sponsors, and basically act as a conduit. Every dollar you donate goes to the charity you want. But the benefit would be that under the ‘billion.org’ idea we would be doing something for the greater good. 1000 people donating $10 - no one pays attention. But billion.org raising $10,000 towards its lofty goal of $1,000,000,000 - maybe something to write home about?

But the nagging question I have always had - would people do it? CharitySearch.com would take less than a minute (changing your default search engine). AdSense ID would be more complicated, depending on your CMS. On a site like Blog Flux it would take us under a minute. The third option is harder, but it gives your donation double meaning - you donate to the charity you want to and you compel others to do the same.

Anyone care to comment on motivations there? (especially since #1 costs you zero cents).

Looks like Yahoo watches references to their sites like a hawk.

Just saw a hit from this URL: “http://bug.corp.yahoo.com/process_bug.cgi”

Thats right - you fix up your Yahoo! Sports.

Andy Sack, the blogging CEO of Judy’s Book posted today about what Yelp did to whip Judy’s Book. Because lets be fair - it was a whipping.

Three main points, each very interesting on its own:

Catered to a younger audience
While this is an easier route, it means some heavy skewing. And you can already see the effects of that. A lot of the reviews are written specifically to get ‘coolpoints’. A lot of the reviews read like stories, of which 1% can be considered a ‘review’ and the other 99% a journey of epic proportions. The other issue at hand is the fickleness of that crowd. Friendster felt it, and everyone is wondering if Facebook is going to feel it. Then again, maybe it is only the younger crowd that will ever really contribute (in large masses) to sites like Yelp. This isn’t to rag on Yelp, just that I think that strategy can be dangerous. But it might be the only one.

Focused on restaurants
This just makes sense. There is no activity (outside of their house) that a person does that is more varied than eating out. You can find a favorite cafe. A favorite club. But even with a favorite restaurant - you look. You flirt, and you tempt. We can have a monogamous relationship with almost anything (again applying to outside of the house) except eating at a restaurant.
So umm - back to the topic. More than Yelp being smart, I have to ask - what the hell was the competition doing? Catering to plumber reviews?

Out-marketed
This is where Yelp does deserve its dues. The site is exceptionally well put together, and has great cheeky humor spread throughout the site. Judy’s Book felt motherly, Insider Pages felt corporate, and Yelp felt friendly. Well done Yelp, well done!

Andy’s final point is interesting - can Yelp (or InsiderPages or anyone else for that matter) properly monetize social directories? Personally - I don’t see why not. If MySpace or Facebook (Friendster is suppoused to break even within the next few months) can do it, why not Yelp or IP? The audience at MySpace is highly fragmented and relatively cash-poor. The people on Yelp are local (and thus far better targeted) and are interested in going out (and spending their relatively cash-rich wallets). Someone give me a good counter-argument.

Then again, our own iBegin is trying to be search-first, social-network second. That in itself is a different ballpark, with headaches galore. I will talk about some of the challenges in upcoming posts.

In an earlier post I had talked about how I had ordered a tablet to get away from the office and also to be able to do some drawing by hand.

As promised, the 24 hour report is here.

Currently you can chalk me up as very satisfied. There are a few annoyances, but in general it is very positive. The system is very light, and I had no problems with holding it. It is bright enough, and pretty good battery live (3+ hours at highest brightness). You can rotate the screen 90 degrees at a time, and the typing (while it takes a while to get used to it), isn’t bad.

I have been using it mostly for some reading work - allowing me to be in a relaxing environment (outside) while still being connected, able to IM my employees if need be (hurrah for Jabber), and reading on a comfortable screen. I’ve also pulled up some drawings and sketched how I want them changed.

The biggest con would be the precision of the system. It has slight problems translating your actual position to where it thinks you are ‘clicking.’ This becomes especially pronounced around the edges - I still continually resize windows instead of minimizing, and hit up the wrong icon in the taskbar, and so forth. Its a relatively small annoyance, and one that will hopefully disappear as I get more used to the system.

All in all - definitely a good investment. It frees me up to move around the house now (I can imagine this summer lounging near the pool while doing a quick mockup or some important reading) and does it without the (relatively) massive bulk of a notebook.

For those curious, I got the LE 1600 TS Centrino with an upgrade to 1 GB ram. The system is more than quick enough for my needs.

I am (mostly was now) a big fan of Yahoo! Sports. It had a lot less clutter than most other competing sites and loaded fast. It got me the info I needed.

The new design (which went live a few days ago) is hovering between meh and meh. I absolutely hate the fact that they have pushed the scoreboards down to stick a damn ad in there.

But my lord - their damn search bar is beyond annoying. In FireFox, you can have the browser auto-find by just typing. Not so with Yahoo Sports - the damn thing automatically starts filling in the search box on top. I never clicked on the search box. I specifically clicked in the main content area. So why the hell is it filling in the input box?

Super Bowl - haven’t had much time to think of the internet today.

UPDATE February 6, 2007 - Looks like Yahoo! is listening. Don’t know if they are acting, but listening is half the battle ain’t it?

I used to be a subscriber to Mashable. Then I realized one day - they post all the news they can get, and 99% of the sites out there are either 1) stupid or 2) crappy or 3) useless or (most likely) 4) all of the above.

One of the biggest reasons I blogged was to point out sites that made no sense. Dead20.com has been gone for a while … so I headed on over to Mashable to find someone to pick at.

The first page did not disappoint.

Mashable talks about MyDesignIn, where you can design your house in a ’social’ setting.

• A social site is exactly as it says - a social exercise. You want to know what your friends are upto. What events they are visiting. What restaurants they have visited. But do you really care what your friends think should be in a house? I sure as hell don’t, and my random straw poll on our own IM network drew 0/6 enthusiastic responses.
• Continuing on with the social theme, you join a social site to come again and again. Once you have your house designed - then what? Are you going to come back to share pictures … and then what?
• Mashable compares the site to something like StyleHive. While I am not a big fan of StyleHive as a site, it has a purpose - ’style’ is always changing. You want to know what is new and chic. But in the house? I don’t think so.
• Lets say I do want to design my house and share it with everyone and get rated and other jazz like that. How am I going to find MyDesignIn? This can work as a feature on a bigger site, but stand-alone? Nope. And that is its biggest weakness. But perhaps they are making a play to be acquired.

Good to know that web 2.0 continues to suck.

PS. I just realized that the headlines I use are more random musings than attention-grabbing headlines. Someone teach me

When the mighty Apple announced its iPhone, Gizmodo got stung. Badly. While Engadget were busy liveblogging, Gizmodo seemed to be updating post by post. Or something like that. And they had promised to liveblog but never did.

The ouch was strong. Calcanis proudly proclaimed about how Engadget did 10 million pageviews and beat down Gizmodo. The graph on that page really tells it all - Gizmodo who?

But lately, in my (getting less frequent) visits to Digg, I have seen Gizmodo linked to more and more. A lot more. Even other Gawker sites like consumerist.com are getting a lot of link-love from Digg. Unfortunately Digg doesn’t let me search by URL, but searching for promoted stories with Gizmodo in it gets you this: clickedy here. Beyond 23 days ago (as of this post), Gizmodo would get dugg here and there. Suddenly on the day of the iPhone announcement, Gizmodo started getting dugg left and right.

The intensity has kept up.

The digg behaviour is questionable. There is the ‘obvious’ user Gizmodonoah (I do love the #1 story). More interesting is user BLONGO. Every single story dugg is a Gawker property, and not all are submitted by him (her?). Of course this leads to user BLAM8, who leads to user diskopo and Blakely, and the chain just repeats and repeats.

Do I have any proof that something is afoot? Nope. Do I find it odd that suddenly I see Gizmodo every day on Digg? Yep. I checked the last 10 pages of promoted (tech) stories with Digg - there were six Gizmodo stories. Two in the last 24 hours. Six in the last three days. Of the six I noticed, all six were submitted by six ‘different’ people, and four of them had a Gizmodo.com story as #1.

Incidentally, when I looked up pages 90-101, I found one story for Gizmodo.

I’m just pointing out the facts - you can make your own conclusions.

UPDATED February 4, 2007 - Evidently I am blind as a bat. engtech pointed out you can search by url - clicky here. 50 promoted stories in the last 25 days (roughly the announcement of the iPhone). 19 stories promoted in the 25 days before that. 32 in the 25 days before that. Evidently Gizmodo’s staff is kicking ass … or something else is up.

So the sordid tale has come to an end.

With everything so peachy and giving loving hugs to everyone, I thought it would be interesting to back and dissect what happened.

The name BloggyNetwork was actually my idea, before Jacob and I worked together. I have this odd interest in the word ‘bloggy’, and thought it would be a nice name for a network. And thus the name was taken.

A few months later, as Blog Flux was doing well, and BloggyNetwork as establishing its identity, we decided to merge our efforts and legalize the entire structure. So papers were drawn up, lawyers were cursed, and virtual handshakes were performed.

In hindsight we did not do enough. It was our own fallacy to not go after the hyphenated domain and to go after a trademark on it. But hey - when you are bootstrapping an operation, you go for what (you think) is more important. In our case that was our writers and not the legalese. This of course was a real blunder for me considering I have experience in TM and even patents, so oops on my part

Fast forward a while, and Blog Herald gets acquired. The person running it was none other than Abe (aka yuga). I had actually met this chap when I was in the Philippines establishing our localized presence there (yep I get around. At the same time, this is an actual local establishment, not an offshore development place). And lo and behold, he took one of our writers, J Angelo Racoma.

To say I wasn’t happy was the least. Use our brand name (others professed confusion over the name) and take one of our writers - bugger!

And so began the correspondence. I am very happy with how Jacob conducted himself. As an aside, one of the best ways to see how someone works is when they are dealt with (public) criticism. This ‘dealing’ is especially important in blogs, when people will pull out magical rumors out of their magical arses.

Anyhoo - in private email it did not seem like things were gonna work out. There were a few terse statements, and it seemed like things were not going to work out. I was talking to my friend Kailash about it when he noticed one of their sites copied his creation, Pingoat. They had a gaming blog at Kotaku.net, when a very popular one already existed on Kotaku.com. I think the boiling point (and incidentally tipping point) came when David posted his thoughts.

I think what happened was that a fresh start was needed (by the Bloggy-Network guys). It turned out they had bought a script for pinging which simply ripped off the Pingoat design. The Kotaku thing was … well … just not the smartest idea. And they realized that with a prime site like Blog Herald, they needed a fresh start.

And really that is what made things okay from my perspective. They could have entrenched themselves, we would have dug up our own trenches, and a nice little bruhaha would have erupted. Not the sissy fight over between Scoble and Engadget (so sissy-like it doesn’t even deserve a link), but an actual legal headache. But really - who wanted that? Only lawyers win that way. In the brave new world of the internet, everyone knows that the deepest pocket wins (actual merits unfortunately become secondary). Not to say we had the deeper pockets - just that it would have sucked!

But they knew they had foobarred, and needed a fresh start. We understood they had invested some money in the TM application, and we reimbursed it. So the network formerly Bloggy-Network became Splashpress Media, we said we are super-friends, and I will hopefully see Jangelo when I trek off off to the East this May and hopefully visit the Philippines.

People make mistakes. It takes a lot of guts to admit flat out what you did was something wrong, and just as much guts to say ’sokay, forget about it’.