I’m confused - what is so special about Agendize?

They enable sharing. Something like Quick RSS links or AddThis.

In the context of blogs it makes sense - it is a mass consumer activity. People use Blogger and Wordpress.com because they don’t have the technical know-how.

But YP companies like Yellowpages.ca are a different breed. How is figuring out the HTML to add to delicious difficult? Stuff like converting to PDF or IM, which may seem complicated, are all open-sourced for you to find online.

Instead of paying Agendize for this little feature, why not just have an engineer build it in-house and be done with it?

Can anyone elaborate the advantages of using Agendize for me?

Yes the title is convoluted on purpose.

Following the debacle that has been Cowboys.com, there was one user on Domain Name News defending the decision - all under the pseudo-name ‘Innocent Bystander’

Innocent my ass - his IP resolved directly to ‘DALLAS COWBOYS FOOTBALL CLUB FON’ This of course begs the question if it is the attorney himself.

So - if you are going to troll - remember your IP can tell a lot about you.

My favorite whipping boy on a site that gets popular due to faddish nature and then just declines for the rest of its life … was acquired.

No terms of deal were announced - really it seems just that Platial needed this feature, and decided to buy out the website instead of developing it themselves. Plus to its credit, Frappr does have a ton of user data.

Reminds me of when Tucows bought Kiko (calendar) - they wanted the functionality, and it would be cheaper for them to just buy it then develop it in-house.

Following up on Compete.com missing Compete.net dropping, a bigger story: Dallas Cowboys re-think Cowboys.com purchase.

A pretty bizarre story really. Cowboys.com was up during the TRAFFIC live auction. One of their attorneys was a phone-in bidder, bidding ‘$275′ - the auctioneer assumed $275,000, whereas the attorney was thinking $275.00

This is a perfect follow up to the Bobcats.com purchase, where the NBA team paid $50,000 for the domain.

Even more interesting is that Cowboys.com supposedly has a TM. And supposedly is the first domain ever granted a TM.

So where do we go from here? The Dallas Cowboys are far more of a global brand than Bobcats will be. The domain cowboys.com gets an estimated 2,000+ visitors a day. And here they expect to pay $275.00 for it?

Oh you fools.

Your traffic will bleed. No matter how many times you brand with the obvious ‘.com’ or ‘.net’ or whatever, people will type in other domains. You can’t stop that.

So I laughed the other day when Compete.net dropped, and someone else picked it up. Compete.com, a traffic analytics company, was completely asleep at the wheel as their domain-in-another-extension dropped.

Whoops.

UPDATE: Actually the domain never expired. The new owner just contacted the old owner and bought it from him. Evidently Compete.com couldn’t even do that.

I was looking over Restaurantica’s About page when I noticed that it was owned by ‘eMedia’. I had previously met the owner of Restaurantica, and (at the time) was an employee of GeoSign. I heard a few months later it was sold to GeoSign itself. The about page also says that eMedia owns TrueLocal, GolfCourses.com, etc

Color me confused - what is going on here? eMedia.com has nothing on it, and the GeoSign page shows business as usual.

Update 1:

From http://www.linkedin.com/in/vfilby:

eMedia is a publishing company that took over many of the marquee domains held by Geosign. Our goal was to make TrueLocal more competitive with other local search players by improving performance and moving towards a social Web 2.0 ideal.

I’m not sure how taking over marquee domains (eg GolfCourses.com and Hockey.com) has to do with local search?

Update 2:
Sort of an on-going discovery of mine, it seems like TrueLocal also uses lucene. Same thing that Yelp uses.

Update 3:
An interesting oddity - Google blogsearch. You can see the second result is dated from Oct 3 from rmay.ca. The link itself is dead (http://www.rmay.ca/16/) but Google cache has it:

Now that the news of our rebranding is public, I now work for Moxy Media as Manager, Special Projects. It’s a little sad to see the Geosign name go away after six years of hard work helping build it, but similarly nice to have a fresh moniker to stand behind as we move forward in a series of new directions. If you have me in your address book please update my e-mail address as it is now rmay [at] moxymedia.com.

And lo and behold: Moxy Media - a red-version of the GeoSign homepage.

So I can only conclude that GeoSign has split into two - Moxy Media (’content’ sites) and eMedia (100k or so domains + TrueLocal).

Update 4:
At the same time, this job posting says:

Emedia (a Geosign company) is an internet media company, poised to launch sites such as Hockey.com and Golfcourses.com

So - if eMedia (a subsidiary of GeoSign) is doing content publishing (ala Hockey.com) - what exactly does Moxy Media do then?

Thought this was sort of odd …

I saw Sebastien’s post on 118.com launching in the US. I was doing some random searches, and I noticed that their ‘default’ website image seems to be from Judy’s Book.

Eg: food (both #1 and #10 have that as their icon).

Odd.

I’m not one to drop links, but for anyone on the bleeding edge of speed, you should look into CSS sprites.

The basic concept is simple - when you visit a webpage, multiple items are downloaded at the same time. But multiple does not mean all. In the case of 20 images, you could be loading 4 at a time.

The problem lies that a lot of the ‘overhead’ cost of downloading images is in the connection time. So every time an individual image is requested, a new connection is initiated (yes I know HTTP 1.0 vs 1.1, I am simplifying here).

So the solution is to bunch multiple small images into one larger image, and then use CSS to position show only the part of that image you want where you want it.

Unfortunately we don’t do this often enough ourselves, but it can make for an interesting improvement. A big user? Yahoo!’s front page.

My last post was on the randomness of how a search let me to find out about other people discussing one of our companies.

I love random stories. It is truly odd how on the internet, everything is interlinked.

So - another story.

I was going through iBegin Geocoder’s stats when I noticed a forum post that kept sending us traffic. Turns out they were using us for ZIP Code latitude/longitude. Since we had recently released US Zip Code centroids for free, I registered on the forum, quoted that specific part, and said hey - since you are using iBegin already, why not just use this downloadable file. I posted in an as non-spammish way as possible.

Checked back the next day, the post was gone, and I was warned. I PMed the moderator, explaining that I was confused. He was pretty prompt, saying that a lot of first-time posters are spam, he will take a look at it.

The next day the post was restored and the moderator PMed me. As I viewed the skin design the site was using (remember, we do skins via vBSkins.com), I clicked on who had done their skin - Relivo. Imagine my surprise when I found out that not only were they using our Illacrimo WP theme (interesting considering they are a ‘design’ firm), the bastards had removed the accredition link on the bottom (something we do not allow).

So I tried to contact them, but of course, their bloody contact form was/is broken. But lo and behold, they are hosted by HostGator (the owner is a friend of mine), and their domain is registered via NameCheap (whose owner I also know).

Anyway - that is where the story stands for now. I still have to get them. And I will. But it is interesting how randomness can be so tied together.

I’ll have a post soon on how we use free themes to push our brand - in the meantime, you can preview our next freebie: GossipCity.

UPDATE: Seems like word travels fast, and Relivo has quickly updated the site. If a staff member did add it, why did no one question where it came from? Anyway - things got resolved purty quickly.

So I was perusing over some stats for iBegin Source, and saw that the last person who had downloaded our data had come via ‘local business data‘

Looking in the results, I noticed a post on Webmaster World titled “Good Source For Local Business Data?

Lo and behold, it redirected to this page, which had been posted roughly 24 hours ago. And lo and behold, someone had mentioned iBegin.

This was both amazing and frightening. Amazing that not only had Google indexed it so fast, but there were now other people mentioning iBegin. But frightening too - there was no easy way for me to know iBegin had been mentioned. This was especially crucial as tennis_fan28 was slightly incorrect - it wasn’t 50k for the full US, but 40k (not that big of a deal, but accidental mis-information). It wasn’t picked up on blogs. There was no link for me to find it on referrals. BoardTracker (imo the best bulletin board search engine) missed it by a mile. The only thing that would have caught it would have been Google’s advanced search option (where you can specify the date-range of when something was first found). Unfortunately this has two problems: 1) it finds a lot of junk/redundant stuff (eg anything on the ibegin.com domain new to Google) and 2) it only works for *new* pages - a forum thread started a while ago but with a new mention of iBegin would pass through.

Anyway - what eventually happened was I posted in two separate threads where iBegin was mentioned, and the next day the threads were gone. Turned out they had been flagged for review - and I don’t blame them, it did seem very convenient. The posts were restored the next day - anyone try to crawl Superpages.com? and Good Source For Local Business Data?