Greg Sterling loves coupons (or at least loves to talk about them :)). Many other analysts and writers in the local space also talk about coupons a lot.

Not to be snobbish, but I’ve never really cared for coupons. Yeah I will use one occasionally, but rarely do I go hunting and looking out for coupons.

And (to my surprise) it seems like I was in the majority. I was just reading today on how coupon usage had been declining for 16 years. It took an extremely tanking economy to reverse that trend.

What am I getting at? So many people talk about how coupons are a great way to prove to businesses that online traffic converts … maybe they should look into some other method to prove the value of their traffic.

Maybe it is some kind of implicit trust in humans, but I am amazed by how easy it is to order food online.

Pizza, ice cream, wine, organic fruit and vegetables, and everything in between - it is amazingly easy to order this stuff online. Literally in the span of 30 seconds I can order myself half a kilogram of ice cream with four different flavors between them. No user registration, no drawn our process, no damn annoyances.

How come such services never exist in the US? I understand the cost of delivery is higher, but heck when ordering pizza you get dinged a buck or two directly and then a few more in tips - is pizza the only food that works delivery-wise in the US?

It surprises me for a country ‘behind’ that online ordering with delivery is a common occurrence, not some kind of unique feature.

I started dabbling in websites way back in 1997, but the first one to make me over four figures was a topsites. And at 18, that catches your attention.

Anyhoo - one of my topsites (which I sold for a quarter million … to help jumpstart iBegin) was doing roughly 100,000 unique visitors when I sold it. As I’ve bemoaned about it before, but those damn copycats are everywhere. And I was looking at the biggest one of my copycats … the site got 5.8 million unique visitors last month! To re-phrase - if June was a 31 day month, that is six million unique visitors in a day. And correct me if I am wrong, Yelp doesn’t even get that.

Sites like Blogtoplist and BlogTopArea (both knockoffs of our BlogTopsites.com) get roughly 2 million and 1.5 million unique visitors a month.

And people want in. I mentioned CSS Topsites before. It was pretty quick-shooting - I created it, contacted a few CSS site owners I had a personal relationship (including the giant CSSVault.com), and suddenly you have all these sites coming in. The links flew in, the homepage and an inner directory ended up with PR7, and … I just sold the site for $15,000 a week ago.

8 years ago people told me that topsites were for warez and porn. Today people still tell me topsites are for warez and porn. In reality they are an amazing viral machine that generates an absolute ton of traffic.

I will say - running a topsites is not fun. Spammers galore, it is a headache to keep that ship straight.

Someone I was talking to was asking me why someone should use iBegin Share and not ShareThis. When I told him it was installed vs having them host it (and track everything), I got the equivalent of a blank stare.

I am confused by all the people who think it is a good idea to ‘outsource’ comments, pictures, and more to ‘widgets’. Not only are you shortchanging yourself on unique content (ala comments) but what happens when the $5 million investment they got for a silly utilitarian feature (and not application) crash and burns? Say buh-bye to all that content.

What is up with all these blogs that think they are some amazing community and feel the need to put up some forum and/or other hard-work-required community hangouts?

I was going through some popular blogs today, and about a quarter had a link to a ‘Forum.’ Odd I thought - I thought the attraction was the writers’ analysis and subsequent conversations. Incidentally, [b]every single[/b] forum was either (1) Sparsely populated or (2) Full of crap. The underlying truth for all of the blog forums was the complete absence of the person who ran the blog.

I never understand why people try to be more than they really are. Focus on who (or what) you are and be done with it. I believe we have had some interesting conversations through this blog. But the reality is that almost every single conversation here was started by me. And there are many other conversations I have taken part in on other blogs.

This isn’t narcissism - it is about reality. I visit Screewerk or Local Onliner because I want to hear what Greg or Peter think. I do care about what their readers think, but at the end of the day I subscribed to read their thoughts.

A blog just ain’t a multi-starter community.

I was reading the Buenos Aires Herald today, and in the top right corner was an ad for American Airlines. They had a url advertised: AA.com/espanol

Now - do people in Argentina (and Buenos Aires) speak Spanish? Sure. But like most major languages, it has its own dialect. In Argentina they call it Castellano (speaking of which - the ‘ll’ is pronounced as a ‘j’ here). So while AA took the effort to create a Spanish version, in a way it was half-assed - that isn’t what they call the language locally here. And that isn’t factoring in the even more varied/slang version of Castalleno unique to Buenos Aires itself.

Continuing on in that tradition there are quite a few words in Spanish that make no sense here, or have a completely different meaning. For example, in Spanish you is ‘tu’ but here it is ‘vos’. Another common one is a word that means ‘to pick’ means ‘to have sex with’ here - imagine the confusion that can cause.

This little ad made me think of the actual localization problems local has. For example - as a local from Toronto, we pronounce it as ‘Torono’ - that ‘t’ is obviously slowing us down and we had to remove it. But say we had a sales team from one centralized location - do we lose subconscious points with a potential client because our sales team doesn’t drop the t?

If I’m in Chicago and I ask for pizza - do they assume ‘Chicago-style’ pizza or ‘American pizza’ (which is not like ‘Italian pizza’ … and don’t even get me started on what passes as ‘Argentinean pizza’). I keep hearing how many people think of ‘hoover’ to be the equivalent of ‘vacuum cleaner’, just like ‘kleenex’ is to ’tissue paper’. But in some places - not true (I honestly have never made that connection myself).

This becomes extremely important when building up language taxonomies to build a relationship between a business/category and words used by people to associate with that location.

Just another headache in the local space - localizing user language.

Google just released a new version of Google Trends that shows Google trying to estimate traffic for sites - but you do have to login first.

What I find curious is the barrier between stuff like Google Analytics, and Google Adsense. If I use Analytics and I said it is okay to disclose my stats - is there any info shared with Trends?

My attempts at looking up stats on Google-owned properties like Google.com, GMail.com, Orkut.com, etc all failed. One did get through: GrandCentral.com, clocking in with roughly 20k visitors a day.

The lag time on the statistics seems to be roughly 4-5 days.

Some interesting stuff really - YellowPages.com vs SuperPages.com vs Local.com vs Yelp.com vs CitySearch.com - it seems like all of them except for Yelp are going nowhere. YelloBook.com is even more disheartening.

One thing I do hope they add support for later are subdomains.

Oh - and that Craigslist vs Kijiji ‘battle?’ Not even close.

My earlier post started my train of thought, but 24 hours lated I’ve decided:

The focus should be on recommendations, not reviews

Let me indulge myself. When we launched iBegin Toronto years ago, I not only added a reviews component, but also a Favorites option. My reasoning was simple - there is a stark difference between ‘liking’ a place and considering it a ‘favorite’. I’ve been to a ton of restaurants I would say I liked, but only a few I would ever really recommend to a friend.

Think of it as LinkedIn connections, but based purely on recommendations. Lets call it ‘LocalRecommendations.com’ (which is actually registered!). No reviews on this site. You simple toggle ‘I recommend this place’ with optional text. No rating numbers at all. When searching for a business, you end up with X of your friends recommend this place, Y of their friends recommend this place, and Z people recommend this place. It would be light, fast, and useful! Of course this is the damn chicken-egg problem - but hey, pull a second-generation social network and spam the shit out of their email contacts!

Kidding on the spam … we have space for only one MerchantCircle

You could then expand it - make something like our Explorer. Browse around for other people’s recommendations. Limit them to your friends (and their friends if you want). And so forth. And then extend it to support Facebook, OpenSocial, Open ID, Android, iPhone, LinkedIn, and so forth. Hell make it an open API even.

I am aware of sites like GigPark and Loladex - what I’m recommending is simpler than them (and also more exploratory). And I’m aware of the spam considerations. But still worth a try.

Reviews: A dime a dozen, often times more a story than an actual review, little trust in what other’s say, highly involved (in writing a review), can be negative (creating moderation headaches), and (worst of all) a moving target (someone’s 3 is someone else’s 5)
Recommendations: Rarely used, simple, based on your friends, low impact, implicit negative (with no recommendations), and no moving target.

Hell I actually want a site like the above (especially with connections into other APIs/platforms) that I’m willing to sell our data at half-price to see it happen. Any takers?

I have 21 drafts - from DDL:08 to TagsPage.com to 19 others in between. From early January 2007 to yesterday. So much to say, so little time to articulate it …

How things turn eh?

I read about Local.com adding reviews, and I thought to myself - “is it really that important?”

I look back to my experiences when trying to find something. Be it a doctor, lawyer, or a restaurant - the only time I have ever given a damn about reviews is for restaurants. Most times doctors, lawyers, etc only have a few reviews, and one bad (or good) experience can easily be an anomaly.

Lets take a simple example - finding a doctor. I have a bum knee (on account of a soccer injury), and wanted to find a doctor that had experience in that area. I also wanted to find out how many years the doctor had worked, where they got their degrees, and so forth. Honestly, my interest in reviews was quite low.

This is quite the turn for me - I was trumpeting reviews (and user-generated content) for a long time earlier, but I am starting to shy away from it. About the only place I think reviews work at all are restaurants. In other areas I’ve become convinced that reviews are not the holy grail. No - the holy grail is knowledge about each business (contextual information). Educate me so I can find who I need.

… On a tangent this brings up my favorite argument against reviews - if a business has good reviews, why bother advertising on your site? And if a business has bad reviews, why bother advertising on your site?

Not to mention other problems with reviews - quality, quantity, relevance, spam, shills, and so forth.