Covered here by the Financial Post. Incidentally no mention of TrueLocal at all.

What would be nice is a conference organizer/searcher. Yes there are sites like AllConferences.com but the data isn’t “rich”. I want to be able to say - hrmm … I want to do business with Company X - what conferences are they attending? Or even better, Person Y - what conferences are speaking at?

Anything like that out there?

So I had talked about the Dallas Cowboys and their mishap with cowboys.com. Now our good friendly domain of Cowboys.com features ads for gay porn.

I am sure the fact that the landing page uses the exact same colors as the Dallas Cowboys is just a delicious coincidence.

We do a lot of stuff in the local space that never sees the light of day. Be it internal analysis, coding projects, little snippets, ‘widgets’, and so forth. A set of non-core and (even) non-useful stuff that still should be published online.

So hopefully in the next week or two we can launch a little version of our own ‘labs’ here at iBegin. Shouldn’t be taken too seriously - just some random testing, thoughts, and projects of our own (most half completed) for the world to enjoy.

Update: and it be here.

What’s going on with Marchex? They seem to be tanking - badly.

Perhaps time to sell their non-local domains? Are are there non-local domains bringing in the revenue?

I’ve argued for a long time that having anonymous contributions is a good thing - even with the increase in spam, there is enough legitimate content to make it worthwhile. Plus - once a user has contributed, they are more likely to register and contribute even more.

A recent blog post by Topix validates my argument (huzzah!) The one surprise (for me) was that the amount of spam by non-registered was only 50% higher than registered. My experience is more along the lines of 100-200% more.

Of course there was no qualitative measurement done, but we could argue that in general about UGC Skrenta also has some good takeaways from the #s.

A common attack method of gaining access to a login is to brute force attack. That means on a login page, you enter a username, and then put in a random password. If it fails, you repeat. And repeat. Ad nauseum. If the user uses a simple password (eg ‘food’ or ‘password’), after enough attempts you will eventually guess the right password.

So to stop such behavior, software like vBulletin gives you five tries to get it right. If you fail, you get locked out.

Facebook extended it intelligently - if you fail enough times (I think I failed six times), it doesn’t just lock you out - it also redirects you to the password reset feature. Fill that out, and voila! You are back into business.

A nice little touch since vBulletin (and similar) lock you out for 15 minutes, regardless of you trying to reset your password.

Just a nice UI touch to have.

From the nuts and bolts to how you present data to your visitors - you can squeeze speed out in many ways.

The (relatively) popular talk is about optimizing the user-download sequence to wring out as much performance as you possibly can. I’ve talked about this in the context of CSS sprites (great for speed oomph).

But there are other things you can do at the server-level that often get skipped over.

Two quick examples:

Our weather widget is pretty popular. It is now used on over 200,000 unique pages. Every pageview on one those pages = a call to our server. So of course we cache the HTML we output, but that still means our hard disks get hit for every request. So we looked closely and saw that the cache never grew bigger than 2 gb. The solution? A server with 8 gb ram, 4 gb for normal memory options, and a 4 gb ramdisk that is used for the cache output. This saves a lot of wear and tear on the HDs themselves, while letting us respond faster than ever.

Second example - re-writing URLs. Often times people use mod_rewrite through a .htaccess file. The problem with that is say you have a file 5 folders deep: /home/folder1/folder2/folder3/folder4/file-here Every time file-here is called, the server is checking all five folders for the existence of a .htaccess file. If it finds one, it has to open it and read it. The solution is to edit your configuration file (eg apache’s conf file) and put the mod_rewrite there. This way you save five file checks (and potentially one or two file reads) for every single hit.

This is of course just the tip of the iceberg - a lot of other things you can do to wring out more out of your server(s).

City-data.com. Look at its Compete.com numbers - estimated 3 million US visitors last month! Pretty close to Yelp.com, and well above of InsiderPages.com.

The site in itself is quite simplistic. Take (what appears to be public) city data, condense it nicely, and put it up. We had done something similar roughly 3 years ago (and City-data.com was around then too), but we never had as much data as they did. The site was getting roughly 10-15k uniques a day when we sold it off.

Interestingly, City-data.com was also one of the few sites (back in the day) that had Wikipedia content and ranked for it.

The owner himself uses this same approach to great success elsewhere. His Web Hosting Ratings site used to be #1 for ‘web hosting’ on Google - but he seemed to have stopped updating it and it has slid a bit. He also owns Faqs.org, a site I believe he purchased. That site has 209 DMOZ listings and 57 Yahoo listings (it used to have well in the thousands of DMOZ listings - getting a listing for every single RFC it published). These other sites of his were used to spread authority and google juice to his city-data.com website … which then took off and gained a lot of links.

City-data.com now has an astounding 1484 DMOZ listings, 1 Yahoo listing, and an insane 48,945 pages referencing that site on Wikipedia.

And don’t forget the forums - Threads: 203,075, Posts: 2,539,326, Members: 248,761

So there you have it. Another local-oriented site getting a lot of traffic, a lot of pull, a lot of stickiness (via its forum) … and being completely ignored by everyone in the local space.

So I got back today - I made a little bit of a blunder and we left the airport … when the flight was leaving in an hour. So we rushed through, cut the lines everywhere, and had time to grab a coffee before we got onto the plane.

I get home and Jacob from Bloggy Network is excited. Turns out Yahoo did some feature on ‘top us jobs’ (on the front page) and linked to search results for that phrase. What came up at #2? None other than one of our sites - Life Spy.

So the site ended up making an extra $1500 (give or take a bit) that it would have otherwise.

What really stunned me was the ‘quality’ of the traffic. The front page feature/search link sent us an extra ~45,000 pageviews. But the CTR on that page was around 15% - giving us a yummy CPM of roughly $35.00! To compare, the normal CTR/CPM are less than 1/4th for each.

So there you have it. One link made us over $1500 in just 12 hours. Looking forward to Yahoo doing it again (and I can only imagine what #1 would have done).