Yesterday was Apple’s WWDC 2007 event, complete with Steve Jobs’ keynote (many people felt disappointed by the announcements, but the hype was just nutty). We ourselves covered it live as it happened.

While it was going on, I went around and surfed other Mac sites. And what I found was highway robbery.

When all was said and done, we pushed roughly 150,000 pageviews during that event. People were refreshing the live page like mad, wanting to know what was going on.

It also made sense not to have any advertisements on that website - if someone is following a liveblogging event, that isn’t normal user behavior. They won’t look around at the site. They have one singular purpose - to get the news as it happens.

So when I visited sites like Engadget, all I could think of was - highway robbery.

Engadget is a big site, so a good example. If we did 150,000 pageviews, it is safe to say they did 1.5 million pageviews. For those looking at it from an advertiser’s perspective, 1500 blocks of 1000 ads.

The liveblogging that Engadget did was on a regular blog post. So people, wanting to know what was going on, kept refreshing that post. That post (of course) was complete with ads. So - if I was an advertiser paying $5 CPM, I basically just got burnt for $7500.

Donna Bogatin covered Greg Stuart’s keynote where he argued that of the $295 billion spent in advertising ever year, over $112 billion is wasted.

Ad networks are supposedly going to be more pro-active and assigning ‘quality scores’ to sites based on their advertising response - sites that throw up ads while doing a liveblogging event need to be hit hard.

I’ve been around for a while. I’ve dabbled in many many markets. And by far the worst market I worked in was games (the one except being virtual items/currency).

Game sites pull some horrible CPM rates. The reality is that it is a perfect storm of crap-traffic - skews young, skews ADD, skews impatient, skews banner-blind. This translates into poor, tons of pageviews, little clicks. Branding may work best here - if they notice the ads.

The problem becomes simple - so much bandwidth is sucked up that the amount of revenue generated by ads doesn’t cut it.

So I shake my head when I see all these IM sites popping up. Not only are they piggy-backing (in a back way) on other networks, the ad market simply won’t support something so spastic as IM. I was recently at Kool IM and all I saw were Google Adsense ads (where do you get contextual relevance?) and annoying flash-banner ads.

You want a recipe for disaster? Start up a web-IM company that piggybacks on AOL/Microsoft/Yahoo/Google’s networks.

Alexa, while crappy, makes for some fun analysis.

Frappr: it was bloody everywhere a year ago.

Today: ouch.

People forget that trends can take some time to rear their head. Then again, I’m still waiting for Yahoo! Answers to flame out - might have to wait a long time!

I had posted earlier about a service stealing our bandwidth because well - they were bastards.

The latest goes does the trifecta: Tagspage.com.

First off, they were using our PageRank Checker without linking back. Strike 1.

When we forced a PR3, they decided to simply rip our image. Yes I know PageRank isn’t ours, but dammit that image is ours, whether you like it or not. Strike 2.

Worst of all, they aren’t even a PageRank7. The real PR: Strike 3.

I feel sorry for the people that fell for this scam. Talk about mis-information.

A picture is worth a thousand words:

I understand that some stories get more diggs than others on the frontpage. But how can you not notice the obvious abuse for a frontpage story to get only ~150 diggs and ~10 comments?

After a regular search, I noticed an SU icon next to every single search result (odd). Clicking on it, I was met with the following (click for fullsize):

Good stuff - they are down, and they will be back up at 8pm.

But wait - 8pm where?

It was plausible that StumbleUpon is doing some IP tracing, figuring out where I live, and then being super-friendly and letting me know that it will be at 8pm. Unlikely, but maybe. A quick check with a friend in the Far East yielded the same message - 8pm.

Thanks guys, but that message is almost as useless as ‘back soon.’

Is it just me, or is there not a single web 2.0 company that is actually trying to make it work as an independent?

You may argue Facebook is trying to go that route (every since their facebook query language I have been a super-fan), but I only see it as posturing. They have reported being profitable (at roughly $150 million revenue a year), but other reports are leaking about horrific marketing results. The company is heavily invested in by VCs. And the quickest payout will be through a buyout, hoping Yahoo succumbs.

But lets even say Facebook holds out and goes IPO (or even stays private). What about everyone else? From Delicious to MySpace to unlaunched startups, everyone is getting snapped up.

‘Back’ in the ‘Web 1.0′, the companies wanted to be the winners. From Yahoo to Excite to Lycos, they had no desire to be acquired. They wanted it all. It seems the latest batch of ‘companies’ are just looking to cash out as quickly as possible. And with Alan Greenspan forecasting a possible recession within 9 months, maybe its a good move.

Then again, the web 1.0 survivors went on to become big winners.

Yesterday I got a friendly email in the iBegin inbox. In a very professional manner, the person informed me of a Cross Site Scripting (XSS). I responded immediately, and a day later popped in the email. It was a simple example - with a certain string, my search page popped a nice JS error saying ‘XSS!’

This was rather bewildering. I have spent a lot of time researching over such holes, and here I was the victim of my own.

The end result was less spectacular than I had been fearing - when adding in the ad-code for Google, I had opted to use the ‘hint’ option. In my rush, I had never filtered the part where I dynamically inserted the keyword the user had searched for. And just like that a nasty nasty XSS hole was borne.

XSS is bloody scary. Basically with that info they can extract a lot of user info, allowing them to effectively take over their behavior. Heck MySpace was literally brought to its knees by a little XSS hack. And protection against XSS is like building a fortress - if your fortress even has one little hole in it, you are in trouble.

I’ve already mentioned how most ‘programmers’ on the web are crap. When you mix JavaScript in, thats like asking to be messed with.

You read right. When it comes to commenting on blogs, I only bring the A+ thoughts (more about different commenting personas later). And yet adding a comment is becoming more and more annoying.

I don’t always agree with Matt of WordPress, but I have to say his Askimet product is top-notch. I refuse to subscribe to any blog that doesn’t let you comment. At least, if it claims to be a blog. But with all the spam abound these days (we get hammered over at both Blog Top Sites and Blog Flux), keeping comments clean can be tough. And Askimet is an absolute godsend for that.

And so I have decided I hate Typepad. The stupid service makes me enter a captcha every time. Not only is the captcha on a different page (who does that?), but they make me fill out the captcha every damn time. You would think that after commenting over a dozen times without a single comment deleted, they would have the intelligence to add 1+1+1=3 and figure out that same IP, same email, same username = okay person, don’t hassle him. You would imagine with their ‘large-company approach’ they could have a programmer figure out making commenting easier.

I want to comment. But pissing me off (because that is what you are doing, purposefully or not) doesn’t help me.

As an aside, I just came across a weird commenting habit. The blogger, instead of adding his own comment and referring to individual commentators with an @xxx, actually edits the original comment with an ‘—Answer—’. This is rather odd - has anyone else ever come across such a habit? It bugs me because it ‘breaks’ Commentful, so I don’t know if my comment has been replied to or not.

Such odd behaviour.

A story about User X:

1. User X subscribes to TechSite on Bloglines
2. Google Reader v2 is released, tech people say how awesome it is
3. User X imports feeds into Google Reader
4. Bloglines and Google Reader both report User X as a subscriber to TechSite
5. TechSite boasts large increase in readership

Repeat above * 500+ users for popular tech blogs. End result: an anatomy of inflated RSS stats.

I suggest FeedBurner allow you to insert a 1×1 pixel on every post. Track IP, get ‘unique readers’ and ‘pageviews’ for a post. This method has its own set of flaws, but it should be some interesting numbers.