Everyone talks about business listings, news, weather, movies, events, etc etc when it comes to local. But it turns out that people care about the obituaries too.

This one took me by surprise. While the responses focused on gags, I did look for some more concrete numbers on how popular obituaries are - with no luck.

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?

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.

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?

In my previous post, I had said you are not a company. The issue was simple - if the business falls apart without you (ie single-employee situations), then that isn’t a company. It is more freelancing.

The same should apply to ‘companies’ that rely purely on widgets.

I read today on TechCrunch on how JS-Kit just secured $1.2 million. It boggled my mind when you look at their stats:

• 1 CEO
• 12 engineers (what in God’s name!)
• 5,000 sites using their widgets
• 1,000 adding each month (but no mention of how many stop using - unless 1000 is net)

First off - what does JS-Kit do that requires 12 employees? I’ve talked about Blog Flux scaling issues, and we were able to solve that with a rotating 1.5 man programming team. Back then we were doing 20 million Apache requests a day - that number is far higher.

But even more depressing is 5,000 users. That is absolutely horrible. Hell iBegin Weather has over two thousand sites using the widget and it was just launched on May 10 (< 3 months).

So really - 5,000 sites isn't impressive. 1,000 a month isn't impressive. 12 engineers begs the question - "wtf are they doing?"

At the end of the day, it is the entire business case that blows my mind. $40 a month. How many people do they honestly believe are going to pay $40 a month? Even with 1,000 paying customers, that means $40,000 in revenue. Is that suppoused to pay for 13 employees? And dropping ads into the widget? Sure you may make some money, but expect a lot of users to drop you like a hot potato - most serious professionals (which is who they want) would rather take the time to find a new widget/install a new widget than to have ads cropping up into a simple rating widget.

And this 5,000 is with TechCrunch having mentioned them before - imagine if they had gone TC-less.

Often times I check the # of bloglines users subscribed to a feed. A quick and dirty way to estimate how popular the feed is overall.

Bloglines that Blog X (which we own) has 236 subscribers. Feedburner on the other hand says 680. I understand there is some variation (especially between Sunday and Monday), but this is a bit more than that.

Anyone have a clue what is going on?

For those that have read my about page, I used to be involved in the MMO (massively multiplayer online) space. Since quitting and focusing on (what I see as) more lucrative markets (local and blogging), I’ve still kept a good relationship with pretty much all the large players - while I tired of it, keeping abreast of news is interesting.

So today, after tucking the missus to bed and getting on the computer to catch up on some email, I saw an interesting email in my inbox (from a trusted acquaintance). Wowhead, a popular World of Warcraft website, was purchased for over $1 million.

Some quick background (hold on, it can be a bit confusing):

Before WoW launched officially, a lot of EverQuest players were invited to beta test. One of them was Thott, leader of one of the largest EQ guilds (Afterlife). Being a resourceful programmer, and utilizing WoW’s LUA programing interface, he wrote Thottbot. The program basically stored information on all quests/items/creatures/characters/etc that the user came across, and then uploaded it into a centralized system (Thottbot). Users around the world could then load up information, find out how to do quests, where to go, etc. Distributed with the most popular WoW add-on (Cosmos), the site was an instant hit.

Before Thottbot, the pre-eminent database site for online games was Allakhazam. It had the largest subsites for the (then) most popular games - EverQuest, Final Fantasy XI, Dark Ages of Camelot, and Star Wars Galaxies. Allakhazam was a subscription site, making money from people willing to pay for features like advanced search (incidentally, all the content on Allakhazam was actually user-submitted).

I had the mental fortitude to snap up Thottbot (for IGE) right before WoW came out of beta. I can’t disclose the details, but it was in the $xxx,xxx range. For the amount of traffic the site got, it was an absolute steal.

With Thottbot on the scene, Allakhazam greatly suffered. Why would people pay for a subscription with everything for free on Thottbot?

Another quick aside: for those new to MMOs, companies like IGE sell virtual currency and goods for real-world dollars. For all the (unwarranted) hype of Second Life, IGE et all are far bigger - they push hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of goods every day. A lot of players don’t like them - they believe virtual good sellers corrupt the ‘pure’ nature of the game.

Allakhazam.com was operated by a guy who used the nickname ‘Allakhazam’. He was one of the fiercest anti-IGE players around. I had once offered him $1 million (before WoW even entered alpha) - he wasn’t interested. Anyway, the site took a hit, and after a few years of struggling to survive, he eventually broke down. He sold out to IGE for roughly $7-10 million. The justification was that he sold the site to ‘Affinity Media’, which owns (but isn’t) IGE. Anyone with half a brain knew that they were the one and same.

So - with Thottbot/Allakhazam owned by IGE, they pretty much owned the WoW fansite market (and thus a huge audience to push their wares to). At least, if it wasn’t for Wowhead. A late-comer, the site was an instant hit, with its clean UI and fast loading speed (think of Thottbot as Altavista, and Wowhead as Google). You can see on Alexa how Wowhead has grown while the others have stagnated.

And so ‘Affinity Media’ has struck again. Verified by three different sources, the price was confirmed at over $1,000,000. The lower limit was 1 million, while the upper was $1.5 million.

And people thought running a fansite wasn’t worth it

UPDATE: Some people have asked for proof - I can’t give you that. But - I did confirm with another source. As far as I am concerned, this is solid. So Digg it.

UPDATE2: IGE has been ’supposedly’ sold off by Affinity Media. They used FUD when they purchased OGaming. They used FUD when they purchased Allakhazam. Just some more FUD - rest assured IGE/Affinity Media are still very connected.

UPDATE3: The FUD doesn’t end. Remember - I sold OGaming to IGE, while they claimed it was ‘RPG Holdings’ that purchased it. I’ve experienced it firsthand. I talked to another contact - it is a bit byzantine (how the site was ’sold’), but as it stands, IGE US LLC’s parent company is Affinity Media. Certain properties may have been sold, but not the company itself.

UPDATE4: The sale is confirmed:

News travels fast! We were hoping to have the time to put together a proper announcement about this, but it appears word is already out, so we wanted to acknowledge it: now that IGE is out of the picture, Wowhead has decided to become a part of the ZAM Network.

I leaked the sale before it was officially announced, so that shows I did have someone on the inside (my past with Thottbot etc just confirms it). All the same contacts are saying the same thing - Affinity is still very much involved with IGE.

UPDATE5: At the recent VRGood Summit, it seems Brock Pierce (CEO of IGE) talked about getting out of the game, with no mention of IGE having been sold from Affinity. Consider this sale supposedly happened over two weeks ago, seems a convenient thing to forgot. Not to mention walking around with an ‘Affinity’ badge.

UPDATE6: I’ve written about why Allakhazam, then Thottbot, and now Wowhead became the top dogs. More developer/design-focused.

Me and the missus were at the local Target today, looking for some odd and misc stuff.

We circled the entire store before we came across something we were looking for - full-length mirrors.

Wouldn’t it make sense for retail stores to have a little ’search kiosk’ at the end of each aisle? Let me put in a keyword (I’m sure they have meta-data associated with all their products), and it can tell me what aisle I should go to.

Wandering out? Not fun. Asking people? I don’t mind, but quite a few don’t. And as the population becomes more and more tech-savvy, it just makes sense.

We advertise quite a bit. Be it Adwords/Overture, or sponsoring sites (ie becoming the sole advertiser), newsletters, forums, etc - advertising is an important part of how we keep our profile up.

I was quite excited when sponsored blog posts came out. Not the PayPerPost crap (it didn’t allow you to control who did the review - how absolutely retarded. Maybe it has changed since then).

The thing many people fail to understand is scale of a business. Lets say I have something tech-related that tech-bloggers would find interesting. We will try to build relationships with 10-25 bloggers, but it is impossible to build a relationship with the 500+ tech bloggers (who have traffic we are interested in). $5,000 is not that much. It is far easier (time efficient) to simply nurture relationship with a dozen bloggers, but pay the rest. With contextual relevance - we have a product that makes sense for their audience.

In an effort to save even more time - Sponsored Posts allows you to create an ‘opportunity’ and let bloggers bid. You don’t even need to go looking for them now (both SR and ReviewMe have medicore search capabilities).

While they were originally decent, both of them now suck ass. Two primary reasons:

Firstly - laziness. Most of these bloggers are horrible at doing any sort of decent look through (one great exception that quickly comes to mind is Michael Gray - his reviews are intelligent and meaty). We bought about a dozen reviews for iBegin Source. I’ll admit people have a hard time understanding the significance - local data is expensive, and that is why we keep seeing the same re-hashed sites. Plus - local data is inaccurate. Horribly so. It is relatively technical, but still an issue any tech blogger should be aware of (accuracy of local search sucks today).

I actually stopped using ReviewMe (their horrible ordering system didn’t help) after those reviews. It ground my bones that here I was, paying hundreds of dollars, and they couldn’t even be bothered to fix these inaccuracies - trying to contact the bloggers and explain their factual errors were blown off or entirely ignored.

With Sponsored Review’s opportunity system, we’ve gotten at least 75+ bids. I think less than 5 actually met the requirements I had clearly spelt out (ie must be tech-related, must be in english). For example - I had a spanish parenting blog apply for the bid. Thanks dumbass.

Secondly - utter shit. These bloggers are basically whores, willing to review anything that pays. Both ReviewMe and SponsoredReviews suffer from this - blogs full of paid reviews. SponsoredReview’s opportunities make it even worse - I love how a tech blog can talk about drug rehab, credit card debt, and fashion shopping all on the front page. What makes it even more annoying is not only are people basically doing a ‘drive-by’ and applying for every single opportunity they can - they have multiple blogs all with no focus, no quality, just filled to the brim with absolute shit.

A few of them even went ahead and did a review! This just helps elucidate my earlier point about paid links -I definitely did not pay for those, and I have no desire to be associated with those neighbourhoods. What is to stop a competitor from buying 100 (shit) paid reviews at $5 a pop? When being at the top of a keyword search can net thousands of dollars in profit a day, $500 is but a walk in the park.

I do want to state that there are some decent blogs out there doing intelligent and relevant reviews out there. Unfortunately there is so much shit out there (making it hard for me to find that) that you can count me as an advertiser who is pulling out.

In my previous post on ForumTemplates.com hitting the 100,000 download mark, I also mentioned how it wasn’t getting any search engine love, even with all the links.

Stefan Juhl and I had a little chit-chat going on in the comments, where Google does recognize 3000 pages, but thinks only 42 are unique enough to mention.

The problem that arises are two fold:

1. Stefan suggests I put in more text, as that might be confusing the search engines. But adding more text would serve no purpose - this is a design that people are downloading/buying - text serves no real function here. Google keeps telling me to design for my users, not search engines. And I have, but it seems like it isn’t working. At all.

2. We have a lot of links as our freebie templates (over 100) require a link back. These aren’t paid. But we could be getting penalized because they are ’site-wide’ (in the context of the forum software). This is a the slippery slope I was talking about in an earlier post. People saw the design, liked it, downloaded it, and installed it. That is as good of a vote (via link) as you will get. But it seems like we are getting penalized. Fantastic.

So we will see. The site *is* successful (zero PPC, weak organic). But I also believe the site is more than good enough to rank highly in the organic results. Yahoo! shows over 800,000 backlinks. People like this stuff.