Judy’s Book recently launched Coupon Looker, which … umm … helps you find coupons.

Pretty obvious.

What is odd is how there is a non-obvious connection to Judy’s Book itself. On the about page, it is (dismissively I think) stated as follows:

couponlooker was started by a few of the folks at Judy’s Book who recognized a need for a fast and efficient coupon search engine.

Huge difference between ’started by a few of the folks’ and ‘owned and operated by’. The terms page also mentions it once:

The couponlooker site is controlled, operated and administered by couponlooker, a subsidiary of Judy’s Book from its offices within the United States.

Much more obvious - so the question remains, why is Judy’s Book hiding the relationship? Do they believe the Coupon Looker dilutes the brand? Or that Judy’s Book has a negative image in coupons?

One other thing - widgets. I have a lot of experience in building widgets/tools to gather links and branding awareness - but who would put a coupon looker widget on their site? Seems a bit odd. I know they have links listed on the right, but those could easily be seeder ones. Speaking of which - I am going to research this and get back on this.

Pretty simple.

Matt complains about selling text links through WordPress to game search engines (he focuses on templates, but you know the gist of it).

He does this on a blog that has the following links:
* Donate your car
* Online payday loans
* Payday Loans
* myspace layouts
* Free web directory
* Professional Web Hosting
* domains
* Payday Loans
* Articles & Tutorials
* Rome hotels

Kettle, pot, black - you know the drill.

I didn’t blog yesterday because of what happened in VT. People talk about hitting home, but this one really did. I remember running the business and going to university at the same time. University was far more stressful. Of course, my emotions melted away and turned to disgust after seeing shit like this.

Technology can be horrible. It allows people like Debbie (ie consequential only because of their hatred) a platform to reach similar people. But its also fantastic that it lets us see news we would never have otherwise, and also to expose people like Debbie.

My next post is going to be quite political. Been see-sawing through it for a few weeks now, but I believe it is something that has to be said.

Yep, I just cursed.

I had written a post on how to monetize a DUGG site (basic idea: setup a new website, get it to the frontpage, re-sell). A few sites picked it up, including this post by Blog Herald.

If you read the Blog Herald post, it adds a bit of analysis, but by-the-by, the meat of the post is what I posted.

So it eternally grates my nerves when the Chitika blog added a link to the end of their post about monetizing Digg traffic, only linking to BlogHerald, not here.

This stuff really pisses me off. There is a big difference between posting news and writing something a bit deeper. When companies like Chitika short-change the source and instead link to the ‘better known brand’, it just dilutes the web.

This isn’t anything against BlogHerald (J Angelo is especially good at taking something and running it in a totally new direction). But what Chitika did (and innumerable other big blogs do) is quite insulting and annoying.

UPDATE: Alden DoRosario (who wrote the post over at Chitika) added his comments - he apologizes for the slipup, and explained how he ended up on BH (Google search). He has since fixed it, so a huzzah for him on that. The general rant still stands though.

I used to be quite snarky about ’start-ups’ over at AJAX Review. I intended to do the same here, but somehow lost my way in between posting …

So first up: Flock replies to Mozilla’s Co-op. For those that don’t know, Flock adds some ’social-network’ features on top of FireFox (it is a complete separate download, not an extension). Mozilla (makers of FireFox) recently announced Co-op, something very similar.

Conventional wisdom makes this a no-brainer: chance of company that requires a separate download vs primary company bundling co-op?

Personally, I hate the idea of such crap. Give me a browser that doesn’t choke, not one trying to be hip-and-happening.

Mozilla will likely beat them into the ground. The number of people who know about FireFox versus the number of people who know about Flock should be roughly 90% of the battle. Throw in the ‘actual developers’ of FireFox vs ‘external developers’ of Flock, and it just makes sense that Flock is going to be crushed (the FF product might not be great at first, but it will catch-up in iterations).

Two part argument by Flock, neither of which make much sense:

First, Flock shares with Mozilla a passion to innovate and provide choice to online users around the globe. Mozilla’s interest in this specific area is an enormous validation of the premise upon which Flock is based: that there are today massive opportunities to truly innovate the browser…

That is nice. But last time we checked, you are in the business of making money. Yeah passion is a key ingredient, but all your passion doesn’t change the fact that Mozilla will be bundling in 90% of what you offer. I don’t see a single killer feature, so all that innovation doesn’t really matter right now (sorry).

Second, rapid prototyping and visualization is an important step in imagining new products and services, but the hard work is what follows. That hard work is all about making compelling new capabilities Dependable, Discoverable, Usable and Fun for average, active Internet users.

The hard work for Flock was convincing users to test them out. Inertia is an absolute bitch, and it takes a lot of effort to overcome it. FireFox does not have that problem - Co-op simply becomes another installation option. Comparing apples and oranges in terms of challenges (Mozilla’s only ‘problem’ is making the product decent).

Sorry Flock, but your goose is cooked.

Ugh. I just read that VeriSign is increasing the base cost of .com domains 7%, from $6.00 to $6.42.

Some background: A while ago, ICANN and VeriSign sued each over. In the settlement (as VeriSign has tons of cash, and ICANN doesn’t), ICANN agreed that VeriSign could continue to be the exclusive provider of .com/.net for the next seven years. Furthermore, VeriSign was given the ability to increase the base cost (which at that point was $6.00) upto 7% every year. The word ‘upto’ being useless, as how many corporations decide to go for 5% extra profit instead of 7%?

Anyway, VeriSign, being the opportunistic monopolistic company they are, jumped at the first chance to make some more money.

This is a company that has an exclusive lock on .com/.net domains. For every year I renew this domain, they make $6.00. Now instead, they will be making an extra 42 cents. Going by TechCrunch’s math, that means $27 million extra per year. For doing nothing.

What is rather disheartening are the people spouting out comments over at TechCrunch without having a clue what is going on. The basic arguments:

• Domains used to be $100. Thats great - they used to be free. Stupid argument
• Don’t use them. I don’t know what people are smoking - if you buy a .com or .net, VeriSign will get your money. The low-cost registrars still pay that fee. And they had nothing to do with how ‘cheap’ VeriSign is (ie - they did not exist until the price went down, not vice-versa)
• Domainers. Love them or hate them, it is Google and Yahoo that give them the money on their PPC pages. $6 vs $6.42 - you think that is going to stop domainers?
• Infrastructure. This one really irks me. Do you remember the cost of hosting 10 years ago? 5 years ago? Newsflash: technology makes things cheaper and cheaper. VeriSign states 30 billion DNS queries a day - and yet OpenDNS does over a billion without much problems. Somehow .info operators are able to run a registry at $1-$2 per domain, and that is with much smaller volume. Scale up from 5 million domains to 65 million domains, and the cost per domain goes down, not up.

What is just disgusting is how people are actually defending a monopoly. VeriSign answers to no one (well, they are supposed to answer to ICANN, but just observe the Registerfly debacle and how incompetent they were at that).

If something costs me 50 cents, and I used to charge you $50, but now charge $5 - I’m not doing you a favor - I’m still ripping you off.

We get all sorts of legal threats and what not.

The latest one (in a long line of bizarre ones) comes from ISPhost.org. Yet another web hosting company out there (with what has to be one of the ugliest designs out there) sent us a nice little letter threatening to sue us. It was boilerplate: We are from XX, how dare you track us and attack our servers, cease or we will sue.’

A few things that really bug me about this:

• In many cases I think - “that’s nice, go ahead and send your C&D.” But in their case, we are actually providing them with (very targeted) traffic to their website. Removing them from the directory was elementary.
• How do they know we aren’t a customer? As a customer, do I not have a right to know if my website is up? Are they hiding something?
• The attack claim - we ping them once every 10 minutes (if they are down, we increase the speed at which we check). Assuming they have 0% downtime, in one day thats 6×24 = 144 checks a day. Are their servers so weak that they cannot sustain 144 ‘pageviews’ by a single user in an entire day?

Just another case of over-reaction (and I know full well both what DDOSes feel like and what running a server infrastructure entails).

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.’

Continuing from my earlier discussion on why startpages are so important.

The problem with the current corp of startpages is they are too damn confusing

I just headed on over to Netvibes and it made my head throb. There are so many potential choices it made my head spin. Modules, feeds, six different searches (’web search’ vs ‘classic web search’), dozens of links, Mini API module … it is completely overwhelming.

Then each module itself has all these inner tabs - four tabs for web search, four for images, four for video search. Wasted space in the form of ‘Netvibes news’

Startpages that cater to parasitic users (eg early-adopters) are doomed to chase feature after feature. By focusing on ‘normal’ users they have the ability to really create a connection with these end users.

I originally bought the domain iBegin.com for a startpage. I had seen some JS examples of modular windows being moved around, and it was extremely thrilling. Problem was I took too long, and before I knew it, Netvibes had arrived on the scene, and I was still getting the machinery moving (really a blessing in disguise - iBegin as local search is where I want to be). To that end, when we had specced out what we wanted, our core goals were the following:

1. Simple. We were not going to mention the word RSS anywhere. We were going to have some fixed RSS feeds, and thats it. There would be a module for search that would default to Google (and then users could edit that if they wanted).
2. Connected. The end goal was to have a static url for every user that they could access. Eg http://www.ibegin.com/ahmedf/ or http://www.ibegin.com/ahmedsmama/
3. Different audience. The hardest part, but we wanted to aim towards people who couldn’t care about fancy and instead wanted stability and usefulness. Eg my mother or my father. I would create them a startpage, ‘lock’ it (so that modules could not be accidentally moved/edited), and then set it as their startpage. Every day they would open up to a startpage that had quick links to where they wanted to go, weather, ability to perform a quick web search, a quick product search, place to scribble notes, access email, and (for my father) news links. I wouldn’t even mention the words module, API, feeds, or anything like that to them. By forcing a static url on them, they could go traveling and still have access to all their links (only having to login to edit notes).

You can even see the design we had formulated (click to enlarge):

The current crop of startpages are simply too damn confusing and complicated. I actually hope 37signals could maybe join the fray and create their own startpage

I keep hearing about how great and fantastic and wonderful Yahoo! Answers is.

I have to ask - has any of the lauding pundits ever tested the site out?

First off, a lot of the ‘questions’ on the site are not even questions - just random musings or inflammatory trolls. A real question? Quite a few aren’t even close to that.

Of the remaining legitimate questions - the answers have nothing to do with the question (or they get it completely wrong). People are absolutely stuck up on getting more points and points and levels and levels. Case in point - Is there going to be a baseball game for the nintendo wii not including wii sports? The two answers are totally off base. The first one is nothing more than a comment. The second one is offbase. It took me literally 10 seconds to find Wii Sports games - and there it is, listed by Konami.

This isn’t the first time. Yahoo! Answers is less Q & A and more ‘Post random thought/question and watch everyone pile on to boost their points’. My favorite question was someone asking how tall the CN Tower was - 11 people answered exactly the same. Nevermind Google has the answer as the description in its first result, I can only imagine what the 10th person who answered was thinking.

I will concede there are some legitimate questions. But by and by, most of the answers are absolutely retarded and contribute zilch to the actual answer. Yahoo! Answers should just be renamed to Yahoo! Messageboards