I’ve been relatively quiet on ILM:07 as I’ve been busy digesting information and getting a chance to reflect on it.

When I came across the Marchex Internal Strategy Memo I couldn’t help but laugh.

So on Day 3 we had “Keynote Address: Marchex and the Vertical Opportunity in Local” It was a decent talk - of everything, what really boggled my eyes was the claim of 25,000,000 unique visitors a month. Not even SuperPages.com, YellowPages.com, etc can claim that.

There was the talk of the difficulties of local data - on how the struggle is both with breadth (quantity) and depth (quality) of data. The approach Marchex has taken is via its acquisition of OpenList - scraping other sites for information and mixing together into coherent text. The talk basically focused on building out various verticals, Marchex’s collection of domains (thus providing them instant traffic), and selling local ads on all these sites (no need to start over - just convert current salespeople into selling online ads).

Overall though - I have to agree with the faux internal memo linked above. I previously mentioned it, but there are a ton of questions I would love Marchex to address:

Why bother building out all these domains individually? Why not aggregate all the traffic into one stronger brand? You may lose out on the SEO value of each domain, but with replicated content galore, it seems to be on a rather shaky foundation again

What exactly is Marchex doing with all the other domains they own? Especially non-US geodomains that are just sitting around (eg Beijing.com)

How is the ZIP code blog panning out? (for those that don’t know, Marchex is experimenting on using its ZIPcode.com domains as local blogs)

While the above memo is poking fun, it does have a legitimate point. Your domains alone are arguably worth your market cap (~$500 million). Sahar says .com went up an average of 311% from 2004. Marchex was founded in early 2004 by purchasing Yun Ye’s collection for $165 million. 165 million x 3.11 = $513.15 million. So it actually seems like their portfolio alone is worth more than Marchex and all of its assets. So - why are you guys going sideways (or even arguably down) and not up?

Are you concerned about impending Demand Media IPO?

Will you ever start selling off any of your non-local domains?

Just a few question to get started

I like what OpenList is trying to do, but I fail to see what Marchex is trying to do - redirect the domains to their respective parts of OpenList (or a new brand), build some good SEO structure, and go from there. What you guys are doing (so far) doesn’t seem to add up.

No other way around it really - sometimes you do things that don’t work out. Sometimes you have to change your tracks (after you already changed your tracks).

The recent ILM:07 was fun. I still have about 3-5 posts to write on it. And I will.

But for now - we’ve placed a moratorium on our city sites.

Because stats are just so delicious.

So I was looking over the stats for one of the local search sites we own (European) - 500,000+ searches, so a decent spread. (An aside - we operate and test roughly a dozen simple local search sites for various countries to gauge user-reaction on quality of data).

The site does roughly 4000 unique visitors a day (weekdays). On weekends it drops to 1500 unique visitors a day - a drop of over 50%.

But what is odd is that on weekdays there are roughly 2500 searches conducted. On weekends, it drops to 250 - a drop of roughly 90%.

Mind you this is just raw searches - they could be visiting the site and then searching, or finding the site via a search engine and then searching, or whatever other combination.

Still an interesting thought - are people more willing to seek out what they want on work-days?

With a ton of stuff to deal with

I did write about my takeaways from the GeoDomain Expo.

One thing I haven’t liked about iBegin Source was that we had one of the worst sites for convincing prospective customers to purchase from us.

All changed now. New design, new style, more substance.

It was quite the mad dash - I’m off to San Francisco now and won’t be back until Sunday. In the mean time, be impressed by Google having had over 1 million business owners verify their listings. I am curious - is that US/Canada only or does it include UK/Germany/etc? (I’ve received multiple postcards from Google, and we are a Canadian company).

Oh - once back, on Thursday I’m going to be pulling a ‘24 hours to build something’. The last time I did something like this resulted in LocalBrit.co.uk (and see the story). It should be fun

I’m surprised no one has mentioned Yahoo’s FireEagle. In a nutshell - an API that lets you query and figure out where a user is. Not user IP baloney - far more accurate.

The site itself is rather plain - hopefully I can get in soon and find out how the system works (eg - since the API is suppoused to be two-way, how do you ensure you don’t get inaccurate information on a user?).

At the same time - this is sorta creepy. A phone that constantly ‘phones home’ letting a centralized server know where you are (or aren’t)?

I believe Urban Mapping is working on something similar - but it has been more than few weeks and no word.

So I was looking at the subdomain breakdown of Google via Alexa. The fourth most popular is Video, with Google Maps (and local) coming in at #8. Even more oddly Google Maps only had 1% of visits, with Video pulling in 3%. And even more perplexing Google Maps falls behind Picasa, Groups, and Translate (wha?!?)

Either Alexa is waaaaay off the rocker … or the uptake on local is weaker than thought.

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a metropolis kind-of-guy. I like walking around to get what I want. I hate using my car. Toronto was ideal for me - within 5 minutes I had everything I could want - subway, grocery stores, dozens of restaurants (I lived in Yorkville), dozens of shops, 24 hour convenience stores, etc. I talk alot about the true sustainability of such living (and the opposite for suburbia).

So when I saw Walk Score I was like - damn. I should have thought of this before. It’s so bloody simple!

At the same time, it is more a feature and less a company. Analytic sites agree - it spiked the past two months, but started falling in October. And only keeps going lower.

Furthermore - I think a lot more could be done with it. And it could integrate brilliantly into other aspects of iBegin.

So the question is - if we build our own version, improve it, and give credit to Walk Score as our inspiration - is that a rip-off, or a true inspiration?

At least that is how I see it

Andy Sack has posted what he thinks are the two biggest mistakes Judy’s Book made.

The first one is one we have battled with too. How far can we push on our users? MySpace was jump-started with spam-emails to a lot of people - but who remembers that now? Ditto for quite a few other ’social’ sites.

But the other problem was - they pushed national to quickly. They lost focus on the consumer. Which is what I’ve argued with our own site - communities need attention, and going national is the antithesis to that attention. This was a big reason why I never bothered with VCs anyway. They all wanted to go national, and to me that was the surest way of losing focus on community.

You never hear people say “Damn, I shouldn’t have listened to my gut.”