My earlier post started my train of thought, but 24 hours lated I’ve decided:

The focus should be on recommendations, not reviews

Let me indulge myself. When we launched iBegin Toronto years ago, I not only added a reviews component, but also a Favorites option. My reasoning was simple – there is a stark difference between ‘liking’ a place and considering it a ‘favorite’. I’ve been to a ton of restaurants I would say I liked, but only a few I would ever really recommend to a friend.

Think of it as LinkedIn connections, but based purely on recommendations. Lets call it ‘LocalRecommendations.com’ (which is actually registered!). No reviews on this site. You simple toggle ‘I recommend this place’ with optional text. No rating numbers at all. When searching for a business, you end up with X of your friends recommend this place, Y of their friends recommend this place, and Z people recommend this place. It would be light, fast, and useful! Of course this is the damn chicken-egg problem – but hey, pull a second-generation social network and spam the shit out of their email contacts!

Kidding on the spam … we have space for only one MerchantCircle

You could then expand it – make something like our Explorer. Browse around for other people’s recommendations. Limit them to your friends (and their friends if you want). And so forth. And then extend it to support Facebook, OpenSocial, Open ID, Android, iPhone, LinkedIn, and so forth. Hell make it an open API even.

I am aware of sites like GigPark and Loladex – what I’m recommending is simpler than them (and also more exploratory). And I’m aware of the spam considerations. But still worth a try.

Reviews: A dime a dozen, often times more a story than an actual review, little trust in what other’s say, highly involved (in writing a review), can be negative (creating moderation headaches), and (worst of all) a moving target (someone’s 3 is someone else’s 5)
Recommendations: Rarely used, simple, based on your friends, low impact, implicit negative (with no recommendations), and no moving target.

Hell I actually want a site like the above (especially with connections into other APIs/platforms) that I’m willing to sell our data at half-price to see it happen. Any takers?

How things turn eh?

I read about Local.com adding reviews, and I thought to myself – “is it really that important?”

I look back to my experiences when trying to find something. Be it a doctor, lawyer, or a restaurant – the only time I have ever given a damn about reviews is for restaurants. Most times doctors, lawyers, etc only have a few reviews, and one bad (or good) experience can easily be an anomaly.

Lets take a simple example – finding a doctor. I have a bum knee (on account of a soccer injury), and wanted to find a doctor that had experience in that area. I also wanted to find out how many years the doctor had worked, where they got their degrees, and so forth. Honestly, my interest in reviews was quite low.

This is quite the turn for me – I was trumpeting reviews (and user-generated content) for a long time earlier, but I am starting to shy away from it. About the only place I think reviews work at all are restaurants. In other areas I’ve become convinced that reviews are not the holy grail. No – the holy grail is knowledge about each business (contextual information). Educate me so I can find who I need.

… On a tangent this brings up my favorite argument against reviews – if a business has good reviews, why bother advertising on your site? And if a business has bad reviews, why bother advertising on your site?

Not to mention other problems with reviews – quality, quantity, relevance, spam, shills, and so forth.

Whew.

I touched on Argentina local earlier – giant gaping holes in the online local space. The biggest problem really has been the lack of any sort of mapping for Buenos Aires.

So I spent a couple dozen hours and using a mis-mash of APIs and some crawling I’m happy to release Mapa BsAs. BsAs is the local short-form for buenos Aires, and Mapa is the Spanish translation. It has actually been interesting creating a website in two languages, and I think the final ‘product’ is decently useful.

UPDATE: Added widget support – you can now embed the map directly on your site. I am still trying to figure out WHY the pin infoWindow is so damn huge. Really stupid, as it even defaults (when the viewpane is too small) to popup to the left, even though the text is always right-aligned. Sigh … Why?

I was taking a really close look today at Google’s StreetView, and the fact that they APIed it is (especially technologically) quite marvelous. First maps, then UK geocoding, then driving directions, then static images, and now Street View?

But Yahoo may have beat them out (at least for now). The Yahoo Internet Location Platform is pretty damn amazing. Over 6 million locations, with proper parent/child nodes. Informal space just got a giant shot in the arm.

50,000 limit is pretty decent – I need to find out Yahoo’s stance on caching on your end.

We’ve sold our iBegin city sites to another company, who will be moving the sites off of our domain in < 90 days.

Sad to see them go, but since we haven't actively done anything with those sites in over a year, it was due time we made this move.

More information as the new buyer is ready.

UPDATE: Should clarify as I got a few slightly confused emails. www.ibegin.com will mostly remain as it is (an open listing of the data we sell). We will continue to sell data via iBegin Source. What we no longer own are the city sites – iBegin Toronto, Ottawa, Nashville, and Kalamazoo.

Further Update: Still a bit of confusion. Lets try again. There were five main parts to iBegin:
1. www.ibegin.com – a simple local directory for US & Canada. It basically lets people view our data
2. source.ibegin.com – where we sell business listings for US & Canada
3. weather.ibegin.com – weather info for US & Canada. We sell enterprise feeds to customers
4. www.ibegin.com/labs/ – where we release random things we have worked on
5. City sites – toronto.ibegin.com ottawa.ibegin.com nashville.ibegin.com kalamazoo.ibegin.com – city guide sites that had reviews, pictures, and other user generated content.

We stopped working on #5 over a year ago, and removed all links to the city sites over 5 months ago

What we have sold is #5. #1 2 3 4 are still a part of iBegin. The city sites were sold as we were no longer working on them, and they were basically just lying around. We decided it was a better move to sell them to someone who can actively work on it.

DDL:08 was a good experience for us – it was the first time we ever had a booth (though we have sponsored other events), and it was a good experience (more on that later).

Right now though I want to point out to a bonafide ass.

Part of our sponsorship was us sponsoring a Cyber Cafe. At the conference they have two sets of three computers connected to the internet. Two companies sponsor the cyber cafe, setting the homepage on the computer to a site specified by the sponsor. As such, three of the computers were set to www.ibegin.com and the other three were set to www.homes.com.

We noticed this earlier on, and it happened non-stop – some ass kept going over to the six computers and kept setting www.bizclip.com/portfolio/ as his homepage. And by non-stop I mean he would come by every 30 minutes to do this.

I never actually saw the bugger doing this as I was too busy to wait to catch him, but quite a few people let me know what was going on, including one of our employees.

I can only imagine the kind of service and product you would receive from someone who would stoop to such a level. Consider yourself warned.

Update: I should note that quite a few people did this. This one particular individual did it multiple times. At the same time – other than human decency I cannot imagine a way to ’solve’ this kind of behavior. Timers, perma-frames, etc – they all have drawbacks. So really nothing Kelsey nor we can do about it.

Post on why not submitting to iBegin.com is a bad idea!

So with iBegin Share v2 coming out soon (stat tracking), we thought we would go ahead and support the Open Share Icon project. But one thing is off – the official website.

The Feed Icon has the pretty feedicons.com site, OPML has an equally purty opmlicons.com, and even the Geotag Icon has a functional geotagicons.com site. And I am quite sure that Sharing is a far more common activity than using OPML or geotags.

If you guys want, we can gladly make a website for it

So I’m at the tail end of LeadsCon, getting ready to go home.

To me, the best two sessions were ‘Keynote Address: Lessons From the Leaders’ and ‘Uncovering Local Lead Generation’

The first was an interesting story – how things were done, how much FreeCreditReport.com cost (hand regged!), and so forth. Personal stories of success and development are always good.

The second was interesting in the sense of mechanics – the background work required to make local lead generation work. What is expect from businesses, and what is expected from consumers, and match the two.

The rest in the middle, while executed well (I much prefer talk sessions than podium preaching), was boiled down to two core issues:

1. Teeth gnashing at what meanies the FTC are and how they hate us
2. Teeth gnashing at the mortgage industry explosion, and looking forward to the housing market coming back

It was, in my opinion, far too retrospective, when it should have been more forward-thinking. What I got (and remember, this is my perspective), was that the only new thing was lead scoring.

My intent in coming was of course locally-oriented – local lead gen, while a tougher nut to crack than the traditional ‘financial’ categories (mortgage, debt, loans, financing), is also potentially far more lucrative (higher margins, repeat customers, word of mouth effectiveness). Yet every single established company I talked to had the same boiler plate answer – we think it’s great, it’s on our list of things to do, but not in the year 2008.

It reminded me a lot of the domainer industry. All those PPC companies are basically the same (their ads come via Google or Yahoo), and they all sell the same services. Instead of trying to evolve the market in new ways, it seems like everyone is content sitting on their laurels fighting each other for the same leads, instead of trying to work on new areas where there is no competition.

Yes there were most definitely some individuals who want to try new things, who are looking at new types of leads. But the local space requires scale and operations – a one man operation won’t make much of a dent in local lead gen.

At the end of the day, this just elucidates the level of disconnect happening between some of the major industries I travel. Local companies should be interested in domains (readymade traffic – just look at Marchex), and should be interested in getting the most money out of a consumer (lead gen!). Yet I saw almost zero local-oriented companies. Domainers should love local (‘unlocking’ the potential of their domains) and lead gen (leaving the Google/Yahoo duopoly) … but again, few domainers. Lead gen should love domainers (source of traffic) and local (higher margins, new areas) – but again, little interaction.

I almost feel like a trailblazer trying to connect the three – anyone else actively participating in these three areas?

#1 – it is now called iBegin Labs. Unfortunately too many people mis-understood the play on ‘beta’ and going for ‘gamma.’ Lesson learned – don’t be too clever for your own good, go with the simple.

We have the updates here, but the most interesting is the launch of iBegin Places.

I think it will be interesting to see how this pans out. Ideally geo-aware people will add their neighborhoods, and use polygons mapped out by others. The actual creation process is quite simple. But will people do it? I have no clue. But it should be interesting to see in what directions it goes. And to show the system in action, you can see the Zillow neighborhood data mapped out (get the original neighborhood data here).