I like my Wii. I got it on the day it came out - I lucked out and arrived at Kmart roughly an hour early. Two kids (+mom) had camped the night, and with three Wiis for sale - I got quite lucky.

So I’ve been following with certain interest as the hypemeter on the Wii goes through the roof. Reading the Techcrunch post on internet searches for the ‘Wii’ I couldn’t help and marvel at the spam accumulating in the comments trying to hawk Wiis.

While they were the typical bundle, one caught me eye - $400 for Wii + 15 games + 2 controllers. That sounded quite sweet.

Until you actually see what they are offering:

The SOBs are considering Wii Sports (already bundled) as 5 games and Wii Play as 9 different games (and it comes with the controller already).

Sometimes I wonder about karma and if people like this get their just desserts.

I’ve always been uncomfortable with the amount of influence corporations have in dictating government policy. I think people like us (on the technological forefront) are more aware than most due to issues that affect technology.

Regardless of ideology, I’ve always seen the internet as the great equalizer. A floating body of knowledge, where things not pushed by the mainstream media can be inspected, dissected, and discussed.

So yesterday’s Ron Paul moneybomb was amazingly fascinating.

The previous one-day record had been $5.7 million - set by John Kerry at the election cycle. And here they brought in over $6 million using nothing but the internet. Even more amazing (to put it in context) is that the amount Ron Paul (who started off pretty much purely as an internet sensation) has raised this quarter is more than any of his Republican peers. And these are the guys who are professionals at raising money.

Again - this is not about ideology. This is about someone raising a crapload of money, and beating out all of his peers (who are part of a group well known for their money-raising abilities). Rather astounding.

I am so sick of people either deluding themselves, or trying to pull in big words in hoping to get you to look at their [for sale] listing.

Classic example: ‘MV-M.COM a premium name for sale’

In what reality is ‘mv-m’ a premium domain? Hell the domain was registered just over 10 days ago - are you telling me premium domains are for sale like that?

I’ve been a long believer that the easiest way to differentiate between serious and dumbass is price. SitePoint has sort of gone that way - adding a ‘Premium Sites for Sale’ category. The problem is that it still only costs $40 to list there. You still end up with stupid sales like Torrentaholic.com. If the site BIN is $500, that isn’t premium. Quite the opposite - certifiable crap.

Same rule applies to any other marketplace - from DNF to NamePros to WebHostingTalk.

I wish one of the forum operators would be willing to take the flak and create a premium listing that requires $500 listing fee. These are established sites. They push a lot of traffic. They have generated millions in transactions. Why not?

Oh an addendum too - provide an Escrow service.

So - SitePoint, DNF, NP, WHT, etc - please provide us with a real premium listing service, and also a built-in escrow service. You have the traffic and brand - it seems to be an obvious extension.

[I’m good friends with the new DNF operator - I will try to get his response here.]

Whew - its 2:10 am, and I’m finally home. We were stuck in the plan for roughly 2 hours due to excessive rain.

Overall - great show. I had a lot of fun and I learned a lot.

But - lets start off with the one negative (or I guess two).

I listened in one the UGC (user generated content) panel. It was a conversation - which I much prefer so that I don’t have to listen to implicit (and sometimes explicit) sales pitches.

So the participants were ZipLocal, Local.com, SuperPages.com, and YellowBot. Now - I don’t want to be the enemy here, but exactly why were ZipLocal or Local.com even on the panel? ZipLocal has had UGC content for roughly … oh, exactly one month today (Dec 1). Local.com has UGC … where?

Regardless - there was a lot of hyperbole on how great and fantastic UGC was. Listening you would imagine you put up UGC, take out your cigar, and puff away with your feet on your desk while people trip over themselves to flock to your website so that they can make you billions. There was very little ‘but to do it properly is tough.’

So when it came to question time - I stood up and essentially asked: “We hear a lot about how great and simple UGC is - lean back and the money will come in. But this seems rather naive - I would imagine there is some effort involved. How do you actually get users involved and participating?”

So what was meant as a question to all four was answered by PremierGuide. But it wasn’t really - I heard about aggregating content and you need to work with everyone. How does that answer my question? While the moderator moved on I wasn’t satisfied. I re-asked my question - that answer didn’t answer what I said, and I wanted something more meaty.

SuperPages.com came to the semi-rescue. She agreed that it was hard, that it was tough, that they try to lead users with suggestions to help participate. I was hoping for more meat - rewards, ‘promoting’ helpful users, pushing away unhelpful users, and so forth. Essentially temper all the exuberance that was bubbling around. At the same time - this was Q&A time, and I can understand and appreciate the response she did give.

And secondly - why weren’t we allowed to ask Marchex any questions? My question I was going to ask:

As a company, you were formed to acquire Yun Ye’s portfolio of domains. At that moment, you were essentially a domain company. So while you are you still part of the domaining community, you have pretty much morphed into a local-oriented site. What do you intend to do with non-geo domains? Are you going to stick with parking them, sell them off, or is there a plan for some other division inside Marchex to develop them? And if your plan isn’t to keep them parked, what will you be doing with non-US geodomains like Beijing.com?

I’m still confused about who Marchex thinks they are (at domain conferences they rarely mention ‘local’) - is this a semi-identity crisis in play here?

As people sometimes lose focus - of all the conferences I’ve attended, this was the most successful one I’ve ever been to. I’m already planning a booth for next years. Still - wanted to start with the flaws before getting into the good stuffs.

There was a good post over at 37 signals about kindle haters. The core of the argument is that people haven’t tried it and are bitching already.

Thankfully my bitching comes with a disclaimer - I have tried it. During Gnomedex (August 10) I got to play with it for roughly 30 minutes.

Now some relevance. A lot of my friends consider me a luddite. I hate social networks. I hate cellphones (in fact my cellphone is dead right now and hasn’t been charged since I got back from the GeoDomain Expo). Call me old school - but once work is done, I don’t want to do anything computer-related. I like meeting face to face. Enjoying my time. A big reason I’m a fan of the Wii

Also - while in third year engineering, I did a group project on e-ink. We had to analyze its strengths, its core uses, etc. I fell in love with it immediately. It was great. Instead of having to look at an ‘active’ screen (that strains your eyes), you had something passive that was easy on your eyes. Going from LCD to e-ink is like going from CRT to LCD - huge difference in eye strain.

So when I saw the kindle I was quite excited. It seemed like it was a good fit for me. Some of my thoughts:

• The design is really ugly. I’m sorry, but I wouldn’t want to be caught dead outside with this. My first digital camera was a crappy looking BenQ. I was so embarrassed by it I never used it. The Kindle is really ugly.
• It is easy to use. Navigating isn’t hard. The scroll wheel is intuitive - once you get used to the fact that it is for menu selection, not browsing content. The little nav bar on the right grows/shrinks according to your options - no ambiguity here.
• The design is a bit stupid. The keys are really annoying to press. But far worse (and I believe the biggest flaw) - the back and forward buttons are in the dumbest possible place. I couldn’t hold onto it firmly - doing so would press either button. So you have to hold it from underneath it. Really - dumbest move.
• It is fast. I was downloading the NYTimes and a few books and pretty beep beep speeds. EVDO worked well here.
• I hate the price. $399 for this? The iPod comparison is unfair - the ‘content’ there was priced at $0.99 - and you could import books for free. I would love if I could import books from the Gutenberg project. But I’m pretty sure you can’t
• At the same time, individual costs aren’t too bad. A book for $9.99? Not bad. Newspaper subscription isn’t too high either. Easily portable, search able (YES!) - seems like a fair deal. Plus perma-online is nice.

Talking to the rep, I was told that on anything (even blog RSS) under $0.99 would be a net loss. I wonder if they did some deal that is more connection-based instead of bandwidth-consumption (or some hybrid).

All in all - I do think that the Kindle product itself needs a lot of changes to it. I like the underlying system - I think with the 2.0 product release I will become a customer.

So why are there a ton of ‘make money’ blogs by people who are happy to break $1000 a month?

Case in point: the 45n5 top 100 - a compilation of the top 100 money making blogs.

Just looking at the last few posts on most of those blogs, you can tell it is nothing more than a pool of the same ideas being restated in whatever new fashion. Not to mention the fact that most of them don’t really make much money online.

Yes there are a few intelligent blogs. Darren Rowse has built up quite a few blogs into a decent sum of money. Shoe Money has proven he can make money offline. But people like John Chow? Are you kidding me. His entire revenue stream is stuffing affiliate programs down the the gullet of his readership (I still remember when he was new and got a dozen or so frontpage Diggs and I thought - this smells fishy).

Then again - at least he has the readership that supports his claim of making money. What about those bloggers with 50-500 subscribers that are happy to make $1000? I’m not belittling $1000. I’m not belittling the drive of these bloggers. What I am questioning is how much advice someone who doesn’t make much money online can give to others?

Let me pick on a post - ‘The Best Blogging Tip no one will ever mention’ - whew, what an amazing headline. What is the great tip? “Don’t overcomplicate things.” Great - thanks. He then goes on to list the most mundane basic steps in setting up a blog. He then links to an article about web hosting. Web hosting is a big keyword. It makes sense to include ‘web hosting’ in the link text - but instead it is just ‘hosting.’ I’m nitpicking here - but a professional should know that SEO is important, that link text matters, and that ‘web hosting’ puts the link into more context (as hosting itself can include other things such as a party).

Furthermore, as these people have little real experience in generating real amounts of money online, the topics become rather incestuous (ie - the root point is the same). ‘Write unique content.’ ‘Think about your user.’ ‘Make it easy to subscribe (don’t forget email!)’ ‘Have fun.’ It is the same ‘top X ways of Y’ - where X is 6, 10, 5, or some other oblique number and Y are the same 5-15 different topics.

And a few links to round out my thoughts.

Points out that few of the blogs actually focus on making money. Yep. Just a lot of noise.

A poll on what you would do with $25 and use it to make money online. Huh? $25?

I do want to add - I’m not saying go for it. I started 10 years ago with $0. It’s tough. It’s exhausting. But if you do it right its amazing. And yes the first $100 was thrilling. But - I never thought of myself as a money making expert. Don’t claim to be something you aren’t (and I still am not a money making expert).

And now you can Digg it

It’s Halloween today, which means I’m busy gorging on the chocolate we are suppoused to be giving out [those Twix are so delicious].

With user accounts as hundreds of sites (I’m sure we can all attest to that) - ‘forgot password’ is a process I go through again. So - pick on Compete again - email addresses are easy to get to. If I put in my email address - you shouldn’t reset the password immediately. You should make sure it is the right user by sending a ‘click this link’ request to that email.

Simple usability stuff like this boggles my mind. I know Aaron likes Compete - time to reset his password ceaselessly

[I’m kidding, don’t actually screw with other people’s passwords. Just a dumb move by Compete]

I had also promised some stats on releasing freebie themes - that is delayed until next week (we have a decent-sized announcement tomorrow).

One of the first things I was taught in Discrete Math in university was that just because b happens after a does not mean a caused b.

So when I saw Matt trumpeting that by removing sponsored themes, he had saved newbie bloggers - I shook my head.

Countless blogs could have been penalized just for the theme they were using, not related to anything they did or did not do on their blog. It was a tough decision at the time, it probably drew more criticism and personal attacks against me than anything we’ve done before, but time has proved us right.

1. Beyond the smug factor, the FUD being spread is insane. There is absolutely no proof that having a sponsored theme would make you rank lower (and point #4 proves the opposite). Or de-ranked. Or anything of that sort. The usage of ‘could‘ is a nice touch - reminds me of Fox News with their ‘?’ after every preposterous idea. Fear, uncertainty, and doubt - you hit all three letters of FUD here Matt.

2. From anecdotal evidence from sites my friends operate that did get dinged (not a single one of our sites got dinged), the only thing that got ‘hurt’ was PageRank. The actual amount of traffic going to these sites has remained the same. It is obvious that lowering the PageRank was to simply hurt text sales. So - if a blogger downloaded a sponsored them, liked it, used it, and lost no traffic (other than the public value of PR) - what is the problem again? The perceived ‘penalized’ problem that has no basis in reality?

3. Sites like Engadget got hit. That is a heavyweight site that pushes a ton of traffic (we get comscore numbers). Even niche but high-pagerank sites like Daring Fireball got hit. So where do Engadget and DF fit into the schema of ‘paid links’? Obviously they don’t - this update was more than just ‘having a link in the footer’

4. No better data to look at than blogs using our themes we’ve released for free. We have released five wordpress themes for free, with every single one getting a ton of accolades (all of them have been converted to other blogging platforms by end-users). Each of our themes has a link to Design Disease (our webdesign arm) + another site. Our license requires you keep the link to Design Disease, but you may remove the secondary link. About 95% of people keep the secondary link. Looking over stats on blogs using our themes (over 1000), less than 1% had a PageRank drop (of which a few of them I am sure had a PR drop coming regardless of ’sponsored links’). I guess the ‘less than 1% of blogs affected’ needed Matt’s help there.

I would hope someone like Matt in his position would be a bit more responsible with his comments. I thought he was above FUD.

Update: My favorite two quotes in the comments:

IMO it best if theme designer used microid,rdf or cc-publisher etc .. as signature for their work.

-chaoskaizer

This coming from someone using our Illacrimo theme and not linking back (as required).

And again:

Well, i’m against sponsored themes but not so with paid links. Paid links can be a good side income for web publishers, why penalize that?

-Young Engineer

And this guy is ripping off our Blogging Pro theme.

Two people whining about sponsored themes (in just one blog post), and both of them stealing our themes. I like how moral-superiority can be so hypocritical.

Update 2: My post tomorrow should be on our own results on giving away quality free themes. Mind you - quality is the key word here.

Why is it that in every niche, any time there is any news/post about their niche, certain companies feel compelled to say ‘oh look at us.’ It doesn’t contribute to discussion. It doesn’t do anything for anyone. It is a self-appraising ‘look at me’ cry for attention.

Case in point: TechCrunch’s post on Judy’s Book shutting down. There are six companies plugging themselves. Without really saying much. Kudos to JD Amer from Lopico for saying how Michael is off (without having to plug his own site).

And then of course you get the more extreme version - multiple employees all plugging the same damn company.

After my post on how much I love Gothamist, I emailed Greg Sterling saying that he is totally overlooking the local-blog scene. He emailed me back asking for the players to note - and the only two I could really think of were Gothamist and Metroblogging. Sure we have our own - but it is not important enough to warrant inclusion in the discussion.

Sheesh. The world doesn’t always revolve around your website. Let other people have their moment in the sun.

When I first launched this blog, I made a concentrated effort to blog daily. Whatever it was, some tech stuff had to be mentioned.

Along the way I got side tracked and got too ‘busy’ for this blog. So while I still posted occasionally, it lost the luster it had originally.

Lately I’ve got two things going my way:
1. We all need to throw our thoughts out there. Alas my fiancee is not one to appreciate a taxonomy generated from user-tags associated with categories. This is my outlet
2. A lot of people have a feeling of connection with iBegin and other projects of ours due to this voice. Be it progress, strategy, and even struggles - it seems like many appreciate it.

RSS growth has stalled around 300. While I was actively blogging it was going at a clip that made me content - with my on/off behaviour, it has flat-lined.

So - time to resuscitate this puppy. Time to get that feed-count up. If you want me to specifically talk about something - let me know.