I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while … but my friend Mike Bogo summed it up better than I can.

He is spot on - more than anything else, people seem content on regurgitating what someone has already said. I desperately want to find more meaty blogs - ones that provide actual analysis. It is okay to be a few days late provided you bring something to the party!

In the last 3 months I’ve added one new blog to my feed: DomainTools Blog. These guys have interesting numbers that no one else have, and they provide some insightful look at it.

I’ve reached the point where I’m deleting about 9 out of 10 trackbacks. Their entire content is roughly this: “Ahmed has talked about Point X, click here to read about it”

More original content please

The title says it all. This post by Domain Tools goes into more details on how Karl Auerbach, a former ICANN board member, told Name Intelligence (who operate Domain Tools) that the cost to VeriSign is far lower than they claim. This goes right along with my point that due to scaling, the cost per domain goes down, not up.

The other great point they raise is domain tasting - the ability to register a domain for five days and get a full refund. If the DNS was taking such a beating (as VeriSign claims), why even allow it? That would make a noticeable dent on all the registrations going on.

($6.00-$0.14)/$0.14 = 4200% markup = 97.6% profit (old).
($6.42-$0.14)/$0.14 = 4500% markup = 97.8% profit (new).

Poor VeriSign, they aren’t happy with their ‘little’ margins.

Updated: Steve correctly pointed out a flaw in my wording. Furthermore, for people with the typical “Don’t use them” defense - if you buy a .com or .net, you have to use them. Read my previous post.

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.

I was reading the latest Business 2.0, and in it was an interesting article on Various, the company that owns AdultFriendFinder (amongst many other *FriendFinder.com sites). It also had an article on LibraryThing, where people can pay to list books they own (the first 200 are for free).

An interesting point by the owner of Various, Andrew Conru, was about how people wanted to pay - in the case of their BigChurch.com site (religious dating), their registration jumped immediately after adding a subscription fee. To quote verbatim:

“On the Web there are not enough filters to sincerity”

I couldn’t agree with this quote anymore. As is evident on social-networks like Digg, the ‘mass’ effect is not necessarily a good thing - mob mentality caters to the lowest denominator, with fantastic news stories such as ‘AWESOME PIC’ the current du jour.

Money has always been a filter. Be it a private school that asks for a ‘donation’, be it a conference you have to pay $5000 to get into, or be it a forum that charges you access to its member areas.

The evolution of most medias has evolved from free -> advertising-supported -> subscription based.

It has happened to newspapers
It has happened to radio
It has happened with television
It has happened on the web (ie online newspapers or forums)

We already have a Digg-like site with a paid barrier of entry with Metafilter.

There are two fields that require a subscription/upfront-fee for admittance (and its coming):

1. Blogs
Yep, I said it. I remember when Greg Sterling mentioned the idea (sorry can’t find the link), I was ready (quite a few people were not). And why not? What is so different about blogs that a subscription model is so horrible? Heck you can argue Search Engine Watch already does it.

2. Local Reviews
I’m not advocating something closed off like Angie’s List. No - the entire point is to leave everything open, but - to contribute you must become a subscriber. It’s an odd situation isn’t it? Everyone can see everything for free, but if you want to write a review (which takes up your time), you gotta pay for it.

Lets step back for a second and think of the situation (where the initial catch-22 problem has been solved). You have a local review website that has 10,000 reviews in your area. Every single reviewer has been ‘qualified’ by having to pay an upfront free (lets say $15). In such a situation, people want to contribute. And knowing they will be contributing alongside serious people (qualified by the buy-in), the ensuring contributions should also be high quality.

There will always be shills. But a combination of upfront free + ‘invites’ could be a great way to go at it (if done properly).

Note: This is part of a ‘three-setter’ on internet morals and what not:

1. Moral Relativism: I’m better than you
2. Love & Hate are not like Black & White
3. Moral Superiority in the face of Hypocrisy

I don’t like telling what our bloggers write about. I do point out mistakes (including logical ones), but by-the-by, they can talk about wherever the wind takes them. That is, except for politics. Talk about a big no-no (do it on your personal blog, not on a company blog)

So I was a little … taken aback when I read about investing in anti-terrorism mutual funds. It wasn’t the general distaste - the idea of investing in such a fund (and the subsequent post about buying into theft insurance) are actually quite smart.

What I wasn’t really happy with was the half-preachy principal. The US government sends people to Syria to be tortured. US companies with large government contracts do business regularly with Iran. If you want to make a change, my opinion is you should fix those holes first. That didn’t settle with me, so I was compelled to post.

I wasn’t happy with the response. Equating not liking someone (which I never even mentioned) to hating something is an old, tired, and cliched argument. And for those that still don’t get it, let me outline it:

The opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference

I won’t go any further than that, except to close with this: you reap what you sow.

Note: This is part of a ‘three-setter’ on internet morals and what not:

1. Moral Relativism: I’m better than you
2. Love & Hate are not like Black & White
3. Moral Superiority in the face of Hypocrisy

I saw this: is it time for a blogging code of conduct? and I just shook my head. Thankfully, one of my favorite bloggers spoketh on this blogging code of conduct.

I posted the following comment on his site, and it sums up my feelings:

Sigh … “unwritten rules of blogging” - what unwritten rules?

The moment someone tries imposing their moral beliefs (nicely called ‘code of conduct’) is the moment they can go fuck themselves.

Sorry for the language, but this holier-than-thou attitude some people carry around like a nightstick gets annoying. Much less the reality that anyone who does send out a death threat won’t stop and go “oh wait a minute, these are against the code of conduct. Shit, can’t send this now!”

There are two things at play here:

1. The ‘abuse’ of internet anonymity is well known. Penny-Arcade covered this perfectly. People will act like jackasses online. I’ve been called every single racial epitaph every known to man (and more). But here is the thing - if someone does throw out a death threat, that is a matter for the police. It isn’t a matter for bloggers. It isn’t the job of ‘A-list’ bloggers. It doesn’t matter what medium the threat was posted on. Unless of course you are on TV, at which death threats are passe (I’m looking at the radical wings of both ‘mainstream’ parties here in the US).

2. The imposition of beliefs on others that do not want it are getting exhausting. The death that I have already covered above. But other than that - bugger off. If what I say does not harm you, and you don’t like what I’m saying - get lost. Why do people have this craving to whine about anything and everything that may offend them. People will use any opening to push their (moral) agenda. Just like the ‘Patriot Act’ was used to push some pretty un-patriotic things (more about love & hate in the next post). I remember getting a call from some group trying to raise donations for the ‘Anti-pedophile bill’. When I asked details about what it actually did, the woman got offended! How dare I ask - can’t I see the title? This hysteria and reaction-driven pushes for morality have got to stop.

I haven’t even gotten into the whole mess that is the internet vs country-specific laws.

Human rights are about protecting the minority that don’t have the majority to push whatever they want.

I just wanted to point this out …

I keep seeing those damn ads where they talk about how they spend 10000 engineering hours to improve the best-in-class-awesome-towing-capacity-insane-fuel-efficiency truck.

But is it all that impressive?

Based on 40 hours a week, the average employee (working at 50 weeks a year) works for 2000 hours. So when it comes to 10000 hours, really you had five employees work on this.

When you have thousands of employees, five just isn’t impressive.

So I was forced to sign up for eFax. Didn’t want to, didn’t really have an option, so oh well.

So last night I went to cancel. Of course your can’t really cancel online - you have to talk to a real-live operator.

So today I initiate a chat. This is the first time I have ever come across a live-chat that is actually embedded in the browser window. If there ever was a case for popups, its live-chat - browsing multiple tabs, it is easy to forget you have a live chat window open.

So I fill out the info (including my email), and ask to cancel. I explicitly state ‘I want to cancel my account, xxx@xxx.com is my email’. I get the usual ’sorry to see you cancel’, and then get asked for my email (alongwith other info). Now I assume the person is using a script, but I already put my email when I initiated the chat, and I just told you my chat roughly 15 seconds ago.

So then my good friend ‘Scott’ asks me why I want to cancel with a list of 8 options. Best of all, he says he cannot proceed unless I pick an option.

Of course, while talking to him, I have one of those ‘talk to a live operator’ popup appear. Sigh!

And then the credit sell. What really infuriated me (and thus sparked this post) was the complete evasiveness. It went like this:

1. I ask that my account be cancelled.
2. Scott said it would be in my interest to keep an account, they are willing to credit me $33.90 for ‘2 months of service’. I won’t be charged then. (note the amorphous language regarding being charged)
3. I ask him explicitly if I will be charged again (I have absolutely no interest in their service, I have my own fax machine now)
4. “Please be assured your eFax account will be credited with $33.90 so you will not be charged any monthly fee for next 2 months.”

You bastard. I didn’t ask for free two months, and I asked for my account to be canceled.

And this went on. I was given more credits, a ‘gift’ usage of $10.00, the ability to send ‘100 pages of faxes for free’, and so forth. I felt like I was talking to AOL.

I’m sorry that you are leaving eFax. At eFax, we are continuously improving our products and services. Please do consider us if your faxing needs should change in the future.

Fat chance.

I’m an avid commentator. I don’t really subscribe to a blog unless I comment on it.

There are many kinds of commentators. Some are found everywhere. Others are rare. I have observed them for years, and have summarized my learnings below:

Narcissistic bastard - Bastard is just the beginning. This person doesn’t care what you posted about. The only point was to vaguely connect their website to the subject matter of the original post. Usually talks a lot, and spews out marketing rhetoric, tries to impress with some big numbers, and then suggest you ‘check us out at xxxxxxxxxxxxx.’ The worst offender I have seen is Mr. Kevin L of MerchantCircle. I was tracking about a dozen different posts when InsiderPages was acquired, read about another 20, and almost every single one had a comment by Kevin L. You can see his work here, here, here, here, and so forth. It consisted of him saying how no one cares about the business-owners (marketing rhetoric), mentions 90k merchants ’signed up’ (trying to impress us with big numbers), then suggests you check out their site. You can read my linked post about some truth behind their numbers.

Scrambled brains - marked by lots and lots of text. Hitting ‘Enter’ twice to create paragraphs is the equivalent of kryptonite to such a commentator. Often comments about stuff that has nothing to do with the original post. ‘In my opinion …’ is a favorite phrase.

Link Whore - consists of few words + link to their site. The super-strain (just like a virus) goes for glory, usually throwing in two to four links. Commonly found at TechCrunch.

Trackback Machine - never actually bothers to comment. Uses the trackback like a shotgun. Gibberish is the most comfortable writing style for such a person.

The Blog Owner who replies by editing a comment - Extremely rare, I have seen one blogger that does this in the wild. Observe this post where both of my comments were edited with an ‘—-Answer—-’. I can only guess that the blog poster was as annoyed as I was by TypePad’s retarded captcha.

The Cheerleader - 99% of comments involve ‘great post’ or a synonymous statement. Common variants are ‘nice work’, ‘well written’, ‘thoughtful post’. The exclamation mark is this person’s best friend. The more, the merrier.

The Troll - marked by jealousy, posts anything contrarian to the original blogger. Revels in pointing out mistakes. Cries and dies a little bit inside when his contrarian viewpoint turns out to be wrong.

The Blowhard Fanatic - Posts a comment no matter what. Desperate plea for attention. The post could consist of ‘I have nothing to say’ and still the fanatic would still comment. This type of person is usually a 2-in-1, combining both Cheerleader and Blowhard styles into one.

The Prepubescent - can be spotted due to lack of punctuation/grammar, and/or excessive use of ! and/or ? Other common words used include ‘ur’ and ‘kewl’. Run-ons are a dead give-away. Actual pre-pubescence is optional. Commonly found congregated at celebrity/fashion blogs.

Mr. Two Cents - every comment refers to the addition of his ‘two cents’. Often times uses the phrase “… to add my own .02 cents” not realizing that he actually said $0.0002.

Intelligent - A dying breed, the Intelligent commentator is though provoking and gracious. I would cite myself as an example, but that should be obvious

These are not single entities - they often mix and match. A Cheerleader mixed with a Blowhard is a common occurence. More rare (but far more interesting) is the combination of a Cheerleader, a Blowhard, and a Troll. In such a situation, the person not only loves the blogger and cheers the blogger on, but also tries to prove his own merit by trying to point out the teeniest mistakes the blogger made. The solution: ban the nutcase.

Any I miss?

I’m actually using the weekend as two days of break from work. It was one of the toughest things I have done (honestly, the computer keeps calling my name out), but it has done wonders for my productivity.

It is easy to fall into the trap of equating productivity with time-spent working. Too many people like me (running a business) fall into the trap. Its hard to get out of it, but worth it.

Not that I let up on my brain. I read. I did Sudoku. I played games. I just used it in different ways.