Is gonna be full of SSD drives in RAID (specifically look for the ‘IOMeter’ test).

Just thinking gets me all excited

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.

We’ve been slaving over this for months - but we finally finished the category work on iBegin Source.

I’ll admit (for current and future clients) - we screwed up a bit. While the ‘business listing’ <---> ‘category’ relationship was accurate, the actual category names were slightly off. A common issue was sometimes we had a category end with ‘(Manufacturers)’ and other times ‘ - Manufacturers’ and other times ‘ - Manufacturing’. All three were the same, but the lack of normalization was an issue we made a mistake on.

It has taken a while, but it is finally ready for consumption. I’ll be sending out a mass-email tomorrow, but for current (and future) clients, the important links:

Category updates: Old » New
Raw list of category updates
New master list of categories

We started off with 11,094 categories, and ended up with 10,432. 662 categories merged into existing categories - a 6% reduction. A total of 5177 categories were affected (though this does include minor tweaks like the above mentioned ‘(Manufacturers)’ vs ‘ - Manufacturers’.

This is of course the start. While the databases are primed to support both the old and new category format simultaneously, we will have to modify the system to properly accomodate and generate files for each. And then we have to start selling the Canadian data. And work on super-categories. And sell super-categories. And re-design iBegin Source homepage. And move the listings to www.ibegin.com [so that source.ibegin.com = info on business data, and www.ibegin.com = actual listings]. All while continually improving our data (normalizations, franchise-lists, franchise info, listings from professional organizations and associations, etc).

Fun

Why - Delicious of course.

Example: iBegin Source. I can immediately see what people associate the site with. Notice how no one mentions ‘yellow’ for localeze, but mentioned multiple times for Amacai.

So - thats my little secret of the day. Doing keyword research? See how your competitors are being tagged. And the tag cloud sums it up nicely for you.

Yes - this isn’t a direct relationship between user search phrases. But it helps you get into the mind of (a lot of) potential users.

I had an interesting call earlier this week. When we originally launched iBegin Source, we almost blew the floor off the competition. Our entire approach was efficiency and efficacy - do it right (the first time), do it fast, and do it simple - remove barriers to save costs (especially in terms of man-power).

Imagine my surprise - one of the ‘Big Three’ was willing to offer Full US for 36 months at $2000 a month.

For another post, but the noise volume over at iBegin is definitely on the up-and-up. By making sure we are around, keeping in contact, our “presence” is starting to get felt, and it seems like the competition is responding. We have quite a few customers now who were going to go with the Big Three - but ended up with us. Price? Support? Our vision? This blog (I myself am flattered by how many compliments I’ve gotten here).

Even better is that our presence is now strong enough that we are cash-flow positive. Isn’t that a peachy thought. Which at the same time isn’t to scare our current customers - the rest of Enthropia Inc does well enough to cover any issues (plus savings). But iBegin is almost ready to stand on its own two feet.

I’m terribly excited for 2008. Not that we are interested in selling (consider me as someone who builds lifestyle companies), but we had a buyout offer in the low seven digits. By end of 2008 we should be at least in the eight digits. We have a lot of stuff to do and implement - so much in the pipeline - our small team means fast results with low overhead. First on the agenda is taking direct control over is My Home and giving it a shake (the current manager for that is … leaving … more on that very soon).

My favorite whipping boy on a site that gets popular due to faddish nature and then just declines for the rest of its life … was acquired.

No terms of deal were announced - really it seems just that Platial needed this feature, and decided to buy out the website instead of developing it themselves. Plus to its credit, Frappr does have a ton of user data.

Reminds me of when Tucows bought Kiko (calendar) - they wanted the functionality, and it would be cheaper for them to just buy it then develop it in-house.

I’m not one to drop links, but for anyone on the bleeding edge of speed, you should look into CSS sprites.

The basic concept is simple - when you visit a webpage, multiple items are downloaded at the same time. But multiple does not mean all. In the case of 20 images, you could be loading 4 at a time.

The problem lies that a lot of the ‘overhead’ cost of downloading images is in the connection time. So every time an individual image is requested, a new connection is initiated (yes I know HTTP 1.0 vs 1.1, I am simplifying here).

So the solution is to bunch multiple small images into one larger image, and then use CSS to position show only the part of that image you want where you want it.

Unfortunately we don’t do this often enough ourselves, but it can make for an interesting improvement. A big user? Yahoo!’s front page.

My last post was on the randomness of how a search let me to find out about other people discussing one of our companies.

I love random stories. It is truly odd how on the internet, everything is interlinked.

So - another story.

I was going through iBegin Geocoder’s stats when I noticed a forum post that kept sending us traffic. Turns out they were using us for ZIP Code latitude/longitude. Since we had recently released US Zip Code centroids for free, I registered on the forum, quoted that specific part, and said hey - since you are using iBegin already, why not just use this downloadable file. I posted in an as non-spammish way as possible.

Checked back the next day, the post was gone, and I was warned. I PMed the moderator, explaining that I was confused. He was pretty prompt, saying that a lot of first-time posters are spam, he will take a look at it.

The next day the post was restored and the moderator PMed me. As I viewed the skin design the site was using (remember, we do skins via vBSkins.com), I clicked on who had done their skin - Relivo. Imagine my surprise when I found out that not only were they using our Illacrimo WP theme (interesting considering they are a ‘design’ firm), the bastards had removed the accredition link on the bottom (something we do not allow).

So I tried to contact them, but of course, their bloody contact form was/is broken. But lo and behold, they are hosted by HostGator (the owner is a friend of mine), and their domain is registered via NameCheap (whose owner I also know).

Anyway - that is where the story stands for now. I still have to get them. And I will. But it is interesting how randomness can be so tied together.

I’ll have a post soon on how we use free themes to push our brand - in the meantime, you can preview our next freebie: GossipCity.

UPDATE: Seems like word travels fast, and Relivo has quickly updated the site. If a staff member did add it, why did no one question where it came from? Anyway - things got resolved purty quickly.

Just wanted to take a moment to pause and note that we now have tracked over a billion pageviews on our Blog Top Sites. All with a load of 0.35 at peak hours (on a dual dual-core server).

At the same time, we have barely scratched the surface of what we can do with Blog Flux.

I’ll be in Seattle from August 9 to August 15 - first for Gnomedex, and then for the Domain Round Table (where I will be a panelist on ccTLDs - another area we have a strong investment but something I rarely talk about on this blog … perhaps I will).

So - if you will be in Seattle during that time, and you read this blog, I would love to meet up with you. I especially encourage you to come to the domain auction - free to get in and view the madness.

Anyhoo - if you want to meet up for coffee (not that I drink coffee) or lunch or dinner or what not, use the contact form.