And I’m off to Argentina today. I’ll be back in the US mid-August, and will move to NYC end of August.

If you’ve emailed me and haven’t gotten a reply - I’m sorry, trying to burn some midnight oil to get everyone taken care.

Time to go broaden my horizons … Spanish and Tango, here I cometh

It is unfortunate that more and more nowadays, the ’solution’ to everything must be along the lines of elegant, simple (ie no brain power or activity required), and some sort of advanced systems.

Great example are air fresheners. Five years ago we had the simple aerosol can solution. Nowadays we have battery powered solutions, dual-smelling systems, plug-in modes with fans, and other feature-rich systems that all promise to make your house smell good.

But what smells good? Yes I like fresh mountain air, but that crap isn’t real mountain air - it is emulated junk. Technology is trying to push a solution that really doesn’t cut it.

I ran into the above problem. My wife had been gone for 8 weeks, and was coming home soon. The apartment didn’t smell bad, but I wanted to make it smell good. And I thought - what smells good? What kind of smells do I like? Smells I could possibly emulate?

The simplest answer possible: baking.

I baked three flourless chocolate cakes. And then I left them on the counter. And then I left to go watch a movie.

When I came back roughly three hours later I could not believe how delicious the place smelled.

This little personal story is just a simple example - we seem to have this need for tech-oriented solutions when good ol’ fashioned solutions work way better.

Yesterday, I was out and about doing some chores, when I got hit with a hankering for a grilled chicken sandwich. Heading on over to the nearest fastfood joint, I opted to park and go inside instead of going through the ridiculously long drive-through.

When I got out I looked at the line and realized I would still have been #4 if I had gone through the drive-in.

But it got me thinking - there are all these articles on reducing pollution and being smarter about using gas - isn’t the idling in a drive-through a lot of wasted gas? At lunch time those lines become long - cars just idling with their AC on (hey its hot) must not be the greatest use of gas.

So am I onto something? If everyone parked and went inside, would there be a noticeable impact on pollution?

And please I don’t want to hear about global warming in the comments. Pollution is disgusting, and cutting back on it is just good for our lungs, plain and simple.

A while ago the Flicker.com for sale story made the rounds. It was a simple site - stating what had been offered, and their status (all rejected). If you read the comments, I mention Sahar owns the domain - and he commented denying any ownership.

It now redirects to a site called Assista. A kind of meld between a search engine and Yahoo Answers. A site owned by Sahar. I wonder how Yahoo feels about this?

So a while ago, I bought a Vudu. It is like an Apple TV - connect it to the internet, hook it up to your TV, and buy/rent movies through the system.

Yesterday, while attempting to watch I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, the thing died. Or it didn’t die per se - it would play the movie for about 30 seconds, before dying and rebooting. A tad bit annoying.

So I posted on the forum, and helpful people swooped in. I called the customer support number, and even though it was 9:30 am PST, the automated system said that customer service opened up at 9:00 am.

Uhoh … this could be bad.

I called back half an hour later, and had customer support on the phone in about 30 seconds. The conversation went like so:

Ahmed: My Vudu isn’t working, *story goes here*
Operator: Sir can I have your name
Ahmed: Ahmed Farooq
Operator: Okay, found it. There must be a glitch with your hardware. You will be sent a new Vudu, and a fedex shipping slip to send back your current Vudu
Ahmed: That was easy
Operator: Have a good day.

The entire conversation lasted maybe 90 seconds. From dial to hang up was < 3 minutes. Color me happy!

In terms of the actual product, some quick thoughts:

• It is damn easy to use. The remote is absolutely wonderful.
• It really needs to remember preferences. Eg I only use it to rent movies. Why it can’t do that boggles my mind
• I can’t see my viewing history through the Vudu. Boo!
• I hate the 24 hour rental period. 48 hours would be more than enough. Too many times something comes up while I’m watching a movie and I have to pause.
• I know this is a licensing issue/headache, but the delay in getting some movies to rental (and the price for some older movies) is annoying. Really annoying.
• I like the HD offerings. I watched 3:10 to Yuma HD and it was absolutely crisp on my 42″
• Some of the categorization is mind boggling. Eg I believe The Hills have Eyes (or similar) was categorized as ‘romantic’. Speaking of categorization, need more (eg animated!)

Overall I’m very happy. Extremely convenient, fast, and easy to use. Right now it’s like a 90% - if they could get release dates fixed and the prices for older movies more balanced, it would be high up in the upper 90s.

I’ve argued for a long time that having anonymous contributions is a good thing - even with the increase in spam, there is enough legitimate content to make it worthwhile. Plus - once a user has contributed, they are more likely to register and contribute even more.

A recent blog post by Topix validates my argument (huzzah!) The one surprise (for me) was that the amount of spam by non-registered was only 50% higher than registered. My experience is more along the lines of 100-200% more.

Of course there was no qualitative measurement done, but we could argue that in general about UGC Skrenta also has some good takeaways from the #s.

1. The previous record we had for # of pages crawled (for one site) by Google was roughly 430k. In the last 2 weeks we had one site that had over 500,000 pages hit by Googlebot. In 24 hours. Needless to say the server was a bit hot

2. I seem to be getting married in under a week. In fact the marriage is exactly on our 50 month anniversary. So after my 2 week Colombia excursion, expect more AWOLness.

3. This month we will break 2 million pageviews served in the local space. By the end of this year we should hit do 5 million a month.

- Little discussion on authority SEO. The owner of the site I mentioned found this site.

- I talked to a company that services SMBs today about publishing the data they have on iBegin Source. The pitch is simple - they provide us with the data, and we help their advertisers get more exposure.

The person I was talking to was taken aback - he was expecting some sort of revenue-sharing deal.

I think that statement right there elucidates the difference between us and the other guys. While trying to squeeze money out of everything (even at the cost of more accurate data), we are focusing on core quality.

- New homepage for iBegin.com. Toronto et all are no longer mentioned.

- Whitepages.com going quasi-wiki. I find this very interesting - and I feel for them the pain of letting users contribute #s etc. Businesses are a headache enough - I can’t imagine consumers. We have full US WP data (117 million listings), and while we do wholesale deals (alongwith that for UK Australia etc), putting it under the full quality control of iBegin is a nightmare waiting to happen.

- I am finally getting into domains again. Mostly through joint-purchases - they find deals, we provide the funding. So my time spent every day on it is <15 minutes. While most are private, I did publicly disclose two of them. Should have some other ones to note later on.

Interesting - just read about this in the Wall Street Journal - IAC (owners of Citysearch are looking to split the company into 5 separate parts. For those that don’t have a subscription, the five parts will be:

• IAC - Ask.com, Citysearch, IAC Advertising Solutions, Evite, iWon, My Way, Match.com; CollegeHumor, GarageGames, Gifts.com
• HSN - HSN TV, hsn.com, Cornerstone Brands
• Ticketmaster
• Interval International
• LendingTree

“We’ve been a complex enterprise almost from the very beginning 12 years ago, with hundreds of transactions over those years. And while we’ve created a lot of value, I’ve always believed our complexity and many mouthfuls of sentences to explain who we are and what our strategy is have hampered clarity and understanding with all our constituencies, particularly investors,” Mr. Diller said in a statement.

The spin off would happen in Q3 3008.

This is an interesting move to me - by a lot of accounts, Ask.com, even with its $100 million campaign, wasn’t making much of a difference in the only category that matters - generating money. I wonder how this will affect Citysearch.

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.