Almost 3 years ago I left Toronto. In the ensuing time I’ve lived in four different cities, seven different addresses, and have generally experienced stuff I could not have imagined 3 years ago.

I returned to Toronto a shade over two months ago, moved into an apartment, did not renew in time (some guy rented it under me 24 hours before I found time to go to the bank), and today finally moved into an apartment. I have not stayed at one permanent address for over 11 months since 2000 – my last year of high school. I’m looking forward to being at this place for at least 12 months

That much is almost guaranteed. Six months ago I badly injured my knee – I had partially torn my ACL (the main ligament inside your knee) in 2000, and I presumed I had simply re-injured it. I finally got it MRIed last month and found out that not only did I fully tear my ACL, but I cracked both meniscii to boot. My surgical consult is next week, but I will likely need two surgeries – the first one to fix my meniscii, and then another one a month later to do the ACL reconstruction. This will be followed by 9-12 months of fun-times rehab.

How does all this relate here? It explains most of my missingness – I’ve spent more time working out, walking around, reading, and pretty much preparing myself for the grueling after-surgery life (which will basically stick me indoors) by spending as little time as indoors as possible.

Along the way I’ve also evolved a bit more on my mindset in local search … but that is for another post.

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A while ago Alexa updated the stats that they display – with a heavy dose of keywords, upstream/downstream, and demographic on each site.

While responding to an email about where yellowpages.ca traffic comes from, I did a bit of digging –

According to Alexa, YellowPages.ca gets 40% of its traffic from Google. Yelp clocks in at 54%, whereas a pure-SEO play like MerchantCircle comes in at 70%.

But if you check the keywords, you can see that YellowPages.ca’s traffic is dominated by synonyms of yellow pages. The other two cannot claim as such (in fact, according to Alexa, the #2 keyword for MC is ‘boysfood’ a popular porn site).

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Ahh, when only one thing matters.

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I tend to subscribe to every local-oriented website blog. One I subscribed to way back was Burrp, a site that started off as a restaurant review website for India (in one city at that time). Since then they expanded to include TV listings, and more.

Their realization was pretty simple – people everywhere want better online local information, and there is value in making it easy to use. The market pitch is easy – our ‘value’ is in taking previously hard to understand information and making it easy for you to use. The ‘value’ no longer exists in the US (imo) – the easy to use translation has been done to death (observe the comments about newly launched Center’d). But in places from Argentina to India, there is an underlying need. People may not be clamoring for it – but hell, people were not clamoring for Yelp before it appeared.

The latest blog post on Burrp brought a big smile to my face. They created something simpler to use out of ZoomTV, and ZoomTV ended up using them. They created something useful in the local space, and one of the de-facto financial sites in India came to them. People coming to you – the ideal position you want to be in.

I am far from saying that the online local space in these other areas are easy to do. Monetizing (the gotcha) won’t be easy. But for individual entrepreneurs who want to try something new – moving to a new country and trying to dominate the online local space there? Damn that sounds like fun

On my way to Argentina, I read an article in the airplane magazine about two guys who had created a restaurant review website for Buenos Aires.

Their website – Oleo – is a pretty decent website. Yet it is the only website I have found for restaurants in Buenos Aires. Hell – in the US I even found one for El Paso! How could a city with a population of over 12 million only have one website for restaurant info and reviews?!

And that barely scrapes the surface. Mapping here is horrible. Google doesn’t even have any of Argentina mapped. MSN and Yahoo both have parts mapped, but no geocoder. What good is a map without the damn geocoding to go with it?

If anything, being here has opened my eyes that the local opportunity, while (in ways) ‘easier’ in North America, is waiting to be exploited in other forgotten cities. Sure the spending power in BA isn’t all that great – but there are a ton of people, there are a metric ton of restaurants (very few chain stores here), and everyone is waiting to be swept away. Heck, that restaurant review site has 50,000 reviews for just Buenos Aires, without any major backing whatsoever.

Plus – the desire for local businesses to get online is strong. Everywhere I go I see xxx.com.ar – from hardware stores to restaurants to anything else in between. Most restaurants have some form of delivery. The largest ice cream (super popular and super tasty here) chain lets you order ice cream for delivery online! (imagine Baskin Robbins doing the same). But for every 10 restaurants, maybe 3 have websites, and only 1 have anything that is remotely useful (it is amazing how many restaurants here have an email link and that is it). And the demand is there – we’ve used two different sushi restaurants for delivery – one of them being Sushi Furusato (who also owns Sushi.com.ar). 400,000+ hits to the frontpage is nothing to sneeze at.

Incidentally geocoding is relatively easier to do here. Every single block constitutes ‘100′. So 220 Uruguay will be in the same block as 290 Uruguay. And 1030 Sarmiento would be the same block as 1099 Sarmiento. While it would require some legwork, after a month you could easily have the entire city geocoded.

Large amount of consumers: Check.
Desire to get online by local businesses: Check.
Solid amount of tourists/visitors: Check.
Zero competition: Check.

And I’m quite sure Buenos Aires is not the only major city waiting for online-local sites.

Drilling Down on Local 2008 starts tomorrow, and if you are coming, be sure to come say hi to us at our booth. Always happy to meet people who read this blog and/or follow iBegin.

I would have posted this a while ago, but I was hit with a stomach bug/fever like I’ve never been hit. It literally conked me out for the past five days or so – never had something hit me so hard

Anyway – if you do come, be sure to come say hi!

Since my last post on our all out assault on local, it seems like I’ve gone AWOL.

Alas, between a quick trip to Houston and focusing on such said assault, it is hard to get a break. Stuck staring at a computer screen for upto 16 hours a day, spending even more time makes me dizzy.

I had missed over something when I had talked about local – weather. Our most requested feature on weather. So after my latest blog post, we got another two requests in one day for weather.

It was time to do something about it.

So (while running everything else), we heavily pressed on weather. Turns out the US Government provides weather information, as does the Canadian Government (but not nearly as openly). Problem is that relying on the government for an XML service is dangerous – their servers are notorious for flaking out at any given time. So we pressed for enterprise solutions to weather delivery.

In under 10 days, we have a fully functioning weather site: iBegin Weather. It is 99% done – the caching element is still a work in progress (right now we fetch data ‘live’ – the updated version will automatically do that every 20 minutes). The site design is ripped straight from iBegin Source – keeping with our simple/clean/quick loading motif. We even have a nice widget for spreading weather. Example: Share San Francisco, CA Weather.

Again – underlines the versatility a larger company can have. Our illustrator did the icons and other misc graphics (roughly 100). Our JS/PHP guy did the widget. Another programmer focused on the primary engine. Data-provider gave us easy to use CSV files that make data manipulation easy. Our geocoding abilities let us figure out spatial distances that would have cost a pretty penny. And previous experience with sites like iBegin let us churn out an intelligent structure, XML feeds, and even try to guess where the user is from.

We should have the site 100% by Tuesday morning (and thus our ‘launch’). We should be in the rest of the world (~15,000 locations outside of the US) in 4-6 weeks.

I have a long history with topsites. My first ‘big’ site (over 5,000 uniques a day) was Game Sites 200. It was an absolute juggernaut when it came to top lists – just look at these stats. When I sold it a while ago, it was getting over 100,000 unique visitors a day, and its yearly earnings was almost $200,000. That ain’t chump change. To put that in perspective, that is almost 4x the most popular blog on Blog Top Sites. Game Sites 200 generated over 250,000 clicks for the consistently top-voted sites.

I soon tired of the vote based system. Voting was a flawed mechanism. Because GS200 was such a source of traffic, often times webmasters would take their own websites hostage and demand visitors vote for them or that the site would be shutdown. Its both humbling and annoying – humbling in the sense that your website is so important, and annoying because people are inconveniencing users under your name. Throw in popups, spammers, bots, trick votes, and you have a recipe for a headache.

So when Jacob started to talk to me about working together on something, a topsites for blogs is what came to my mind. We would use Jacob’s network & my programming knowledge in topsites (I was busy with other stuff at that time) to combine our forces. Shades of Captain Planet.

The product, Blog Top Sites, has been a runaway success. Game Sites 200 was tough because we weren’t the first. For blogs, we were. And after Darren Rowse added us to his sidebar, it just took off. According to Technorati, we have over 10,500 links. Just counting our four most popular categories (Entertainment, Personal, Technology, and 1,000,000 for Blog Catalog and (almost) 1,000,000 for Blog Flux Directory puts Blog Top Sites in rare company.

But that isn’t the point. The point is how all I keep getting is copied. Over and over and over.

With Game Sites 200 there are dozens of toplists that copied every single category of Game Sites 200. Everytime we added a new category, it would magically appear on all the others. Ultimate Top 200 went so far as to use the exact same design as us (our old design), the exact same menu structure/style, and everything else in between. To add a bit of irony, they use evoTopsites, a product we created (before we spun off Evo-Dev) but did not actually use for Game Sites 200.

And the same thing exists with Blog Top Sites. Dozens of clones, that have all copied our categories and our appearance and our structure. Even our site details and what not is ripped off. I state this categorically because I modified the Blog Top Sites look from the original evoTopsites look. And yet they all look like Blog Top Sites.

Of course, none of them match the amount of traffic Blog Top Sites tracks. But still – annoying. Do something new!