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!