No ‘niche’ gets as nasty and personal as politics. It seems as time drags on, more and more people are convinced that the only way to co-exist with someone else is to hammer in your beliefs and ideals into them, whether they believe it or not. The idea of intellectual discourse seems almost dead.

So when you take user generated content and mix in politics, what do you get? Digg’s political news, political opinion, and world news. If people thought the tech side easily skewed to topics that were pro-Apple, pro-Ubuntu, or anti-MS, the political/news areas are about who can troll best.

The topics du jour mostly revolve around how evil Islam is and/or how evil Iran is. An occasional story about a US presidential candidate is thrown around.

A few case examples:

http://digg.com/politics/Group_for_former_Muslims_threatened_by_Muslims
The most obvious case of focus groups pushing their agenda is if one reads the comments. As one progresses down the article, you can see that the original comments are all virulently anti-islamic. As you progress down, the entire tone of ‘discussion.’ changes. Users like patriotickiwi and tomcpp continue to fan the flames for as long as they can. The reality of the content was ‘Leader of ex-Muslim group anonymously threatened.’. The sensationalist headline was ‘Group for former Muslims threatened by Muslims’

Unfortunately I cannot find the link right now, but there was a delightful link to the LittleGreenFootballs (one of the most popular right-wing/anti-Muslim website) which talked about the large influx of traffic by working on Digg. There is a post though on where its readers are recommended they report a blog that was on Digg for an anti-LGF post. (mouthful eh?)

Next up we have example users. Included with delightful users like patriotickiwi and tomcpp we have users like copmoore, Robbie Cooper, davenp35, and so forth and so forth. These are people with a specific agenda. In the tech news, the general idea is that people love Apple. So when they see an Apple story, they digg it. But they also digg other stuff. The above subset of people have only one goal - to use Digg as a mouthpiece showing Muslims in a bad light. Every single one of their comments … well, I will let the comments speak for themselves.

The other interesting example is as follows: http://digg.com/politics/Digg_Presidential_Data_Who_s_hot_and_who_s_not. The original poster himself is a Libertarian. So while the 41.6 percent number is bolded (in BIG RED), isn’t it a bit odd how 10 posts still got through to the frontpage? At a ~9% success rate, our fearless Ron Paul has almost 4x the success of Obama (the current media ‘darling’), and over 9x more success than Clinton. Obama, Gulliani, and McCain are all around 2%, and yet Mr. Ron Paul clocks in at 9%? If anything, his numbers show an odd affinity between Ron Paul and Digg’s frontpage.

I could go ahead and showcase the diggers fro Ron Paul, but I leave that as an academic exercise for the readers

Digg’s wordly news sections are fraught with people and agendas. And it is something that needs to be fixed (how? I don’t have a solution in that case).

I like Google’s webmaster tools. Definitely the best ‘out-reach’ system from any of the major search engines, it is an awesome way to get a quick snapshot on your sites (as Google sees it).

One thing that has recently annoyed me is how it deals with sitemaps. Why can a sitemap only link to 1,000 other sitemaps, and only 50,000 urls in one sitemap? It may seem like an odd comment, but when you have the formula of popular site + lots of users + tags it is easy to generate a lot of pages. Not to say that it would generate over 50 million pages, but I like having my sitemaps categorized. And it would be easier to have a sitemap_tags.xml, sitemap_pages.xml, etc. Maybe I’m lazy, but the 50,000 number seems arbitrary.

Same goes for 1000 other sitemaps. On a recent site I created (standard disclaimer of it being unique - cost me roughly $500,000), there were a total of 16 million pages. Two hours later I’m still struggling with the sitemap system (it complains I have over 1000 sitemaps when in fact I only have roughly 800 (20k links per page)). I’ve gotten as high as 13.9 million pages, and without the ability to actually contact Google Webmaster Team (can’t find that anywhere), I guess I have to settle there. But again - that 1000 limit seems completely arbitrary.

Update 7 hours later: I re-visited the page, and now its finding them all A-Ok.

UPDATE: Read more about this site

There are few things in life that bug me than inefficient systems. I don’t mean inefficiency for the sake of art or beauty. Hell, I hate cellphones etc because I find it imperative to get a break from being connected all the time.

There are two common place systems that are the bane of me: traffic lights and elevators.

Now that I’m no longer in a bustling metro (Toronto), the elevator issue is mostly gone. But oh dear did it used to bug me - you would imagine such a system would put a high priority on efficiency. When I was in Toronto, I lived in a pretty upscale condo (my rent was 25% off as my friend owned a few condos in that building). I was on the 30th floor - my office view was fantastic (for those in Toronto, I was at Yonge/Yorkville and could see all the way up Yonge). But I remember once waiting 15 minutes to get to the bottom floor. Absolutely insane. You would think a building with three elevators would be able to get me down to the ground faster than 900 seconds.

And now traffic lights. While in Toronto, where the subway/walking was the norm (I miss walking), traffic lights weren’t a big headache. Now living in a more subarbanish US city (still with a population over 750,000) the traffic lights drive me insane. Green left turns that stay on when there was only one car (and why even bother with a green left turn). Lights that turn red because they are based on a simple timer. Lights that turn green for a single car and literally take over 30 seconds to turn over.

What bugs me about the above two is that the problems are not unique to a geographic area or special circumstance. They happen in every damn city everywhere in the world. You would think the control logic would be smart enough to make choices (as a computer engineer by degree I can see the logic involved).

Not that it has gone nuts or anything … just that I am waiting on things that are out of my control. Is it ready? Yep. Is it live? Newp.

Go on over to iBegin Source and be sure to pop in your email. It may just be worth it … or not. I am leaning towards it being worth it, but no guarantees!

Beyond my little plug about iBegin there, the real meat here is about how managing a business brings about frustrations people normally don’t deal with. When I was a wee-one on my own, making a website was easier. I would get a designer to quickly make a design, or alternatively I would go and use a template (as a placeholder). Programming, writing content, hammering out the non-spam emails … it all counted on me. I had no one to blame for failure but my self (and in that same manner, no one to pat on the back for success but me).

Things are much different now. A larger organization (we have dedicated programmers, designers, artists, writers, server-admin, etc) means that while we get a lot more stuff done (in the same timeframe), but it also means that sometimes Person X is waiting on Person Y. And in my current situation (with iBegin Source), I am waiting on Person X, Person Y, and Person Z.

This can be quite terrifying. For micromanagers, having such ‘idle’ time can end up with you interfering in your employees’ progress (something I used to do). People hate losing control … (most) business owners completely loathe losing control. Trust is hard - but worth it in the end.

I remember a time when Blog Networks were the it thing. Everyone and their mother was setting up blog networks. People actually cared when a name was changed from ‘Pajama Media’ to ‘Open Source Media’ (though I do agree OSM doesn’t sound very good).

Blogs were the path to easy riches.

About time reality set in.

Perusing around, I came across this sale: Parents Behaving Badly for sale. On its own not very notable, but what was interesting was that they were under the b5Media umbrella. For those that don’t remember, the network recently announced 2 million in funding.

This sale sets off some questions. What exactly does it mean to be ‘owned within the network’ - does b5 own it, or does Person X own it? If b5 owns it - how did it sell? If Person X - why is it under b5’s brand? I assume that b5media actually does own it, and Person X was just running it (and now wants out). But then - is Person X actually selling her ‘webmaster’ position? Can she even do that? Is there some sort of easy answer I just don’t get?

Through all those questions, the real point was that people are finally realizing that blogs are not easy money. Blog networks are not easy money. It takes a lot of time, dedication, and great staff to get to a successful position.

If it wasn’t for Splashpress buying out sites like Blog Herald and Performancing, things would be getting boring

I read the Technosailor no-sale-happened post with a bit of interest. We had taken a quick look, but had decided to pass (more on that later).

We’ve been involved with selling blog resources (but never blogs) and also been involved in acquiring blogs ourselves. And while Jacob does all the heavylifting in finding great bloggers and so forth, there is one condition I have always placed on any purchase involving a blog:

If the blogger does not come with it, we don’t want it

Jacob picked up Blogging Pro and ForeverGeek before we merged. And the lesson he got there was that half the value is in the blogger. What I like about blogs is that it is filled with personality - when I read it, I am subjected (to use that word) to a certain style of english. There are thousands of blogs regurgitating the same information over and over. I like my regurgitated news with a certain flair

So back to Technosailor - things he did wrong:

1. Care that people said he was asking too much. Almost all sites I have sold I have had people complain that the starting bid was too high (nevermind the actual BIN). Every single one has hit the BIN. People always whine and complain … don’t forget, they don’t care about you. They just want the best deal possible.
2. Use of the word potential. Any time I look at a sale and I see ‘lots of potential‘ I immediately hit BACK. Every website has potential. To me it says - “I haven’t done much with this site, but if you work your ass off, you may be richly rewarded. If not well - you didn’t unlock its potential”
3. He was Aaron Brazell. Lets be honest - he is basically the IT/server guy at b5 media. His audience is interested in how Digg is nothing compared to Grey’s Anatomy. The new buyer couldn’t emulate that. If it does have so much potential, why doesn’t b5 push it more?

Aaron’s writings are interesting. His blog is pretty good. But a buyer would have such an uphill battle that unless the blog was highly niche-based (ala Blog Herald), acquiring it at a high multiple just doesn’t make sense.

When it comes to the US, Yahoo! Local is by far the best site. As I outlined in my previous post about scrubbing local data, they have taken extra steps to make sure their data is accurate and clean. They have a ton of data and information - from local reviews to web-results to even extra information gleaned from sources like Delicious.

Yet dammit to hell, they have by far the most complex interface I have ever come across. Eg I was looking at this listing for Chipotle Mexican Grill. What do I see on the top:

Save to Collection | Save to My Web | Send to Phone | Add to Address Book | Email to Friend | Print

Someone tell me the inherent difference between ‘Collection’, ‘My Web’, and ‘Address Book’. Not only is the ‘Collection’ link on top, but also on the side.

Of course, at the same time Yahoo! is trying to convince me to read a review, to rate it, to edit it, to map it (whats that on my right), to get directions, to see a larger map, show various things, save to my collection, write a review, see Donny O’s reviews, (boldfaced) write a review, search the web (even with web references), a link to alternatives (with a list of alternatives right under neath it too), a plug for Yahoo! Answers, and then … way on the bottom (building value for advertisers) … the category sponsors.

And then those damn links again.

I feel a headache coming on …

I partook in a small but interesting discussion a while ago about how bad local data is out there. Not just bad, but also impossible to clean up.

I’ve been taking the time lately to go back through iBegin and ’scrub’ our data. As it happens, the raw data we purchase is far from perfect (duplicates galore, mis-categorizations, etc). It is essentially a ‘risk’ we take. But that isn’t the end of it - even franchises suffer from big problems when it comes to local data.

Case in point: McDonald’s. You cannot get a more recognizable name. But do note its name - McDonald + ‘ + s. Not McDonalds, not Mc Donalds, not MacDonalds, or the other dozens of varieties.

So while we went through, pass-by-pass (basically you create rules, ‘run’ the rules on the data, tweak the rules, and then re-run) through our data, I wondered what my esteemed competition was upto.

Looks like not much. Checking them out:

• InsiderPages. IP couldn’t even handle the single-quote. It did local McDonald’s, so I guess we give it a pass
• Yelp. I found McDonalds, McDonald’s, McDonalds Restaurant, and other variations. A few of the clickable links had a link to the official website, but most did not.
• Google Maps. A bigger mashup than all the rest combined. No standardized name (Whats a Restrnt), some are categorized, most aren’t. No link to the official website.
• TrueLocal. A few results, various spellings, no link to the official site except for the first link. Interestingly if you click on the first result, it shows you many more McDonald’s listings. Those are accurate, but why aren’t they in the default search results?
• Yahoo Local. Correctly spelled and all results link to the main website. Perfect

Really my point here (amidst the connections in my brain) is that if companies cannot even get the data on the largest franchise in the world right, how are they going to cover data on small businesses?

Its a mind-boggling problem.

Who needs to monetize with ads when you can just sell the entire site!

I remember seeing the site, BeTheBot.com being linked on Digg’s frontpage. I saw it, shook my head, and moved on. An idea implemented many times over many years, it just seemed like another shot against Digg.

And so when I came across the beforementioned link today I let out a hearty laugh. Basically what happened was as follows:

• Domain registered on Feburary 14, 2007 to Kavi Siegel (cvxdes)
• Website and content put up that very same day.
• Domain gets dugg that same day also.
• Three days later, domain/site gets sold for $500

The really interesting thing about this is because of domain tasting (ie you can get a full refund minus 25 cents on any domain within 5 days) our friend Kavi would have been out only 25 cents (plus some of his time).

I’ve decided to jump on this bandwagon - digg this post so I can sell it (just this post) …

I recently purchased a site from the SitePoint Marketplace (incidentally I left them some suggestions that they should *really* implement). Anyway, a day after I bought a site, I had two people separately message me on AIM. Their intent? To sell me a website.

I wanted to smack these people. And it wasn’t that they wanted to scrounge up more potential buyers (neither actually linked to an SP post) … nope, they were trying to get around the fees. I don’t often want to reach through a computer screen and smack someone, but this was one of them.

Another reason not to publicly post IM contacts.