Blog Entries - April 2008

Digg Death Penalty for Promote My Site

admin — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 22:00:00 +0100

Digg hung our blog and buried it in a pauper's field without a trial and with no review. That's not the "wisdom of the crowd" or "social peer pressure" - it is French Revolution style mob rule. (I thought the line was "Nobody expects the Spanish inquisition!")

Our Digg Genesis

We started off reading and "digg [...]

Beta Testers for Social Media Automation Suite Needed

admin — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 22:00:00 +0100

If you would be interested in beta testing our new social media automation product before it is released, please drop me an email.

You should be

An experienced Digg userWiling to install iMacro for Firefox
To spend at least a few hours using the product (My guess is that you will, like I did, fall in love with this product, so it shouldn't be too painful.)

We're very excited a [...]

TechCrunch Can't Do Math

admin — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 22:00:00 +0100

I was reading through the usual stuff this morning and hit this about a TechCrunch post that

ended up at the Yahoo front page, which leads to around 300,000 clicks per second. That’s a crap load of users.

Yes, it is. Or would be if it were true.

Do Some Numbers

I always like to run the numbers up and down until I get something I can comprehend. I look at Al [...]

Doing The Math - No Money In Facebook

admin — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 22:00:00 +0100

The otherwise very very smart Don Dodge posted this gem that gets some bits right:

I talked to a Facebook App developer at the ReMix conference. He told me his app is generating 300 million page views per month. Wow! Then I asked what kind of CPM (Cost Per Thousand) ad rates he was getting. He shrugged and said somewhere between $0.02 and $0.05 per thousand. That pencils out to betw [...]

Whois Promote-My-Site Defensive Posting

admin — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 22:00:00 +0100

[Bump and update: two hours after posting and we have the number one slot for our own whois search. Neat.]

This is not yet another weary re-telling of the Google Blogscoped article on whois this morning. I am sure our readership has an almost 100% overlap with the blogscoped guys. I am also sure that at least a few "SEO Bloggers" will duplicate the articl [...]

Stupid Timesaving Filezilla Trick O' The Day

admin — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 22:00:00 +0100

We use filezilla as our Pointy Haired Boss friendly (*cough*) ftp front end. It rocks, and it is free - what more can you ask for?

Lately I've been testing screen capture software and have been spending a lot of time rebooting my PC (install/uninstall) and reconnecting to our servers, shoving a video up, testing it on several different computers. Rinse and repeat.

And it was rea [...]

We Rank On Baidu

admin — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 22:00:00 +0100

Ever used Baidu? I haven't because, well, my Chinese is not much better than my French or my German. And without even cognates from five years of Latin to guess my way around a site, heck, I don't think I've ever used it.

And, yes, yes, I know that there are more internet users in China than there are people in the US, blah, blah, blah. I am focused more on the fact that [...]

Two Great Articles on Digg That Get It Wrong

admin — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 22:00:00 +0100

Well, not wrong in the sense that they are writing silly stuff (lord knows there is plenty of that in the SEO blogosphere!) but that they get the wrong end of the handle, as it were.

Article the first: Real People Don't Have Time For Social Media.

B: The Decline and Fall of Tech on Digg.

Go read them both as they are frightfully well written and insightful, but ultimately no [...]

My Personal Deadpool of Funded Venture Business Cards

admin — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 22:00:00 +0100

I was pondering yesterday's post about Mowser's demise and ran across an old (last boom) stack of business cards from VC's, startups, and "advisors." So I decided I would try a very unscientific snowball sample experiment and grab the top 20 cards and see what I came up with.

Winners

The Monster Board Who? You know them as Monster. This card was pre-m [...]

Destructive Self Funding versus VC

admin — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 22:00:00 +0100

I was reading a very sad, frank, and wise notice from Russell Beattie about the death of Mowser, his mobile browser project. I know, and you know, that most startups die young, the ones that don't mostly become zombies living on consulting, and the small remaining percentage are bought for peanuts by larger companies lusting after their IP and management team.

Bu [...]

The Ten Commandments For Failure

admin — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 22:00:00 +0100

I am not a big fan of "top 10" lists because my teeny tiny dinosaur brain can only remember two or three of the points, which makes me feel like I'm treading water watching eveyone else evolve their way ashore and I've left my proto-feet behind somewhere. But someone recently sent me this ancient (1994 era) email that had Bonnie McElveen-Hunter's:

The Ten Commandments For Failure

[...]

Imacro as an ETL Tool, or Screen Scraping on Steroids

Don — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 22:00:00 +0100

I'm not talking about evil, low-life scraping that involves stealing content.

Data Wants To Be Free

In this case we're looking at how to get data out of an existing system that has nothing more than a web interface. Perhaps for political reasons your IT department won't give you SQL access to the database, but you really need to pull out a copy of the product [...]

More Great Business Advice Having Nothing to do With SEO

admin — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 22:00:00 +0100

Today's article at Bruce Clay was about avoiding a PR nightmare. He rightly suggests that the easiest way is to be smart and not get into one in the first place, which is easy advice, but then he knocks one out of the park by giving a 1-2 punch to the most human of impulses, retaliation:

Refrain from personal attacks. At all costs. There are no exceptions.Refrain from responding to [...]

SEO Puts $31,752 Additional Profit in Man's Pocket

admin — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 22:00:00 +0100

At least. Which is a pretty good piece of pocket money. I suspect even Warren Buffet would slow down to pick that up.

I attribute this to SEO because even thought it was a change in business process coupled with good SEO that made it happen it could not have happened without SEO.

Fair warning to people looking for "advanced" techniques - they ain't here. [...]

Digg Fascinates Me Like A Non Fatal Car Wreck

admin — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 22:00:00 +0100

You know, when a tanker full of eggs hits a rail car of charcoal and they roll into the propane factory? You don't get omlettes for Lubbock, you just get a stinky mess.

Digg Is Not A Stinky Mess

Well, it's a fascinating mess, some sort of mixture of socialism run amuck and web bubble captitalism.

By socialism I mean that people profess to want to "do good&qu [...]

Redbox Gets Customer Service Right

admin — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 22:00:00 +0100

I've given Cari.net a hard time about giving almost good customer service and TracFone for looking like they just don't care about their image. So here is an example of an excellent proactive response to a potentially serious problem. We use Redbox (automated DVD vending jukebox) a lot for kid and probably-do-not-want-to-own (ex: I am Legend) films. It's not perfect, and their online [...]

Digg This Cheap Shot Friend Strategy

admin — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 22:00:00 +0100

[Stumblers, welcome! Before you leave, check out our Digg Friend Finder (or our other SEO tools on the left hand sidebar) to find people on Digg who have posted stories with your keywords of interest in them!]

Recently I have been bending over backwards to be a good digg friend and to really nuture my network. Not only because I am a nice guy [...]

Humans Versus Robots On Digg

admin — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 22:00:00 +0100

I don't think you can apply a pure Turing test (human or robot?) to Diggers, because Digg is a highly complex system and you can't know as much as you need to.

But I can look at a diggers profile and see that 24,000 posts in 90 days say.... Robot. And I can look at his "friend" network and see a lines of robots stretching out to the horizon.

And robots run by not very [...]