Dunia Bisnis

Evri Vs. Ensembli

2009-11-30T12:30:00.001-08:00

At this week’s DEMO conference, two products are launching that are aim to make memetracking easier for everyone. The first one is UK-based Ensembli, which lets users enter any keyword, and it returns articles about that topic. The second is a new feature from semantic search engine Evri called “Collections” which lets you follow any term that it has categorized. Both are new twists on an old idea: prospective search. (You enter a company name or topic and any time a new article about that subject appears, it populates a custom feed to track that meme). I’ve tried out both, and compare my experiences below.

Neither one was as comprehensive or up to date as they should be. Searches for news about major companies such as Google or Facebook missed headlines that other memetrackers such as Techmeme do a better job of capturing. But both have merits as prospective search tools and are examples of how search is increasingly becoming more of a navigational tool.

Evri’s Collections feature lets you “follow” any concept that the semantic search engine has categorized. The Collection page brings up not only recent articles, but also images and videos for the topic you are tracking. It also provides a handy list of related topics and concepts. For instance, my “Google” collection offers links on the side to “Eric Schmidt,” “Twitter,” “Microsoft,” and the lost city of “Atlantis.”

Evri’s collections pages are basically saved searches, with different entry points to navigate to other entries on Evri and across the Web. Topics can be merged in the same collection, so you can follow Google and Facebook on the same page. For some reason, Evri chose to show only the latest three articles for each topic, which is much too limited. It certainly doesn’t capture all the news you’d want to see. And if Evri’s semantic search engine has not categorized what you want to track, you are out of luck. For example, it doesn’t recognize the DEMO conference as a separate topic.

Ensembli, in contrast, provides a much simpler interface. Once you sign up, you type in the topic you want to track, and then Ensembli uses artificial intelligence software to generate a feed of articles about that keyword. The fed updates as new articles appear. You can follow as many topics as you want, but there is no way to browse topics or find related topics. You are presented with a blank search box and either know what you want to track or you don’t. Each headline can be expanded to provide a summary of the article, and you can share each headline, but only via e-mail.

When you click through to a story, you can also share it directly via an Esnembli toolbar at the top. (You are actually sent to an Ensembli link which frames the underlying Webpage, much in the same way Ginx and Digg’s upcoming toolbar present shared pages). Integration with Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, and other social sharing services is sorely lacking.

I have a few other issues with Ensembli as well. There is no way to combine topics into a single feed. You have to click on each term you are following to see the respective headlines. There is no way to see them all together. The biggest weakness, however, is that the headlines are not always as comprehensive or up to date as they should be. For instance, tracking “Google” turns up one article from yesterday as the most recent one, and then before that is an article from February 18. There are enough things going on at Google and enough coverage that Ensembli should be able to produce multiple headlines every day. Finally, Ensembli even had trouble identifying articles about itself. (I got a bunch of articles about “ensembles,” a forgivable error, but you’d think the startup would have at least properly categorized itself).

All in all, Evri wins this faceoff.

Twilio Closes Funding Round

2009-11-29T12:29:00.000-08:00

Twilio, the powerful API for phone services that allows developers to quickly integrate telephony functionality into their apps, has closed its first institutional investment round, which was led by Founders Fund and Mitchell Kapor. The company plans to use the new funding to increase its efforts in sales and marketing, and to enhance the infrastructure of the service (likely to cope with increasing demand). The amount of the round was not disclosed.

In conjunction with the funding announcement, Twilio has also announced some of its early customers, including Cheetos, Earth911, and Tumblr, which used the service to launch its Call-to-audio feature last month. Sony Music has also been using Twilio to promote some of its album releases; musicians have been recording phone messages, which can then be sent to fans of the band (you can hear a sample recording below).

The Twilio service allows developers to integrate common phone actions (like placing calls or playing back a recording) using a small set of basic API commands. Building basic projects, like this Rick Roll app, takes only a few lines of code, though developers can create far more advanced applications (Earth911 used Twilio to replace the systems behind their 1-800-CLEANUP recycling hotline).

With a solid business model and a growing customer base that includes Fortune 500 companies, Twilio seems to be off to a great start. While some commenters in my original post noted that there are a number of enterprise solutions that offer similar functionality, it’s clear that Twilio’s simplicity and use-based pricing structure has a strong appeal for many developers.

Unofficial Desktop App

2009-11-28T12:27:00.000-08:00

Everything comes around full circle. First we had Joost, Babelgum, Veoh, and others create standalone client software for watching online videos, but the ease and ubiquity of watching directly in the browser trumped whatever technical benefits a standalone client provided. The rise of YouTube, and more recently Hulu, proved that. But now that watching videos on the Web is something many of us spend an increasing amount of time on, the idea of a better viewing experience through a download client may now be making a comeback.

Hulu, in particular, now has an upgraded, if unofficial, desktop app in MyMediaPlayer2. Developed by Paul Yanez, this video player is more of a demonstration app than anything else, but it is still quite functional. MyMediaPlayer2, which was recently released, is an Adobe Air app which features 400 TV shows and 208 movies from Hulu. You start with a grid view, which resizes depending on the size of your screen and the window. The larger you make the window, the more thumbnail TV show icons appear in the grid dynamically. When you click on a show or movie, it then takes over the top half of the screen, with a list of other episodes below with the date, description, run-time, and a thumbnail. There is also a full-screen mode that works with a remote and allows for a ten-foot viewing experience. The app also includes Twitter integration. Now the whole world can know every time you are watching an episode of The Hustler.

But Yanez is not married to the idea of watching videos outside the browser. The app also works natively in Google’s Chrome browser. Simply go to this URL: http://www.paulyanez.com/labs/mymediaplayer2/app/. That link seems to work in Firefox as well. And Yanez even has a version that works inside Microsoft Outlook. I am not sure why yoou’d want to watch videos in Outlook, but you can.

Yanez has bigger ideas about what a media player should do, and has created an overall framework for what a Web media player should be. Many of these ideas are realized in MyMediaPlayer2. Before you go ahead and download the app, though, you should know that it regularly becomes disabled every time Hulu makes a major change to its service. If this happens again, Yanez suggests that you email Hulu CEO Jason Kilar to complain.

Tap Tap Revenge

2009-11-27T12:27:00.000-08:00

The sequel to Tap Tap Revenge, the iPhone’s most popular game ever, is hitting the App Store tonight. The original version(iTunes link) of the game has been downloaded over six million times and spawned a number of spinoffs featuring licensed music from Weezer and Nine Inch Nails. You can learn more about the sequel here, and we’ll update the post as soon as it goes live on the App Store. Update: You can download the app here.

Created by iPhone development house Tapulous, the TTR series is akin to a ‘Guitar Hero’ for the iPhone, asking users to tap their fingers on a flurry of scrolling blobs that are presented in time with the music (it’s fairly easy to get started, and very addictive). Tap Tap Revenge 2 will include a new game engine with a revamped look and feel, along with some gameplay additions that include new moves like the “Tap & Hold” and “Multi-Tap”. The game will feature over 150 free songs (downloaded after installing the app) including music from Death Cab for Cutie, an exclusive song by The Cyrstal Method, and another by Stroke 9.

The game is expanding its social options, tapping into the iPhone’s network effect to create a ‘Challenge’ system that lets users face off with friends, who attempt to beat each others scores. The game will also include an ‘achievements’ system, and a complimentary new feed for alerts, allowing users to keep track of their friends’ accomplishments. There’s also a “Kids Mode” that offers a more basic version of the game for younger children.

TTR2 is sure to be another hit for Tapulous, but the game is still hindered by the App Store’s ban on allowing developers to include in-game transactions. Whenever Tapulous wants to release a premium song on the TTR platform, it has to do so through an entirely new game - it can’t sell premium songs through an integrated store in Tap Tap Revenge. If Apple ever does remove the restriction (and it should), Tap Tap Revenge and its sequel could well become some of the store’s most lucrative titles.

Crowded Online Commentary

2009-11-26T12:25:00.001-08:00

Why do online commenting start-ups keep beating their heads against the same wall? Kutano, a browser add-on that lets users read, write and search comments side-by-side with any webpage, launched at DEMO today. With over one-third of the 1.574 billion internet users worldwide participating in online commentary and forums, Kutano is joining a slew of other start-ups hoping to capitalize on this growing trend by providing a free and open stage for online discussion.

As we wrote about last fall, there have been many online discussion add-ons and services developed to allow users to share unmoderated commentary on webpages, but very little traction for most of them.

Kutano’s technology doesn’t appear to be vastly different than its predecessors. Once Internet Explorer and Firefox users (Safari and Linux versions will be rolled out in Q2 2009) download the free add-on, a Kutano, collapsable “window” will be displayed to the right of the browser, which will show the discussions and information related to the specific subject (not by URL) of the web page that is being viewed. The add-on lets users comment on the website and also allows users to search and exchange information on any related commentary on the web (much like Reframe It). This serves to broaden the discussion, but also risks showing disjointed conversations.

Kutano, which means crowd or gathering in Swahili, integrates with Facebook and Twitter, giving users the ability to broadcast commentary on social networks. While Kutano offers users the ability to create specific subject-based commentary, competitor Reframe It provides many more social-networking features, including the ability to follow comments in a RSS feed and upload Gmail and Facebook contacts into the application.

Kutano will undoubtedly confront similar roadblocks that other commentary and Web annotation applications have experienced. The chance of coming across a website with commentary from Kutano users is small, making the side-panel somewhat useless. Like Reframe It, Kutano’s comments can only be seen by users who have downloaded Kutano to their browsers. And as free and open commentary becomes a staple of blogs and media sites, users tend to look and read comments and discussion sponsored by the blogs and news sites themselves. I’m skeptical that users will be looking for yet another open forum for comments and discussion relating to, for example, articles on The New York Times website.

Companies Honest With ReputationCheck

2009-11-25T12:24:00.000-08:00

Social evaluation platform Vanno launched a widget application of its real-time company reputation index called ReputationCheck. Vanno’s platform allows customers and others to share stories about their personal experiences with a particular company, submit news articles they’ve read about companies, fill out surveys and comment on companies. Vanno then quantifies this dialogue and information into an index using Bayesian algorithms (the same statistical methods used to filter spam and detect credit card fraud). The company’s index measures the reputation of more than 5,800 companies worldwide.

Vanno’s reputation index was recently brought into the public light when Vanno quantified the damage Kellogg’s brand sustained after the company pulled the plug on Michael Phelps’s sponsorship following the swimmer’s marijuana photo fiasco. Vanno’s data suggested that Kellogg’s reputation plummeted after its decision, falling even further on the index than when the company had to recall products after this year’s peanut butter salmonella scare.

ReputationCheck, the index’s embeddable widget, shows a company’s real-time reputation rank and compares the rank to the best and worst companies relative to customer and employee satisfaction, community involvement, the environment, patriotism and social responsibility. The widget can be used in a post or in the sidebar of a site. Considering all of the various inputs of the index, the ranking system cannot be deemed as 100 percent authoritative. But it certainly is a measure of the public’s perception of a company. (Contrast to Glassdoor, another reputation service from employees’ point of view). While the index widget could be useful to bloggers and writers to show one measure of a reputation of a company, its probably best not to rely upon ReputationCheck as the final arbiter of a company’s standing.

Startup2Startup Tackles Web Design

2009-11-24T12:23:00.000-08:00

Last Thursday over 140 entrepreneurs, investors, and startup rookies came together for Startup2Startup, a monthly invite-only dinner built around fostering the startup community. This month’s featured speaker was Adaptive Path founding partner and ex-Googler Jeffrey Veen, who walked the audience through some of the key aspects of website design and how to deal with associated communication issues.

Following Veen’s presentation, the attendees shared their thoughts and experiences related to design in intimate round-table discussions. The event’s co-founder Dave McClure painstakingly creates seating arrangements to ensure that each table has an array of attendees ranging from startup rookie to veteran, ensuring that discussion is both lively and informative (and strictly off-the-record).

The evening was an overwhelming success, highlighted by Veen’s engaging presentation that was both accessible and entertaining (you can see an intro video and his slides below, and we’ll post the full video of his talk shortly). As a bonus, Veen introduced the audience to one of his newest projects.

Dubbed Wikirank, the site tracks the popularity of Wikipedia articles, sifting through hundreds of gigabytes of Wikipedia’s publicly available traffic data and presenting it in an intuitive and attractive interface. With this data, the site can generate an at-a-glance view of what the world is interested in at any given moment. The site also allows users to create embeddable charts comparing the popularity of different topics over time. If you’d like to try it out, the first 30 TechCrunch readers to enter their Email addresses here will have access to the site’s private beta.

Next month’s Startup2Startup event will feature Tony Hsieh, founder and CEO of Zappos, who will be offering tips on building a great company culture and customer service (for which Zappos is widely acclaimed).

Oodle on Facebook

2009-11-23T12:22:00.000-08:00

Oodle, too, has been a long slog. As founder and CEO Craig Donato told me last week, had he known how hard of a slog classifieds would be, he might have chosen a different startup idea four years ago. I’m sure he was (partially) joking, but Oodle has long been the question mark in David Sze’s otherwise stellar Web 2.0 portfolio that includes Digg, LinkedIn and Facebook. (Now, some see Digg as the question mark, but that’s a different post.)

Oodle has done two things well to combat the local trap. One is deals with huge properties like MySpace, Facebook and AOL that really juice distribution and listings. As a result, before it even goes live with Facebook or AOL, the site has 40 million listings with 500,000 new ones added each day. Second smart move: Making classifieds social, not local.

Increasingly, the social Web has created more meaningful communities than just geographical proximity. Sure, we are more likely to know and regularly interact with people near us, so you can’t ignore geography. But think about how many times you’d rather sell something or buy something from someone you know or someone who knows someone you know, than someone whose only commonality is living in your city.

The Oodle app is coming about just at the right time for Facebook. Not only is the site huge, but it’s so focused on the Wall that distributions of listings and conversations around items for sale will be natural and organic. And unlike eBay or Craigslist, it’s just a few clicks to post something. You fill in what it is, why you’re getting rid of it, how much you want and designate whether you’re giving it away, selling it, or want the money to go to charity. Can you imagine if posting something on eBay was that easy? My dining room of boxes would be empty.

That’s not to say Oodle replaces Craigslist or eBay. You can reach a wider audience, and hence conceivably make more money on both of those. And Facebook could be too tied into your social graph for some transactions. Do you want your boss to see your old Playboys are for sale? Lastly, if you’re setting up a small ecommerce business, I doubt Facebook marketplace is the right fit. But if you’re just a regular person who has something they want to buy or sell for a fair price from a reputable dealer whose reputation they can trust– it’s going to be a stiff competitor.

And come to think of it, wasn’t that the original eBay community?

Sequoia Pumps More Funding

2009-11-22T12:20:00.000-08:00

srael-based search engine marketing (SEM) automator Kenshoo has received another capital injection from its existing backers Sequoia Capital and Arts Alliance.

As with the Series A round, this second round of funding remained undisclosed, although our contact person at the company ensures it that this was an “up-round” financing and that the valuation was “50% higher than the last time” it attracted outside capital.

The startup, based out of Tel Aviv but active worldwide, says it will use the funding to further fuel its expansion and explore new business opportunities in the search marketing space.

Kenshoo’s flagship product, Kenshoo Search, is billed as an end-to-end SEM platform and essentially automates most if not all of the work usually carried out by marketing consultants (who are of course much pricier than automation software). In that regard, Kenshoo also competes with bid-management software from all the online advertising giants (DoubleClick, aQuantive’s Atlas Solutions, and Omniture) but at the same time goes a step beyond that by taking a look at the quality of the campagns. Kenshoo is able to find relevant keywords across different search engines, and automatically changes campaign specifics to maximize their returns.

In the economic downturn we’re in, marketers should be focused on building or maintaining decent levels of Website traffic and drive better conversions. Search marketing is still the best customer acquisition tool in the online space, so it’s not a surprise that eMarketer predicted continued growth from 2008 to 2013 in a very recent report on the state of SEO spending in the U.S.

If Kenshoo can keep winning customers over by cutting out the middlemen and maximizing campaign ROIs, it definitely has potential to continue riding that wave and keep / make their investors happy.

Investor Deadpools Jooce

2009-11-21T12:19:00.000-08:00

Funny how we receive tips sometimes. Yesterday we covered the latest Startup2Startup meetup, and a certain ChrisATSo33t commented on the story pointing to the latest quarterly report (PDF) of Luxembourg-based VC firm Mangrove Capital Partners in which they state that Paris-based portfolio company Jooce would be “closing its doors” during the month of February.

We’ve now entered the month of March, and the Jooce website is still alive, people can still sign up, and their blog has been silent since October 2008. No notice of shut-down anywhere to be found, and e-mails are not bouncing (we hope they’re still being replied to since we contacted the Jooce team for comment). But since Mangrove was the company’s only investor, having injected seed funding into the startup in 2007, we’re pretty sure we can deadpool the startup.

Update: wow. Jooce got back us with a completely different story:

I think the gun was jumped just a bit, Jooce is not closing. In fact, Jooce has been recently been in talks with an undisclosed buyer within the internet cafe world wishing to acquire Jooce. Doors don’t shut so easily on great technology.

When I asked why the VC would possibly claim such a thing about one of their portfolio companies, they made me laugh out loud by saying that “VCs are apparently not omniscient” and that “God can rest easy for now”.

We covered Jooce, which operates (operated) a web-based OS, a couple of times before starting with its launch in August 2007. It offered a virtual online desktop that provided a Flash platform for communication services like chat and e-mail combined with a custom way to play games, listen to music, etc. so you could essentially have the same user experience when you go online on any computer anywhere in the world.

I’ve always had doubts about this kind of concept, which is similar to what startups like Goowy, Cloudo, eyeOS and others are up to, given the current evolution of the web.

See, I already have a web-based OS. I just refer to it as my browser

Socialtext add Twitter

2009-11-20T12:18:00.000-08:00

In yet another sign that this will be the year of the activity stream, Socialtext is adding a Twitter-like message stream to its enterprise wiki/workspace service, The new feature is called Socialtext Signals, and it appears both as a widget in the Socialtext dashboard and as a standalone desktop app built on Adobe AIR.

Socialtext Signals is essentially an enterprise version of Twitter, much like Yammer. Employees within a company can micro-message each other without competitors or the rest of the world snooping. They will see only the messages of the co-workers they are following. In addition to the 140-character messaging between co-workers (the “signals”), there is also an “activity” tab. This generates a micro-message every time a person you are following takes an action inside Socialtext, such as creating a wiki page, writing a blog post, or making a comment.

The activity stream which Socialtext makes visible is very particular to its products, and in fact is designed to keep employees engaged with those products. Any time someone changes a page that you’ve created or edited in the past, it shows up as an activity. So constant updates from Ralph in engineering about the progress of a project serves as a reminder for everyone else to do their part as well. Unlike Yammer, there is no ability to create subgroups within Signals, or upload files. But then, you can always create workgroups elsewhere in Socialtext, and upload files directly into linked wikis. Signals just ties it all together. There is no mobile support either, however, which is a more serious gap.

Socialtext is used as a collaboration tool by 5,000 companies (subscriptions are as much at $15 per employee per month). Signals and the desktop app should go far towards increasing employee interaction with the service. Each update serves as a prompt to follow up on a project or keep it moving along, while Signals can also serve as the new watercooler. Companies that don’t need Socialtext’s other apps (the workspace and the dashboard, primarily) might want to check out a simpler enterprise micro-messaging service such as Yammer or WIzeHive.

Expand Web Video Empire With Obsessed TV

2009-11-19T12:16:00.000-08:00

Gary Vaynerchuk is going after the Oprah set. The wine wholesaler who launched a career as a Web video celebrity talking about wine and marketing just launched Obsessed, a new video talk show hosted by Samantha Ettus. With Obsessed, Vaynerchuk hopes to move beyond niche programming on the Web to appeal to a mainstream audience.

The format of the show is an in-depth 30 to 40 minute interview with guests that appeal to 25 to 55-year-old women. The first interviews on the site right now are with food writer Mark Bittman and floral designer Preston Bailey. Future guests will include Today Show travel editor Peter Greenberg, TreeHugger founder Graham Hill, and BlogHer founder Liz Stone. (They are working on some bigger names as well).

Ettus will host the show and be the main star, while Vaynerchuk will come on at the end for 3 minutes to talk about wine, which is his thing. He is the host of Wine Library TV and also serves up regular videos on gary vay•ner•chuk, mostly about marketing. “There is only so much content I can pump out,” Vaynerchuk say. “I need to own as many media properties as possible.”

Vaynerchuk and Ettus are co-producers of the new show. Each owns half of Obsessed TV, the production company behind the endeavor. Vaynerchuk’s other projects include a T-shirt search engine and Corkd, a wine rating site he promises to pay more attention to this year.

Mufin

2009-11-18T12:15:00.000-08:00

Mufin, an automated music recommendation engine that actually works (most of the time), has released a new native media player in public beta. The player includes a powerful recommendation engine based on technology developed at the Fraunhofer Institute, allowing users to quickly generate playlists similar to any song they have in their library. The player is for Windows only at the moment, but Mac users can still try out the recommendation technology at Mufin.com, which launched to the public in November. You can see a full list of the new player’s features here

Mufin’s core technology is based on finding recommendations based on knowing a few songs that you like. Unlike Apple’s Genius feature, which creates recommendations based on aggregate data compiled from user listening habits, Mufin actually analyzes the sound file itself, ‘listening’ to 40 audio characteristics as it tries to recommend similar songs. In my testing the service has usually worked surprisingly well, though there are sometimes a few bizarre results. Oftentimes these apparent errors actually do share characteristics with the original song I used to gather recommendations, but they are very obscure and sometimes in a completely different genre (which is both the blessing and the curse of using such audio-based recommendation engines).

Mufin’s new player incorporates this recommendation technology, alongside a standard set of features that you’d expect from a modern audio player. Beyond creating the recommended song playlists, Mufin’s Player also brings a new twist to music management by allowing users to sort their songs by the way they sound (versus by song title or artist name). But aside from that I’m not sure if there’s a compelling reason to use it over iTunes at this point, especially since you can download a Mufin plugin to integrate the site’s audio recommendations into Apple’s music player (though the plugin is limited to creating playlists, and doesn’t allow users to sort by sound).

Future Of The Web

2009-11-17T12:15:00.000-08:00

When I was a kid one of my favorite parts of Disney World was Tomorrowland’s Carousel of Progress. It was steeped in 1950’s futurism: Why, of course! Every family will have their own electric paint mixer in the future! And I only wish I’d been old enough to see this gem before it was torn down and replaced with a souvenir stand: The Monsanto House of the Future, a house built entirely of plastic.

Disney likes to talk up inventions the house featured that wound up becoming commonplace, like the microwave oven. What it leaves out are all the ones that never did. You know, the type of things we saw on the Jetsons: flying cars, our food in pill form, robot butlers and maids. Sadly, as it turns out the “future” looked a lot like the past, just more streamlined. Had Tomorrowland stayed in tact, it would have looked more like the Tomorrow-that-never-happened-land.

I’ve been thinking about Tomorrowland for about three days. It started when I read Farhad Manjoo’s excellent piece on Slate about the “Jurassic Web.” He painted a picture of what the Web was like in 1996. It was mostly a place you went and then thought, “OK, I’m here. Now what?” He reminded us of the sheer wonder the first time you could search on Amazon by author or browse through Yahoo’s hand built “directory” of Web pages.

The note Manjoo struck at the end of the piece was pure Silicon Valley: If all this happened in just 13 years, what will the next decade of the Internet hold? Will we look back on YouTube, Facebook, Hulu and iTunes as primitive?

This is where Tomorrowland and the Jetsons come in. There seems to be a pattern of diminishing innovation the longer a new technology is on the market. The early years—even decades— of, say, the plane, the car, the telephone, television, computers all saw rapid innovation, such rapid innovation that people would look back with the same kind of wonder that we do thinking of the Jurassic Web. “Can you believe you used to have to crank a car engine?” “What do you mean TV was only in black and white?”

But at some point, the innovation gets more evolutionary than revolutionary. Sure there are advancements in digital filmmaking and editing equipment but has anything in movies yet transformed the medium as much as the change from silent pictures to talkies? At some point, the technology stays the same while the cultural importance of it, or the way it is used is what changes. Put another way, the technology that was used to film a movie like “Deep Throat” wasn’t what changed society and the industry, it was the content of the movie itself.

I know it’s heresy to write this on a site that entrepreneurs and technologists read: But what if the bulk of technology innovation on the Internet is, well, done?

Already, if you think about Web 2.0, the successful companies are building off the technology that was pioneered before—whether it’s the browser, broadband, or the open source stack. Sites like YouTube and Twitter may be technically hard to scale, but are they really technical leaps in innovation, or more of a creative, cultural leap in how existing technology is being used?

Of course, the Internet is still very young. It certainly took technologies like the mobile phone more than 13 years to go from that embarrassing brick that took up half of a briefcase to the iPhone. Some could argue the mobile phone is still ripe for as much game changing innovation, as new models like the Palm Pre promise to integrate the browser experience throughout the user interface. Is it simply too early in the Internet’s lifecycle to even raise the question of whether Internet innovation has peaked?

As someone who writes about the Web for a living, I certainly hope so. But then again, everything has happened faster on the Web. No other technology has been so rapidly adopted by such a large number of people. Is it possible this is it?

Buzzable Creates Twitter Groups Around RSS Feeds

2009-11-16T12:13:00.001-08:00

One of the most requested features for Twitter is the ability to create groups. While users wait (and wait and wait) for Twitter to add this feature, a number of startups are going ahead and showing how it should be done. The latest of these is a LaunchBox Digital startup called Buzzable which just launched today. Buzzable lets you create Twitter groups around RSS feeds, and does so in a very compelling way.

Right now anyone can browse public groups, but you need an invite code to create a new group. Anyone with a twitter account, however, can join a public group and post a message. We have 500 invites. Just use the promo code: techcrunch.

You sign in using your Twitter ID, which lets you join and create both public and private groups centered around different topics. Some of the public groups right now include Android, Kindle, the New York Knicks, and the White House. There is even one for TechCrunch.

Groups are built around RSS feeds. So the TechCrunch group is simply our feed. But you can set up topic-specific groups which pull from a number of feeds, including Google News, Eventful, Digg, Yahoo Finance, Twitter itself, blogs, and so on. You can set it up so that the feeds are filtered by keyword (such as “Android,” Kindle,” “Knicks,” etc.). Members of the group can then discuss any headline by commenting in-line. Each comment can be pushed out to Twitter proper as well. Both RSS headlines and comments can be “Buzzed” up by popular vote. The result is a combination of RSS content and Twitter conversation, all in the same stream.

By priming the pump with the RSS streams, Buzzable hopes to stimulate conversation, even among people who don’t normally Twitter twenty times a day without prompting. In addition to micro-messages, images and YouTube videos can be added to each comment. And since Buzzable uses your Twitter ID, every time you create a group, it asks you if you want to invite all of your Twitter followers. Every Buzzable member can also be followed on Twitter simply by clicking a follow button on their Buzzable profile. Buzzable groups can also be republished as their own Twitter account. In these ways, Buzzable tries to take advantage of the viral nature of Twitter itself to create as many entry points as possible for new users. Each group can also be republished as a separate RSS feed or as an embeddable widget

The Cloud Of A Fraction The Cost

2009-11-15T12:12:00.000-08:00

At today’s TechCrunch Cloud Computing Roundtable event, a new storage company called Diomede launched in private beta with the goal of offering low cost cloud-based storage that is also very energy efficient. The basic premise behind the service is that not all data in the cloud needs to be immediately available, but that most people still pay for the immediate access anyway. While most data centers have their servers and disk drives operating 24/7 with near-immediate access, Diomede allows customers to designate files that they don’t need instant access to, and places them either as ‘nearline’ or ‘offline’. These files have an access time of five minutes or four hours, respectively, but cost only 1/12 as much as standard cloud providers to store and take as little as 1/60th the amount of energy. If you’d like to try it out, go to this page and enter the invite code ‘tcrunch’.

The service offers a full API to developers, and also allows them to view metrics like the power consumption of each individual file. Possible applications include allowing developers to set their redundant file backups (which rarely need to be quickly accessed) to ‘offline’, where they can be stored at only a fraction of the normal cost.

Friendfeed For Online Video

2009-11-14T12:10:00.000-08:00

Sometimes it’s hard to remember which video you have seen, left a comment on, rated, or who recommended it to you. And it’s getting harder to cut the noise in the heavily crowded online video space (YouTube users alone are uploading 15 hours of new content every 60 seconds). This is where Mitter, a service provided by Tokyo-based Metacast comes in (the site is available in English).

Mitter wants to do for video what recently introduced Dutch startup Twones does for music. The service tracks viewing patterns over multiple video services and generates a social feed based on that information. And much like Twones, Mitter doesn’t make much sense without installing an add-on for Firefox or the Internet Explorer (there is also a browser-independent bookmarklet available). To date, the Mitter toolbar has been distributed 1.5 million times. It’s now being actively used by more than 150,000 people, mostly in Japan.

Mitter is all about aggregating metadata of online videos and using the information to let users socialize around it. Once the tracker is installed, you will see a Mitter button next to every video accessed on 14 different sites like YouTube, Veoh, Seesmic etc. After pressing the button, you can tag, rate and comment on the video (the service calls this activity “mittering”), which will be then added to your history on the website (this happens even if you don’t mitter the video). In addition, the activity can be posted to Twitter and several Japanese blogging platforms.

Your history can be set to private or shared with friends. Other users with a similar taste can follow you, receive updates on your video viewing log and possibly find new content that’s of interest to them (Mitter->Twitter, get it?). It’s also possible to join discussion groups, view rankings of popular videos and dig up videos that are similar to the listed one (and share the relevant video, too).

mitter_screenshot

Mitter does fill a gap in the rapidly growing web video space but there are some drawbacks. Even though the site wants to let you share “experiences” (and not necessarily the videos themselves), it would make a lot more sense if users didn’t need to navigate away to watch videos. The English version still lacks Non-Japanese members who may find it hard to connect to the Japanese usership (and its taste) and there are hardly any comments or tags in English to be found at this point. This can obviously only be overcome through increased participation of Non-Japanese users.

CEO Kengo Ito says in its current form, Mitter is just covering a snippet of one’s life log. The company’s ultimate goal is to build a “social lifestreaming service” that automatically keeps track of a person’s complete online media consumption behavior. Think FriendFeed for media.

This is a big plan and just yesterday, Mitter broke out of the video geek community by following what you watch on TV (Japanese only for the time being). Music, movies, video games and other media will be added to user feeds in the near future.

Heated Bidding War

2009-11-13T12:09:00.000-08:00

In a heated bidding war, ToysRUs bought the domain name Toys.com at auction for $5.1 million. ToysRus really wanted the domain, for obvious reasons. Everyone except ToysRUs and domain holding company National A-1 (owner of domains such as free.com, boys.com, girls.com, and divorce.com) bowed out of the auction at $3 million. The last $2 million was just those two companies going back and forth for hours.

ToysRUs really didn’t have much choice. If it wants to be the first thing people associate with toys it really couldn’t afford to allow anyone else to own that domain, even in this economy. Who says real estate is dead?

Personello Photo Gift Service

2009-11-12T12:07:00.001-08:00

Photo gift service Personello has launched a simple but useful web service dubbed DAZZ that lets you preview a wide variety of goods with uploaded photos on them, completely automated and with both custom images and video clips.

It seems like a no-brainer for any personalized photo gift service provider to offer a similar functionality, but to the best of my knowledge DAZZ is currently the only one of its kind.

What you do is create an account on the DAZZ website and upload a photo that you’re considering printing on things like mugs, mousepads, t-shirts, teddybears, snowglobes, jigsaw puzzles etc. to give away as a gift. The startup’s ‘DAZZigners’ will then strip out the background and create a collection of so-called photostyles (e.g. Flowers, Heart, Sepia, Pop Art, etc.) centered around the main subject of the photo.

DAZZ subsequently lets you preview a bunch of items and also put together a video that shows a number of items in a sequence which should help make up your mind. For each type of item, you also get to see a separate animated video clip showing you the personalized gift in question in a relevant setting. (screenshots embedded below)

The biggest downside of DAZZ is that it takes several hours to get your photostyle previews ready, so it’s not the most ideal way to trigger impulsive purchases (although you are notified by e-mail once the previews are ready for your evaluation). Also, the video player inexplicably doesn’t offer a way to embed videos in your own website or blog so you can only play them when logged on to your account on DAZZ.com.

I think Personello, a startup based in Germany, was right to execute on this idea and offer a way for potential customers to visualize personalized photo gifts prior to purchase. Many people are not aware of the fact that photos can be printed on a slew of regular things, and this could open their eyes to the possibilities of giving away personalized gifts and significantly lower the threshold for them to actually start buying stuff.

Yahoo Add Facebook Profile Action

2009-11-11T12:05:00.000-08:00

Yahoo just embedded some Facebook functionality directly into its search results via SearchMonkey. When you search for a person on Yahoo, if they have a public Facebook profile, a link to that profile will appear in results, along with a photo and several actions you can take. these include adding them as a friend, “poking” them, sending them a message, and viewing their friends.

You can see how it looks like in the image above, which shows results for Yahoo marketing VP Raj Gossain. The blue links under his name are the actions you can take. These are similar to the deep links SearchMonkey added to Yahoo Search for Wikipedia results.

The links save you at least one step. But I’ve also noticed that the Facebook profile is often far down the results page. I wonder if this will help to change that. By all rights, Facebook should be the default people search, whether on Facebook or on search engines like Yahoo and Google.

Yahoo Clean Up House

2009-11-10T12:04:00.000-08:00

Yahoo’s new CEO Carol Bartz is streamlining the company and picking which executives will remain on her team and which ones won’t. Chief Financial officer Blake Jorgensen will be departing, as will the head of Yahoo Mobile, Marco Boerries, among others. Getting a bump up are Ari Balogh, now CTO and head of all products, and Hilary Schneider on the advertising side, now head of North America. David Ko will be taking over mobile, reporting to Schneider interestingly enough rather than to Balogh. In her first blog post, Bartz writes:

So today I’m rolling out a new management structure that I believe will make Yahoo! a lot faster on its feet. For us working at Yahoo!, it means everything gets simpler. We’ll be able to make speedier decisions, the notorious silos are gone, and we have a renewed focus on the customer. For you using Yahoo! every day, it will better enable us to deliver products that make you say, “Wow.”

In addition to getting rid of unnecessary layers of management (and, oh boy, does Yahoo have plenty of that), Bartz also says that she is going to get the company to pay more attention to its customers and to burnishing its brand. To that effect, she is creating a “Customer Advocacy” group to speak for the customer inside Yahoo, and she promises to clarify “what the Yahoo! brand stands for. . . . Look for this company’s brand to kick ass again.”

In a note that just went out, Barclays Capital analyst Doug Anmuth says of the CFO’s departure:

We are not surprised by Jorgensen’s departure given that he was largely brought into the company by Sue Decker who left YHOO upon new CEO Carol Bartz’s recent appointment. However, we are increasingly concerned about Yahoo!’s thinning management ranks & about who internally will help guide new CEO Bartz as she moves deeper into the Internet space & soon makes critical strategic decisions for the company.

In other words, where are the star hires? (Note that Bartz has hired a new Chief marketing officer in Elisa Steele).

Facebook Term of Service

2009-11-09T12:03:00.000-08:00

After the uproar that ensued when Facebook tried to change its terms of service a couple weeks ago, along with its subsequent backpedaling and public assurances that users own their data, the company is trying a different tack. It is inviting users to comment and contribute on proposed changes to its terms of service.

Facebook has posted a proposed set of Facebook Principles (reprinted below) and proposed Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. Members can discuss these proposals in two groups dedicated to each set of statements (here and here, respectively).

During a conference call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained:

He also reiterated:

We do not own user data, they own their data. We never intended to give that impression and we feel bad that we did.

Here are the statements:

The Facebook Principles

We are building Facebook to make the world more open and transparent, which we believe will create greater understanding and connection. Facebook promotes openness and transparency by giving individuals greater power to share and connect, and certain principles guide Facebook in pursuing these goals. Achieving these principles should be constrained only by limitations of law, technology, and evolving social norms. We therefore establish these Principles as the foundation of the rights and responsibilities of those within the Facebook Service.

1. Freedom to Share and Connect

People should have the freedom to share whatever information they want, in any medium and any format, and have the right to connect online with anyone – any person, organization or service – as long as they both consent to the connection.

2. Ownership and Control of Information

People should own their information. They should have the freedom to share it with anyone they want and take it with them anywhere they want, including removing it from the Facebook Service. People should have the freedom to decide with whom they will share their information, and to set privacy controls to protect those choices. Those controls, however, are not capable of limiting how those who have received information may use it, particularly outside the Facebook Service.

3. Free Flow of Information

People should have the freedom to access all of the information made available to them by others. People should also have practical tools that make it easy, quick, and efficient to share and access this information.

4. Fundamental Equality

Every Person – whether individual, advertiser, developer, organization, or other entity – should have representation and access to distribution and information within the Facebook Service, regardless of the Person’s primary activity. There should be a single set of principles, rights, and responsibilities that should apply to all People using the Facebook Service.

5. Social Value

People should have the freedom to build trust and reputation through their identity and connections, and should not have their presence on the Facebook Service removed for reasons other than those described in Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.

6. Open Platforms and Standards

People should have programmatic interfaces for sharing and accessing the information available to them. The specifications for these interfaces should be published and made available and accessible to everyone.

7. Fundamental Service

People should be able to use Facebook for free to establish a presence, connect with others, and share information with them. Every Person should be able to use the Facebook Service regardless of his or her level of participation or contribution.

8. Common Welfare

The rights and responsibilities of Facebook and the People that use it should be described in a Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, which should not be inconsistent with these Principles.

9. Transparent Process

Facebook should publicly make available information about its purpose, plans, policies, and operations. Facebook should have a town hall process of notice and comment and a system of voting to encourage input and discourse on amendments to these Principles or to the Rights and Responsibilities.

10. One World

The Facebook Service should transcend geographic and national boundaries and be available to everyone in the world.

Facebook Conference Call Live

2009-11-08T12:02:00.000-08:00

We’re live blogging this morning’s Facebook conference call, during which Mark Zuckerberg is planning to “announce the new steps Facebook is taking to improve user understanding and ownership of the Facebook terms of service and, more generally, the policies of the Facebook service”. The call begins at 11 AM PST.

To coincide with today’s call, Facebook has also announced that it is Opening Up Its Terms Of Service To Input From Users.

After a brief delay. Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s VP Communications and Public Policy, is introducing the call.

Mark Zuckerberg:

Today we are going to talk about a set of documents that will be the governing documents of Facebook from here on. . . . We feel this is fairly unprecedented, giving users this much involvement into the process. The purpose of Facebook is to make the world more transparent and open. The governing documents are the framework of how we want to move forward with this. Last week we put up an old set of terms after we got feedback from a newer set of terms that we put up. What we are talking about today are things we’ve discussed at Facebook and our principles for a long time. We took last week as a strong signal that people care about Facebook. These are the foundational policies. The policies, principles, rights and responsibilities are really the foundation for the things we are going to build. The rules for how we want to govern the site.

What we’re talking about today is policy, not product.

We are open to putting the documents up to a vote. The rules people must do when on the site and what we must do, a two way thing. There will be Comment periods, a council that will help on future revisions.

” We do not own user data, they own their data. We never intended to give that impression and we feel bad that we did.” This document is a foundation that we’re going to use our decisions going forward.”

Q: How did you go about changing the terms of service last time?

Zuckerberg: The terms were similar to what other sites have. We actually shortened our terms from 15 pages to something much smaller. But we made some mistakes, and the complaints were completely fair. But what we’re doing now is totally unprecedented.

Q: Who decides what the vote determines? What if you disagree with them?

Schrage: We feel confident they’ll make good decisions..

Q: You’ve been here before. Did you not learn from Beacon that people will rebel against changes in Terms of Service?

Zuckerberg: Beacon wasn’t a change in Terms of Service. This was a dialog around the governing terms of the site. People use a lot of services on the web, but this is one of the only ones where they’re sharing their information.

Schrage: Part of the challenge is that what was proposed with new ToS is remarkably consistent with what other sites have their ToS. Some of the blogs criticizing our ToS had Terms that were just as broad, but Mark’s point is that people share so much more on Facebook so we have to be held to a higher standard.

Q: You mentioned that the amount of user involvement here is unprecedented. As an increasingly international organization, some of these continents like Europe have more stringent laws. What are your considerations for international laws?

Ted: We of course pay attention to the laws…

Q: Can you comment on steps Facebook is taking to determine phishing, malware?

Schrage: That’s not really the purpose of the call today, feel free to contact us about that later.

Q: You were already asked about Beacon. What could you have learned from the News Feed response? How do you manage expectations to people Twittering that you’re allowing users to write your ToS?

Zuckerberg: We’re going to build product according to the goals we’re laying out. We should have been communicating about these products more broadly.

Q: Is there not a need for contract language somewhere?

Ted: I encourage you to look at the statement of rights and responsibilities. We have not just what you see as the ToS for users, but also for advertisers and developers. We have shrunk 44 pages of material to around 5.5 in this document including all three of those terms.

AIM for iphone

2009-11-07T12:01:00.000-08:00

While there may still be a lot of confusion surrounding the future of AOL, that didn’t stop the folks in Northern Virginia from recently overhauling their popular AIM instant messaging app for iPhone (and iPod touch).

Available in two tasty flavors, free (”AIM Free”) and paid (”AIM Paid”), AIM 2.0 for iPhone now provides SMS notifications, has location-aware services, and supports multiple accounts (among other updates). It appears as though all of the application updates have been included in both the free and paid versions, with the major (and obvious) difference being the inclusion of ads in the buddy list of the AIM Free app.

So, what’s the big deal here? What do all the changes mean? Well, for one thing, now when you first sign in, the app will ask you if you want to share your current location:

Want to see where your friends are hanging out? You can share your location with your Buddies (or everyone) and see Buddies who are sharing their location.

Users are given three options: 1. No, don’t share location (default); 2. Share only with people on my Buddy list; or 3. Share with everyone. Once you’ve made your selection (let’s say we pick option 2 or 3), a new Group will be added - “Near Me” - showing other contacts within your vicinity. As Ars Technica points out, “there is no control over how large one’s nearby radius is” and thus, it is not exactly clear how near or far any of your contacts may be from your current location. What you can control, is the frequency of your location updates by navigating to: My Info > Preferences > (scroll down) Frequency. Here, you can select between 3 options: 1. On Startup; 2. Every 5 min. (default); or 3. Every 2000 feet.

aim2cBeyond location-awareness, AIM 2.0 also features SMS capabilities. Users now have the option to send an IM to a screen name, or alternatively, can send an SMS to a contact’s phone number (works on both iPhone and iPod touch). The app now includes both a buddy list and a contact list, to take advantage of these new features. Also, you can now stay logged-in for up to 24 hours, even if the AIM app has been closed. This allows you (iPhone users only) to get notifications via SMS when you receive a new IM and offers a work-around until Apple enables real Push notifications.

Other notable new features include the ability to use photos (taken with an iPhone) as buddy icons and the option to configure/switch between multiple screen names at any time. Are these new features enough to take down competing IM apps such as IM+, Fring, Truphone, and others? Only time will tell.

AIM Free (2.0.1) is currently available for download, while the cleverly named (but as yet unpriced) AIM Paid is still pending approval (at the time of this writing).

Digg Toolbar

2009-11-06T12:00:00.000-08:00

A super-secret Digg toolbar has been spotted in the wild. We tracked down a beta tester who gave us the skinny on its features. The toolbar lets you Digg or Bury the page you are on, and shows how many Diggs it has already received. There are also links to show related pages, as well as more pages from the same source voted highly by the Digg community or marked as up and coming.

Then there is the “Random” button which works like StumbleUpon. It takes you to a randomly-generated page based on your past input and overall Digg voting. By the prominence of this button, it appears that is a feature Digg will be trying to highlight. Users can also share the page via Facebook, Twitter, or email via icons at the top. A drawer slides down to expose additional functionality.

Now, here where it gets interesting. For each page, the toolbar creates a shortened URL similar to TinyURL or bit.ly that starts instead with http://digg.com/. . . followed by a six-character code such as “http://digg.com/d1gVha.” When you share a page via Twitter or Facebook, it is that shortened URL which is used. And in fact, for the beta testers, the toolbar can be wrapped around any page simply by sticking “http://digg.com/” in front of any URL, which then gets converted into a shortened version. This technique works for pages that have never been Dugg as well. I could see this feature eventually showing up as part of a browser add-on so that Digg URL’s could be created with one click.

The toolbar is not an add-on to existing browsers. It is actually creating a large i-frame around the original Webpage and delivering it on the Digg.com domain. Users can click on an X to get rid of the toolbar frame and be taken to the original page, and the original page gets the hit as well. (This is a similar technique to what Ginx does with its Web-sharing Twitter client). But by running all of the recommended pages through its own domain, Digg can run all sorts of analytics on each page such as how many people viewed it, where people clicked to next, and so on.

It is amazing that Twitter has single-handedly created this need for shortened URLs and that a relatively large player like Digg now wants a piece of that market.

Persistent Chat Future with Ning

2009-11-05T11:58:00.000-08:00

Tonight Ning will introduce new chat functionality, giving Ning network administrators the oft-requested ability to integrate a rich chat environment similar to the one launched on Facebook last April. Ning’s new chat system is Flash-based, presenting users with a persistent chat bar along the bottom of their screens as they browse through a Ning network. Users have the option of chatting through an interface at the bottom of their screen, or can ‘pop-out’ their chats into their own windows. While the interface will remain consistent across each network, users won’t be able to chat with members outside of the Ning network they’re currently browsing.

Ning originally introduced a more basic chat feature last summer, but that version uses either dedicated chat pages or sidebar iFrames, which means they aren’t always visible as users navigate through a network. But even the basic version has proven to be very successful - Ning’s chat traffic has skyrocketed, as seen in the Compete graph below pitting Ning’s IM domain against Meebo’s homepage. To be fair, the graph probably doesn’t take into account Meebo’s traffic that occurs offsite (Quantcast reports that Meebo’s entire network sees more like 12 million uniques), but it’s clear that Ning Chat is rapidly gaining traction.

Aside from its growth in chat, Ning has also been posting some impressive stats recently, growing to 4.8 million uniques in January (a 368% growth year over year) despite the fact that the site recently banned porn networks, which some believed were responsible for a significant amount of Ning’s traffic.

Redesign of Facebook Pages

2009-11-04T11:57:00.000-08:00

Facebook launched Facebook Ads in November 2007 to give brands and businesses a way to create a presence on Facebook and interact with users. Starting next week, says a source with knowledge of the new product, those pages will be substantially redesigned.

Today there are countless pages (example) that highlight brands. These pages are free to set up, and the Facebook sales team then encourages those brands to buy Facebook ads that point back to the pages. The brands get users who become fans of the page and maybe leave a wall comment. Facebook gets ad dollars, and users never leave the Facebook site.

Those pages include standard Facebook features like a Wall for user comments, a News Feed showing changes and updates to the page, and places for photos and videos to be uploaded. Many advertisers also spend a great deal of money customize the page with applications and widgets showing off various products as well.

Look for a much more streamlined look to Facebook Pages next week though, with a multitab interface very similar to what Facebook launched to users in 2008. The default view will show the Wall (which may include negative comments unless they are routinely deleted). All the custom apps will be pushed to a second Boxes tab. The Pages will also likely mirror the look of normal user profiles, with an image in the top left corner, etc.

The Facebook sales team is soft selling the concept to advertisers now, some of whom aren’t pleased with the changes, we’ve heard. Many of these advertisers have spent significant money designing the pages, and lots more on top advertising the Pages through Facebook. Now the Pages will be changed. Users may love the changes and interact more with the pages. Or they may not. As usual with changes at Facebook, people (in this case advertisers) will scream bloody murder, and then likely settle down.

The timing on the change doesn’t seem to be a coincidence - MySpace recently announced that they’ll be launching their own business profile product in the near future. As with last year’s stacked announcements on data sorta-portability, both companies want to be first with new products and features.

Link Cacher for Twitter

2009-11-03T11:55:00.000-08:00

It used to be that if a link was worth sharing, people would bookmark it for all to see on del.icio.us. Now, they just Twitter it (with a shortened URL). Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to separate out all the Tweets with links in them, and sort them by time or popularity? That is what MicroPlaza does in a nutshell.

MicroPlaza is still in a very limited private beta, but I have 100 invites for TechCrunch readers. Once you log in, you are presented with a stream of headlines, along with everyone who Twittered the link to that page. You can see a personal timelime made up only of links from people you are following on Twitter, or a public timeline to see what everyone is linking to. Each timeline has its own RSS feed.

The headlines can be sorted chronologically or by popularity. The more people who Twitter about the same link, the more popular it gets. Each time someone Tweets a link, it becomes more popular (although there is a time-decay function so that you only see the most recently popular links and associated headlines.

Since most of the time these links are articles or blog posts, MicroPlaza distills the headlines for you and gives you a sense of what is capturing everyone’s attention on Twitter. Any headline can be bookmarked, and you can group the people you follow into different “tribes,” and then keep track of each tribe. MicroPlaza also lets you look at everyone you are following and see their most recent links.

Print Your Favorite Wiki as Book

2009-11-02T11:54:00.000-08:00

Did you know that you can assemble your own wiki pages from Wikipedia and print them out in book form? You can, for a while now, thanks to a partnership between Wikimedia Foundation and a German startup called PediaPress. Last week, the wiki-to-print feature was activated for six more languages besides German but as of yesterday the functionality is also being tested on the regular English Wikipedia (restricted to logged-on users only for now).

You can check it out here, but you might want to visit the help pages first.

The books can be created with a table of contents or category lists and can be downloaded as free PDF files but also ordered as a printed book from PediaPress. PediaPress books are bound in dimensions 8″ x 5.5″ with a color cover and black & white interior, and the prices are reasonable. The cost of a book depends on the number of pages contained in addition to a base fee (starting at $8.90 for 100 pages) and worldwide shipping that’s charged extra.

As indicated by the Foundation, the roll-out for English Wikipedia users will be gradual out of fear for scalability issues, so it’s currently still in test mode. We’re trying to find out when the organization will open it up for non-registered users and will update this post if we learn more.

You can find a sample book on the fascinating subject of ‘Amphibious Aircrafts’ here (PDF).

And if you’re wondering if PediaPress got a sweet deal out of the partnership, the answer is yes. The Wikimedia Foundation receives (only) 10% of the gross total for each book sold. Another part of the agreement is the development of open source software with the goal to ease the reuse of wiki content in other media or applications.

Domain Leasing Focuss

2009-11-01T20:00:00.000-08:00

Domain leasing I feel will continue to be one of my main focuses this year while others tick over, I am either having more luck or business owners are more receptive to new ideas in challenging times, either way I feel after a year or so of working quietly I am beginning to reap some of the rewards.

The premise for domain leasing for me for the most part is to buy a good product based generic UK domain, build it out as much as can be justifiably done to get it indexed and possibly ranking and then offer it as a second storefront to existing businesses, show them the advantage of a generic, high recall & recognition value especially when advertising, easy to spell, niche dominance and market credibility as well as some traffic.

The first year was mostly working on getting some good domains and after a great early lease it’s been odd pickings here and there to finally end up at £775 per month in income at the end of last year for a business built literally from scratch.

This year needs to be the year I take this side of my business up a notch, the basic strategy which I have detailed on the blog is sound and I’ve tested it out enough times to feel happy with the principle. I decided in January my goal for this year will be to get up close to around £2000 per month from leasing which will be a pretty decent sideline, you have to remember that if I get it up to £24k annual income by the end of this year then not only is it a business earning pretty much £24k net passively, it also has assets that amount to far more than that, the lease itself increases the value of the domain hugely.

I’ve been asked once or twice to list domains for others and lease out for others but that’s not on the cards just yet, for now I need to ensure I’m getting a decent payoff for investing the time & effort needed to see a domain through from purchase to lease and that means ignoring the £15-£45 per month price bracket. One of my better domains was leased out this week for £500 per month, it was 2 long months of waiting to conclude the deal but it’s done and I’m very happy to have it wrapped up, I’m happy to say that for the most part I’m still working on the general rule of trying to get my capital invested back in around 12 months on a lease of 2 years+

Already done some more research and bought 2 domains, one for £600 & one for £800 which I feel are good candidates for leasing out at around £100 per month and I feel I have the inventory here to push on. Like I mentioned earlier I have had good feedback in the last few weeks when approaching companies, one agreed to lease 3 domains for £360 - not sure if it will come off and I can’t include it until the paperwork is done, I’d really like to get a few done this year around £100-£200 as they would add up quickly, however for now the confirmed passive leasing income stands at £1275 per month.

Google Appication and your email

2009-10-31T20:00:00.000-07:00

Google’s apps includes hosting premium applications (of which the biggest thing is Mail) for $50 per user per year.

I have been curious about switching for quite some time but thought the flexibility of having my own server outweighed the benefits. Well, 2 weeks ago I finally decided to make the switch. And now I have to say that although things have been great for the most part… there are still a few quirks that frustrate me.

Like most things on my blog, I will take you through my experience in switching over. Hopefully it can help you if you decide to convert one day, too.

Step 1) The setup.

Setup is SUPER easy.

I started out by purchasing 5 accounts. At first, you have to specify 1 of the accounts as the administrator. I made the mistake of making an admin@ and using that for an administrator instead of just using my own email. (Later I figured out that I could just use my own email as the administrator.)

With Google’s really simple walk-through on what to change for your DNS, I was able to quickly make the right changes. (But if you have already run your own mail server, this should not be a big deal anyways.)

During the setup process, you can also make a catchall account. (A catchall account means that you can specify 1 user as the catch-all for anything you forgot.) I started off using Brienna’s email for that but it got so much junk that I used info@ for this instead. Also for the Auto-Responder (out-of-office) purposes, it’s much better to have a seperate account for catch-all email rather than just using filters (which I will cover in a bit).

Step 1.5) Special NOTE

If you are an IMAP email user and do not store mail locally right now, you’ll have to remove all accounts from your desktop client. Your mail will be on your old server and you’ll have to migrate it. (But if you leave desktop clients setup, it’s going to be a clusterfuck - trust me.)

Step 2) The Migration

The administrator can setup the old mail server and then start to migrate all your folders.

*IMPORTANT* Gmail does not let you make new “folders” as you know them. They have an all mail folder which ALL MAIL goes into then things can be labeled (which will appear like folders and ACT like folders on your desktop client). All of your newly imported mail when you first import it will look like INBOX/Travel or INBOX/Sample.

Once your import is complete (it took over 24 hours for mine to fully complete), the only things you still need to do is move/delete your old sent mail and trash. (DO ALL MOVING ON GMAIL!)

Then rename your labels … instead of INBOX/Travel just rename it to Travel. Repeat this for each label.

With Gmail, the email is not stored in these “labels” - it’s just organized there. Essentially, all your mail is set in the All Mail folder. These labels will appear like folders in your desktop client later, but just know that if you delete a label, the emails with that label will not be deleted. They will still be in the all mail folder. You are just deleting the label. Also, you can have more than 1 label per email (which really makes this cool). I know, I know… some of this may seem redundant to you if you’ve used this for a while - but it took me some time to fully understand how this works. I had never used Gmail before.

Step 3) Contact Migration

Even if you are going to use a desktop client 99% of the time, it’s very handy to have all of your old contacts available. There are guides on Gmail for everything under the sun except for Apple Mail.app users. Don’t worry - there is an easy converter (like stupid easy). The application I used is called A TO G and it’s free (although donations are appreciated). I still think that dude should charge $50 for it though, because without it the process sucks…

Step 4) Client Setup

Now you have all your mail setup how you want it INSIDE Gmail and your migration is finished. (You can now delete the migrated mail label if you want - it has just labeled all the mail that’s migrated.)

On each of your desktop computers, set up a new IMAP account with:

incoming server: imap.gmail.com (secure port)

Username: username@yourdomain.com

Outgoing (SMTP) server: smtp.gmail.com

Username: username@yourdomain.com

Password: the password for the user you’re setting up (DUH).

Step 4.5) Don’t set up all your desktops at once.

I currently have 6 different computers I could possibly check mail from. 2 laptops, my office mac, home mac, home/office mac, and Windows PC. I made the mistake of trying to set them all up the same day and started getting errors… it turned out I was exceeding my daily bandwidth limit (who knew?). So instead, I setup 1 per day and since then they have all been fine.

Step 5) Don’t forget to check in on your old stuff.

Inside Gmail, go to your accounts and pop mail from old accounts or other accounts. I setup a .forward on my old mail server for each of our users just incase something goes there.

Step 6) Setting up the cool shit.

Be sure to check out the Google Labs. I would suggest enabling the following “must have” labs:

Canned Responses - I try to answer every email I get and 95% of the time I am just repeating myself. Canned responses have dramatically sped up my email response time. You can also use canned responses in your filtering. It’s kind of like an Auto-Responder/out-of-office message but only for certain people. For instance, let’s say someone emails me through the Contact Us form and somewhere in that message the terms ”paid links” or “paid review” are found. I can then make a filter that will allow me to reply with a canned response stating that we do not sell paid links but we do occasional do paid reviews with no follow links for a particular price. And bam! Just like that I’ve answered the email. That’s nice.

Send and Archive - This is probably one of my favorite features. It gives me a extra button inside my mail window next to the Send button. This feature allows me to both send a response and then remove the mail from my Inbox. How many times do I really want to save something I have already responded to?? Yea, never. Also, archiving is NOT deleting. It’s simply putting it into the All Mail folder.

Offline - This app let’s you access your Gmail (the last sync of it) without an Internet connection. This is pretty hot.

Reply To All Default - Setting this up makes it so the default button to reply/forward is actually “Reply To All”. For about 99.9% of all my emails, I WANT to reply to all. With email, I often forgot to do this so I’m loving this feature.

So … pretty big step for me. I migrated myself and 4 other users (dillsmack is still not convinced yet). Am I glad I did it? Well, in the beginning I was not so sure. At first, I didn’t really get the labels idea and man… when I first saw that crap saying my bandwidth had been exceeded, I started thinking, “Oh, great!” (Thank god it hasn’t happened again.) Other things that still bug me include:

1) Flakey connections. While checking or sending mail, occasionally I am asked for my password. (But hey, maybe it’s because I leave myself logged in on multiple boxes? Not quite sure.)

2) Return path header. After racking my head trying to use the filter/canned response and out of office/vacation feature, I noticed it was replying NOT to the reply-to or reply email, but rather the return path header. Dillsmack made a thread in Google groups and while this is against the RFC, it looks like Google is keeping it (as retarded as it is!).

3) IMAP Downtime. Occasionally the IMAP servers are just unavailable. It doesn’t seem to last long and has not happened much. Maybe it’s just been a fluke. I can always tell I am not alone just by asking on Twitter or using Twitter search.

4) It’s also $50 a person.

Let’s look at the positives.

1) 1 less server to maintain. This is huge IMO. It’s one less machine we need t0

* Maintain Hardware

* Update spam rules

* Update software for security

* Administrate

2) Spam filtering - AMAZINGLY AWESOME. I now get 1-2 spams a day. I used to get between 20-40 a day.

3) Simple things. Before, doing a out-of-office meant writing a special rule…. Nothing too hard but the more our business grows the simple things start to have a big expense in time and what it’s taking time away from.

4) Mobile application. The Gmail Blackberry application is SO NICE. In fact, I’ve given up on the default Blackberry and now this is the only one I use. Searching through folders/labels and looking up contacts is so slick. It also integrates nicely with the other applications.

5) Branding - no need to say more:

PitchEngine Social Media

2009-10-30T20:00:00.000-07:00

PitchEngine is a great free service that allows to create a social media release for your business news. The site is easy to use and offers quite a few great features you will love.

Basically, with it you can create a page on your company news fully customized for distributing it around your social media networks. Some nice features include:

* Google-news friendly (that gives you better chances for more exposure);

* Social-media friendly (can be posted to Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook with one click of your mouse):

Pitch Engine

* Fully customizable;

* Views stats and control panel inside.

Let’s have a look at what you can do on this page:

* Add a link to your company (prior to writing a release you should create your company’s profile and specify its web destination; this information will appear in the right sidebar of the published social media release);

* Add as many links to relevant sites as you want (after writing a release, you can add links at the bottom of it);

* Add images (add your website logo, site home page screenshot or any other imaginary to customize the look and feel of the release);

* Add videos (embed your company video to the left sidebar of the press release).

Let’s have a look at a few examples:

* California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) Announces Winners of the 2008 Stem Cell Image Contest (via CIRM): notice the imaginary to the left, a large “About us” abstract and in-text links (the release editor allows HTML);

* FreeShipping.org Rolls out New Web 2.0 Features (via FreeShipping.org) includes a video of the newly introduced feature described.

* Social Media Tools in Crisis Communications - includes a very smart Twitter pitch in the beginning.

Increase Traffic to Get Money

2009-10-29T20:53:00.000-07:00

Over the last four years I have made all of my money by getting website traffic and turning that traffic into dollar bills. People ask me all the time how to increase website traffic, so I figured I would offer some honest, straightforward advice.

Social Traffic Isn’t Worth It, In Most Cases

If you just want to throw up huge numbers there are a lot of ways to do it. StumbleUpon, Digg, and Reddit can send you huge numbers of visitors. Many of you have already chased that traffic and some of you have probably succeeded. I personally have been able to get loads of traffic that way so I’m a good person to listen to on the subject. The honest truth is that it’s incredibly difficult to make money from those traffic sources. Those individuals typically have very short attention spans and will leave your site just as quickly as they found it. If you don’t believe that, I highly doubt that you’ve tried to sell to them before.

When you go through the process of learning how to increase website traffic, I want you to focus on the most important type of traffic there is - search traffic. Once a stream of traffic starts coming from Google it will come day after day after day, whether you continue working or not.

There’s only one type of person that can make social traffic work and that type of person is naturally gifted. If you are an extremely gifted writer or personality, social traffic might be an awesome fit for you. If you aren’t it’s going to be an enormous waste of time because you won’t be able to influence the short attention spans that will find you.

Search traffic is honestly a lot easier to work with. There’s a huge difference with search traffic because they are already looking for you. Since they already want what you have to offer, the process is a LOT easier.

How To Increase Website Traffic From Search Engines

Getting more traffic to your website from search engines is actually fairly easy to do. I want to keep this lesson fairly simple for you so I have organized the basics into four separate tasks:

1. Researching your market.

2. Choosing keywords.

3. Creating keyword-optimized content.

4. Getting links to your content from relevant pages.

Most people go wrong because they don’t do any research in the first place. To fully understand this process, I want you to take a look at how you found this article. You probably did a search in Google for ‘How To Increase Website’ traffic, or something similar (or you are a regular reader of mine). You found me because I anticipated that people would be searching for this, and created a solid article on this topic.

Researching Your Market

You may be curious about how I was able to anticipate that you would be doing this search. This is pretty easy if you take a look at the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. You start by typing on topics that are related to the content of your site. In this case I started by searching for ‘website’ because I help people to learn to make money with websites. The tool showed me a bunch of keywords that people search for and are related to websites. Website traffic was one of the terms that came up. Since I understand a lot about getting more website traffic, it’s obviously pretty easy for me to write about.

Hopefully you can see why this article came to be. I want to be found by people who want to get more targeted website traffic.

What you need to do is use the Adwords tool to take a look at topics that people are searching for in your market. You will obviously know your market better than I would so you need to think about different aspects that people need to understand. Type those terms into the tool and take a look at what comes back. Expand on the terms that come back and you’ll probably find some winners in there.

Choosing Keywords

Choosing keywords to me is a matter of looking at your competition and deciding how strong it is. I wrote about this concept extensively on The Keyword Academy: Choosing A Topic For A Website. I was actually talking about choosing a topic for a site, but the same concepts apply. You can use those metrics to choose topics to write about that you can realistically get ranked for.

Where most people go wrong is that they only choose the super competitive keywords that everyone else is using. Finding the easy ones will make your life a lot easier so I would definitely start there. Increasing traffic to your website becomes one of the easiest things ever when you write about topics that have weak competition.

Lately I picked up a site that’s about food and honestly it’s one of the easiest things ever. I’m barely trying and getting ranked really well. It’s so much easier than my internet marketing topics it’s not even funny. If you can try to find keywords that aren’t that competitive it will be a lot easier. Obviously you don’t want to write off topic, so your search will be limited to the scope of your website.

Creating Keyword-Optimized Content

Creating content that will rank well for a keyword is honestly really easy. I have written extensively about this and so I’ll point you to an article I wrote about this: How To Target a Keyword With a Post Page. The only thing I want to add to that is that the better your post, the better it will work. If your post excites people enough to get them to point some links at it, it will rank better and it will rank more quickly.

Getting Links To Your Content From Relevant Pages

If you’re starting out, this might seem like it’s pretty difficult but after you get going, it really isn’t. The first thing you should try to do once you create your website is find some friends in your industry. This will help you a ton because when you need to get some extra links, they will be there to help. There are also a lot of other methods that you can use. You can write articles for EzineArticles and they will allow you to link back. For that matter, you can write articles that can be submitted with Unique Article Wizard, or a similar service.

Getting links is often as simple as asking. When I started CourtneyTuttle.com, I looked through all of the make money sites on Technorati to find beginners who had sites similar to mine. I then participated on their sites and made friends with them so that we could help each other out. We have helped each other a lot over the last few years and the links we have passed back and forth have made a huge difference. Now that I have some people reading my site building links has also become a lot easier. That said, I started out with zero traffic just like everyone else and overcame that with hard work.

How to Keep Fresh Content Delivering in Your Site

2009-10-24T12:50:00.000-07:00

“How do I keep posts flowing on my blog?”

This is a question that most bloggers face at one point or another - particularly bloggers who have been blogging for 6-12 months.

The reality is that there comes a point where most bloggers feel either uninspired, unmotivated, that they’ve got ‘bloggers block’ or that they’ve said everything that there is to say on their chosen topic. This is something that we’ve all felt at one time or another - so what does a blogger do about it?

The first thing that I want to encourage you with is that all is not lost. Every blogger has this challenge at one point or another (in fact most of us face it regularly) and it is possible to break through it. They key is to persist through the tough times - something that many bloggers do not do.

At this point it is important to sit down and work out how you will generate content going forward. There are a number of strategies that come to mind for doing so - all of these I’ve used at different points and I hope that some will give you inspiration and a way forward:

1. Mind Mapping

My favorite technique for coming up with new topics is using mind maps. I outline my mind mapping technique here but in short the technique is that you take one post idea (one from your archives perhaps) and then brainstorm ways that that topic can be expanded upon into numerous new topics. You then take some of those new ideas and think about ways that they too can be expanded upon into new posts. This technique can literally help you identify hundreds of new topics to write about.

Whether you use Mind mapping or some other kind of brainstorming technique the key is to set time aside to do it. I try to do this at the start of each week and find that if I do that the writing task for the week ahead is a lot smoother - sometimes just coming up with the ideas is as hard as the writing of posts.

2. Involve Readers

One of the resources that a blog who has an established readership has (remember we’re writing this series for these types of blogs) is that it has a knowledge based within it’s readership that can be drawn upon in a variety of creative ways to help create content for your blog. There are a lot of ways to do this - but here are a few:

* Guest Posts - in every 100 or so readers there is bound to be 1 that has the knowledge, expertise, motivation and skill to contribute posts to your blog. The key is to identify them and give them the confidence to contribute a post to your blog. Pay particular attention to those leaving comments on your blog. You’ll find that some comments just go the extra mile and contain wisdom and depth that are not far off being the standard of actual blog posts. Also don’t be afraid to invite contributions by writing post asking for guest posts or having a page linked in your navigation inviting contributions.

* Reader Questions - stuck for a topic to write about? Ask your readers to ask questions. A post inviting reader questions can draw out some great ideas to write about.

* Community Written Posts - one of the things that I’m loving about Digital Photography School at the moment is that some of our best posts are actually ones that our readers provide the majority of the content and teaching for. My role is not to ‘write’ the content for these posts - but to ask a question and set some boundaries for a discussion - and then open it up for readers to add their suggestions. Examples: How do I take band promotional photos?, How Would You Photograph a Funeral? and How to Photograph Grandma?

3. Explore new ‘Voices’

One way to break out of a rut as a blogger is to experiment with new types and styles of posts. Sometimes doing so can unleash creativity and new ideas. So if the majority of your posts are ‘tips’ posts - try an opinion piece. If you always write ‘news’ type posts - why not try something with a bit of humor or controversy.

Further Reading: I’ve outlined 20 types of blog posts for bloggers battling bloggers block here to give you a little inspiration.

4. Update Previous Posts and Topics

Even after a few months of blogging you can hit a point where you feel like you’ve covered most topics in your niche. Many bloggers get to this point and simply give up the blog - however I’ve found that most posts that I’ve written in the past can be expanded upon, updated, improved or rewritten with fresh insight.

Also keep in mind that many of our old posts will only have been written by long term readers and your new readers will not have seen these posts.

Further Reading: The Why and How of Updating old Blog Posts.

5. Guest Posts

The decision to allow guest posters onto your blog has both good arguments for and against it - but it is certainly one way to keep the flow of content going on a blog when you’re a little low on inspiration or don’t have enough time on your hands to be writing content (see also Why Guest Bloggers are Great for a Blog).

Getting people to submit guest posts on a blog is not always achievable when a blog is very young and the blog has little profile - but once you gather a readership and build your reputation as a growing community it becomes easier to attract contributions from other bloggers and freelance writers looking to grow their own profile.

If you’re new to the idea of finding guest posters for a blog - start with your own readers (as described above - look in the comments section of your blog) and then also look at other blogs in your niche or even forums that are on a similar topic to your blog. I’ve also had some real success lately with finding guest posts for Digital Photography School from non bloggers, particularly pro photographers who are looking for a little extra exposure to their business sites.

Further Reading: How to Find a Guest Blogger for Your Blog

6. Hiring Writers

Another way to approach bringing others onto your blog as writers is to look at hiring a blogger (or team of bloggers) to help you create content for your blog. This has some cost associated with it - but can (if you do it right) increase the quality and frequency of posts as well as decreasing some of the admin of relying upon guest posts.

Basic Things for being Successful Internet Marketers

2009-10-23T15:02:00.000-07:00

Given the rise in popularity of internet marketing, wouldn’t it be great to know exactly what it takes to be successful at such an endeavour? Here are 5 traits of successful internet marketers. How do you measure up?

1. Broad Knowledge Base - A successful internet marketer should be, at the very least, a well-rounded person. He should have a wide base of general knowledge and be able to use that knowledge to his advantage by drawing on it to come up with new and innovative ideas. Critical thinking and problem solving skills are a must since the prime tasks involves analyzing problems and finding solutions to them.

A background in English is particularly helpful since a successful internet marketer must be a master with words and know how to tell and use stories. A successful internet marketer understands design and how humans are influenced by what they see. He must understand basic human motivation and behavior, so a rudimentary understanding of psychology is key.

Finally, a successful internet marketer understands interpersonal relationships, and how those relationships function given the rise of social media.

2. Technologically Proficient - A successful internet marketer doesn’t have to know everything there is to know about internet technology, but he should have a fundamental understanding of databases, HTML, Flash, and style sheets. This sort of understanding is necessary if an internet marketer is going to have a firm grasp on how search engines and the Web work together. Most of all, the successful internet marketer should be pretty fascinated with technology and have a desire to use the latest online tools whenever they become available.

The successful internet marketer should have a realistic view of the capabilities of technology and, most of all, he should be aware of their potential. He should even be able to dream up new ways to use such technology, even before his counterparts come up with great ideas themselves.

3. Solid Skills-The successful internet marketer has supurb communication skills. Not only can he express his ideas, but he can explain, in laymen’s terms how web technology works. He has to be a great writer and must be able to write formally and informally, for experts and laypeople, and persuasively and factually. He has to be good at research as well, since he will have to understand those to whom he is marketing in order to be successful.

4. Lots of Experience-The online experience is driven by searching. When we need to find information, we use a search engine to hunt it down. Therefore, the successful online marketer must have experience in search engine optimization and marketing campaigns. He should also be a prolific blogger. One of his most important tasks will be to create high-quality content, build a loyal following, and participate in the conversations that take place around the content he publishes.

He should also be an expert in social media and how to use social networking for marketing purposes.

5. A Penchant for Problem-Solving- The successful internet marketer loves to encounter and solve problems. He should constantly be looking for ways to do things better and faster, and he should have a hunger for learning new things all the time. He should enjoy the trial-and-error approach to conundrums and, therefore, should be very patient. Most of all, he should be interested in getting the job done right.

Build Your Strengths as a Blogger

2009-10-22T09:37:00.000-07:00

This post belongs to the ‘taking your blog to the next level‘ series which looks at tips for bloggers whose blogs have got a start but want to take it up a notch. Read the intro here.

Analyze why Readers Come to your Blog….. and then Build on It

The first thing that I’d highly recommend medium sized bloggers do when I speak with them is to set aside some time to analyze the current performance of their blog and particularly to focus upon the successes and strengths that the blog has.

While there’s a lot to be said for identifying a blogs weaknesses in order to improve I think many bloggers spend so much time working on improving the negatives (patching holes and fixing problems) that they fail to build upon their successes.

Here’s a ’secret’ of success that I’ve observed in quite a few successful bloggers…

They don’t do everything well, but what they do do well they keep doing it over and over again.
3 Examples of Blogs that Build Upon their Successes

Many successful blogs illustrate this principle. Let’s take a quick look at three:

i-can-has-cheezburger.png

* I Can Has Cheezburger - these guys are geniuses, I don’t know when they discovered that putting captions on pictures of cats would draw hundreds of thousands of readers to a blog - but when they did they focused upon that. Their blog design might not be the sexiest and they rarely write a post with more than a handful of words - but they worked out what their readers wanted and kept giving it to them. In fact they’ve taken the LOLcat formula and have rolled it out for Dogs, Celebrities, News and Politics etc.

* Post Secret - in some ways this is a similar story to I can has Cheezburger - Frank discovered that the idea of posting people’s ’secrets’ on postcards captured people’s imagination. Again - I’m not sure where the idea came from but Frank latched onto it and has continued to keep his blog focused upon what works. In fact he’s expanded the idea into books and traveling exhibitions - all focusing upon the same thing - postcard secrets.

* Smashing Magazine - this blog has seen incredible growth in the last year or two and a lot of it is by building upon what works. If you analyze their posts you see certain types of posts that are repeated again and again. Check out their post 35 examples of animals photography for example - a post filled with great images on a theme. They do these weekly and they always generate lots of interest on social media sites. In fact this ‘list’ type post isn’t just photographic - they do lists of tips, resources etc. They’ve worked out what types of posts work with their readers and they continue to apply it again and again.

I could go on with most successful blogs. They identify something that works and repeat it over and over again. This doesn’t mean that they simply repeat the same content - the key to their success is to find new ways to apply the same formulae.

So what has worked on your blog? How can you do it again and even improve upon it?
Let’s Get to Work and Do Some Analysis

Here are some questions to ponder to help you to identify these points of energy on your blog that could be worth expanding upon:
Questions about Content

* What posts have had the most traffic to them?
* What posts have had the most comments?
* What posts got the most links from other blogs?
* What posts did better than others on social media sites?

When you’ve compiled a list of these posts that did better than others - do some analysis of WHY they did well.

* Was it the topic?
* Was it the style of post?
* Was it the title that you used?
* Was it the use of an image?
* Was it the posts length?
* Was it the use of humor?

There could be any number of factors that contributed to a post’s success - but there’s usually one or two that stand out. Do this analysis on a number of successful posts and you might just discover that the same things come into play in each case. Identify what these factors are and you’re in a great position to develop more of this type of content.
Questions about Traffic

Another type of analysis to do is asking questions around the ’source’ of current traffic to your blog.

* What are the top sources of traffic to your blog?
* What other blogs or sites are linking to your content?
* What social media sites seem to be liking your content?
* What search engines send you traffic?
* What keywords are people arriving on your site as a result of searching for

Looking at the source of traffic coming to your blog is a powerful technique to help you grow your blog further.

I’ve found that when you see a significant source of traffic to a blog that there are almost always ways to build that traffic further. For example:

* When you notice a lot of traffic coming to certain posts from Google it can be helpful to optimize those pages for the keywords people are searching for to increase the traffic (looking at keyword density, linking to the page from other parts of your blog with good anchor text, tweaking titles etc).
* When you notice another blog linking up to yours there’s an opportunity to build a relationship with that blog. Get to know the blogger, thank them for the link, submit other posts that they might find useful, link up to them etc
* When you notice a social media site has been sending traffic it is a signal for you to get involved in that site. You might want to do some analysis on the type of content that does well on that site, you could educate your current readers on how to use the site, it might be worth adding a ‘voting’ button from that site to encourage readers to vote for you etc.
* When you get a lot of traffic for certain keywords from search engines it can be a hint to write more content on that topic. Pay particular attention to ‘questions’ that people are typing into search engines as these can be ready made post titles and topics to write about.

What is Affiliate Marketing

2009-10-21T09:35:00.000-07:00

Many people have heard of affiliate programs, but only few of them actually know what they are. Affiliate programs are business programs, also sometimes referred to as business opportunities. In a way, you will be selling merchandise for another company, allowing you to make money without having to sell your own products.

A large number of companies participate in affiliate programs, namely retailers. Once you make the decision to join an affiliate program, you may have to file an affiliate partner request form. This form is usually small, but it is almost always required. Most of the retailers, in charge of running an affiliate programs, are well known; therefore, they want to protect their image. This means that before officially joining an affiliate program your website has to be reviewed. If your website is approved, which most legitimate ones are, the next step will all depend on the company in which you are working with.

Most of the retailers or affiliate advertisers will have customized links or banners. These banners will need to be placed on your website. These advertisements will vary from company to company; however, most advertisements showcase merchandise or special sales. If one of your website visitors is interested in learning more, they will click on your link or banner. In doing so, your website will be flagged. This flagging is often done to ensure that you will receive the proper credit for bringing in new customers. If an internet user, who clicked one of your affiliate links or banners, makes the decision to purchase anything, you will receive credit or money for that purchase.

How To Increase Traffic with Forum

2009-10-20T09:53:00.000-07:00

There is no doubt about the fact that Forum posting works when it comes to driving traffic to our site or blog. The goal of every forum post you make is to get as many people to subscribe to your líst! Posting to forums is a very fast and powerful way to build your base of subscribers in as little as 30 minutes. Here is the guide for you to do:

1. Find Forums About Your Niche Very Easily

Just use the search engine like Google, yahoo, Ask, etc, and type the following:

"your niche" + forum or "your niche" +"discussion board"

For instance, if you want to look for Forums in the Internet Marketing field, you only need to type "Internet Marketing" + forum.

2. Join the Forums and Set Up Your Signature

Signature is another name for your resource box, so... remember to include your website address in your signature. Your resource box is just like an 'about the author info'. This appears at the end of every post you make and drives traffic to your website.

3. Read the Rules and Regulations of the Forum Before Posting

This ensures that your posts are not deleted by the Administrators of the Forum. Now, don't go about spamming all members of the Forum with your website advert. In fact, I will advise you not to post an obvious ad. It's a pure waste of time because it will be deleted.

4. Ask for Input

Approach from a weak man's position. Assuming you've written an article on your site entitled "13 Ways to Drive Traffic to a New Site." You could make a post asking folks to check out the article and see if you missed anything. Or you can ask for additional points to add to your article. Of course you'll have your opt ín box at the end of the article with a compelling offering.

Let's say you've written an article on meeting the right partner. You could post a message like this: "If you had a chance to learn how to meet your right partner now, what would you do?"

It's a great way to get the attention of forum members to your article. You also get them engaged in the article by asking for their input. And who knows, you may also get other publishers who would use your content in their ezines, thereby getting more exposure for your site.

Forget Expensive PPC Advertising - There is an Alternative!

5. Ask for a Critical Assessment

If you are the type that is not easily hurt by honest feedback even when it hurts, you can go to a forum and ask for a honest critique. You may think this will not make people sign up for your líst, but I tell you, many people will end up subscribing to it. It's a more indirect and acceptable way to ask people to check out your site without blatant advertising.

Plus, the feedback they give you may help to make your squeeze page even more compelling. Ask them if it would persuade them to give it a try, assuming they were in your target market (of course, you already know they are by the forum you selected). And, if they say no, ask them why. You can get valuable information on what they want (and don't want) this way.

There are two types of forums where you should ask for critiques: the niche forum itself and a marketing forum. You'll likely get more sign-ups from the niche forum and good advice to test out from the marketing forum.

6. Ask Your Target Market What They Want

Unknown to most people, this is one of the best ways to develop products and services. And most times, Forum members are ready to tell you what they'll buy and give you ideas for articles, auto-responder content, your blog posts, whatever you need. People guess the products their target market will want and create them only to discover no one is interested in the product, but with this approach, you have real people telling you what product they want, how they want it and how much they are prepared to pay for it.

The way you would use this technique to get them to subscribe is to post something like, "what's your biggest question about loosing weight?" Or "what's the single most important thing you'd like to know about building a business?"

Don't forget to ask if they're willing to pay for solutions to their problems and have them give you an indication of how much they would be willing to pay. Powerful stuff!

Let them know you've already answered 10 questions (your 10 step mini-course loaded in your auto-responder), for example. Then they'll be more likely to sign-up. Make sure you point out that you'll add to your mini-course with the answers to the questions they've provided, and that they'll get answers to the existing questions in your mini-course PLUS the new ones when they subscribe. Everybody wins!

7. Provide a Step-By-Step Guide or Video Tutorial

If someone asks how to create an ebook, give them a progression of steps they can take. Or, make a Camtasia tutorial video showing them how. Now that you've got them to your site, you'll want to "make them a proposal they can't refuse."

Provide a Líst of Resources and Websites

In addition to checklists, resource lists with website URLs make a great site for them to bookmark! Make sure you supply more than just links. Make it a huge info-page of information. A collection of resources, links to everything you have - articles, video, audio, your blog, other useful sites, tools, you name it.

Solve a Problem for People

If someone asks for help or asks a question, provide your experience and try to help them. But to maximize your odds of getting both the asker of the question and everyone else who reads the post to subscribe to your líst, try to phrase your answer in one of the following two ways:

1. Give them tips, techniques, shortcuts, secrets, or anything that offers both the promise of exclusive information and fast results. A shortcut to success.

2. Whenever possible, supply them with specific results. Think about it. When you want to learn how to make income online, you go to someone who is making revenue online to guide you. This quickly establishes you as an authority in that area.

And by helping them, maybe - just maybe - they'll click on the link in your signature to check out your website. If you direct them to a blog post or article you wrote to answer their question, they'll be even more likely to investigate.

That's all there is to it but at the end of the day, it's a failure-proof way to drive serious traffic to your website using Forum Posts. Apply it and see your traffic soar through the roof.

Low Interest Rate Loan Tip and Trick

2009-10-18T09:32:00.000-07:00

A mortgage is a huge responsibility, one in which almost every family undertakes. The length of a mortgage amortization is generally 20-30 years. Think about that for a moment. If you took on a mortgage at age 30, you would pay off your house when you’re 60. With that length of time the interest payments rack up to excruciating levels. The amount could add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars between a low interest mortgage loan and a medium or high rate. That’s why it’s crucial to get low interest rate mortgage loans.

Low interest mortgage loans don’t always present themselves when applying for the mortgage. There are things ways to make sure you have the lowest interest rate mortgage possible. One way is to know your credit score before applying for the mortgage. Another is to save for a hefty down payment. The single biggest step you can take is reducing your debt to income ratio.

If you’ve applied for any credit recently and been turned down, you should know you’re entitled to a free credit report. While the information may help reduce debt to income ratio, it won’t help much when determining what you’re eligible for in terms of interest rates. In order to determine which level of interest rate you’re eligible for (there are high and low rates), what you need to know is your FICO score. This score is determined with all the information on your credit report and it’s the biggest determination of what interest rate you’ll be paying, how much you’ll be lent, what down payment is required and the length of the mortgage. There are new credit assessment scores, like VantageScore, but banks most often use FICO scores.

Your FICO score is a compilation of your payment history, how much credit you have, or have had, the length of time you’ve used any types of credit, what credit types and how many applications for credit you have open. Scores range from 300-850. Lenders will not lend to you if you have a score less than 550~. Anything between 550 and 649 are the borrowers that receive the highest interest rates. Borrowers with scores above 650 are offered low interest rates.

While FICO scores are a big part of the determination, they aren’t the only part. The amount of your down payment plays a big part as well. A large down payment shows the bank that you have a serious investment in making payments and keeping in good standing on your mortgage. It also reduces the amount of money the bank needs to lend.

In order to find out your FICO score you have to request a specific type of credit report. The free one will not contain this information. The reason it’s important to know the score, is so you can judge if the interest rate the bank is offering is worthy of your credit score. Remember it is in their best interest to give you a higher interest rate.

Reducing your debt to income ratio (your monthly debt divided by your monthly income in percentage). This percentage of DTI (debt-to-income) must be 36% or lower. A 28% DTI can basically ask for the lowest interest rate mortgage possible.

Simply reducing your DTI percentage and increasing your credit score and your chances of a low interest mortgage loan increase tenfold.

Number One Advocate Brand

2009-10-16T09:28:00.000-07:00

Who needs to be my number one brand advocate?” The guesses range from my current supervisor, a trusted mentor, a current client or a leader in the industry. Some, even after going over the ”18 Critical Connections You Need to Know” still ask, “is there one that stands out as more important than anyone else?”

The answer is yes. Yet, it’s not one of the ones on the list nor is it any of the really good guesses. Simply put – it’s you. The biggest sale we make on any given day is the sale we make to ourselves – we either sell ourselves on our strengths and our great “you can do it attitude” or we sell ourselves short and buy into the many weaknesses, obstacles, should-ofs, would-ofs and could-ofs.

Where people fall short is in HOW to be your best brand advocate. It doesn’t mean getting really good at spouting your unique value or promise (although that doesn’t hurt). And, it doesn’t mean being so promotional that all you do is talk about yourself. (I’m reminded of Bette Midler in the movie, Beaches, whenever I broach that subject where she states to someone who has been listening to her drone on and on about herself, “well I’ve talked enough about me; now it’s your turn – tell me what you think about me?”)

Here are three things you can do immediately to be your best brand advocate:

1. Ask for documentation. What I mean is start asking for documentation of your strengths and your great accomplishments. When you volunteer for an organization, while the plaque or t-shirt is nice or even a mention in a newsletter is appreciated, you must be proactive and ask for a letter documenting what you did. I’ve worked with many organizations and have even declined them creating a plaque for me and encouraged them to save the money and put it towards the “cause or cure” by just sending a letter on the organization letterhead to me that thanks me for helping them with their walk, event, gala, board of directors, volunteer team – basically whatever I assisted with. Why? Because I cannot put a plaque or cute mug, into my personnel file. I cannot flow the comments onto my blog, or include it in an online bio or a LinkedIn profile. A letter, however, can be reproduced, excerpts can be used for quotes on website, blogs, profiles or brochures and it can be reviewed at evaluation time

Be sure to keep the original and then you make copies for your immediate supervisor and one for the personnel department so they can place it in your permanent personnel file. That is your job to do – not to hand off to the personnel department or supervisor for if they lose track of the original then you lose a valuable piece of documentation. If you’re an entrepreneur, keep it in your testimonial file, use it on your blog, website and any online portfolio.

It’s your job to be your best brand advocate and this includes documenting all of the great things you’ve done – from volunteering with the boy scouts, belonging to a Rotary club and providing a quick speech or walking for a cure. Asking for a letter is a relatively easy document to ask for and to retrieve. Look into your calendar for the past year or on your desk/bookshelf and see what other forms of recognition you’ve received that would serve you best in letter form. Then ask! In the nine years I was employed by non-profit organizations, only once did anyone ask for a letter documenting their service. I would of gladly written hundreds of letters instead of having to peruse promotional catalogs for days looking for paperweights or cool framed certificates to give. And, worse yet, expending the hard raised funds on ‘thank you’s’ that could go towards eradicating, alleviating or advocating for the cause.

2. Create an “I love me” wall. I know how narcissistic that must sound! Yet, when people walk into your office, cubicle, space, store front or any place you conduct business this wall speaks volumes to them without you ever having to say a word. Now, while I call it a wall – it can be a bookshelf or a counter top or even the flimsy press-board of a cubicle privacy separator. What it showcases are all those certificates and plaques that you’ve already received BEFORE you started asking for written documentation. (Understand that even as you start asking for letters and declining any plaques or framed gifts – there will still be organizations that give you that – regardless.)

3. Collect your documentation. A little different from the “ask” recommendation – this is collecting all the “atta-boys, kudos, good jobs and gold stars” you’ve ever received and put them all together. Some companies have slips like “catch them doing something right slips” or they have a “suggestion box” or some other types of employee recognition programs. Collect those documents. Make sure you have copies of each of those and that the personnel department has copies of them.

Did you make period sales three months in a row? Do you have that documented or was it merely applause and an announcement during a staff meeting? Did you help reduce expenses or eliminate a line item? Make your evaluations, whether it is an employee evaluation or someone evaluating hiring or doing business with you. more than just discussion about – what have you done for me lately. Give a full and complete rendition of brand you!