I noticed the other day while searching for ‘what is my ip’ that Google now directly responds to the IP. Check out whatismyip.com’s traffic:

For the past year I’ve been doing my darndest to get away from anything that relies on Google – for traffic (eg DealCatch) or anything they would directly compete with (eg Examine). I’m not there yet, but I’m feeling more confident as time passes. I’m hoping that 50% of our revenue by 2013 will have nothing to do with Google (at any point of the transactional funnel).

I hope you are doing the same.

But I digress.

While being grilled about my nomadic nature, the customs officer said I did not seem very loyal to any place. Careful to keep the tone as civil as possible, I did snap back that Canada was and always will be my home. It was where I got my start, and no matter where I go or what happens, I will love Canada simply for the opportunity I got.

It was while reading Fred Wilson’s post on immigration that I realized the reason I got so angry – loyalty. I was so loyal to Canada as it was where I got my start. Looking back, I see that all of my most loyal people were the ones that I gave the opportunity to properly grow and flourish. It is something more than money – it is actual personal growth.

Not an easy thing to foster, but oh so important.

So this week finally marks my return. There are now 3 projects I am actively working on. Two of them are completely mine, and one is a bit of a JV. One of them is strictly local, one of them has a local flavor, and one of them has nothing to do with local.

Fun times ahead.

I’ve had very little to do with iBegin for the past 6 months, and as of this year pretty much down to zero. A few people already knew about this, but in general I’ve been pretty tight-lipped about it. I personally have spent the past few months catching up on reading, exercising, and just watching sports/movies/etc. I’ve gone from hyperlocal (neighborhood) to local (Toronto) to quasi-local (multiple cities) to stupid-local (full country). In retrospect I think the winning solution is to stick to “local” – even today, more than 25 months after iBegin Toronto was ‘turned off’ the site garners 10,000-15,000 pageviews a day.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some Plato to read.

Also according to Google, api.twitter.com has 20 million pages indexed. Pages which are identical to normal twitter.com/username pages.

Oops.

So to help out a friend, I’ve been playing around with the Twitter.com and its various API methods. When filing an IP whitelist request, what I thought would take days was pleasantly approved in 24 hours.

So while playing around with it, and their OAuth method, I came across a confusing bug – and after an hour of trying to figure out what the hell it was, I went to the forums. And it turned out to be a real nasty bug. A bug they deemed critical. And with that single click (the bug wasn’t just High Priority – it was Critical) I moved from the pantheon of the masses to the select few to make Twitter.com run around and try to figure out what went wrong.

But that really wasn’t the point. Twitter API support was fast. Blazing fast. Withing moments Doug and Matt were on it, and within 5 minutes of filing the bug it was claimed.

Twitter.com may be maddeningly slow at times, but I can see why so many apps around Twitter as springing up – those guys kick ass in making sure everything is being taken care of.

I had some large sites that had pretty low max rates (eg 1 page/sec), and it took me some figuring out how to get Google to go faster quicker – sitemap. By submitting a sitemap with a sizeable # of pages, we were able to boost from 1 page/sec to 2.5 pages/sec in roughly 96 hours.

Across all my sites Googlebot hits me at least a million times every day.

Our own estimates are roughly 5000+ sites are using this plugin already. I expect it to go up a lot as we refine it and make it simpler to install.

While most of what I talk about here (and really think about daily) revolves around the local space, I do a lot more than that. I’ve been building (proper) websites since roughly 2000, and did not enter the local space until 2005. Enthropia Inc was incorporated in early 2003. This means we were obviously up to other stuff than local – and we continue to.

As a quick example – I found value in domains, and picked up a few that I developed out. Some worked, some didn’t. Two top domains that were once owned by me were beat.com and webmaster.org. Both were developed out at one time – until a more lucrative offer (or better opportunity) made their sale an easy decision.

Local to me is a long term project that will not be solved in 1 year, or even 5 years. It requires a seismic shift in thinking – in how the YP business operates, in how consumers perform local search engines, and in how small business owners treat and operate with the internet (clearly exemplified in my last post on people being jackasses). Right now, I feel like local search is a swimming pool. We were on the edge with our feet sticking in, and sites like Yelp.com and Menupages.com have pushed us fully into the water (albeit the shallow end). Product inventory and companies like Yipit and LDC are pushing us towards the deep end – but everything has to come together before we can finally enjoy and have fun in the deep end.

But of course – all of that will take time. And while as a company we are growing very well

in the local space (giving us the capital to expand in new directions – more on that next year), we have other areas that provide us with revenue too (being self-funded requires creativity). Occasionally I will point at one of our efforts – in fact, I had two posts I wanted to write about, but one of them I imagined would get incorrectly construed with local. And so this post to clear the air.

I spend maybe 90% of my thinking time towards local. That still leaves 10% to do some other interesting stuff.