Whew I am tired
23 Sep2008
Tomorrow heralds the launch of the newest version of iBegin.com. Nothing changes superficially – but internally it pushes live 8 months of complete re-write from the ground-up.
We’ve learned a lot in the 2+ years before the re-write started, and the new base will allow us to do more. A lot more
.
I’ve also finally settled into NYC. My days right now literally comprise of 10 am to 2 am being 90% work. I’ve never been a public fan of it myself, but I think that grind will end this weekend and I can finally get back to being me.
Glorious times await us all 
Just today five unique visitors hit the site looking for ‘merchantcircle.com scam’ and in the past week 25 unique visitors have.
And we are not even the #1 or #2 result.
One of these days that 575k # will be dis-regarded.
- In: Local Search
Re-Enter your Password
9 Sep2008
Why do sites insist on having you put in your password twice? So what if a person types it in wrong?
Looking at it in another way – what is the probability a person types it in wrong? 1%? 5%?
Lets even say 5% … so why make 95% of the users suffer and make them enter a password twice when the 5% who did not type it in correctly can just reset a password?
Just a UI thought I had.
Why Hello WordPress.com
4 Sep2008
The latest news post on WordPress.com announces the availability of the Albeo Theme – made by none other than our Design Disease brand. That Elena is a fantastic designer.
We already have roughly 2 million backlinks from our other free WP theme releases – I wonder what number this release will push it to?
- In: Sweet 2.0
iBegin Labs …
27 Aug2008
So a few people have asked me … we ‘released’ iBegin Labs over 4 months ago, yet outside of this blog and the iBegin Blog we have never mentioned it.
The thing is that we have a lot of stuff that we are working, testing, and experimenting with. As I alluded to in my earlier post on our Simple Earnings Viewer, there is a certain cost in taking something we are using internally, polishing it, and publishing it live.
One little thing we have been having fun with is Lifestream. As the # of services people are using explodes all around us, and the content disperses into the furthest nooks of the internet, we’ve been trying to figure out how to target, harness, and make sense of what is going on through all these social networks.
While it may not make immediate sense in the context of what iBegin does (how does social networking feeds tie into business listings), all eventually makes sense.
The plan is now with Lifestream (the finalized product will of course utilize iBox and iBegin Share) and ‘Simple Earnings Viewer’ (in lieu of a better name) released, we can finally go live with iBegin Labs.
And maybe we can resurrect our ajax feedback mechanism.
Simple Earnings Viewer – Want it?
26 Aug2008
We’ve written a pretty simple engine internally that basically scrapes ad revenue from X Y Z sites, and then spits it all into a nice manageable table. We then go ahead and graph these – be it a line graph for growth over the course of the day/week/month etc, or bar graph that shows changes over the course of the day/week/month.
So for example – if you use Google Adsense, you can see how your CPM levels off the course of the day, and how it varies on a day to day, week to week, etc etc basis. Throw in predictive earnings too while you are at it.
Just curious if people would be interested in using something like this? There is always a cost of exporting something from internal use to the iBegin Labs, so want to know if it is worth the hassle.
- In: Giving Back|Sweet 2.0
Friday Stupid
22 Aug2008
Seth Godin on ads being like online tip jars:
I can say this because there are no ads here but,
If you like what you’re reading, click an ad to say thanks.
Pretty simple, but not an accepted online protocol, at least not yet.
I like most of what Seth says, but that just made my eyes boggle. Clicking on an ad that you don’t care about just because you like the content is outright cheating
.
I hope people know to do better.
IYP Reach in the US (according to Google)
20 Aug2008
Was talking to Mike about Google’s stats for websites, and we thought it would be cool to see the reach for the biggest YP sites in the USA. Cut-off was 0.1% reach:
| Site | Unique Visitors | Reach |
| City Search | 7.4 M | 3.2% |
| YellowPages.com | 6.8 M | 3% |
| SuperPages.com | 6.2 M | 2.7% |
| Yelp | 4.6 M | 2% |
| Local.com | 3.2 M | 1.4% |
| MerchantCircle | 2.6 M | 1.1% |
| InsiderPages | 2.1 M | 0.9% |
| Yellow Book | 1.5 M | 0.6% |
| Open List | 1.5 M | 0.6% |
| Dex Knows | 1.2 M | 0.5% |
| Yellow Bot | 900 K | 0.4% |
| Yellow.com | 920 K | 0.4% |
| MagicYellow | 750 K | 0.3% |
| 50 States | 390 K | 0.2% |
| Kudzu | 560 K | 0.2% |
| YellowUSA | 420 K | 0.2% |
| Judys Book | 200 K | 0.1% |
| iBegin | 180 K | 0.1% |
As a kind of comparison, YellowPages.ca reaches 4.7% of Canada.
Color me surprised at CitySearch being #1.
Update:
I added 50states.com to the list – if I miss any other, let me know.
I will admit that it is domain based. So sites like HelloMetro get lost because of their multi-domain approach. Alas nothing I can do about it.
I can also say that the #s for iBegin (our site) is a bit off, so you should take these #s with a grain of salt.
Canada Top Start-ups … according to Google
20 Aug2008
I have found the TechVibes Top Start-ups list entertaining, and while looking over all the stats Google is now sharing, thought how the top 10 would play out:
| Plenty of Fish | 620 K | 2.4% |
| Metro Lyrics | 560 K | 2.2% |
| Nexopia | 430 K | 1.7% |
| Zip Local | 220 K | 0.9% |
| Suite 101/td> | 200 K | 0.8% |
| iBegin | 180 K | 0.7% |
| Shop To It | 85 K | 0.3% |
| b5 Media | 39 K | 0.2% |
| Abe Books | 43 K | 0.2% |
| Cellphones | 47 K | 0.2% |
Please note that it just so happened that anything not in the top 10% had a reach of 0.1% or lower.
This was of course a one-time shot – hopefully TechVibes can add Google and Quantcast to their numbers for even more number-griping
- In: Big Brother|Sweet 2.0
Yelp Traffic Stats
13 Aug2008
Not hard to find really: here we go.
So about 575,000 US unique visitors a day, and another 25k outside of the US. Extrapolates to roughly 10 million US visitors a day.
That was easy
Addendum:
subdomain stats. If the quantcast code is on all pages, the biz center is not doing well.
Addendum 2: Attack of the asians!
- In: Local Search