Exile From the Herd - Tech Wreck 2.0

TARP funds were for loosening up the credit markets, right? Right?

nospam@example.com (Mark Jeftovic) — Sat, 30 May 2009 21:20:24 -0400

Can't go into this too much, but was on the phone yesterday with a friend of mine who is COO of a tech outfit in New York state. Been in business around 5 years, has customers, revenues, cashflow, etc.

They had an operating line-of-credit with Silicon Valley Bank, who in December took somewhere north of 230 million in TARP funds. TARP funds were handed out to "get the credit markets flowing again" after they completely seized up in late '08. This company has not used up a lot of their credit line, but they do use it. They've never missed a payment.

This week they've been informed by SVB that their credit-line is no more. It's been converted into a note and they've been given 10 months to pay it off.

After I got off the phone I wondered if perhaps they were registered Republicans

When The Music Stops

nospam@example.com (Mark Jeftovic) — Tue, 08 May 2007 10:59:26 -0400

There is a saying among Native Indians "He who doesn't consider what is distant, will find sorrow near at hand". I suspect we are entering an age where, to paraphrase Douglas Casey, the inevitable is finally becoming imminent. Today's post is about a couple of trainwrecks, one that just happened which everybody could have and should have seen coming, the other is still on the rails...for now.

Continue reading "When The Music Stops"

OpenDNS' address bar labels is a signpost to the type-in domainers

nospam@example.com (Mark Jeftovic) — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 11:31:38 -0400

Predictably, most of the reaction to my Domain Aftermarket Due for an 'Asset Repricing' post awhile back was disgruntled and hostile. The domainer traffic king Rick Schwartz called it "One of the worst and most inacurate[sic] articles on domains I have ever read." and on the various forums I was called a total idiot and worse.

Since I'm talking about it, I should mention that I did get some of the numbers in the article wrong, like way off wrong. Drugs.com sold for 800K, not 4M and Yun Yi's Ultsearch portfolio was bought by Marchex for 165 Million, not 65. Next time I shall endevour to google the numbers before reciting them.

Be that as it may, the numbers may be wrong, the premise isn't. And I saw some pretty flimsy arguments why type-in traffic will increase in the future, not decline.
Continue reading "OpenDNS' address bar labels is a signpost to the type-in domainers"

Forget Ajax, a look at two good blog tracking and SEO tools

nospam@example.com (Mark Jeftovic) — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 14:00:31 -0400

Yesterday I blogged about AJAX, and other uses aside, how I don't think it's useful as a selling feature and mentioned MyLongTail.com as an example, and then I mentioned MyBlogLog.com as another site in a similar niche.

First, as I've commented before (somewhere), the speed at which search engines and specialty filters index and disseminate has reached the point where it happens in near real time, as the comments to yesterday's post illustrate. MyLongTail's Mike Levin left a couple constructive comments within hours and I woke up this morning to find a third comment from MyBlogLog's Eric Marcoullier . Both of these guys no doubt do what any savvy website operators do nowadays, and monitor for mentions of their services via sites like technorati or google alerts. I've found these services to be invaluable for tracking references to my business and my band. On one notable occasion it helped me head off a complete misunderstanding which could have easily snowballed into a PR debacle.

Mike Levin posed the question "Do I get it?" with regard to what MyLongTail actually does, and Eric Marcoullier hoped I would give MyBlogLog a try and it became clear to me I didn't do either of them justice in the original post: I already use both services:

MyBlogLog: is a great tool if your blog resides on a third party server like Blogger or Blogware, like mine did until the weekend. Because you don't have access to the server logs, you get some overview type stats from within the blogging app itself, but MyBlogLog gave me the fine detail on exactly where the hits where coming from, and where the outbound clicks were going (more on this in a second). So I wasn't a hard sale after the three day test period to become a paid subscriber at the premium level ($3 a month, via Paypal)

So then I moved the blog onto one of my own servers for various reasons and I thought I wouldn't need this service anymore. But on a lark, I plugged the code into my new blog and things got even more interesting for me because of the outbound link tracking. Most of my blog posts contain very few outbound links, so before the move, these statistics weren't terribly interesting for me. But under the new blog setup (using Seredipity with all the third party bookmarking and tagging links enabled), I was surprised to be able to see a nice breakdown of the tagging and bookmarking action around my posts. So I'll happily keep my premium subscription here and will likely add another for the easyDNS company blog.

MyLongTail: The value proposition behind MyLongTail is that is analyzes every inbound hit and search hit and looks for keywords that reside "in the long tail" where it thinks you may have some underdeveloped potential and makes recommendations. The underlying premise is if you write more about those underdeveloped phrases you will incrementally improve your organic search traffic, I hope Mike Levin doesn't mind me hotlinking his graphic to illustrate his point:

Everything I said about AJAX aside, MyLongTail uses it to display the inbound hits to your site in realtime, which is interesting for my company site, which, accordingly to MyLongTail analytics, gets 46.5% of its search engine traffic from our top-10 keywords and the rest (53.5%) from within the long tail.

But for my personal blog, watching inbound hits in realtime would normally be about as interesting as watching paint dry. Usually it only gets a smattering of visits per day.

But owing to fact that today is 06/06/06 TEOFTWAWKI day and as I mentioned over the weekend, a blog post of mine from last year comes up #1 in google's organic search results for various "June 6, 2006" phrases, MyLongTail is getting a nice workout the last few days. 1000+ uniques on saturday, 2400+ sunday, over 8500+ yesterday to what I expect to be a blow-off high today, there is lots of fresh data going into MyLongTail to analyze and I was expecting it to be heavily skewed by this 06/06/06 hysteria. So out of all this, it has so far recommended "sovereign individual" as an under utilized search term for me. Well done. This is a topic near and dear to my heart and something I'd have no problems writing more about. I would have never thought to target it as a phrase specifically.

So I see value in both of these tools. MyBlogLog is a sneeze at $3/month andMyLongTail is still in a free beta, but all indications are I'll stick around once it goes over into a pay service.

AJAX Heresy: It's not a feature and nobody really cares anyway

nospam@example.com (Mark Jeftovic) — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 15:46:21 -0400

Lately I've been hacking around with AJAX. Most of the time AJAX is used for little more than eye candy but I thought I had found a situation where AJAX would do actually something novel and solve an existing problem.

The problem is on our universal whois lookup site: easyWhois.com, where it has sporadically run into problems over the years where one registrar site or another (*cough* cough Netsol *cough*), would block us for "excessive queries". The idea was to use AJAX to push the query back into the client's browser, instead of doing it from easywhois. The server would be more of a switching station: it would grab the domain to be queried from the browser, find the appropriate whois server for it, send that back to the client who then would connect to that server and conduct the query. Nice, easy, simple and has the effect of difusing all the whois queries across the client IPs instead of at the central server, vastly reducing, if not eliminating blockages at remote registrar whois servers.

So it literally took 30 seconds to get Rasmus [Lerdorf's] 30 Second Ajax Tutorial working and begin to understand what all the hoopla was about. A couple of other Ajax examples later (here and here) and the entire idea took a hit. The idea in it's original form won't work because the javascript XMLHttpRequest only lets me do HTTP GET and POST method connections (as the name would imply). There doesn't seem to be anything like PHP's fsockopen() available to me to get the client to open its connection to port 43 (the whois port). I'd have to use something like Java, and if I did that I may as well load the entire application in there, never mind Ajax.

Throughout this process something became clear to me which I think is perhaps lost on a few people, Ajax is a tool, period. Granted that it is an essential component of "the Web 2.0 Kool-Aid", it is not a feature and I don't see it as an end-user selling point. It became even clearer as I explained to my wife (who is far more technically adept than the average person) what Ajax was and did and watched her eyes glaze over. And it wasn't an incomprehension glaze over, it was a "who cares?" glaze over.

"Ajax allows one to create bi-directional communications from the client to the server without page refreshes"

0.0001% of the population: Wow!

Everybody else: *yawn*....what's a "page refresh"?

So in the course of all this, and what inspired this post, was MyLongTail.com which is self-described as "The first AJAX based system for Search Engine Optimization". Something I came across co-incidently during my foray into Ajax and which hammered my point home for me. MyLongtail seems to be along the same vein as MyBlogLog.com, in that they are both search engine keyword trackers and IMHO, offer a subset of something like Indextools, which uses the same approach of embedding javascript into the remote pages to collect data and has been around for years.

But I digress, so MyLongTail talks up it's Ajax-ness. If you look at their signup form, you really see a good application of Ajax in form validation. This in itself makes Ajax worth the price of admission because I can see this being a very effective means of providing less cumbersome form validation and probably drastically reduces form abandonment. Who wouldn't want that? Answer: nobody. Roughly the same number of people that would actually care that the technology that enables this is something called Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, a.k.a "AJAX".

In short, I don't see the point in trying to turn your tools into features. We use all kinds of various tools to provide our services and most of our customers couldn't care less what they are. They just want the box to go "Bing!" when they press the "Bing!" button and the rest is our problem.

It is beyond the scope of 99.9% of web users to even be aware of what Ajax is, and of the remainder, less care.

Obligatory mesh web 2.0 conference post

nospam@example.com (Mark Jeftovic) — Wed, 17 May 2006 09:54:24 -0400

I decided to attend the Mesh web 2.0 conference since it was taking place within walking distance of my place. I had better blog that now, since I brazenly left my laptop at home when I went (convention faux pas).

The question that I always have is what the hell is web 2.0 anyway? And how is it different from web 1.0?

There was a predictable mutual admiration club forming over blogs, tagging, social networking, RSS and communities. "100% authenticity" was being bandied about in a lot of overheard conversations.

Now that "web 2.0" is heating up as defined by a series of high profile aquisitions, it seems to me like web2.0 is really just "bubble v2". Another wave of start-ups whose business plan revolves around "social networks", "community driven", "100% authenticity"..."and then we get bought by Google or Yahoo". Sound familiar?

The "Does Web2.0 Need VC" panel with Rick Segal the celebrity blogstar VC from JLA Ventures and Jason Fried, of 37signals.com, the non-VC funded, profitable company from Chicago, was refreshing.

It was refreshing because both Jason and Rick recognized that profits and revenues count for something, and Rick's "Don't take VC if you don't need the money" was advice well received. Rick Segal, BTW, is one of the "good-guy" VC's in this world, and I've always had a very high opinion of JLA Ventures. I've also bought Jason Fried's Getting Real because I was impressed with what he had to say (don't take VC if you can help it, in today's market its more than doable to bootstrap your business, charge for your products/services, and you don't have to move to the Valley to be in the tech biz)

I remember the startup.com movie, where the guys were so smug and proud of their first round financing I remarked to my girlfriend (who is now my wife), "I think these guys have their first round financing confused with revenues."

Now that the whatever 2.0 bubble is in full force, there is a little bit of that circulating still and I am always grateful when a panel throws some cold water it.

I remember during tech-wreck 1.0, when companies were failing left, right and center, VC was drying up and shareholder value was evapourating by the billions, I got an email from somebody at RobTV asking me if I would be interested in appearing on a forthcoming "venture capital" episode, where I would have the opportunity to pitch the members of their VC panel to invest in easyDNS

I replied back with a different idea. How about instead of the same old "grovel for the VCs" I bring along 4 years of company financial statements demonstrating growing revenues and profits and the VCs can pitch me on why we should take their money and let them get their mitts into our profitable company?

I never heard back from them.

Negative blog posts: How not to handle them.

nospam@example.com (Mark Jeftovic) — Sat, 30 Jul 2005 13:02:41 -0400

Quick Boy's Movers became upset because of a negative comment posted about them on Joey DeVilla's weblog. The comment became the #2 result on Google for "Quick Boy's Movers" and they did not like this.

What should they have done?

Well they shouldn't have called Joey up, threatened to go over his head to his employer and made a lot of noise that he take the comment down. Now the whole saga has exploded into the blogosphere. When Corey blogs it on Boing Boing it's game over.

If you Google "Quick Boy's Movers" now, guess what comes up first? That's right. The entire Accordion Boy blog saga, complete with the threathening call from Quick Boy's and the shill posts on his blog.

So what should they have done, really?

They should have gone into their records for Jay Goldman, the original commenter, dug out his billing records, called him up, apologized. Bonus points for giving him a refund. Eat the loss and then the president or the owner of the company should have followed up with a comment of his own:

"We're very sorry that Jay Goldman and his girlfriend are unsatisfied with moving services provided. We have refunded his payment in full and have issued a formal apology. This kind of service is not indicative of our company and we strive to provide complete satisfaction. If anyone has any questions or concerns about our services or policies, please don't hesitate to call or email me at.....

You can bet that that would have been blogged as well.

If it were your company, which would one of these scenarios would you rather have come up on Google at #1 or 2 for your name? For Quick Boy Moving, the decision has been made and there is no putting this cat back in the bag.

And the most useless technology ever award goes to...

nospam@example.com (Mark Jeftovic) — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 16:31:48 -0400

Car Alarms.

I write this as I listen to one going off steady for about the last half hour. It brought back painful memories of my last apartment, on a residential street with lots of street parking for the local residents and there being about a half dozen repeat offender cars whose alarms were on a hair trigger. They would go off for no reason several times an hour, all day, every day.

In their most common form car alarms don't do anything to mitigate threats to your vehicle. They just piss people off. I wouldn't be surprised to find out they actually incite more instances of vandalism towards vehicles where they constantly go off for no reason than prevent a crime. (If this thing is still going half an hour from now, I will seriously consider dropping an old G3 out the window onto the damn thing's windshield).

Given the technology today, it can be done so much better. There are some systems that are better: silent, networked, tracking devices, GPS, etc. Yes, they can be circumvented but at least that's the car thief's problem. These ones are just goddamn ignored, and that's everybody's problem.

I would like to see a municipal bylaw that set fines for oversensitive car alarms. If one is going off for no reason you could just call the parking authority and they'd ticket the vehicle for noise pollution (or even better, tow the damn thing away).

SEO RIP

nospam@example.com (Mark Jeftovic) — Thu, 19 May 2005 11:38:26 -0400

The Preparing for the Death of the Link Based Algorithm on Threadwatch.org discusses a Death to Link Based Algorithms posting which prompted me to foward the links and my own observations to "SEOSteve".

SEOSteve's name has been changed to protect the paranoid: which is Steve himself. He's an SEO professional and a good friend of mine, lives down in the US. Big city. Great guy and a personal friend as long as we agree never to discuss politics.

SEOSteve is embarking on a very committed, in depth project which involves SE rankings. When he describes it to me I tell him he is f***ing crazy. Some times it's hard to get a word in edge-wise when I talk to him so it was hard to articulate why. So I finally managed to accompany the above links I forwarded him with the following thoughts:

Steve:

This thread talks about sustainable business models for SEO's and it hits what I've been trying to articulate for awhile: if your business model is held up by getting #1 thru 5 top organic search engine listings on some key terms, then your business model is flawed.

This is why I think you're nuts doing ...[SEO Steve's proprietary idea and tactics deleted for the benefit of the paranoid].

Because even if you're successful in attaining your goals you are still at the mercy of the next algorithm change or the next radical shift in the SE wars (i.e. somebody storms out of a garage and knocks Google off the top and uses completely different heuristics).

In any case, you're going out and doing a lot of work and not accomplishing much other than still being at somebody else's mercy, which kinda runs contrary to what people like you are all about. That's not why you build businesses.

It seems to me you could channel the same effort into building something that users would gravitate to which would cultivate linkpop and rep on its own inertia. The SE's will help speed the momentum as the process feeds back on itself, and it will not cripple you if they make a change.

Caveat: it may take longer.

Benefit: it'll last longer.

-mark