Not Yet Retitled

Failed experiment with Google Webfonts

2011-10-20T10:00:00.000-07:00

I've been implementing a new design for one of my websites, and my designer recommended using a couple of Google web fonts.

In the past, I've simply implemented custom fonts as images, which has the major disadvantage that changing the text requires creating a new image, and then tweaking the styling so that the new image fits the space available. (It has the minor disadvantage of requiring a new HTTP request and the download time of the image, but if you use CSS Sprites, you can remove that extra HTTP request.)

So, I decided to try the new web fonts. Google has largely solved the problem of acquiring the rights for new fonts, by requiring that any font in their library be licensed as open source. They are also happy to host the fonts for you, so that they're always available and download quite quickly. They even have beta support for a feature where you only download the images for the particular letters you're going to use -- if you only need 4 letters, why download an entire fontset?

Implementation is very simple -- the webfonts team has done an amazing job of making the process of selecting and implementing their fonts very intuitive.

But then I ran into a massive, deal-killing problem: Each user that visits your site will see a popup box (for each web font) that asks permission to download and install the font. Ouch! I can see why you might want that protection if you're installing a java applet or a Firefox plugin. But isn't installing a font-set more analogous to downloading an image than installing code?

The popup includes text that looks something like this:

Firefox wants to use the font "Oswald Regular"
This font is not installed. Allow Firefox to use this font?

Some subset of visitors (3%? 20%?) will see that warning and run screaming in the opposite direction.

So, I turn back to using images of words for this new design.

When might Google web fonts be acceptable? IMHO: Only if you have a captive set of users using your webapp that you can train to "Allow" their browser to install the font.

Update:

I have gotten a couple of comments on this post, so I thought I'd provide an update. I now think that this problem is limited to Mac users, and even then it happens only intermittently. (You can see other complaints about this problem by doing the following Google Search.)

I actually decided to go ahead and use Google's webfonts on the site I was working on. (Mac users make up a pretty small portion of my visitors (<2%) -- and they actually have a slightly lower bounce rate (about 1% lower) than Windows users.) I take that to mean that when they do encounter this problem, it doesn't scare them away at too high a rate.

Why does VPS.net Suck so Badly?

2011-06-14T14:29:00.000-07:00

I host FixItYourself.com with VPS.net. I pay more than $450 a year to host a blog that gets about 67 unique visitors per day. And it crashes every couple of weeks.

I have been hiring webhosting companies for more than 10 years, and I've worked with at least a dozen of them. VPS.net is the worst I've ever found.

And the kicker? Every time FixItYourself.com goes down, I have to pay VPS.net $10 to get it running again. What a beautiful business model they have! Not quite as attractive for their customers, though.

Great website for internet marketers concerned about media liability

2010-11-15T13:36:00.000-08:00

Quick note: if you publish websites you've probably wondered about your liability for content on your sites. If so, the Citizen Media Law Project has a great website with suggestions for privacy policies, terms of use and media liability insurance. The CMLP is associated with the Berkman Center, and I believe it's a non-profit.

An Amazing Trip to Ethiopia

2010-06-27T10:30:00.000-07:00

Ethiopia was the highlight of our trip. None of us had ever been to Africa before, and I can't imagine a more fascinating country to introduce us to the continent. It is a lush, beautiful, culturally rich country. The people are friendly and helpful. From its religious importance (the Ten Commandments are there) to its strange calendar, very different food or that coffee was discovered in Ethiopia, it is an unique country. We loved it!

Some trivia...
Ethiopia follows a different calendar than the rest of the world (Ge'ez calendar) so if you want to go back in time, there it is 2002! Their new year is September 11th each year.

Since, travel is primarily just an excuse for eating out, I should say something about Ethiopian food. There are two things you need to know about eating in Ethiopia: Number 1: there's no silverware -- you eat with your hands (actually, you right hand -- using your left hand is considered a major faux pax, as toilet paper is not widely used). Number 2: You eat everything by wrapping it in this spongy pancake called Injera. Love it (like most of us -- especially Mae) or tolerate it (like Wendy and Aidan). Either way, you're going to eat a lot of it.

Ethiopians don't eat much fish, and no pork, but they eat a lot of beef, goat and lamb. Meat is typically cooked into a spicy stew or "wat". On Wednesdays and Fridays Orthodox Christians eat "fasting food" like mashed beans, lentils, potatoes and cabbage (with injera).

Something else that you may already know but we did not is that coffee was discovered in Ethiopia, thank you so much! An observant goatherd named Kaldi noticed how excited and energetic his goats became after eating some interesting looking red berries. After a little experimenting... coffee!. And the coffee in Ethiopia is wonderful. There is a whole ceremony around the drinking of coffee that most Ethiopians perform up to three times a day. Incense is burned and the beans are roasted grinded with a mortar and pestle as part of the ceremony. After the coffee is ready, good and amazingly strong, it is served. Three cups of coffee are offered to each person, each time being diluted a bit more by additional water. Children may be offered the third round of coffee. We found, much to our dismay, that our children loved coffee in Ethiopia- Most likely because, even though it's black, it is served with lots of sugar).

They love Obama. There are Obama gas stations, Obama restaurants, Obama souvenir shops, t- shirts... I also saw two UNH t-shirts- One was a "Wildcat Lacrosse" shirt. He didn't understand why I wanted to take a picture unfortunately. I thought some of us would get a kick out it. (No BC shirts, Bob!)

We divided our trip into two parts: 8 days in the South and 8 days in the North -- somewhat at breakneck speed.

Southern Ethiopia

Traveling to the South was like stepping into the pages of National Geographic. We had an excellent guide named Mila. We flew from the capital to Arba Minch, the largest city in the South and from there we explored some amazing places and visited six different tribes near the Kenyan and Sudanese boarders. Though the pictures look like they can't be real, they are authentic. The tribes people we saw -- visited with, played patt-a-cake with, danced with -- they really dress and look like they do in these pictures in their everyday life. It wasn't a tourist thing. There is too much to say about each tribe, but we will try to hit on the highlights. A brief summary of most of the tribes we saw...

Erbore Tribe

Their cattle are their most important possession. The number of cattle shows their wealth. They also grow corn and sorghum.

In order for a man to be able to marry, he must kill a dangerous animal. To propose, the man sends four elder relatives to the woman's village/hut, carrying the intestines of four goats with them.

After the proposal of marriage is made and if the woman's family accepts the proposal, they indicate their approval by draping the intestines, one over each of the visitors. The man's family also offers about 100 goat and sheep and 30 cows to the woman's family. Marriages take place in the mornings and in this tribe, women are circumsized the afternoon of their wedding! Great wedding gift.

Hamer Tribe

They are mostly animists.

Before a man can marry here, he needs to successfully perform a Bull Jumping Ceremony. Thirty or so bulls are lined up and kept in a line, side by side. Naked and with his body painted, the young man has to run down the backs of the bulls without falling. If his succeeds, he needs to complete the task three more times. Then he will be considered a man and able to marry. If he doesn't succeed, he is mocked by the women of the village and needs to perform the ceremony another time. While the man is running down the backs of the bulls, his female relatives are whipped- the deeper the gashes, the more love they show for their young man.

The more earrings a man wears shows the number of wives he has. If a man kills a dangerous animal or an enemy (there is tribal fighting), he can decorate his hair with special red clay and an ostrich feather to show his special status in the community. A special pillow is used so he can keep this hair decoration (up to a year). We saw a Hamer man at a village market adorned this way.

Hamer women are known for their hair styles- making ringlets of ochre clay, water and resin in their hair to show status and health. First wives wear a special neck decoration and their clothes are pretty much goat, cow, sheep skin adorned with beads and shells. They also wear bracelets up and down their arms that have been made from old bullets.

This tribe is one of a couple that sadly believes in Mingi, the practice of abandoning babies and child seen as "unpure". This may be due to being born out of wedlock, being born to parents but before a special preparatory ceremony was performed, being born a twin or being born with small baby teeth. These children are drowned or left in the bush to die.

Bumi Tribe

Called "Elephant Eaters" (apparently an insult) and not well liked by the other tribes. Originally from Uganda, they found themselves in Ethiopia years ago following their lost cattle and ended up staying in Ethiopia. Now they live near the Omo River and are somewhat surrounded by enemies. They are known as fierce fighters.

On the day that we visited they were on alert. The men of the village were staying up at night as look outs because another tribe had accused them of stealing 1000 cattle. (They fight with the Hamer tribe among others.) While walking to the village through tall grass a small child surprised us by jumping out of the grass (he wanted to see the strange white kids). He got into big trouble with the elders who were not quite as impressed with surprise ambushes as we were. As these tribes are cut off from the world, we had no way of knowing that they were in the midst of troubles with other tribes that day. I was so happy to get out of the head-tall grass!

Women scar themselves for beauty in this tribe. Women also wear up to 40 pounds of beads on their necks. Men scarify also, but need to kill a dangerous animal or enemy first. The scars show the status of his new position in the community.

The women in this tribe danced and sang for us and eventually pulled Chris into their dance. He did a great job! (I even have a short video of it.) Sam and Charlie were great sports and allowed themselves to be pulled into the dance too.

Dasanech (Geleb) Tribe

Visiting the Bumi with the dancing and this tribe were my favorites. This tribe lives on the banks of the Omo River. When we got there we saw that sacks of something from USAID had just arrived. We saw that often in Ethiopia and not in India or any other country. It seemed strange because Ethiopia is a poor country but a proud, dignified country and it didn't feel poor, like India or Nepal did.

The Dasanech Tribe is animist but Christianity had been introduced. They read goat intestines to predict when rain will come and other events.

For a boy to enter manhood, he must kill an animal. That night, he needs to sleep away from the village and while he sleeps his father blesses him, sprinkling milk on him. After this the young man can do the special scarring on his chest and then he is considered a man and able to marry- Yet, to marry, the man also needs cattle and goats to give the brides family. Livestock shows wealth.

Both boys and girls are circumsized between 10-13.

I really enjoyed our time here because Mae and I, while waiting for our boat back across the Omo River, played Pat-a-Cake with the girls. It was so fun, so adorable. They really wanted to learn it and tried so hard. Mae was an awesome sport as they stroked her face, touched her hair. It was all very gentle and Mae was patient and kind and even enjoyed herself. When the boat came, the girls carried her away to the boat.

Man getting his head painted with red clay	Playing Pattycake

Mursi Tribe

Mursi are amazing body decorators. We saw some watchbands, bottle caps, old keys hanging off the decorated heads of the men and women- even corn cobs on a young girls head. In this tribe, the young girls have a slit in their bottom lip when they're young. Eventually, their bottom two front teeth are removed (how I don't know, scary) and a small clay disk is inserted. As the young woman grows, bigger and bigger lip plates are put in the lip, stretching the bottom lip. The plates can be as big as 8 inches. We were told it is done for beauty and wealth. Our guide also said that some believe that it was orginally done to mark the women so slave traders, looking for unblemished slaves, would pass them over.

This tribe and the Konzo Tribe see more travelers and it made me wonder about the continued practice of the lip plates. We were told that they tended to be aggressive and that we should hide anything shiny as they love to adorn themselves. Even our driver said that he had to watch the 4x4 and its hood ornament. I thought they were mellow- probably due to the fact that we found them much sooner than we thought, waking them up pretty much.

Konzo Tribe

This Tribe lives closer to mainstream Ethiopia, is easy to get to and has seen lots of travelers and missionaries. Thus, they are mostly Christian and wear Western clothes. Whereas many of the other tribes move around watching cattle or growing different crops, the Konzo seemed more stationary and established in one place. Their village looked like a Hobbit village. They have an initiation rock that young men must pick up and throw over their shoulders in order to be called a man and be able to be married. Chris gave it a shot -- I don't know whether our marriage is valid now...

Northern Ethiopia
Low blow. In my own defense, the rock was really heavy, and I was worried that I might hit some of the small children standing 20 feet behind me.

Our last day in the South was kind of interesting, as we drove for 10 hours to get back to Addis Ababa. It had rained the night before, and the road was flooded in several places. We stopped at one place for about an hour while a big tractor tried to remove a big truck that had gotten stuck in a river that flowed across the road. We eventually made it to our hotel, in time to go to bed, and leave at 8:00 the next morning to drive North!

Bahir Dar and Lake Tana

We drove another 10 hours the next day to a small city called Bahir Dar. It is on a beautiful lake called Lake Tana, which is dotted with a number of small islands, each of which has a 1000+ year old church, convent or monastery. Unfortunately, we lost the better part of an hour at a local bank in Bahir Dar. I stopped to do a cash advance on my debit card (pretty much the only way to get cash). Unfortunately, the banker tried to withdraw $51,000 from my account, rather than $1,500, resulting in a "DECLINED" message. I don't think he had ever done a cash advance before, and my bank was offline (shame on you TDBank!), so it took a while to figure out what had happened. Between the delay and our guide renting the slowest boat on the lake, we only got to see a 50-year old convent, rather than one of the more historical sights.

Gondar

So, enough about Bahir Dar! The next day we drove to Gondar, which we loved. The town is home to five or 6 16th and 17th century castles, and we spent a very pleasant morning touring the towers, passageways, saunas and lion cages! (Lions have always been a symbol of Ethiopia, so kings kept them in cages all the way up to the 20th century.)

There is also a really interesting (though small) castle called the Baths of Fasilides. King Fasilides essentially had a small castle built in the middle of a large swimming pool. Every year Gondarans gather for a festival called Timkat. Each of the 40 churches in town sends their replica of the Ark of the Covenant to the Baths, and the townspeople come to view them. Them the local bishop blesses the swimming pool. Preparing for this moment, children climb all the trees that overhang the pool, and once the water becomes holy water they jump from the trees and splash all the people from the town. It sounds like an amazing site.

Axum

When we left Gondar, we drove to stay at a lodge in the Simien Mountains. For most of the trip to the Simiens, I was underwhelmed. The landscape was not nearly as dramatic as I expected. However, as we rounded the corner to the lodge, the ground just sort of opened up beneath us -- it was beautiful. The star attraction, however, were the gelada baboons, which only live in the Simien Mountains in Ethiopia. They are also called "Bleeding Heart" baboons, and they're fascinating. They're vegetarian, ruled by women, and the males have a child-rearing role (once they're no longer the the strongest male in the family).

When we left the Simiens, we had yet another eternal drive (sensing a pattern here?) And we finally reached Axum. Ethiopians believe that the original Ark of the Covenant is stored in a Church in Axum. (The story goes something like this: There was a beautiful Ethiopian queen called the Queen of Sheba. She traveled to see Israel's wise King Solomon, who was smitten with her. Solomon asked her to share his bed, which she declined. So, he made her a deal -- he said that as long as she took nothing that was his, she could sleep on her own. That night, he served her spicy food, and then placed a bottle of wine next to her bed. She woke up part way through the night, and drank his wine. Therefore having taken something that was his, she bore him a child -- Menelik. She took Menelik back to Ethiopia, but when he was 20 he returned to Israel and stole the Ark of the Covenant (the 10 Commandments).

So, we visited the Church of Our Lady of Zion in Axum. It's a boxy little church, and foreigners have to stay about 20 yards away. Apparently one priest lives in the Church, and he's the only one allowed near the Ark.

Axum is also know for its Stelae -- large stone monuments to dead important people. The most impressive one is about 100 feet long (I say long instead of "high", because it apparently fell over hundreds of years ago as its builders were trying to stand it upright.) However, the I can't say that I was tremendously impressed with the stelae. (More interesting were the tombs underneath the stelae. It was very Indiana-Jones-esq.)

Lalibela

Finally our driving was over! We hopped a short Ethiopian Airlines flight from Axum to Lalibela, saying goodbye to our guide. 40 minutes later we landed in Lalibela -- which was my favorite of Ethiopia's historical sites. Lalibela is famous for its "rock-hewn" churches. That might seem sort of unexceptional, since many churches are made of stone. The difference is that the 11 churches is Lalibela were mostly carved from one single stone! The architects started at ground level and carved the roof of the church. Then over the period of 22 years they began to carve their way down towards the eventual "floor" of the church.

Even more fun (for the kids) is that the churches are connected by passageways and secret tunnels carved from the rock. Actually, I think a fantastic movie or video game could be made with Lalibela as the setting.

We took a day trip to a cave church about 25 miles from Lalibela. The church was unique in that it was built inside a cave, rather than being carved from the rock. Creepily, this cave had the bones of thousands of pilgrims who had come for a pilgrimage, and then decided to die there.

Ethiopia was a whirlwind, but Wendy and I both kept saying how it was the most interesting place that we've ever traveled. I think when we go back, we'll try to go a bit more slowly, and spend some time in each of a couple of different cities.

Postscript: Ethiopia gave us one last gift: Wendy has now pulled four parasites out of her left foot.

Miscellaneous Pictures:

These pictures are all candid -- people that we just saw coming out of the bush, walking down the road, being ostriches in a field, etc.

We have so many pictures of kids that we can't show you all of them. But children from 4 or 5 on are out all day on their own, herding the family livestock (goat and sheep for the littlest kids).

The firewood carriers are almost always women. They often walk 5-10 miles to collect firewood, and then they bring it home on their backs. The wood might almost weigh their weight.

The picture of the 3 men on the road was interesting, because they were sitting on the side of the road holding their guns, and they looked sort of scary. But when Wendy showed them their pictures these huge smiles broke out on their faces.

The two little sheep herders walking towards the camera could not understand that I was trying to take their picture. They had no concept of what I was doing, so I took their picture while slowly walking backwards, because they wouldn't stop!

Snapshots of India

2010-06-26T02:06:00.000-07:00

Wendy and I have always wanted to travel to India, but I've always been scared to go. Looking back, I'm really glad we went, and I was right to be scared. India's an amazing country and a feast for the eyes, but it's also completely exhausting. This post starts with some of our overall impressions, and then I'll talk about some of the towns that we visited.

Amazing Sights

You can't go to India without seeing the Taj Mahal. Construction began in 1632 when Emperor Shah Jahan commissioned the building as a monument to his favorite wife (who had died the year before giving birth to their 14th child.) It was beautiful and perfect, but the town that surrounds it is squalid, with open gutters and garbage everywhere.

Beyond the monuments and 1,000 year-old forts, everyday life in India is a spectacle. The women dress in beautifully colorful saris -- even when they're working in the fields. There are 20 different sorts of vehicles on any given road, all moving in different directions. I think you could learn a lot about India just by sitting in a coffee shop and watching people go by for an afternoon.

Shopping

There's no question -- the shopping in India was amazing. You could buy funky, beautiful clothing, religious statues, knives, books, food, cell phones, knock-off designer goods and spices. But, there's a huge downside: every interaction is a negotiation. Hard bargaining is fun the first few times, but after a while it's exhausting. And remember, you're bargaining not only for clothes and memorabilia, but for bottles of water, taxi rides, food on the street, books in a book stall. Everything. And, you're from a wealthy country and you have no idea what the actual cost of a product should be. The one constant is that it probably cost a lot less than you think. Shopkeepers will swear up and down that there's no way a hand-embroidered shirt could cost less than $2 -- how could someone work for that little? But, in the end, they'll follow you down the street and sell it at a profit for $.75.

Scams abound -- everyone has an angle to take your money -- some are obvious, some subtle. Without exagerating, I can say that almost every interaction felt like the other person was trying to take money from us. A Hindu priest in one of the holiest towns in India (Pushkar) kept pushing us to donate $200 - $300 in return for the blessing he gave us. I gave him $2.50, and he kept pushing.

The Food!

Indian food is second to none, in my humble opinion. From "Family Size" dosas (a South Indian food featuring a big 4-foot-long crunchy crepe-like thing) to North Indian curries, raita and garlic naan -- we ate amazingly well!

Homelessness

Tens of thousands (millions?) of people live in the street. Highway underpasses are covered with small children, entire families, single men that sleep anywhere they can find space. I've never seen a place with so much poverty, right out and in your face. Ethiopia, for example, is much "poorer" than India -- but we only saw a handful of people living on the street in Ethiopia.

Transportation

I've never been to a country where I'd be more afraid to drive. Cars mix with tuk-tuks (little 3-wheeled motorized taxis), bicycle rickshaws, buses, camels pulling carts, horses pulling cars, and sacred cows wandering everywhere. Cars will drive on any side of the road, in whatever direction gets them to where they want to go. Beggars will walk, hop and drag themselves to your car at every intersection. You'll see three year old children walking on 4 lane highways, with no adults around to look out for them.

We took a 19-hour overnight train ride from Jaisalmer in the West to Delhi in 120 degree tempatures. However, the only seats available were in fan-cooled (rather than air-conditioned) compartments. (Despite the poverty, everyone paid for A/C.) That has become the single most difficult -- though memorable -- trip of my life.

The dust on the train was amazing -- over the first few hours it literally covered everything. Aside from the dust and the heat, there was the culture shock. We bought assigned seats that converted to beds. However, unbeknownst to us, assigned seats are only assigned (private) from 6:00 pm - 6:00 am. The next morning as we began to approach Delhi, the train began to swarm with passengers, all who wanted to sit in our seats. People were various levels of polite and rude, but it was quite clear that they wanted our seats. In fact, our six seats were shared with (at times) 12 additional people.

And check out the plumbing system -- guess where this train toilet empties?

Itinerary

We took a "classic" tour around North India -- starting in Delhi, then heading Southeast to Agra to see the Taj Mahal, then turning West towards the state of Rajasthan. Our final destination (before returning to Delhi) was Jaisalmer, where we wanted to ride camels. The heat in Rajasthan was incredible -- temperatures were as low as 110 degrees F by noon, and ranged up to 120 degrees every day! (Luckily, it was a dry, desert heat, which mean that we didn't turn into six spontaneous Brooks puddles.)

Jaipur

Our first stop after the Taj was Jaipur. This was one of my favorite cities in India -- it had great clothing markets, a great hotel (the Hotel Pearl Palace), and interesting historical sites. We took a 2-hour tuk-tuk ride around the city and got to feed monkeys (and some very persistent cows) at Jaipur's Monkey Temple.

Pushkar

Pushkar is one of the holiest sites in India, and home to one of the few Brahma temples in the world. People travel from around the country to bathe in its holy lake -- which, unfortunately, has largely dried up due to global warming. Some of Ghandi's ashes were spread in Pushkar, and it is one of the quieter towns that we visited.

Jaisalmer

We saw a 1000 year old fort in Jaisalmer with 99 turrets. Inside was a maharaja's palace that launched 3 jauhars -- the ritual burning alive of all the royal women so that the men could go out and die in battle when faced with certain defeat.

We also finally rode camels! We saw the sun set across the dunes 25 miles from Pakistan.

Other Cool and Interesting Things

The Blue City of Jodhpur	This one's for you, Amy M!
Yep, that's a dead body on the street, and nobody cared.	The new sign I'm going to post outside my home office
Pakistan -- go that way, 25 miles	Views from Jaisalmer Fort
The only King Cobra we saw in India

One week in Kathmandu

2010-06-13T15:20:00.000-07:00

We had a whirlwind tour of Nepal. The night before we left Tibet, we heard that all buses in Nepal had been shut down because of a strike. Maoists from the countryside had set up checkpoints on all the roads around the country, and were beating people that refused to respect the strike. (Like, umm, bus-drivers!)

So, we weren't really sure what we'd find as we took our bus from the Tibetan border 3 hours to Kathmandu. (We found out that vehicles carrying foreign tourists were being allowed to pass.) We started hitting roadblocks about half an hour after the border. The first roadblocks were set up by the police. In fact, at about 10:30 in the morning we were told that we would not be able to continue on until 6:00 pm that night. (Apparently the angry mobs wouldn't see our white faces as easily at night, so we would be safer.) No amount of parading around with our kids convinced the policy officers that they should let us pass.

However, as the second and third tourist buses arrived, the officers saw that they would have a logistical nightmare on there hands with hundreds of bored Westerners. So, they decided to give us an "escort" past the screaming hordes of protesters. They stopped a passing sedan traveling in the opposite direction, and three police officers with bamboo sticks nervously piled in. We soon found the source of the trouble -- six young men chanting (and waving to us) on the side of the road. A mile or so later, our escort pulled over and we drove on.

As we approached Kathmandu, there were thousands of people on the streets, just walking from place to place. Soldiers in full riot gear relaxed near smiling Maoist strikers. The only cars on the streets said either "Tourists Only", "UN" or "Hospital".

In full Brooks' style, we didn't actually know where we were going to stay once we reached Nepal. There were 5 or 6 other people in the bus with us, and they were headed for the Radisson. Nothing, of course, could make us stay in such an
upscale hotel -- we like to rough it. (Nothing, -- until we discovered that the rooms included a breakfast buffet, and the hotel had an "Olive Garden".) Then, of course, we did it -- "for the kids".

The biggest effect of the strike (at least for us) was that there were no services available in the town. The only way to find restaurants that were open was word of mouth -- people would tell you which restaurants were serving, and how to get to their back doors (usually through the kitchen.) The few restaurants that remained clandestinely open had to be careful -- a couple of restaurants were destroyed by Maoists for ignoring the strike.

The next day we rushed to the Indian Embassy, applied for a tourist visa and bought our plane tickets to Delhi. This was apparently what the Maoists were waiting for, as they immediately cancelled their strike.

Things we managed to see while waiting for our visas to India

Tourist Central

Once the Maoists packed up their sticks and went home, we moved from the Radisson to the Kathmandu Guest House. KGH is backpacker heaven or hell, depending on how you see it, and -- for bonus points -- they had 4 kittens on the grounds. We also ran into Mel, Tony and Bebe -- our new friends that we had met in Tibet.

Being in the heart of grungy, exciting, chaotic Kathmandu also introduced us to our first street children. They come to the tourist areas because tourists pack lots of cash and aren't very good at saying "no". We met several Westerners that offered to take us to orphanages so that we could sponsor a child. (We later learned that -- much like in other sales-oriented businesses -- such a referral earned the Westerner 50% of the donation.) And, speaking of scams, we learned plenty of them. Suffice it to say that if someone tells you that "Concord" is the capital of New Hampshire within 12 seconds of meeting you, a request for money is coming.

My favorite was the 20 year-old who told me the capital of my state, explained that he had AIDS, but his son didn't, and then tried to pull the "milk scam" -- "I don't want money, can you just buy me some (overpriced) milk at that store over there so that I can return it and pocket the difference?")

Buddhist and Hindu Sites

Monkey Temple (Swayambunath): a Buddist temple on a hill above Kathmandu. The temple featured great views, and a monkey that tried to rip a necklace off Charlie's neck.

Durbar Square: Home to the Hippy Temple and stone carvings that make up Nepal's contribution to the Karma Sutra
The House of the Living Goddess (Kumari Ghar): The Kumari is a living goddess -- she is chosen when the previous Kumari reaches the ripe old age of about 13 (or when she gets her period), and must meet all sorts of divine criteria to be selected. Goddesses don't have that appealing of a life -- the Kumari is only allowed to leave her temple home a couple of times a year.
Pashupatina : a Hindu pilgrimage site, that includes a temple, caves for holy men, and platforms (Ghatts) to burn the bodies of deceased loved ones. This site really deserved more than the hour we had for it.
Sadus: Hindu holy men from Nepal and India. Very interesting to look at, painted white and yellow.

Kathmandu was a strange time in our trip, with the strike and traveling with our four kids. There's tons to see there, and someday we'd like to go back and do it justice. (And maybe visit the Lazy Gringo Mexican restaurant again.) ;-)

Genuine Holy Man -- or just a Character Actor?

Maoists in Action During the Strike

The Fam

Body Burning on a Ghat in Pashupatina

Hippies and (fake) Sadhus

Widows that live on donations at Pashupatina

Waving goodbye to Kathmandu at the (extremely security conscious) Kathmandu Airport

Traveling in Tibet

2010-06-01T10:15:00.000-07:00

Potala Palace

Traveling in Tibet is a different beast than any other type of traveling that we've done. China began occupying Tibet in the early 1950s, and it's clear that the occupation is still unwelcome. At least in theory, foreigners can't travel in Tibet with just a Chinese tourist visa. They must also get a Tibet Travel permit -- and only travel agents can arrange the special travel permits. So, the upshot is that you need to get a travel agent to arrange a tour for you -- no way to easily backpack and simply move from city to city.

Pilgrims walking Cora around Jokhran Temple

Our first full day in Lhasa, we went to the Potala Palace ticket office, and registered to tour the palace the next day. Our first night we had slept in a hotel in the Chinese part of Lhasa. While it was a perfectly nice hotel, it didn't feel like "Tibet", and so we moved to the Mandala hotel which is half a block away from the Jokhang Temple -- one of the holiest in Tibet.

Buddhists walking Cora

This was the perfect vantage point to see real Tibetans. Thousands of Tibetan Buddhists walk Cora every day -- a clockwise procession around Jokhang Temple and the surrounding buildings. Jokhang Temple is a once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage for many Tibetans, and many spend all day prostrating themselves in front of the temple's doors. (In fact, on the roads driving around Lhasa, we saw people that spent up to a year traveling from remote parts of Tibet, walking a few steps, then prostrating themselves on the ground. Then walking a few more steps, and prostrating themselves. Amazing!)

For us, the people walking the Cora showed the best and the worst of the situation with China. The rural Tibetans were amazed at our four children, and they couldn't stop smiling, talking about them, touching them, and saying "Namaste" ("Hello").

For many of them, Lhasa might have been their first time ever seeing someone from outside of China, and then to see 4 white children -- probably shocking. (I should mention that the rural Tibetans were amazing to see -- we just wanted to smile at them and say "hi" -- it felt like we were transported into the pages of National Geographic. We even had a couple of Tibetan monks with cell phones who were taking pictures of our kids -- though most of the pilgrims were way too poor to have a camera.)

However, the police do not want Tibetans talking with foreigners, and by the second day, we had a police escort whenever we walked near Jokhran Temple. As soon as people would start to smile and come towards us, the police would wave them away. (We were able to evade the police a couple of times, but not for more than a couple of minutes.)
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While our first two weeks in China left us with a very positive impression of the Chinese, our few days in Tibet made it very clear that the Chinese occupation was completely unwanted by the Tibetans. It also made it clear how poorly the Tibetans are treated, and how paranoid the Chinese are. (For example, when we crossed the land border into Nepal at the end of our trip, soldiers went through our bags very carefully, removing travel books, and ripping out pages that referred to the Dalai Lama.)

Other impressions of China's occupation: there's a tremendous amount of economic development -- but it's coming at the expense of the Tibetan cultural sites. Tibetan buildings are being ripped down and replaced with modern concrete apartment buildings. (One Tibetan we spoke with was evicted from her apartment so that China could tear it down and put another in its place. They were supposed to get a stipend to rent a new place, but the government never sent the money.) The Tibetan architecture is beautiful, but disappearing quickly.

Beautiful Hillside Monastery about 1.5 Hours Outside Lhasa

Signs in Tibet have locations in both Chinese and Tibetan, but the Chinese letters are much larger -- and some signs have no Tibetan at all. (And many Tibetans can't read Chinese.)

Brooks Kids walking a non-traditional Cora around said Monastery

China also actively encourages Han Chinese citizens to move from mainland China to Tibet, apparently to ensure that native Tibetans are not a majority in their own country.

There were police photographers posted on the roof of our hotel, presumably to photograph people that might be trying to assemble without permission. And there were soldiers with rifles on the roofs of many neighboring buildings.

Our time in Lhasa was truly eye-opening, and left us feeling a little less positively towards China.

After Lhasa

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After 4 or 5 days in Lhasa, we climbed into our trusty bus with our guide, driver, and 5 other fellow travelers, and headed out to start our trip to Everest Base Camp and our trip overland to Nepal.

Did I mention that Tibet is really high up? The night before we left, we bought 6 canisters of Oxygen, and as we left Lhasa we pretty quickly climbed from about 3500 meters to 5200 meters. ("Quickly" is perhaps an overstatement, given that we were traveling in an 18-passenger bus. However, we did begin climbing almost immediately, and reached 5200 meters within a few hours.)

Altitude Mountain Sickness (AMS) is real, and noticeable at about 3,000 meters. You get out of breath quickly, get dizzy, develop headaches, and can have a hard time sleeping. And that's if you climb slowly. Go too fast, and you can drop dead. (Our guide recommended against that.)

On the first day after Lhasa, we encountered a number of the indigenous animals. Charlie and Mae quickly managed to wrestle some of the more ferocious beasts into line.

We then continued on, visiting monasteries, forts, the odd buffet, and people's houses.

People we Met	Tibetan Prayer Flags and a Fort

	Typical Tibetan House -- Yak Dung Stored on Fence
Tibetan Famer	Pack Yaks (yep, they really use them)

But, for me (Chris) at least, the highlight was seeing Mount Everest. Here's a completely spontaneous, non-posed, candid photo of our family when we first saw Everest.

Our First Glimpse of Everest (we weren't oxygen deprived at all!)

Everest really was in the background there -- you could see it in person. We then took a slight detour to see the summit of Mount Blue Job.

Peak of Mt Blue Job on a Clear Day ;-)

Our bus then spent hours laboring up a winding dirt / gravel road to get to Everest Base Camp. It was a stomach churning, though beautiful ride. After about 3 years, we arrived at a series of "tea house tents" that sit 4 km away from Everest Base Camp.

Our Teahouse Tent at EBC

Not to mention, the world's highest post office.

World's Highest Post Office

The view was amazing. The next morning, Wendy and I slipped out at 6:00 am to catch the sunrise the next morning.

Wendy at Sunrise at EBC

And then, we headed to Everest Base Camp. This is where the expeditions that are climbing from the Tibet side spend a week or two acclimating to the height. (You can see the tents in the background of these pictures.) We met one climber -- he looked exhausted. He had 4 days before they began their ascent proper, and he was spending his days climbing up 1,000 meters, and then coming back down to base camp.

The morning after sleeping below Everest Base Camp in Tibet

Mt. Qumolang = Mt. Everest. Really

The Brooks Brothers at Everest Base Camp

Mae sucking down some Oxygen (We all got sick)

Everest Base Camp was our 7th day in Tibet. After that, we re-boarded the bus, and headed to the border with Nepal. That was an experience in itself -- the last 30 kilometers must drop 2,000 meters, and the road barely hangs on the the side of the most amazing cliffs that I've ever seen. The driver was (in my opinion) driving like an idiot -- way to fast on a one-way road around blind corners, and simply slamming on his brakes to slow down. Finally, one of our fellow passengers (thanks Antony!) asked the driver to stop so that he could take a picture. It immediately became obvious that something was wrong with the brakes when we got out -- there was a strong smell and the tires were smoking! So, the photo opp became a half-hour wait while the driver hauled water from a nearby stream to bathe the brakes.

We did that twice more on the way down, and the driver still ended up crashing into the guardrail and bashing up the side of the bus. By the end, we were all telling the driver to slow down. One of the scariest trips in a wheeled vehicle in my entire life.

Guilin -- Southern China

2010-05-15T10:14:00.000-07:00

Since we last wrote in the blog, we left China & Tibet, had a brief pit stop in Nepal (brief because we seem to cause political unrest everywhere we go) and are now in India. Here's a bit of our adventures in Southern China in a region known as Guilin. We hadn't planned to go to Guilin at all, but our innkeeper in Beijing convinced us that the landscape was so beautiful that we had to see it.

Rafting down the Yulong River

Hiking in the beautiful karst mountains

These pictures don't really do the mountains justice, because we didn't have a blue sky to pose them against.

Our week in Guilin was wonderful -- we met a great family that were the Innkeepers at our guesthouse in Yangshou. They were inspirational in terms of the amount of travel that they had done with their kids (hi Michael and Nadine!) All the kids got along great, and nearly buried themselves in a little tunnel.

Highlights included river rafting, caving and traditional Chinese fans that Wendy and the kids made.

And, not to be forgotten, I also got a little schooling in how to tell time, military style.... 20:15 doesn't mean 10:15 pm, no matter how forcefully you try to explain to the airlines that it does. This also gave us the opportunity to sample the beds in a complete dump of an airport hotel, as we awaited our rescheduled (and more expensive) flight the next morning. (We also got to try sleeping 3 of us in each twin bed, along with innumerable bedbugs.)

...

The next day: Xi'an, China and the Terracotta Warriors.

Back in the 1970s, a farmer was digging a well on his land, when, to his chagrin, he hit pottery rather than water. It turns out that the first Chinese emperor, Qin Shi Huang, wanted to ensure that he would have a powerful army in the afterlife. So he had 8,000 life-sized terracotta warriors built and buried. The emperor was a charming guy -- he had tens of thousands of "unpaid laborers" build his tomb, and then had them killed to maintain the secret of what they had built. The warriors were amazing to see.

After seeing the warriors, we spent an amazing evening in the Muslim quarter of Xi'an, sampling street food and seeing a traditional Chinese puppet show.

And then we were off and waiting for our train to Tibet!
And this is how we spent the next 37 hours on the train:
(And here's a lovely shot of Wendy in the throes of altitude sickness -- we found out quickly that altitude sickness _is_ something to be taken very seriously. The train even pumped in oxygen as we crossed 5,000+ meter peaks -- but it wasn't enough for Wendy!)

A Week in Beijing

2010-04-24T01:12:00.001-07:00

Kids in the Forbidden City

After the chaos of leaving Bangkok, we caught an easy flight to Kuala Lumpur. Two hours later, we arrived in a very new airport, and rented a hotel room in the terminal for 7 hours. The next morning we visited the airport Starbucks -- don't judge us, we were in a Muslim country, and we really wanted coffee. Addiction is rarely pretty.

Wendy and kids in the Forbidden City

The flight from Malaysia to Beijing was uneventful, and, after haggling with two taxi drivers, we managed to get a ride to our hostel at only twice the price we had anticipated. One thing struck us immediately -- Beijing in mid-April is cold! But, what is cold but an excuse to hit Silk Street? (A hagglers' paradise, full of knock-off brand name jackets, watches and clothes.) The sellers have perfected the art of haggling, reducing Charlie to tears at one point, and dragging Aidan to the floor as he attempted to resist their efforts to spread Capitalism. Well armed with 6 new intellectual property-infringing jackets, we hit the Streets to see the great sites of China.

Brooks kids on the Great Wall

The high point of our week in Beijing was walking a 10 kilometer section of the Great Wall. We caught a bus at 6:00 am and took a 3-hour ride to Jinshanling. The kids were real troopers -- parts of the wall were very rough, and extremely hilly. 4.5 hours later, we reached Simatai, where we dismounted the wall the way the Chinese did 1,000 years -- by zipline. Okay, in reality the zipline is not actually on the wall, but close.

Chinese Soldier kidnaps small child

The next day, we went to the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square. The Forbidden City was the imperial palace for the Ming and Qing dynasties for about 500 years, and it was amazing. Apparently some members of the royal families lived their entire lives without leaving the palace grounds. The funniest part of the day was that probably 30 different Chinese tourists wanted to have their pictures taken with our children. They would literally stand in line, and have their pictures taken one after another. The kids were quite patient with it, at least in the beginning.

Another cultural experience was a visit to the Chinese Acrobats in Beijing. Actually, we tried to go our first night, and kept having travel difficulties. It wasn't until our 4th attempt that we made it successfully. The acrobats did all the tricks that any self-respecting gravity-defying pretzel might do. Except that they did them in groups, stacked on top of each other, occasionally using spears and motorcycles. Needless to say, the kids were impressed, and my neck was sore.

Brooks kids invade Tiananmen Square

In a nutshell, we really liked Beijing. It was a very comfortable city, despite (or maybe because of) the fact that few people spoke English. Nobody approached us on the street and tried to sell us anything. In fact, people would come up to us and start talking full-speed in Chinese, assuming that -- of course -- we understood them. I can't tell you how many people counted the number of children that we have on their fingers and then gave us a big thumbs-up.

Alternative Transportation	Charlie eating Snake
Tea Ceremony at our Guesthouse

Missing images

2010-04-17T06:09:00.000-07:00

Careful readers (as of course, all of you are) will have noticed a couple of cryptic messages in that last post where you might have expected images. Here are the two missing images:

[insert image 1726]

[insert image 1608]

Wrapping up our first month in Northern Thailand

2010-04-09T03:04:00.000-07:00

So, we're back in Bangkok at our favorite guesthouse, all of us camped out in our room which has wifi and air conditioning. We arrived here at about 1:30 am this morning, after a day of travel, and tomorrow night we head to Beijing. So, it seems like a good time to talk about the last two weeks.

When I last wrote, we were a few days into our time in Chiang Mai, and getting ready to head to the Elephant Nature Park. Monday morning, we packed up our gear, scrambled to find some bug spray and a couple of towels, and hopped into a minivan to spend a week volunteering to help elephants. Wow, is all I can say. It was a really interesting experience.

[insert image 1726]
The elephants all had crazy stories. The one that Mae was touching in this picture was blinded in both eyes by it's handler (its "mahout"). As a result, it was a little bit dangerous to be around. Not because it was aggressive, but because it used its trunk to "feel" its way through life, and you could get whacked accidentally.

[insert image 1608]
After getting introduced and feeding a few elephants, we gave them a bath. Luckily for us, elephants really like the water. Unluckily for me, my kids enjoyed splashing me as much as the critters.

Wendy then decided to make out with an elephant named "Hope". Hope's mother had died when he was a few months old, and local villagers found him wedged between two trees.

Speaking of baby elephants, they're really cute, given that they weigh almost as much as our minivan. There were "only" two babies at the elephant park. Here they're wrestling together.

The kids did a wonderful job -- the other volunteers repeatedly complimented them on their behavior and how hard they worked. On the last day during the wrap-up, one of the volunteers stood up and said to the whole group that she had volunteered for years all around the world and that she had never seen... (at this point I was expecting her to say that she had never seen such a well-organized animal refuge or volunteer program...) such well-behaved and hard-working children.

While at the camp we saw several videos about how elephants are trained. It's a very abusive process, that starts with something called "Phajaan". Young elephants of 3 to 4 years old are strapped into a small pen for days, and beaten, stabbed, and kept off balance to break their spirit. Later, as they learn more specialized skills, they are hit with hooks in their ears and skin to train them.

This made programs like the Elephant Nature Park more amazing -- they also work to train elephants, but only through rewards. (Unfortunately, this also meant that we probably aren't going to ride elephants -- something we had been excited to do.) On the other hand, we spent hours bathing the elephants in the river -- not to mention swimming and tubing.

Further North into Thailand

After returning from the Elephant Camp, we went three hours North to the town of Pai. (It was supposed to be three hours North. However, we rented a car without a map, and accepted directions from an extremely helpful -- and even more clueless -- person, who sent us on a seven hour drive along the scenic dirt road (pictured to the right) in the golden triangle. Wendy was convinced that we were going to be "disappeared" by gun-toting opium farmers. It took a mango smoothy in Pai to get life back to normal.)

We stayed in a treehouse (cleverly named the Pai Treehouse) situated about 30 feet up an amazingly healthy tree. We rented a couple of motorbikes, and scooted to a natural hot springs about 8km outside of Pai (taking care to drive around the clumsy farang (foreigners) that had crashed their motorbikes, leaving them with odd limps, and larger bandages.)

Saying a temporary Goodbye to Thailand

Things got ugly in Bangkok around April 10th (ironically the day we were scheduled to fly to China). 21 people were killed that day in clashes between soldiers and red shirts. It was crazy: the area we were in was in complete gridlock, there were helicopters circling around, and you could here gunshots. Everyone was glued to their televisions.

We had a 7:40 pm flight out of the city last night and had hired a driver who was supposed to arrive at 5:00 to drive us to the airport. At 4:00, he called and said that he couldn't get through the traffic. So we loaded up our backpacks and hiked to the river. From there we took a boat about 2 miles south, where we flagged down a taxi, and made it to our flight with about 20 minutes to spare. In the end it worked out fine, but we weren't sure we were going to make the flight for a while!

But, then the flight was easy. We stayed overnight in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia -- we rented a room for 7 hours, so we got some sleep. And the next morning we flew to Beijing.

Had a hilarious time trying to eat in China for the first time. No one here seems to speak English (at least in the restaurants, unlike in Thailand.) And we had no idea how to eat! They gave us chopsticks on these tiny 3-inch round plates, then brought out central platters of rice, veggies, meat, etc. We sort of scooped it onto the little plates, but we felt completely over our heads. Other people were stopping at our table and laughing (nicely) at us. Eventually we figured out that we should just eat directly from the communal bowls.

And that's it for now! Our computer battery is almost dead, and it's pushing 11:00 pm, so bedtime!

Update from Thailand

2010-03-25T08:35:00.000-07:00

Hi from Thailand,

Thailand is so beautiful and friendly. I can't say enough how friendly the people are here. The folks at our guesthouse love our kids and it's so peaceful in the sitting and garden area. They have two gentle rabbits that hop around the garden that the kids play with constantly when we are here. Except for one day when we stayed here all day, we have been sight seeing during the afternoon and at our guest house in the late afternoon. We stayed here all day one day because of the "red shirt" demonstrations (an anti-govt group wanting to change the ruling party. We all took a Thai cooking class and it was so cool because the kids were as involved, if not more involved than we were- grating coconuts, cutting veggies, making coconut milk for the curry.... They dressed Mae and Charlie and Sam up in traditional Thai clothes for fun that day too. (Aidan would have none of it.) So cute.

..... (About a week later....) Since the above was written, we have moved on to a few more places- Lopburi, Sukathai and Chiang Mai in the north. Lopburi is a regular,not particularly touristy Thai town that has monkeys EVERYWHERE- all over the telephone polls,in the middle of the road, all over the sidewalk, sitting in wait on top of a phone booth outside a little store ready to steal your bag of food...

We next went to amazing Buddhist and some old Hindu ruins, biking around them one day. We have met and got to talk with a Buddhist monk at a temple and today we saw elephants, beautiful waterfalls and poisonous snakes. (We all held a python!)

Next week we have signed on to volunteer at an elephant protection center for the week. We will stay there and all help take care of the elephants. As I understand it, about 2000 elephants in Thailand have been "domesticated" having worked in the logging industry. But now because less forests are being deforested (: the elephants and their handlers don't have work and some animals go to these rescue centers.

After the elephant preserve it's back to Bangkok and April 10th we fly to Beijing!!!!

Sorry for the long note. I am trying to be a better emailer.

I hope spring is beautifully green in Durham (and elsewhere!)

Sa wa di kaa,
Wendy

Just a quick update from the "bald is beautiful" side of the family. (Actually, I'm not as bald as I'd like to be. The 3rd day in Thailand, I plugged in my hair clippers, and shaved half my head before the clippers decided that they really were designed for 120 volts of electricity instead of the 220 volt stuff they use here. I then tried to find a replacement, but only managed to find a guy that re-wound the coil in the center of the clippers, so that I could continue to use them. However, in the absence of a voltage converter, I've been afraid to try again.)

I should mention the food, seeing as that was one of the main reasons for coming. The Thai food here is quite good, but they make it a bit spicy for my taste. Green curry seems to be the spiciest, with red curry and Panang curry being more palatable (with sugar). The pad thai is consistently good, and tom kha gai has been inconsistent, but I've had some of the best I've ever eaten.

Chiang Mai -- where we currently are -- has a wonderful variety of food, which is particularly convenient because after 10 days of nothing but Thai food, I have gotten a wee bit -- err -- sick of it. We found a great tex-mex place (eaten there twice) and an excellent Mediterranean place as well. Lest you think we do nothing but eat, we have also managed to stay pretty faithful to working / homeschooling twice a week.

We haven't met many Americans here -- which seems surprising. There are lots of Japanese and European tourists around. We haven't really met many friendly tourists though, not sure if that's because many of them are here for "illicit" activities and the kids make them feel guilty, or if the friendly folks just hang out in the South of Thailand. We shall see!

That's it for now. I hope Spring is treating you well, and we'll talk with you soon!

And now, I've gotten lazy about embedding images, so I'm just going to import the rest of them here.

Beginning to experiment with Video

2010-02-03T14:41:00.000-08:00

So, the word is out, video consumption online tripled in 2009, Google says video is "where it's at", ad revenues begin to creep up. What's a text guy to do? Starting small, trying to grok video.

Here's one of my early attempts: Sh*t Happens.

Investing in Assets to Boost Organic SEO

2009-12-16T05:45:00.000-08:00

Frequent reader of this blog (Hi Mom!) will know that I place a lot of value on domain names. In Decembers past, I have made end-of-tax-year "big-ticket" (ie low 4-figure) domain name purchases. This year is different. That's partly because 3 sales I pursued fell through (1 person wanted $200k for a domain that I was willing to pay $1500 for; Sedo had another domain listed, but it turned out that the person listing it had already to sold it to someone else; and Rick Latona advertised a name in "Daily Domains", but it turns out that they didn't bother to check whether the person selling it actually owned it.)

But there's a bigger trend going on. Despite some really large domain sales this year, domains as an asset class have substantially declined in value. The biggest factor is Google's decision to dramatically cut payments for parked traffic. Perhaps that was a strategic decision on Google's part -- they certainly have no interest in propping up the business models of (competing) type-in traffic or spammy "made-for-adsense" companies. Perhaps it simply reflects advertisers taking advantage of the ability to segment parked traffic out from search traffic, and deciding that search traffic is more valuable. Either way, it's harder to justify buying domains when the opportunity to earn parking revenue has evaporated.

A second factor is that (at least from the tests that I've run) "mini-sites" are a complete and utter failure. I purchased 3 mini-sites from AEIOU in 2008 (Ski-Hats.com, Cross-Country-Skis.com and Landscape-Designer.com), promoted them for several months in 2009, and then watched to see what happened. The answer, unfortunately, was "nothing". When AEIOU announced that they were no longer supporting this business, I gave the Ski-Hats.com domain to SkiHats.com, moved Cross-Country-Skis.com to my own server, and I still haven't figured out what to do with Landscape-Designer.com.

Where does that leave domain investing? It seems to me that there are really only two options left -- "buying to flip" (at which I have failed repeatedly and miserably) and building domains into real businesses. While I am a big fan of the latter strategy, it doesn't scale! Buying a new domain name makes your job harder instead of easier -- you now have to develop content, functionality and links for more sites! So, at least in the short term, you're worse off than you were before you bought the latest domain.

Domain owners: wake up! Unless you have a truly premium domain, it lost half of its value in 2009, and will lose more in 2010. End users have less money to spend, and fewer ways to make money on the domains that they do buy.

Domain buyers: wake up! There are higher value assets to buy for organic SEO than domains. Invest your money in real content, real functionality, better business relationships, and assets that make it easier to attract editorially-chosen links. Although these assets are more difficult to manage than domains, they are (much!) more valuable.

More signals from Google that Page Load time will affect SERPs

2009-12-03T08:32:00.000-08:00

Just a quick note -- there are a couple of recent signals that Google will start to use site response times to affect how well you rank in their search results in 2010.

The first is found in a summary of a recent PubCon session with Matt Cutts:

He [Matt Cutts] hints that people at Google really want to use site speed as a factor in rankings. They’re not using it right now, but they want to be. They want search to be like a magazine. Google wants to make the Web fast. 2010 is a great time to pay attention to speeding up your site. HINT. HINT.

Source

The second is that Google Webmaster Tools now offers a page called "Site performance" which gives you feedback on how fast your site loads relative to other sites on the web. (Announcement is here.)

Have you thought about how quickly your site loads? Probably a good time to take it seriously.

Bad experience with 99Designs -- my takeaways

2009-11-19T04:49:00.000-08:00

I'm coming off an unhappy website redesign with 99Designs.com -- only 2 or 3 of the 13 designers submitted designs that seemed worthy of iterating on. This contrasted sharply with my previous experience having a logo designed at 99Designs when I had nearly 350 designs submitted (compared to 37), and 4 of them were very good. This time around I have 1 design that I'm pretty happy with (and the overall hit to my wallet is twice as high).

Part of the explanation appears to be that many more designers submit designs for logos -- they're probably much less work -- and payouts tend to be about half the payout for a website design, so designers opt for the logo projects.

One approach to designing a successful project:
If you sort the webpage designs by the number of designs that were submitted, you can find projects that received more designs than projects that offered to pay more. Sometimes these high-marketing / low-cost projects beat out projects offering to pay nearly 3x as much! These disproportionately successful projects suggest a few takeaways:

Tell designers that there's a possibility of ongoing work in the 2nd line of the project description

Projects that get lots of designs often offer a high payout but don't guarantee the project. Some of the projects that do guarantee a payout didn't get many designs. There doesn't seem to be a clear association between guaranteeing a project payout and the number of designs submitted.

Making the project "blind" -- ie designers can't see what other designers have submitted -- doesn't appear to be correlated with the number of design submissions.

Here's what I'm going to do in the future:

Make an effort to "sell" the project, both by describing how tricky a project it is, and by approaching designers directly and asking them to take a crack at it (see the tips in the links at the bottom of this post).

Don't buy separate logo and webpage design projects for the same website.

Give feedback to everyone, even if you only give personalized feedback to the folks whose designs you like. My guess is that designers look at whether or not a contest-buyer gives feedback to everyone before they decide which sites to design

Avoid the "blind contest" option like the plague. I understand that designers love it, because it prevents less talented designers from stealing their best ideas. However, as the buyer, I kind of like designers riffing on other peoples designs. You probably get more designs overall, and more of them are going to be appealing. Plus, (granted with only two data points) I had about 1/10th the number of designs submitted in my "blind" contest.

Other tips for 99Designs Contests:

10 Tips for Obtaining a Stellar Graphic Design via 99Designs.com

tips: crowdsourcing a design project

4 tips to hosting a fun design competition

Using "Outposts" in your SEO Strategy

2009-11-02T20:16:00.000-08:00

I attended the Cambridge SEO Meetup again tonight, and was once again reminded why I go: there are some great people that attend. Props to Derek Edmond for giving me a great link-building idea, and thanks to CentersAndSquares.com for bringing food!

Tonight's speaker was Stuart Foster. He has an interesting resume and it sounds like he's done some genuine legwork to create a meaningful following on Twitter. However, I'm iffy on his SEO recommendations, and I disagree pretty strongly with one of them. He recommended that people follow a strategy that he credited to Chris Brogan: that you "syndicate" the articles that you write to 5 or 6 "outposts", like Facebook, a blog, etc, and that you then funnel links from those "outposts" back to your main money-making site.

Now, I first heard the name "Chris Brogan" about two or three years ago when he came to speak at one of the Cambridge SEO meetups. I later heard him speak at Affiliate Summit in Boston after his star had ascended a bit, and I have to say that he came across as a genuinely decent human being. And further, he does appear to have written a post titled: "Using Outposts in Your Media Strategy" which uses a lot of the same words and concepts that Stuart used. But, for Chris' sake, I'm going to assume that this strategy makes more sense for personal branding than it does for SEO -- because it's a really bad idea for SEO.

Here's the idea behind using "outposts": if you set up 5 or 6 mini-sites on different hosts (maybe a Facebook page, a MySpace page, your LinkedIn account, etc) then you can point all of those sites to your main (money-making) site, and Presto! -- instant inbound links | PageRank | link juice. You'll have the magic of Facebook's PageRank 11 site to push your money-making site up in Google's rankings.

Here's the problem: If you want this to actually work, you now have 5 mini-sites plus your money-making site that you need to update. Let me say that differently: instead of simplifying the work it takes to get inbound links, you have multiplied it six-fold!

Let's say that your brand-spanking new Facebook page has exactly one article on it, plus a link to your money-making site. Guess how many visitors it will get per month if you don't promote it? 3,000? 1,200? 8? Nope. Zero. The only way to get people to visit your Facebook page is to go out and promote the page.

Make no mistake -- getting editorially chosen links is really, really hard. Why in the world would you want to increase your link-building workload by a factor of six? Especially when the link juice passed from 5 of those 6 sites doesn't flow directly to your money-making site? Insanity!

Take all that hard-earned content and publish it on your money-making site. Spend all the time you would tell your friends and acquaintances about your MySpace page, and tell them about your money-making site instead. Stop tweeting. Stop retweeting. Write more content; promote that content. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

The NOLO Consultant & Independent Contractor Agreements book rocks

2009-10-20T11:55:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note to folks out there that hire independent contractors. You should run, not walk, to your nearest web browser and order a copy of Nolo's Consultant and Independent Contractor Agreements book. It comes with a CD with stock contracts, and excellent explanations of each of the clauses within the contracts. I use it at least monthly.

(Those of you who know me know that I had a situation back in the Spring where I thought an independent contractor was trying to get their contracting work for me re-classified as an employee to get benefits after losing his full-time job. In the end, it just turned out to a mistake on his part, and he cleaned everything up. However, I now use this book with every new contractor I hire to be sure that I have good contracts in place up-front. $34.99 well spent!

What Great Long-Tail Organic Pages Look Like

2009-09-01T21:15:00.001-07:00

I attended tonight's Cambridge SEO Meetup, and left the meeting somewhat frustrated. The speaker, Chris Baggott presented blogging software from his company, Compendium Blogware. Chris was articulate and well-informed, and dealt gracefully and with humor while being challenged by several people who seemed intent on proving that he isn't a Linux sysadmin -- which he's not.

That aside, here's what frustrated me: Chris was presenting a solution that really bothered me. He was recommending that clients use his company's blogging software to build web pages that target long tail keywords. That in-and-of-itself is laudable. It's relatively easy to rank for long-tail keywords, and a lot of high-volume "fat-head" keywords don't convert that well. His software has some proprietary sauce that helps to categorize those posts in several different categories, and post them with keyword-enhanced titles and using keyword-enhanced directory names. So, for example, the page might be:

CrazyToasters.com/four-slice-cuisinart-toaster/

And the resulting page would have the title "Four Slice Cuisinart Toaster". Aside from these basic SEO optimization techniques, he encourages his clients to write a 100-word blog post on what they're doing that day that relates to four-slice cuisinart toasters. I'm imagining posts that say something like: "My family ate four slices of sourdough toast this morning from our new Cuisinart toaster."

Compendium will then also helpfully categorize that post under:

CrazyToasters.com/four-slice-toaster/ and
CrazyToasters.com/cuisinart-toasters/

The result is made for Google psuedo-spam that takes very little effort by the end user, is easy to update on a regular basis, and probably ranks pretty well for queries involving these keywords. (Indeed, just several weeks after registering a $10 domain and pushing 150 posts live, he claims that they have sold 20 toasters.)

Why does psuedo-spam like this work?

It seems to me that when Google visualizes the web, it sees a vast topographical map. At the center of the map are commercial terms like "mortgage", "gambling", "viagra" and "insurance". And surrounding these keywords are vast mountains of pages that are attempting to optimize for those keywords. The 10 pages that make up the very peak of this mountain are displayed to the end user when they type the query "mortgage". Surrounding that peak are lesser peaks, such as "online mortgage", "second mortgage", "quick mortgage", and foothills such as "san diego mortgage", "interest-only mortgage new york". Within each of those lesser peaks and foothills there are 10 pages that fit the Google algorythm well enough to become local maxima.

Compendium's brand of psuedo-spam works because out beyond the mountains of high-volume, highly-commercial keywords, there are vast plains, with 4 and 5 word keywords that very few people search for. Because so few people search for them, few marketers optimize for them. And because few marketers optimize for them, it takes little work to create the sub-surface geology that gives these pages a moderately higher peak than the plains around them. By choosing a domain name with the "toasters" keyword, highly-targeted sub-directory names and titles, and a bit of text that hasn't been translated from English to Russian and back again, Compendium's clients gain enough altitude to rank for their long-tail keywords.

So, what's wrong with that? I guess nothing. It's certainly better than the true spam that's out there -- stuff scraped from RSS feeds, and then churned through an automated content re-writer and spewed onto the web. Stuff that almost reads as English, until you realized that the last few sentences you processed don't actually make sense. I mean, from one perspective, I'm glad that Compendium's software works. Certainly reading about what toaster people used for their breakfast is better than reading true spam. However, the problem is that it doesn't take that much additional work to create truly useful long-tail organic pages. In fact (in volume), it may even be easier.

Start by asking yourself: When someone types 'Four Slice Cuisinart Toaster' into Google, what are they hoping to find? What are the implicit questions that they're asking?

They probably want to know what models are available, how much they cost, and where they can buy them

They probably want to know what product features they have

They probably want to see pictures

They might want to know where the user manual is, or troubleshooting tips

They might want to see user reviews

Why not create that page for these users? If you're going to create 250 pages (which Chris recommended), it's probably faster to collect the data in a spreadsheet, and then have someone spit out that data into a web page. Include a link to a "Consumer Review" page, and then roll those reviews back into the page. The upside of this approach is that you have a page that genuinely ought to rank #1 in Google. The better it ranks, the more people will come and submit reviews, which creates a virtuous cycle.

Now, over time perhaps Chris's clients will create these higher-value pages that offer more substance to their readers. Or maybe domainers will adopt Compendium (or one of the the other similar CMSs) to monetize their middling domains. And maybe that shouldn't bother me -- I've certainly got one or two projects out there that I'm not really proud of. But my personal bias is that two-or-three years out you'll reap the rewards of building a platform that results in great pages, rather than pseudo-spam.

Update: Here's the danger of writing blog posts at 2:00 am. I slept on this and decided that I was being an idiot. Compendium is a much better solution than just ignoring your long-tail keywords, and clients certainly have the option to make those pages genuinely useful. The "pseudo-spam" aspect of it has nothing to do with Compendium's product -- just what I imagine most people would enter as blog posts.

PoliticalCalculations just did an excellent Cavalcade of Risk

2009-08-26T13:29:00.000-07:00

Just a quick pointer. Ironman from Political Calculations just did an excellent job rating and ranking the 30 submissions to this week's Cavalcade of Risk. (Of course, I may be biased -- my submission on home insurance and hurricanes was tied for the highest rating that he handed out).

Favorite Techniques for Buying Domain Names

2009-08-14T04:20:00.000-07:00

I've written in the past about the value of domain names. I thought I'd write a brief summary of some of the methods of buying domain names that I've found to be most successful.

1. Approaching domain owners directly

The best names I've ever bought I found by approaching the owners directly. FixItYourself.com and SepticSystem.com are 2 examples. Here's the story of a 3rd:

I recently decided that I wanted to buy a better domain name for my life insurance website. The old name was TermLifeOptions.com, and I felt like it detracted from the site's credibility. I generated a list of what I thought were the 20 best generic keyword names related to life insurance. (ie: Insurance.com, LifeInsurance.com, TermLife.com, InsurancePolicy.com, TermLifePolicy.com, etc.) I then checked each domain, and contacted all of the owners that hadn't built actual sites on their domain. Contacting the owner is often as simple as checking the record domain name at Whois.sc and sending an email to the administrative contact.

Given that life insurance is such a competitive niche, many of the names were unavailable. Prices on some of the available names were as high as $100,000. However, the owner of TermLifePolicy.com was willing to talk in a couple of months, if the deal he was working on at the time fell through. Luckily for me, it did, and we were able to agree on a price.

2. NameJet.com

NameJet is a drop-catching service. That is, when a domain owner allows a domain to expire the name "drops", and a number of services (such as NameJet, Pool.com and SnapNames.com) compete to register the name and then resell it. However, NameJet also has exclusive relationships with a number of registrars that guarantees that Pool and SnapNames can't compete to catch names. That means that many of the best names are only available through NameJet. I've purchased 8 names through NameJet in the last 2 years, including RoofingEstimate.com, AccessRamp.com and a third excellent name that I'm not going to mention here.

The trick with NameJet, I think, is to be patient and selective. Spend 10 minutes every day checking the service, and don't buy names of marginal value. (For example, one of the 8 names I bought was xShoe.com -- what in the world was I thinking?) If you want to buy names of marginal value, I'd recommend a different method.

3. Buying names for Reg Fee

"Reg fee" means that you pay only the registration cost of a name -- somewhere around $7 - $8. The trick for buying names for reg fee is simply to generate a large number of names (either via scripts or just through keyword munging in Excel). Then run 10,000 names through a Bulk Registration tool (like GoDaddy's bulk reg tool).

The advantage of this approach is that you can develop a relatively large portfolio at low cost. I've sold three "reg fee" names in the past few months for between $300 - $450 apiece.

However, the disadvantage is that you may be paying reg fee on 200 names a year to sell 3 or 4 names. If you don't have a repeatable method of selling names, then you may have a hard time making a profit, even if you bought the names for cheap.

The trick for all three of these approaches is not to fall in love with a particular domain name. If you must own a particular name, you're going to pay a premium for it. If you simply need a good name in a particular vertical, you can generally find one that represents good value. (If you simply want a good commercial name, and you don't care what niche it's in you can probably get a steal!)

New Look and Feel for WashingMachines.net

2009-07-17T14:17:00.000-07:00

Just launched a new look and feel for WashingMachines.net. I'd love to hear feedback or suggestions!

Renaming TermLifeOptions.com to TermLifePolicy.com

2009-07-16T11:59:00.000-07:00

I have been developing a life insurance site called TermLifeOptions.com since 2006. I'm excited to announce that I have now renamed the site TermLifePolicy.com to more accurately reflect the site's focus on helping consumers choose the most appropriate term life insurance policy.

We've done some really interesting consumer-related research on life insurance, including topics such as:

Should you request multiple life insurance quotes? (link)

Why do insurance quotes from different companies vary so dramatically? (link)

What to do if you have given inaccurate information to your Life Insurance Company (link)

The site also profiles more than 60 life insurance companies, policies in each state and more. If you're in the market for life insurance, please take a look (and let me know if we're missing anything!)

ApplianceRepair.com -- great end-user domain

2009-07-16T03:35:00.000-07:00

I always like to see great domain names put to use by end users (as opposed to domainers), so I wanted to give a shout out to John Sowden. John works for RepairClinic.com (an online appliance parts retailer) as their VP of something, and he's been really helpful with a couple of articles that we've published.

He pinged me last month to say that he had launched a site for his appliance repair show called (appropriately enough): ApplianceRepair.com. John's been working in the appliance industry for more than 2 decades and he really knows his stuff. If you're interested in radio along the lines of "Car Talk for Appliances" check it out.

By the way, from a domainer's point of view ApplianceRepair.com is a fantastic name. My stats show that people are much more likely to type-in a domain name that's "NounVerb.com" than one that's "VerbNoun.com" (ie RepairAppliances.com), and my guess is that that gives "NounVerb" domains a bit of a boost in search engine results as well (the domain name is one of the few bits of data that the user gets to see before they click).

Affiliate Sites in Highly Competitive Niches

2009-06-17T13:26:00.000-07:00

One of the things that I've "learned" in the past couple of years of building websites is that some niches have a hell of a lot more competition than others. Life Insurance, for example, is just a tough niche to break into. My takeaway from that is that it probably makes more sense to be a big fish in a small pond that a small fish in a big pond.

However, this article makes a couple of interesting points while encouraging people to just into "big niches":

More offers to split-test
Higher payout due to more competition
Longevity -- these niches aren't going anywhere

Interesting thoughts.

Domain Names as Force Multipliers for Websites

2009-06-12T09:46:00.000-07:00

My day job involves developing and promoting my own small stable of online businesses. However, on a daily basis I devote time to domaining -- finding good domain names to buy. One thing that I have banged my head against in the domaining community on a regular basis is (what I believe to be) a substantial misunderstanding of what makes domain names valuable to online businesses. A domain name's true value lies in its value as a force multiplier. Independent of a domain owner applying substantial force to the domain, it has relatively little value at all.

First, I should make a few caveats:

I buy a handful of domain names each month, so I believe domain names are both useful and valuable.

There are a couple of classes of domain names that are valuable independent of their value as force multipliers. For example, misspellings of popular generic domain names aren't really useful to develop a site on, but they may generate substantial and valuable traffic. Alternately, short commercial .com names (Toys.com, Candy.com and various adult-themed names have been in the news this year) attract substantial easy-to-convert type-in traffic. And there are all sorts of stories about domainers building 5-6 figure a month revenue streams on these sorts of domains.

Here's an example of the misunderstanding that I see often:
"The domain name itself takes care of something like 50% of the SEO work" (from a comment on ElliotsBlog.com). I've had other conversations with domainers who have argued that "the domain is the biggest piece of the puzzle" when it comes to building sites.

I don't buy it -- and more importantly, I've never seen a result remotely similar to that. Building websites into effective businesses takes a tremendous amount of work, experimentation, time, patience and risk. Good domains are a useful starting point, but it takes a lot of work to grow a site from "registration fee" money (which the vast majority of domains that people buy and sell every day never make), to "car payment" money to "work for yourself" money. In fact, what strikes me most about the domains that I own is how little type-in traffic there is out there relative to the traffic available from search engines.

(As one data point, I own a single-word commercial .com domain that I have been developing for a bit less than 1 year. Type-in traffic represents less than 5% of the site's traffic; search engine traffic > 90%. And true type-in traffic -- navigation to the site from folks that have never heard of it -- will continue to decline as a percentage of total traffic.)

Domains as Force Multipliers

A "force multiplier" in military speak is a factor that makes a group of soldiers dramatically more effective: for example, the ability of precision-guided bombs to dramatically change the outcome of a war. (thanks Wikipedia) I think that's a good analogy for the utility of most premium domain names.

A domain name is useful for several things:
1. You'll get a small amount of type-in traffic -- people that think "Hey, I want to buy some candy -- I bet there's a website at Candy.com that sells candy."
2. Search Engines give a bump to sites that have content related to the generic terms in their domain name. I don’t think they do this because it makes it easier for search engines to categorize the site — I think it’s because end users are more likely to trust the “brand”.
3. If you’re building a site, it’s easier to get on the phone and explain to someone that you own “Laptops.com” than “Best-Laptops-Around.com”. The person on the other end of the line is more likely to believe that you’re serious with the former domain than with the latter, whether you’re trying to get a link, become an affiliate, sell them something, etc.
4. The domain name — along with your title tag and some text the search engine scraped from your site — appears in the search results. End users trust good generic domain names, so all else held constant, they’re more likely to click on your link.

But, with the exception of type-in traffic, none of these benefits help you unless you help yourself. That is, if you do a lot of work, a good domain name can amplify your efforts. But if you don't do the work, don't expect the domain name to do it for you.

How big of a force multiplier is a good domain?

Tough question, and one that I can't do more than speculate on. However, I think there's a good case to be made that the more competitive the niche you're trying to break into the less useful premium domain names are.

1. In competitive areas, where much of your competition has a good domain name (perhaps a branded domain name), don't expect to see much of a bump because of your domain name. (One industry that comes to mind is life insurance.) There's lots of great content out there and people have been consistently building links for a decade. There's a lot of offline advertising and people trust brands that they know more than generic names. In this scenario, the search engines have lots and lots of trusted content for the most profitable queries. My guess is that the multiplier effect is minimal -- low single-digit percentile. Given that domain names in these niches are expensive, you may be better off coming up with a brandable $7 domain name (ie Insurabilious.com)

2. In areas with middling competition, I think a good generic name can be quite useful. I'm guessing that it can give your efforts as much as a 20% bump. Maybe it becomes easier to attract links than it otherwise would have been; Maybe it's easier to find partners, or to negotiate a better payout from those partners because they took you more seriously; Maybe a higher percentage of people clicked on your links in the search results because they assumed that such a great domain name would be coupled with useful content and features.

Other Force Multipliers that You Can Buy

There are, of course, other force multipliers for your business that you could buy instead of a domain name.

Editorially-chose inbound links are probably the single most powerful force multiplier. While I don't buy (or recommend buying) links directly, I certainly invest in techniques and assets that increase my chances of acquiring such links. It's hard to overestimate the degree to which a single good link can multiply the rest of your work.

A technology platform that makes it easier for you to develop content and features that help your end users.

Analytics tools and consulting that help you understand what your users want.

Increased traffic can itself be used as a force multiplier if it helps you better understand how to convert your users.

Names matter, not least for the simple reason that humans seem to be wired to remember them (present company excluded). But before you go out and spend 5 figures for a domain name do some deep thinking about whether that name will pay back your investment within a reasonable time horizon. And whether it will multiply your efforts more than some of the other assets mentioned above.

Airlines for Travelling within Mexico

2009-06-01T05:22:00.001-07:00

List of airlines you can take within Mexico:

Aviacsa.com

Mexicana.com

Aeromexico.com

Aeromar.com.mx

Volaris.com.mx

Interjet.com.mx

Almost caught by a clever domaining scam

2009-05-27T14:40:00.001-07:00

Kudos to the folks at Sedo.com -- they just helped me avoid getting caught in a clever domaining scam. Someone wrote me (email reproduced below) and said that they wanted to buy Bath-Cabinets.com, and that they would pay 65% of the appraised value of the domain name. Then they recommended 3 companies whose appraisals they would accept: Sedo, Podzz or AccurateDomains.com.

I forked over $29 to Sedo to do an appraisal of the name, and wrote the folks back saying "Sure, I'm happy to try it".

Sedo contacted me the next day saying "We believe the email is an attempt to get people to order an appraisal from nameorange.com. After purchasing an appraisal, the domain holder will not receive a response from the person again."

Anyway, Sedo then offered to refund my appraisal price, which I think is tremendously good customer service. Thanks Sedo!

Here's the original email expressing interest in the domain name:

Dear Sir or Madam,

We are interested to buy your domain name BATH-CABINET.COM and offer to buy it from you for 65% of the appraised market value.

As of now we accept appraisals from either one of the following leading appraisal companies:

sedo.com
podzz.com
accuratedomains.com

If you already have an appraisal please forward it to us.

As soon as we have received your appraisal we will send you our payment (we use Paypal for amounts less than $2,000 and escrow.com for amounts above $2,000) as well as further instructions on how to complete the transfer of the domain name.

We appreciate your business,

Yours truly,

J. Harris

Can Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer play nicely together? (Part I)

2009-03-31T05:49:00.001-07:00

Over the past couple of years, I've run both Google Analytics (GA) and Google Website Optimizer (GWO) on the same site. The problem is that out of the box, if you add a GWO experiment to a set of pages, GA will stop reporting correctly about those pages. (The situation that I run into is that I add a GWO experiment to one of my Goals -- say a lead gen funnel -- and then the GWO stats are correct. But GA stops reporting on my goal funnel. Quite an annoying situation.) Given that I'm fundamentally lazy (in a bad way) I haven't really tried to sort this out (until now).

First things first -- does Google realize that there's a problem, and do they think it can be solved? Turn out the answer is "Yes" and "Yes".

How to fix it. Google gives instructions here. Those instructions look like they're a bit outdated, as they include a call to secondTracker._initData() -- and GA / GWO doesn't seem to use that function call anymore.

But, it looks like the change is pretty straightforward -- all your GA code is going to be using:

var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-xxxx-xx");
pageTracker._trackPageview();

While all the GWO code is going to be using:

var secondTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-yyyy-yy");
secondTracker._trackPageview("/zzzzzzz/test");
-- or --
secondTracker._trackPageview("/zzzzzzz/goal");

So, I've made the changes -- I'll have to check in tomorrow to see if they actually worked!

Update 6/20/09: By the way, this solution works perfectly.

I need some Google Analytics Help!

2009-03-17T07:19:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, one of the folks that I drive affiliate traffic for mentioned that another affiliate had seen improved revenue by running a 300x250 ad for their affiliate offer in place of an AdSense ad. I said I'd test it, and within a few days I was running a bright and shiny new clickable image. Now I must admit that I was lazy, and I ran the ad without really thinking through how I would tell which ad performed better. I was just hoping that the results would be so dramatic and obvious that I wouldn't be required to actually, you know, think. However, I did go so far as to add a JavaScript call (pageTracker._trackPageview('/affiliate/click1')) to the image that would record the click with Google Analytics each time someone clicked the image.

Now that I've dug around on the web a bit, I have a strategy for comparing the revenue generated by the two, and I'm looking for some feedback on this approach.

Basic Methodology

I'm going to write a cron job that switches the ads every 5 minutes. So, the AdSense ad will be displayed half the time, and the affiliate ad will be displayed half the time. (I could display the ads randomly on every pageview, but I can't think of any bias that this simpler approach introduces.)

Calculating AdSense Revenue

The AdSense ad is its own channel within AdSense, so I can slice and dice the data by channel and date.

Calculating Affiliate Revenue

This is a bit trickier. Basically, I'm setting up an "advanced segment" within Google Analytics for everyone that views the page '/affiliate/click1'. Then, if I segment "Goals -> Total Conversions" for the date range that I'm comparing to AdSense, I can get the total number of conversions. By multiplying the conversions by the revenue per conversion, I can get a dollar value for the affiliate ad.

If the two ads are alternated for a week, at the end of that week I should have a dollar amount for AdSense and a dollar amount for the Affiliate revenue. Whichever is higher, wins, no?

Potential problems

I'm assuming that by alternating the ads every 5 minutes, I will serve about as many of one ad as another. If it turns out that in fact, I've served 10x the number of affiliate ads as Adsense ads, then the results would be biased. Is there a straightforward way within GAnalytics to show the number of times an image is displayed? (An onLoad event for the image perhaps?)

One of the issues that comes to mind is that people may be more likely (or perhaps less likely!) to click on an ad if they see it multiple times. So it might be that the very act of alternating between AdSense and an image ad increases (or decreases) the number of conversions. So, I think ideally this would be further segmented: A group that sees only AdSense ads, a group that sees only Affiliate ads, and a group that sees both (if they request multiple pages from the site). But I can't think of a straightforward way to implement this (absent a cookie infrastructure that I'm not currently willing to invest in). Any thoughts?

This feels sort of kludgy -- is there a more elegant way to do this from within Google Analytics?

Why Geeks Suck at Organic SEO

2009-02-26T10:34:00.000-08:00

Or, Why Google Loves Links

I have a t-shirt that has #!/usr/bin/perl on the front, and a bunch of obfuscated perl code on the back. If you were to type that code into a file, and submit it to a perl interpreter, it would print: "The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris". Now I'm as much of a fan of automation and a willingness to boil reluctant oceans as the next person, but such virtues don't apply to everything.

Success with organic SEO depends on two things: (1) Good long-tail content; and (2) Good inbound links. People say other things matter, but they're wrong.

Geeks excel at the first task: generating long-tail content. That's because content generation scales. You can create a technology platform that makes it relatively easy to published edited articles; you can integrate databases with templates to create endless variations on subtly different keyword combinations. If you're a fan of generating textual crap you can scrape RSS feeds, use a rewriting script to munge the text and publish limitless text with the push of a button.

But, Geeks don't excel at building good inbound links: acquiring inbound links doesn't scale, and hubris is rarely your friend. It requires repetitive work that isn't easy to automate, such as making phone calls and developing relationships.

This, of course, makes the quality and quantity of inbound links an ideal criteria to keep the world's most effusive content generators from spamming Google's index. Look at how Google reacts to link acquisition strategies that do scale: link-buying (removing pagerank of participating sites, requesting that people report purchased links), links in comments / forum posts / wikis (devaluing IBL, promoting the nofollow tag) not to mention older link-building techniques such as massive link farms.

Geeks suck at organic SEO because Google has to make organic SEO depend on something Geeks suck at. Or, said differently, if Geeks were great at building good organic inbound links, Google would have to put its algorithmic weight behind factors that Geeks suck at.

Charles & Hudson: Best Home Improvement Blog

2009-02-18T19:58:00.001-08:00

I just thought I'd give props to my favorite home improvement blog: Timothy Dahl's Charles and Hudson. As you know if you read my blog regularly, I work in the home improvement industry, and Timothy's blog is the best I've found.

He has a long history in writing about home improvement issues, and you can expect to read posts that cover tools (here's my favorite), DIY news and new products. If you use a RSS reader, you subscribe to his RSS feed here.

New experiment in selling domain names

2009-01-29T08:41:00.001-08:00

I've written in the past (here and here) about my attempts to sell keyword-rich, but typein-traffic-poor domains. I'm going to try again.

I'm going to sell the domain name via a reverse auction, using Twitter as the platform. Starting at 8:00 am CST tomorrow, I'll twitter the initial price of the domain on my Twitter account (you can follow me here: http://twitter.com/madbury). The initial price will be less than $100. If you want to buy the domain, just reply (publicly) to my tweet with the word "SOLD", and we'll work out the payment details (via PayPal). The first reply with the word "SOLD" will win the domain.

If the domain doesn't sell at the initial price, I'll drop the price a few hours later -- and continue dropping the price during the day.

The name I'm going to sell is: Curtain-Rod.com. Google's AdWords keyword tool show 246,000 queries for the term "curtain rod" per month, with a clicks costing $1.33 apiece. Given that consumers are holding off on larger home improvement purchases, my guess is that they're shifting their spending to less expensive repairs and improvements around the house. (Indeed, Google's December traffic numbers for "curtain rod" show 301,000 queries, rather than the average of 246k queries.)

Generic keyword domains are great tools for ranking on the keyword in question, so you could easily tie this domain name with content from a service like AEIOU.com and potentially develop a valuable site for a very small investment.

If you have questions about the auction or the domain, please feel free to leave a comment, or email me at: madbury at gmail.

What does a "natural" distribution of links look like?

2009-01-26T13:23:00.000-08:00

From time to time I see articles claiming that link-building campaigns should try to acquire a "natural" distribution of inbound links. Sometimes people think you should have links from sites of different page ranks (text-link-ads.com used to claim this). Other times people talk about the distribution of anchor text for your inbound links. (Here's a SearchEngineWatch article that claims this.)

If you're out there doing weird artificial stuff with inbound links (like buying them, or link farms) then I agree -- you should worry about having a "natural" link distribution.

However, the problem is, you and I have no idea what a "natural" link distribution looks like.

When I used to run Talkr.com, people would often link to the site with the link-text "Talkr" or "Talkr.com".

When I linked to the SearchEngineWatch a couple of paragraphs ago, it was much more natural for the anchor text to say "article" than "anchor text distribution article".

For the last few great feature articles that I've published, I've gotten a few links from very popular high-pagerank sites that made the editorial decision that it was a good story. But no links from little sites.

So what does a "natural" link distribution look like? You and I don't know. And I doubt that Google knows.

How would Google build up a corpus of websites that only had editorially chosen links, against which they could train their algorithm? (Perhaps it would be easier to build a corpus of websites that had spammy inbound links -- but the problem there is that good sides with spammy inbound links would also attract natural links, because they would tend to rise in the search results.)

Probably, there's a distribution of distributions. And it may be quite possible for Google to spot dramatically-manufactured link distributions.

But the irony is that there's a good chance that manually trying to tweak your anchor text or the PR of your inbound links results in easy-to-spot unnatural distributions like:

Buying links based on pagerank formulas (ie buy x PR 5 links, 2x PR4 links, 3x PR3 links, etc.)
Systematically varied anchor text (ie 20% says "mortgage leads", 20% says "mortgage quotes", 20% says "mortgages", 20% says "buy mortage", 20% says "insurance.com")

My guess is that the easiest way to make your link distribution stand out as manufactured is to manually try to vary it.

What do you think? Am I an idiot, or is this spot-on?

One reason fighting paid links is so difficult

2009-01-13T14:13:00.001-08:00

I contacted a website today with a pointer to a great new article that I just published. The writer that wrote the article probably spent more than 20 hours on it. I spent another 10-15 hours, and the editor that worked on it spend 3-5. It's a 1600+ word article that nails an important commercial topic, and it's a very strong piece of work.

As part of promoting the article, I contacted a number of websites that are interested in the vertical that this article covers. One of the replies that I received said:

"We normally charge $25 to include links, but I've waived it in this case and added a link to the article to XYZ.com"

Has Google flagged XYZ.com in the past for selling links?

In my opinion, this link should pass PageRank. I think Google should think that it should pass PageRank. Yet there's simply no way (unless they're parsing Gmail messages with some very sophisticated algorithms) that they could attain a sophisticated enough understanding of my site's relationship with XYZ.com to correctly pass PageRank on this post, but not the ones that are sold for $25.

The reality is that there's a chance that this link will pass PageRank (ie Google hasn't penalized them for selling links in the past). Or, as I understand how Google addresses paid links, the link simply won't hurt me. I suppose the net takeaway is that I'm glad I don't have Google's job!

PPC is a Dead-End Strategy for Affiliates

2009-01-13T12:02:00.000-08:00

Affiliates should exit the PPC market as quickly and efficiently as they can. Here's why:

Barriers to entry in PPC are incredibly low. If you're working in a space that has decent payouts you either (a) have lots of competition -- which means small margins; (b) are in a really small niche -- which means a relatively small upside; and/or (c) are about to get lots of competition as other PPC affiliates test your niche and discover that it has good margins.
As an affiliate, every conversion has a relatively small lifetime value. (I see this all the time in life insurance -- a single conversion might be worth hundreds of dollars over its lifetime to MetLife, but only $13 to me. There's simply no way I can compete with the 300+ life insurers (not to mention potentially thousands of insurance agents and the networks that funnel leads to them) in the PPC space.
You have no long-term competitive advantage and no assets. On the technology side, let me describe the ultimate technology to you: you know on a keyword-by-keywords basis how much a click costs you, how much it's worth to you, and a pretty good estimate of how much more traffic you could get if you increased the amount you spent per click. You're able to tie those three pieces of information together programatically, so that you maximize your profits. Here's the problem -- lots of companies figured this out 3 or 4 years ago, and they're busy expanding this formula to every niche they can find. Their technology is more robust, more scalable and better designed than whatever you will throw together in the next couple of years. They've already tested and wrung advantage from the next 10 niches you think of, and they've negotiated better payouts on their conversions.

Mini strategies that might buy you a bit more time:

Get some of your PPC traffic to subscribe to your email list. Good idea, but it still won't save your bacon -- you'll probably lose them as a conversion in the immediate term, thereby driving up the average cost of your traffic, and running a successful email list takes actual work.
Hope that some of your PPC traffic will link to your site, thereby sending you more organic traffic. Yeah, not likely on the a/b tested, limited content landing page you just sent them to. Either (a) your landing page solves their problem so that you make no money from them but 1 in 1000 might link to it; or (b) your landing page convinces them that they need to buy a product to solve their problem, so they leave your page and link to the wonderful product or service that you just pointed them to.

Of course, I don't mean to sound like an idiot -- PPC is great for lots of folks. For example, the folks you're acting as an affiliate for, for example. They make a lifetime value from each conversion 10x what you make. They're reinvesting in an actual business that solves people's problems. They're getting better and better at converting their visitors, so their cost per lead probably stays relatively stable as increasing PPC competition drives up their prices. They reinvesting the money you've earned them into building a bigger affiliate network, meaning that you are less and less important to them, and are subsidizing their attempts to reduce your margins. You're just the sucker that sends them cheap conversions between now and when you're run out of business.

Free Domains a Complete Flop

2008-09-19T14:22:00.000-07:00

So, in my continuing attempts to sell some of my domain names, I've tried three new (and completely unsuccessful) approaches:

1. Giving away domain names in return for someone giving me the one true sales solution. (Two people did give interesting replies -- essentially suggesting that I manually try to sell the domains to end users.) However, neither expert was interested in the domains I was giving away. (Thanks Andy, though, for your kind words.)
2. I tried selling Bridal-Fairs.com on DigitalPoint's Buy/Sell/Trade forum. No nibbles, even at the bargain basement price of $8.
3. I approached Rick Latona about selling WoodFurnaces.net and WoodBoilers.net. He politely declined -- though whether it was because he didn't like the names, or because he thought my price was too high, I'm not sure.

Which leaves me, perhaps, slightly wiser and slightly disappointed. Next up: contacting end users.

Giving Away 5 Commercial Generic .COM Names

2008-09-08T12:14:00.000-07:00

During the year and a half that I have been experimenting with domaining, I have developed a portfolio of about 400 names. The best names in my portfolio are quite good, and pay for themselves and a good portion of the rest of the portfolio. The worst of those names have expired (or are expiring). The remainder (which make up the bulk of my portfolio) is made up of what I consider to be 2nd-tier names. These are largely ".com" domain names, made up of 2 commercial keywords, and separated by a dash.

Monetization options for these 2nd-tier domains are limited:

I can park them -- although only a handful pay their own registration fees
I can develop them myself (see, for example, Sport-Trucks.com), which is time and money-intensive;
I can outsource their development to a company like AEIOU.com (see this post);
I can sell them

While I cannot claim to be an expert in acquiring domain names, I can certainly claim to be a complete novice at selling them. I'm hoping that the folks that read this post are considerably more experienced in that area than I am. To that end, I am going to give away 5 domains to readers that can help me figure out how to sell some of my other 2nd tier names.

The following 5 names are representative of the quality of the bulk of my portfolio.

ARTIFICIAL-TREE.COM
DRAFTING-SUPPLY.COM
SHAPED-SKI.COM
SILVER-BULLION.COM
TOILETRY-BAG.COM

I will give these names away to 5 people that tell me useful things I don't already know about selling domains. This decision will be purely subjective -- but I'm serious about giving these away to people that provide truly useful information. (You need to supply a GoDaddy account that I can push these names to -- one name per person.)

This might include:

Contact information for a good domain mailing list that promotes these sorts of names
Contact information of a person or company that buys these sorts of names in bulk, for a substantial multiple of the reg fee
Contact information for services (or qualified individuals) that will find and approach end user buyers in return for a percentage of the sales price
Other techniques that you've found to be genuinely useful

It's important to me that you have actually had experience with the person, service or company that you submit. (Simply sending me a list of all the domain mailing lists would not be terribly helpful, for example.)

Thank you for taking the time to read this far. You're welcome to leave tips in the comments (please leave contact info) or email them to me at madbury at gmail daught kom. (Spell that phonetically, of course.)

Quick Review of AEIOU.com

2008-09-08T11:22:00.000-07:00

Rick Latona launched AEIOU.com a month or so ago, to provide a way for domainers to build natural search engine traffic to their 2nd-tier domains. (ie Domains that are built on strong commercial keywords, but that don't get substantial type-in traffic.)

As the vast majority of my domains fall into this category, I thought I'd give the service a spin. I plunked down $500 to have AEIOU build two websites for me, on cross-country-skis.com and ski-hats.com.

About 2 weeks later, the domains were active, and after about a month, cross-country-skis.com is now the top result on search.msn.com for the term "cross country skis". (It has bounced in and out of this position once or twice, so who knows how stable that position is at this point.)

At current traffic levels it would take about 6 years to pay off development costs, but given this initial success it may be worthwhile to build out more content so that the site ranks better over time.

So, if you have strong commercial 2-3 word domains with dashes that aren't monetizing well on type-in traffic, you might want to give AEIOU a try and see what happens.

Amazingly Bad Customer Service From GoDaddy Handled a Dispute

2008-08-08T05:10:00.000-07:00

I have been in something of a running customer service dispute with GoDaddy.com since June. I have a small (400 domains), middling-quality domain portfolio that I manage with GoDaddy. Apart from registering the domains with GoDaddy, I also used their CashParking service to place ads on most of those domains. I had a couple of minor complaints with their CashParking service:

they charge about $9 a month to place ads on the site;
they charge an additional $10 a month to mail me a check (the checks were each less than $100, so this represented a large percentage of revenue);

However, those complaints were far overshadowed by one amazing benefit: every time I registered a new domain with GoDaddy, it would be placed into my CashParking account by default. That means that all the work was in discovering new domains, rather than configuring them.

So, at the end of the day, I was quite happy to continue working with GoDaddy.

However, all this came to a screeching halt in late June. I received an email from the CashParking team saying that my parking account had been irrevocably suspended. Sure enough, all of my parked domains were offline with a message saying that the site was unavailable. I called the CashParking team to find out what happened, and they said that they could not give me details -- but that pay-per-click traffic had been sent to one or more of my domains in violation of the terms of service, and therefore they were cancelling my CashParking account.

I found this frustrating, but I understood why they cancelled my account. First, for the record, I did not send pay-per-click ads to any of my parked domains. Nor did I encourage, suggest, allow, barter, trade or in any other way influence the placement of those ads. Nor am I aware of who did it. And if I could think of any more disclaimers, I would add them. I simply had nothing to do with whatever happened.

GoDaddy had a right to cancel my account, and I understand that they can't take my word that I had nothing to do with it. After all, someone (apparently) sent those ads -- and whoever sent that traffic apparently sent it without any financial incentive -- after all, they wouldn't make any money off of the traffic! Since GoDaddy displays Google ads, and Google doesn't allow arbitrage, GoDaddy had a responsibility to suspend my account.

Here's what makes me angry, though. GoDaddy removed all of my stats for the year that I hosted CashParking with them, and won't give them back! Because I did not keep regular backups (my mistake) I don't have a record of which domains get the most traffic, and what the eCPM is for all the domains. I can't calculate stats on how the length of a domain affects the amount of type-in traffic that it gets. I can't look at seasonality in traffic. I've sent emails, spoken with customer service reps, and even left a voice mail for a Cash Parking supervisor. (The voice mail has not been returned, the better part of a week later.) No dice.

To add insult to injury, GoDaddy just started showing parked ads on those domains again! Let me say that again -- they won't give me a revenue share for the ads, but they're now willing to show ads again as long as they can keep all the revenue!

One other cute little "feature" of the CashParking team canceling my account. They stop showing ads, but they don't stop the $9 / month billing!

GoDaddy -- I must say I am very disappointed in how you've handled this.

How to Choose Colors for Web Design

2008-04-28T09:17:00.000-07:00

One of the real (unfilled) market niches in web design is a designer that knows how design affects conversion -- ecommerce conversion, lead gen conversion, home page bounce, etc. When I hire someone to design a website, I'd love it if they were aware of the following sorts of considerations, and had well-grounded opinions on how to use design to address them:

How different colors encourage or discourage people from buying, or even from sticking around for a second click.
How images (of people, of products, of pets) affect whether people will buy, register for my site, click on a link.
How design affects download time for webpages, and how download time affects people's willingness to stay on a site.
How a/b or multi-factorial testing works, and why that matters for a designer.
How to balance the SEO value of actual text, vs the "it looks pretty" value of images of text.

And there are a thousand more issues like this. None of the designers that I've ever worked with have ever even thought these issues were important, much less thought that they were a fundamental part of their job.

Anyway, end of rant. But here's a useful article that talks about some of the implicit meanings of color.

Develop many "thin sites" or one deep site?

2008-04-19T03:49:00.000-07:00

Just thought I'd give some link love to Andy Sweet, who's wrestling with some interesting issues related to simultaneously developing an entire portfolio of domain names.

Free as in Beer

2007-09-21T12:33:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to talk about my friend Jonathan's new startup DealLocker.com, which is sort of Delicious meets coupons. Let's say that you're about to register a domain name at GoDaddy, but you can't remember that coupon code that saves you 10%? Go to DealLocker.com and search for "godaddy". Better yet, they have a little javascript bookmarklet that you can install in your bookmarks toolbar, which will tell you if there are any deals available on the website that you're surfing.

It's social, because you can store your own coupons there, record whether or not a deal code worked for you, etc. I've been saving $5 - $10 a month with it for the last few months, so I think it's worth your time to take a look.

And, finally getting back to the title of this post, Jonathan just posted a great deal for free Guinness in Boston on Oct. 11, 12 and 13 in Boston.

If only Ask.com's traffic was as good as their support...

2007-03-30T19:10:00.000-07:00

I must say, I'm impressed with Ask.com's support folks. I bought 183 clicks from ask on a very competitive keyword. And the average user that came from their network of sites viewed exactly 1.0 pages. Not 1.06 pages, not 1.3 pages, 1.0 pages. During the same time period, the rest of the traffic that came to the site averaged more than 3 pageviews per user.

If you know anything about buying traffic from second tier sources, you know what this means: click fraud. (Someone set up a site, displayed my ads on their site, and then had a bot click on the ad. They got paid, Ask got paid, I lost money.)

Now, this is not a post about the evils of click fraud. As John Battelle would say, it's simply a tax, and if you want to play this game you pay the tax.

But Ask did the right thing when I complained. They researched it, they blocked traffic from that site, they refunded my money and they called me to explain the situation.

The most interesting lesson learned? If you want your ads to appear on Ask.com for competitive terms, buy AdWords ads. Ask backfills their own search results with AdWords. Think about that for a second.

This is no longer the Talkr Blog

2007-03-21T19:46:00.000-07:00

So, it's official. If you want to latest news on Talkr, you'll need to go to the new official Talkr blog: http://blog.talkr.com.

I have completed Talkr's sale to LiveOnTheNet.com. You can read the press release here. That's a smart bunch of folks over there, and I think they're going to do great things with Talkr and with the other tools that they're working on.

If you're still reading, here's the sort of stuff that I'll be posting on this blog: experiments in search engine optimization, link-building, and improving monetization. If you have a sneaking hunch that the world already has enough blogs on these topics, you may be right. Here are a handful of blogs that I read religiously:

Still reading? Really?

Okay, then I suppose I should tell you what I do. I build content websites that have old-fashioned, useful content on them. Then I drive traffic to them. And then I monetize that traffic. Doing that successfully is all about testing -- A/B testing, multivariate testing, back-of-the-envelope "does it feel like this works" testing. So if you continue to subscribe to this feed, that's what you'll find. Lots of analytics, lots of testing. If that gets your motor running, stay tuned. If not, point your browser to blog.talkr.com.

An Update on Talkr's Sale

2007-01-19T12:20:00.000-08:00

I've had a number of interesting phone calls in the last few days. If you are planning to wait until the last minute to place a bid on Talkr (in hopes of avoiding a bidding war) I would encourage you to call me instead: (603) 397-3935.

Professor Larry Press blogs that Talkr's sale "illustrates the attraction and risk" of web 2.0 startups.

Bloggers that have mentioned Talkr's Sale

2007-01-17T08:39:00.000-08:00

For those of you "avidly" following Talkr's sale, I thought I'd point to some of the bloggers that have written so far.

Read / Write Web (a long-time user of Talkr) provides the most in-depth post and suggests that Talkr may not be the last Web 2.0 company on the market. Emergency Trap wonders whether Talkr is giving up too soon. 21Talks hopes Talkr will find a buyer. Tycoon's Row provides an alliterative title and describes Talkr as "outstanding". One by One Media suggests that someone with deep pockets ought to roll up Talkr and several other Web 2.0 companies for a later buyout.

Of course, these are just quick summaries -- several of the posts (and comments) offer measured doses of criticism as well.

I'll continue to summarize posts over the next few days.

Talkr is up for sale

2007-01-15T11:29:00.000-08:00

This has been a tough decision, and perhaps one that has been long in coming. But, Talkr is now for sale.

I began work on Talkr in March of 2005, and after nearly two years of banging on this idea, I have decided to try to find it a permanent corporate home. I strongly believe that Talkr will thrive as methods of monetizing podcasts become simpler and more robust. Bloggers will provide content and distribution and Talkr will provide increasingly sophisticated text to speech, and ad integration.

However, the companies that monetize podcasts effectively today have full-time ad sales forces. And, although I have immense respect for the people that spend hour after hour on the phone selling ads, it isn't a skill that matches my skillset.

In the meantime, the bloggers that use Talkr deserve better support than I can offer them. They deserve new features, better voices and they deserve to be paid for their time. Since I haven't been able to successfully monetize Talkr, I can't offer that to them.

Thank you to the countless bloggers that have offered support and encouragement. Your excitement and support have kept me going for almost two years. Talkr is still checking feeds and creating audio, so you don't need to make any changes to your site. I'll give you an update next week about this new phase in Talkr's life.

Google's AdWords for Audio comes one step closer

2006-12-07T07:58:00.000-08:00

Mark Ramsey at Hear 2.0 has an interesting post on Google's new "Ad Creation Marketplace". Google is accepting applications from "audio ad specialists" to create a searchable directory of professionals "to help AdWords advertisers to create radio advertisements".

Although AdWords for Audio has the potential to dramatically mature podcast monetization, there are difficult issues to address: How would ads be targetted? By channel, like existing RSS ad networks Feedburner and Pheedo? Or contextually using speech-to-text conversion? How would the ads be sold? CPM? Cost per acquisition in conjunction with pay-per-call?

Here's where I'd place my bets: AdWords for Audio will release without support for podcasts. Google's timeline is already rumored to have slipped a couple of months. Why deal with the headache of supporting podcasts when the money in the offline radio market is orders of magnitude larger than the money in podcasting? Support for podcasting will come -- but it will be months down the road. My guess is that Google won't offer ads in offline podcasts -- instead, they'll make a Flash mp3 player available, so that podcasters can monetize listeners that consume their podcast in-browser. The mp3 player will include a text or image ad related to the audio ads, so that listeners can immediately take action on the ad that they hear. Ads will be targetted contextually against the website on which the audio is embedded -- not against the audio itself. This allows Google to play to all their strength -- deep analytics, existing click-fraud protection, the existing pay-per-click pricing model and the existing AdSense contextualization technology.

So is AdWords for Audio good for podcasters? Absolutely. Is it a short-term fix for podcast monetization? I wouldn't balance my checkbook on it.

Slight interruption in Talkr's Service

2006-11-16T10:47:00.000-08:00

You may notice a slight interruption in Talkr's service today. We need to tweak the text-to-speech server, so you won't be able to create new audio files for a few hours. Apologies for the inconvenience.

And, we're back. Everything should be back up and running. Please let me know if you run into any issues.

Make it easier for people to find your Talkr Feed

2006-10-29T21:00:00.000-08:00

Talkr's latest release makes it easier for people searching for podcasts to find your Talkr feed. If Talkr creates a podcast from your feed, log into your account and describe the topic of your feed, assign categories that explain the basic subject matter that your blog covers and specify keywords related to your feed.

(If Talkr doesn't create a podcast from your feed yet, what are you waiting for? Create a free podcast now!)

Why is this a big deal? By providing this information to Talkr, we'll make it easier for people to find your feed and for advertisers to advertise in your feed. Once you provide customized information, we'll generate an iTunes-friendly version of your podcast. What's more, advertisers looking to advertise in a particular category can see which categories your feed belongs in! And that means more listeners and more revenue.

Speaking of advertising, we've added a new option in your Talkr control panel to give you more control over how advertising is used in your podcast and feeds. Log in to your account and click on the "Make Money" tab.

We've released a number of bug fixes and back-end improvements which should create a better user experience:

We have had some complaints from bloggers that our crawler wasn't consistently pulling their feed. We've released a new version of the crawler that resolves these issues.
We've also fixed a handful of bugs in the code that allows your readers to listen to your blog within their web browser.
Finally, we've made some look and feel changes which should simplify site navigation.

We are always interested in hearing your feedback (especially the stuff where you tell us how to do a better job)! Please feel free to leave comments on this blog, or email them to: support at talkr daught com.

A couple of Interviews about Talkr

2006-09-06T12:44:00.000-07:00

If you want to hear the latest on Talkr (and my brilliant, eloquent and prescient explanations of where podcasting is headed) you might enjoy these two podcast interviews:

1. Internet Marketing Voodoo
2. Eric Mattson's Marketing Monger

I always enjoy these sorts of interviews, although I sometimes think my mouth outruns my brain....

Talkr now support Atom feeds

2006-07-29T22:33:00.000-07:00

Talkr now supports both Atom and RSS feed formats. This means that folks that use Blogger or other blogging tools that only provide Atom feeds can use Talkr without needing to use an intermediate service such as FeedBurner to convert their Atom feeds into RSS.

Talkr launches reporting functionality

2006-06-30T13:48:00.000-07:00

We're providing a limited release of our reporting functionality today. This allows partners to check how many times their audio has been downloaded from the "Listen to this post" links on their blogs. You can view the number of downloads by date as well as by story. Multiple downloads of the same story from the same IP address are reported as a single download.

We have not yet integrated statistics on the number of downloads by podcatching clients.

To access your statistics sign in to your Talkr Partners account and choose the "Reports" tab.

Quick update

2006-01-27T10:52:00.000-08:00

Just a quick note -- we've been working on improving Talkr's stability, and have begun to add a few new features. As we mentioned previously, Talkr had some problems with downtime in October and November. Since then, we've spent a good deal of time figuring out what caused the downtime, and we've added scripts to address those problems. We have also added an automatic site monitor, and negotiated the system administration services of Todd Finney, aka Boy Genius. With the exception of a bit of flaky code on January 17th, we've had a very nice month, thank you very much.

We've also started coding a set of feature improvements: first up is a long-overdue tool to allow bloggers to force a refresh of the audio that Talkr has created from their blogs. Just login to your free Talkr Partners account, and click on "Refresh this feed". Much more to come.

Talkr hires its first investor...

2005-12-05T14:28:00.000-08:00

I'm proud to announce that Talkr has added its first employee. Or, perhaps that's more accurately phrased as: Talkr has acquired its first investor. Dave Liloia has agreed to come on board as Talkr's Director of Network Development. His job will be to work with the bloggers that use Talkr's services to improve the existing feature set and bring in new ideas.

Since Talkr is a small, unfunded company, Dave has agreed to work part-time for Talkr in exchange for equity. That's a good deal for Talkr, because Dave is fantastic (he's the guy that came up with the tagline "Letting blogs speak for themselves") ; and hopefully, it will end up being a good deal for Dave as well. (It also fails to break the bank, which hiring Dave with cash most certainly would.)

Speaking of hiring, Talkr still needs more help. In particular, we need some Perl geeks that are interested in working on cutting edge problems. (I may have an announcement to make in this area in the near future, but I'd be happy to make two or three announcements.) If you like what Talkr does; if you're comfortable working with the LAMP stack; and if you'd like to help make Talkr better, please send me an email at cbrooks@talkr.com. Please include a couple of specific ideas for how to improve Talkr, and give me a sense of your Perl chops.

A long-overdue update on Talkr

2005-11-22T13:03:00.000-08:00

My apologies to folks that use (or are simply interested in) Talkr. Over the past two months, the service has had several outages, and has provided a complete lack of new functionality. I'd like to make a confession in this post, and then give you a general update on the site.

First, the confession -- if you envision Talkr as a hip, venture-backed Silicon Valley startup, complete with chefs, foozball and offices, you will probably be sorely disappointed. (Don't get me wrong, of course, Talkr _is_ hip.) ;-) Talkr has to this point been the work of one person (me), plus some paid and unpaid consultants. Talkr is really a "virtual" company. Our entire office fits inside the knapsack that I wore today, and physically consists of two laptops, a surge protector and a microphone / headset to allow Skype calls.

The service itself has been spotty because, over the past two months, my family and I have prepared for (and now largely completed) a move from Durham, NH in the USA to Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica. We are now living where the jungle meets the Caribbean beach, where the vast majority of people don't have computers, and people look at you kind of blankly when you ask about a "fast" internet connection. (Thanks to the wonders of satellite internet connections, I have now found a provider, "Jungle Internet" which can provide me with a 128 kbps wifi connection.) This is a really exciting opportunity for my family -- three of our four children are now attending a Spanish-only school here, and this is going to be quite a formative experience for all of us.

So, what does this mean for Talkr? First, I should have more time in the coming weeks to make sure that the existing service is actually available. My most sincere apologies to people that have signed up for Talkr, but been unable to use it. In addition to my own time, I'm also hoping to announce some additional help in the near future. That help will allow us to begin to roll out a host of requested features that I will write about soon.

So, thank you for your patience, and please don't hesitate to write (cbrooks@talkr.com) if you have any questions or suggestions.

Lancerlord demos new features from Talkr

2005-09-25T05:14:00.000-07:00

Lancerlord has created a demonstration of some of Talkr's most advanced new speech features. We're very proud to link directly to the audio. The comments to Lancerlord's post are both thought-provoking and true. We recommend that you read them in their entirety.

On hitting important milestones

2005-09-06T13:14:00.000-07:00

The following represents a bit of shameless promotion of some of the milestones that Talkr has hit since our launch in May.

Perhaps most importantly, Talkr has signed up more than 350 partners in the past 2 months. These partners hail from more than 40 countries, including such far off places (at least relative to my current latitude and longitude) as Sweden, Japan, Cambodia and Middle Earth.

On the content creation side, Talkr currently tracks just under 1000 feeds, and has created more than a quarter of a million audio files. (If you read that sentence twice, and then wondered if there was a mistake, the answer is no -- those are accurate numbers. Some of these feeds are updated frequently. Of the nearly 1000 feeds that we track, 143 have more than 250 posts. The three most frequently published feeds account for nearly 75,000 posts since late April 2005.)

On the listening side, we're averaging between 1000 and 1500 downloads a day. The majority of downloads come from readers that listen to audio directly from our partners' sites, or through talkr.com. The remainder represent files downloaded by podcasting clients.

Thanks for suffering through that onslaught of infoporn. We have a lot of development going on now, and plan to announce new functionality in the near future.

Talkr denies rumor that it will debut new features at Web 2.0

2005-07-08T07:41:00.000-07:00

For immediate release.

"We vigorously deny the rumor that Talkr will debut a fascinating set of new features at the Web 2.0 conference this year" says Chris Brooks, CEO of web 2.0 company Talkr.com. "However," Mr Brooks continued, "We are planning the release of some really cool stuff at about that time. It's just that we aren't sure that the Web 2.0 conference would be the proper venue."

He later retracted that statement, saying "Okay, okay. Yes. Actually, the Web 2.0 conference would be the perfect venue. It's just that, on moral principles, we are completely opposed to that sort of blatant self-promotion."

Mr Brooks continued, "In fact, we would like to explicitly discourage anyone with an interest in Web 2.0 from suggesting to the conference organizers that they should include Talkr in the agenda. Please do not read John Battelle's blog entry asking for input from the community, and please do not use the web page provided explicitly for this purpose to request that Talkr make a presentation. Thank you. We appreciate your complete lack of support."

An open invitation to podcast your blog with Talkr

2005-07-07T19:47:00.000-07:00

Talkr has been providing podcasts for a select group of bloggers since our launch on May 9th of this year. Our pitch is simple: we will convert your text-only blog into a podcast for free. We will monitor your blog every hour, and convert each new article into an mp3 audio file using the best speech synthesis software on the market. We will host those audio files and provide you with an RSS feed (and bandwidth) to make it easy for your readers to get access to your podcast. If you are interested in generating revenue, you may choose to link to Talkr from your blog. If one of your readers becomes a paying subscriber to Talkr, we will give you a share of that revenue.

Until now, we have asked bloggers to submit their blogs, and then wait a couple of days until we have time to review their blog and issue an invitation. This 2-day delay is now a thing of the past. Any blogger can now use Talkr's new self-serve podcasting tool to configure a podcast of their text-only blog. The entire process takes less than 10 minutes.

So, if you currently have a blog, and you'd like to work with Talkr, please point your web browser to talkr.com and click on the button entitled "Want a free podcast of your blog?".

Apologies if you heard a "Your license has expired" message yesterday

2005-06-30T05:47:00.000-07:00

If you listened to audio from Talkr yesterday, you may have heard an audio file that began with the message "Your license has expired". This was caused by a mixup with our speech synthesis vendor, and is not an attempt to nag our listeners into becoming paid subscribers.

Our previous license expires on June 30th, and so earlier in the week we requested a new license from our vendor. However, our vendor misspelled the name of the license file, and we did not catch this when we removed the old license and installed the new one. We ran our suite of unit tests which saw that audio files were created, and we patted ourselves on the back for an easy upgrade.

Our mistake. Our speech synthesis software adds a nag message to the beginning of each audio file if you don't have a valid license -- but it still creates the file. So all of our tests passed, but the audio files were wrong. We have now added a step to our QA process to generate an audio file and actually listen to it -- rather than simply validating that it is binary, has a non-zero size, and has the correct file extension.

Our apologies -- we should have caught this.

Does podcasting threaten radio?

2005-06-27T23:41:00.000-07:00

Think back, if you will, to 1993, when the first web browser was released. Imagine that a very wise friend had pulled you aside and told you that the internet would create a vast amount of wealth over the next decade. And then imagine that this friend had asked you to speculate on which companies were likely to benefit. You might well have concluded that newspapers were extraordinarily well-placed to capitalize on this new medium. Newspapers had earned the trust of their local (and often national and international) readers; they owned the rights to volumes of engaging and thoughtful text content; and they had developed an enviable content-creation process. In addition, they had essentially cornered the market on classified ads for job, rental, real estate and yard-sale style ads. This gave them both method and motive to become major players in the coming internet boom.

Yet, while the newspaper industry averaged profit margins of around 20% in 2004, the internet boom largely passed them by. Newspaper circulation is in decline, and readers are as likely to get their news from an internet portal as from their hometown paper. Furthermore, several of the best-known internet brands (such as eBay, Craigslist and Monster) have largely supplanted newspaper classifieds.

At least two of the trends that explain newspapers' inability to capitalize on the internet (1. readers' preference for niche-content; and 2. the development of extremely fine-grained advertising metrics) will wreak havoc on the radio industry's attempts to take advantage of podcasting.

One of the most consistent trends over the last decade has been the explosion in the number of news and information sources. Television networks expanded from 3 to a few tens to hundreds (and if Google has their way, perhaps to millions) of channels. Text news sources expanded from a handful of major papers to millions of blogs. The underlying trend is a consistent and voracious appetite for niche-content. Radio, however, has been insulated from this trend, because until recently there has been no distribution channel for niche-content audio. The first cracks in this foundation were the satellite radio companies, which offer hundreds of channels. Yet if the rise of the internet is a reasonable analogy, once the enabling technology is widely available, listeners will demand thousands, tens of thousands, even millions of audio channels.

A second trend is the rise of extremely fine-grained classified ad reporting metrics. Companies that enable online advertisements (such as Google and Overture) provide advertisers with extremely detailed advertising metrics on click thru rates, costs per click and costs per conversion. Online advertisers can use these tools to quickly and cheaply iterate through a series of advertisements, improving them on each cycle. Newspapers had no way to match these statistics, and advertisers have shifted online in droves. Radio, of course, has never had to face this threat, because there has been no competition. And, to be fair, the advertisers that are currently underwriting podcasts are doing so on metrics which are almost certainly less credible than those offered by the radio industry. However, as mp3 players are integrated into more powerful palmtop devices, fine-grained tracking will inevitably follow. (I would go so far as to speculate that users will soon accept fine-grained (if somewhat anonymous) tracking of their phone usage in exchange for free phone calls. Phone companies, in turn, will turn that tracking into a powerful mechanism for improving advertising metrics.) Advertisers will not hesitate to convert from broad demographic ad buys to niche-content based ad buys with good conversion statistics.

Where does that leave radio? At worst it leaves them with few listeners and fewer advertisers. While other scenarios are certainly possible, radio execs have to deal with two basic facts: over the next few years users will demand unlimited options when it comes to content and advertisers will demand perfect information.

Audible introduces its new podcasting features

2005-06-22T05:25:00.000-07:00

I have written elsewhere about audible.com dipping its toes into podcasting. Audible has released an introduction to its soon-to-be-released podcasting functionality:

Audible now offers content producers the infrastructure for circulation control, paid subscriptions and advertising management needed to effortlessly produce and manage podcasting - and turn that audio content into predictable, incremental revenue.

Full announcement to follow next week at Gnomedex. (In fact between announcements from Apple, Audible and who knows else, Gnomedex is shaping up to be a watershed event in the popularization of podcasting.)

Recent changes at Talkr

2005-06-02T20:33:00.000-07:00

One of the pleasures of a startup is that you can invent and implement in quick release cycles. Here are a few of the updates that we have released to Talkr in the last week.

Perhaps most noticeable is a new look and feel on the homepage and secondary pages. We moved several of the feeds from the free audio page to the homepage so that people can get a sense of Talkr's functionality without having to click deeper into the site.

We have also changed our subscription policy -- in addition to the free audio feeds, you can now listen to any three feeds for free. So if you want to hear how your own blog will sound, submit it on our Search for Feeds page, create a free membership, and get out your iPod.

Finally, we have been getting lots of requests from people that are interested in having Talkr host a podcast of their blog. You can now submit your blog for inclusion in Talkr Partners -- our free program to podcast text-only blogs.

If you have other feature requests, please don't hesitate to contact us, or leave your requests as comments to this post.

Grokking Findory

2005-05-31T09:13:00.000-07:00

I have been experimenting for the past couple of weeks with Findory, a web search company that provides implicit personalization of search results. Findory's algorithm orders search results based on three criteria beyond your explicit search terms: your previous search queries; the articles that you read in response to those previous queries; and the articles read by other people with similar search queries.

Unlike most search engines, Findory will present you with search results even if you don't enter a search term. In this sense, using Findory has more in common with using a newspaper than using Google. However, unlike a newspaper, Findory will gradually learn which articles you want on the front page.

Findory also has a feature that I really like: you can subscribe to a daily RSS feeds for keywords that interest you. However (unlike Technorati and PubSub which offer a similar feature) the RSS feed is generated based on Findory's model of your interests -- and reading articles from the RSS feed provides feedback to the personalization engine. That's a big win if you want a generalized tool that can find interesting articles for search terms that interest you.

But enough of an overview -- let's get to the meat.

The Good:

Findory turns up articles that I find interesting. Many of those articles (unsurprisingly) appear related to my previous search queries and the articles that I read. But not all. One article (that was completely unrelated to my search history) was entitled "Virginia to Shoot Gulls Nesting on Highway". Sort of a mashup of Google does BoingBoing.
You get lots of control over your search history -- if you perform a search and you don't want Findory to remember it, you can simply delete that search.
Findory provides substantially fewer search results for an average search term than, for example, Google or Yahoo. I'm going to assume that this is because the underlying algorithm allows them to throw away a lot of keyword results that aren't personal enough.

A few complaints:

Perhaps my most fundamental criticism of Findory revolves around its core strength: Findory is focused on implicit personalization. Yet I kept wanting my homepage to reflect my interests faster. The way to teach Findory what you like is to run searches. But I kept wanting to tell it more explicitly what I wanted.

Let me digress. Those of us who blog are creating ever-expanding streams of meta-data about ourselves, including the keywords and concepts that preoccupy us and the sites and articles that capture our attention. Why should a personalization engine wait around for the fairly paltry information that it can derive from 5 or 10 search queries over a two week period? Why not allow me to explicitly point a search engine to my meta data? (Especially when this meta data is already formatted into a well-understood xml format?) Better yet, why not say "I like gadgets. Personalize my searches based on Gizmodo." Couldn't a personalized search engine make some interesting use of my blogroll or my del.icio.us bookmarks? Why not allow me to "prime the pump" so to speak when I first arrive at Findory?

I also had a minor implementation complaint with Findory's RSS feeds. Suppose I see a summary of an interesting article in my personalized feed, and I click on the title. That click brings me directly to Findory where I see the same article summary that I just saw in my feed aggregator. Why does it bring me to Findory? I can't think of a reason (besides inflating Findory's pageview count). Furthermore, Findory does not consider this behavior to qualify as "reading" the article (and therefore presumably does not customize my future search results based on this click). Why not have the link point to Findory (so that Findory can record that I read the article), but then immediately redirect my request to the full blog article?

Finally, let me wrap up with a bit of speculation on Findory's future.

Let me argue, briefly, that personalization such as Findory's will not find a killer app in serving personalized news or search results. The killer app for this sort of personalization is in serving search engine advertisements. Remember, the current model of an AdWords-type advertising engine is that the advertisers that pay the most get a boost in their ad's ranking, and the ads that have the highest click-thru-rate (a form of collaborative filtering) get a boost in their ranking. But the underlying relevance model for which ads get displayed is based on keyword (and synonym) matching.

Instead, what if the search engine created a mental model of the concept you were searching for, based on your interests as exposed by your search history? Could the search engine serve more accurate ads?

Here's a brief experiment to try at home: Run a search on google for "tiger". When I did this the first ad was for worldwildlife.org: "Learn about big cats". The second ad was for tigerdirect.com: "Low Prices on PCs, LCDs and More!". Now run a second search for "Mac OS", and then a third search for "tiger". Notice that the ads displayed on this third search are still split between felines and computers. Google has missed an opportunity to learn something from my intervening search for "Mac OS", and therefore lost an opportunity to show me more relevant ads.

In fact, the ads that you click on could themselves provide additional feedback back to the personalization engine -- feedback that is at least as relevant as any article that you read.

Here are some practical reasons why one of the top four search engines would be more likely to buy Findory for its effect on advertising than its effect on search results:

The return on investment is straightforward to calculate: Success in advertising could be defined as a higher click-thru-rate. To estimate the ROI you need an estimate of the percentage of searches that employ commercially viable but ambiguous search terms; an estimate of the percentage of such queries that can be clarified by the personalization engine; and an estimate of the increase in click-thru-rates that might result. Compare that to estimating the ROI for an search results: Success in this case is defined by a user being incrementally more likely to return to your search engine and use it again in the future. (Not to mention that more accurate search results may actually decrease the number of ads that users click on, since the organic search results may address their needs without them turning to the paid advertisements.)
Integrating a personalization engine into an advertising engine would be trivial compared to integrating one into a general search engine. Instead of hundreds of weighting factors affecting relevancy you deal with a handful.
Measuring the quality of a particular set of search results is a difficult task -- one for which it is hard to agree upon common metrics. End users wouldn't necessarily notice the results of personalization in an average web search. Search engine marketers, on the other hand, live and die on incremental changes to click-thru-rates.

Overall, I will probably continue to use Findory's RSS service -- I just wonder if its focus on personalized search results will result in a viable business.

Is there a future for standalone podcasting clients?

2005-05-23T20:24:00.000-07:00

This should be an exciting and unnerving time for the folks writing podcasting clients. Exciting because there is lots of interest in podcatchers. Unnerving because... there is lots of interest in podcatchers. Steve Jobs has announced that the next version of iTunes will include a podcasting client. Newsgroups are buzzing that Microsoft can't be far behind iTunes.

Is there a standalone future for the Dopplers and the iPodders? No. Here's why: a good podcasting client is like plumbing -- it's only visible to the end user when it screws up. Do you pay your plumber to put in brand name copper pipe? No. You buy a house and you expect it to have adequate pipe. Podcasting clients are going to get absorbed into some other piece of software on user's desktop.

So here's my advice to the folks currently writing podcasting clients: port your podcatcher to FireFox. Earn the praise of your peers and the bragging rights of having contributed to FireFox. Help to create a podcasting client that could be installed on 50 million desktops, doesn't enforce DRM and that accepts audio in any format. The podcasting community will thank you.

Update: Looks like Thunderbird, Mozilla's standalone email client, is scheduled to add podcatching support later this month. Let's see, iTunes, Mozilla, and lots of rumors about a major Microsoft podcasting announcement later this month at Gnomedex. Who else might be interested in playing in this space: Nokia? Palm?

Talkr beta launches

2005-04-26T19:42:00.000-07:00

We launched the Talkr beta on April 15th. We've gotten some great feedback, and made a number of changes -- both to the underlying functionality and to the user interface itself. We had quite a few folks ask for invitations to the beta -- more, in fact, than we had planned to give out. We have just begun to send out a few more -- so if you wanted one, and we didn't get in touch with you, please send me another request at cbrooks at talkr dot com.

For those of you that haven't looked at talkr.com, let me give you a brief introduction.

Talkr provides a service that allows people to listen to any text feed. Want the New York Times headlines as a podcast? Point Talkr to the NYT's feed, and point your podcast client to Talkr. Want to listen to your favorite blog? Point us to their feed -- we will convert that feed from text to speech and make a podcast available.

Curious about the sound quality of our podcasts? Here's a link to a 3 minute audio version of a post that I wrote entitled "The quiet 600-pound gorilla".

The quiet 600 pound gorilla

2005-03-30T17:25:00.000-08:00

AudioBlogger, BlogSparx! and Odeo have been getting a lot of press lately for their efforts to popularize podcasting. But there is another company that does something that looks a lot like podcasting: audible.com.

Audible was founded in 1995, did an ipo in 1999 and recently announced 2004 revenue of US $34.4 million. The company is expecting approximately $60 million in revenue in 2005. They are extremely bullish on the increasing demand for spoken audio. They have initiatives to expand their presence in overseas markets, to expand their wireless offerings, and to dive into educational products. They have also noticed podcasting.

In a February 2005 analysts' call, audible's CEO said a few words about podcasting:

Also on the technology front we will shortly publish powerful tools and support services to aid the growing community of talented self-publishers, bloggers and podcasters. We will move to combine some of the singular advantages of the audible listening experience, our broadly adopted platform for internet audio distribution, and powerful new rss enclosure-based distribution technologies both as additive services for our current content partners and as new tools for the growing self-publishing community.

The technology of podcasting (that is, time-shifted playback) is a natural fit for audible -- especially for their daily audio editions of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. And I certainly applaud any efforts that encourage more mainstream use of podcasting. But audible's current stable of content is edited content -- in fact, it represents the most successful of edited works. The WSJ recently noted that audio books are only made if the publisher expects the hard-cover edition of a book to sell at least 50,000 copies. Blogs represent a shift to much less formal (and less formulaic) content.

What can we make of this shift to include the substantially less formal blogosphere? First, audible undoubtably sees the power of the long tail in their own business. (How could they not? In many ways, Audible is in the same business as Amazon -- and Amazon is the canonical example of the long tail.) Second, while several entrepreneurs made it out of the starting gate first, large businesses have noticed podcasting and are reacting quickly. First-mover advantage is often an ephemeral advantage at best, and in this market it may go to the larger players!

Odeo begins its beta

2005-03-30T14:08:00.000-08:00

Judging from the login text boxes on Odeo's homepage, they have begun their beta. Seems like a reasonable occasion to announce that my new company, talkr.com will begin its beta on Monday, April 18th.

Pheedo scores early advertising wins for podcasters

2005-03-23T05:13:00.000-08:00

Pheedo, a company known for its AdWords-like advertising on blogs and rss feeds, has brokered advertising agreements for two podcasters: Eric Rice and the Chris Pirillo Show. Pheedo's blog entry is here. Other coverage is here and here.

I think the deal with Chris Pirillo is interesting, in that Citrix (the company sponsoring the advertisment) is experimenting with pay-for-performance (PPP) metrics on the podcast. Pirillo will be using a Citrix product in his podcasts, and listeners can use a promotional code to register for a free trial of the product. PPP advertising is a natural fit for podcasters given that standard web advertising metrics will be hard to come by.

Hats off to Pheedo!

Update on Odeo's business plan

2005-03-18T12:40:00.000-08:00

Evan Williams gave a presentation yesterday on Odeo at O'Reilly's Emerging Technologies conference, and the blogosphere is buzzing. Tom Foremski has a nice writeup, that includes a summary of Odeo's business plan:

Offer free basic hosting and charge for premium hosting, based on bandwidth usage....

Sell advertising into popular content (a la radio) with some sort of revenue-sharing arrangement....

Sell premium content. "Audible has shown that a significant audience is willing to pay for non-music digital audio," said Ev, who counts himself a loyal Audible customer. "I think there's a lot of potential in non-book forms as well. There are a lot of things I would be willing to pay to get in audio form even if they're available for free on text form....

Another Company in the PodCasting Space

2005-03-18T12:30:00.000-08:00

Just noticed a company called MessageCast which is adding a new advertising wrinkle. According to IntenetNews.com, MessageCast monitors a podcast feed and notifies its subscribers (via email, rss or "desktop alert") that that a new podcast is available. It plans to add advertisements to those notifications.

MessageCast's LiveMessage alerting service lets users know when a new podcast is available and alerts them via any number of different mechanisms, including e-mail, IM and RSS. The plan is to allow advertisers to place contextual ads in those alerts.

Surveying a rush of Podcasting businesses

2005-03-17T19:57:00.000-08:00

A number of new businesses have sprouted in the past month to capitalize on podcasting. (Not sure what podcasting is? Wikipedia is your friend.) The PodCast Network, Odeo, TechPodCasts.com, and Adam Curry's Boku Communications to name a few. And, of course, we can't forget the veritable granddaddy of them all, itconversations. Does the podcasting trend have strong enough legs to support these businesses? Before I answer that question, I should disclose that I am tossing my hat into this ring as well -- so you may want to keep your salt handy if you choose to drink the cool-aid that follows.

How will these businesses make money? A number of individual podcasters already make money from sponsorships and micropayments. Doc Searls' thread on making money with podcasting drew a number of examples from people that make (what I assume to be) beer money (or perhaps car payment money?) from podcasting.

Yet the new crop of podcasting businesses are seeking more substantial revenue. They are focused primarily on advertising. That is, they intend to develop a network of high-quality podcasts that will attract a core of committed listeners, and in turn, a group of avid advertisers.

The problem with advertising strategies today is that there are relatively few listeners. Few podcasts have aggregated more than 10,000 listeners. (In February of this year, ClickZ reported that The PodCast Network's most popular podcast had about 6,000 listeners.) In BlogAd's second annual survey of blog readers about 5% of respondents acknowledged listening to one or two blogs on a weekly basis. It takes no great analytical skill to conclude that if only a few blog readers are listening to podcasts, substantially fewer non-blog readers are listening. Therefore, pursuing an advertising-based strategy today depends on (1) a faith that listenership will expand quickly and (2) either deep pockets or keeping your day job.

Is the audience for podcasts likely to grow dramatically in the next year or two? My guess is that it will. Three trends point in that direction:

1. Better technology for creating, finding and distributing podcasts: Many of the companies mentioned above are trying to make it easier for listeners to find high-quality podcasts. Adam Curry's company is taking that one step farther and offering to pay up-and-coming podcasters directly. Many other companies are developing tools that dramatically reduce the cost of creating and producing high quality audio. And finally, there are a multitude of podcasting clients (podcatchers) under development.

2. MP3 player / cell-phone ownership: MP3 players reached a tipping point in 2004. According to a Pew Internet & American Life survey released on Feb. 14, 2005, 11% of adults now own MP3 players -- and if the teenagers I know are representative, the adoption rate among teens quite likely exceeds the rate among adults. Cell phones with adequate memory can already be used as MP3 players, and that trend will only accelerate. In fact, a recent study found that of the 44% of US teens (ages 10 - 18) that have a cell phone, 71% want to use their phone as an MP3 player.

3. Continuing penetration of broadband: Downloading audio files is impractical on dialup lines -- time shifted or no. As of February 2005, slightly more than 56% of US internet users have broadband access from home. This percentage has increased at approximately 1% a month over the past 12 months. This upward trend is expected to continue, although likely at a decreasing rate as we approach 60 - 65% penetration.

These three trends suggest a trifecta for audio content: it will be easier to develop, easier to find and easier to access in the coming year. That spells more listeners and the advertisers that follow them. Will advertising revenue offset revenue burn quickly enough for these companies (and my own) to succeed? It's too early to say -- I suspect what will matter most is good-old-fashioned entrepreneurship: keep an eye on the money and innovate, innovate, innovate.

First post on new blog

2005-03-03T10:53:00.000-08:00

So, here's the obligatory first post / introduction to me:

Name: Chris Brooks

Job Title: Entrepreneur

Current Business: Can't tell you -- Still in stealth mode.

Previous Business: The ever-popular FurnaceCompare.com

Previous Jobs:
VP, Technology at CareScout.com (2000 - 2005)
Software Engineer / Developer at Fidelity Investments (1998 - 2000)
Application Programmer at UNC-Chapel Hill (1997 - 1998)

Education: Yep.

What this blog is about: My thoughts on creating, growing, screwing up and learning from online businesses.