October 13, 2007 at 7:52 pm · Filed under Editorials, Google, Humor
Why can’t Google tell me what time it is? I know that my IP address and it’s corresponding ISP location aren’t an exact match to my physical address but why can’t Google just take a whack at it, and tell people that they *might* be wrong?
Here’s a quick little graphic I worked up in Fireworks showing where My IP registered (geographically) and where I’m actually located.
Not a huge distance in miles, and definitely within the same time zone (EST), therefore Google could easily tell me what time it is.
September 13, 2007 at 9:06 am · Filed under Editorials, Humor, Web Design, Web Development
I don’t know if you’ve been to Yahoo! Shopping lately, but it’s a complete disaster of a shopping portal and Yahoo should be ashamed … ASHAMED! of having that atrocity in their mature web portfolio.
First some history …
I happened across Shopping.Yahoo.com not because I was ’shopping’ but rather I was following the story on Woot! about a new “partnership” they rolled out with Y! Shopping (anyone else find it weird that Woot! and Yahoo! both end! with! exclamations?! Jason Toon is hilarious by the way, and his blog announcement of the “selling out” is a good read.\
Getting back to Y! Shopping, if anyone hasn’t seen the home page, it’s a disaster of banner ads, links that look like banner ads, and poorly structured navigation and changing page layouts … it’s that bad.
Here’s a screenshot, see the large version at Flickr.
Here’s a screenshot with my commentary, and the larger version at Flickr.
The Problems as I See Them:
1. The main store navigation looks like a poorly disguised ad placement, more commonly seen on spammy landing pages setup by domain prospectors.
2. There are ads, everywhere. Too many ads and not enough product highlights and shopping tools. Amazon makes Yahoo! Shopping look downright silly.
3. Wasted space. Not only do the ads take up valuable real estate, the spacing is bad and Yahoo uses an entire section to tell me I’m not logged in that could be devoted to … selling? (what a concept)
4. Woot! Their best feature is halfway down this depressing page, and offers the only glimmer of hope (and slim chance that someone still has a pulse) over at Yahoo! Shopping.
Look, I’m sure Yahoo! makes an assload of money from this portal, and probably sells a crap load of ads and makes a tidy profit. But it’s just downright horrible, and they could make a lot more if they’d devote a little attention (and some expensive Stanford PHD brain time) on devising a better shopping experience, and in turn better ROI for their advertisers.
August 17, 2007 at 8:45 am · Filed under Editorials, Social, Startup, Web 2.0
Web 3.0 Startup Checklist:
1. New Take on a Social Network: CHECK
2. Built With Uber Cool Rails: CHECK
3. Investment from Rich Web 1.0 Moguls: CHECK
4. Crazy Ass Business Model: CHECK
The idea for Zivity is good, but the execution is not in line with the market, and I know a little something about the pron market. I mean who doesn’t?
According to VB, they want the photos to be “fine erotica” submitted by hot people where paid subscribers vote and follow these local hotty attention whores.
Hmmm sounds a lot like MySpace … which is free … and prob has 1000 times more local hotties to stalk than Zivity has. Where do I sign up? Oh that’s right I can’t (it’s in private beta)
Pron is free all over the mighty Interweb. There are free social networks, free attention whores, free fine erotica photos and free adult blogs to keep everyone more than satisfied.
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Zivity, an adult social network, raises $1M before launch
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 Zivity, a new adult social network start-up, has raised a $1 million round of seed capital from Silicon Valley investors — as it prepares for launch.
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It’s not a porn site, such as the newer sites Eroshare (pictures) or Pornotube (vidoes). Rather, it likens itself to a mixture of MySpace and Playboy magazine with popularity/voting features thrown in. It says it focuses on pinup-like photography, or so-called “fine art erotica.” It invites regular woman — such as the local Starbucks barista — to submit photo shots.
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It is apparently based on ruby+rails, python, and/or perl, according to its job list.
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| Several former PayPal executives are among the investors. |
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August 16, 2007 at 3:29 pm · Filed under Editorials, News, Search Engines
No offense Allen but you’re just plain wrong here. Yes Mahalo doesn’t pick up “new” news as quickly as automated bots, again just like Alexa as long as you understand how the data is collected this shouldn’t be a surprise.
The important question here is; Will the Skype outage of Thursday August 16th 2007 really go down as a “newsworthy” topic? One that would warrant a complete page on Mahalo?
The answer is No, of course not, the story barely belongs in Google’s index as I’m sure it’s already been resolved and 99.99998% of the population didn’t even notice.
As far as Mahalo using social news site to promote original articles I don’t really take issue with that, Jason will just need to be careful not to focus too much on that sort of social baiting. As you can see from Digg, most social communities tend to boil down the the least common denominator as the audience exands.
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 As nearly everyone online knows by now, Skype is out of commission. It’s down for the count. I was one of the first people to post about the Skype outage this morning, and since then, hundreds of others have as well. It’s a hot topic on Google Hot Trends (#45), and I am seeing 500 people an hour from my first page Google result.
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But where is the Mahalo page? The Mahalo Skype page has 3 headlines of which 2 are semi-outage related. Otherwise, searching for “Skype down” or “Skype outage” provides no result. Yet Google has indexed my page from 6AM and already shows it as one of the top pages.
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August 14, 2007 at 11:00 am · Filed under Editorials, Google
I have to object with Arrington’s analysis of Alexa and scold him for yet another blog article about how Alexa is inaccurate and needs a “re-work”.
Alexa is just a tool, no more no less. We all know HOW Alexa gathers data, and we all know the flaws. It should be used along with Compete and Comscore to gain an overall picture of where a website ranks in comparison to other sites in it’s field. Just like your FICO score is calculated from 3 credit reporting agencies, your overall website rank is the summation of different traffic and influence measurements.
I can find flaws in any web service. How easy it is to show a bad rank order in Google? How easy is it to spot inaccuracies with the Technorati Top 100? Singling out tools and highlighting how inaccurate they are when you fully understand how it collects data is foolish. It also means that you can’t discount a tool completely just because it isn’t perfect. Will I post a blog article about how Google is useless because it could give me a good result set for “car insurance”? Of course not, I’ll just use another tool in my virtual “tool belt”.
Posting’s like this one are useless and contribute nothing to the discussion. Have I learned anything besides TC pointing out that more Alexa users visit YouTube than Google? No, I could have gone to Alexa and seen for myself. The content of this posting is just blogosphere flame bait spewed out by anyone who wants to make a name for themselves or attract the largest crowd (in this case the latter).
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We’ve gotten a few “tips” that YouTube has actually grown larger than Google in terms of page views according to Alexa .
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This is, of course, complete fiction. And it shows just how useless Alexa has become as a method for measuring web traffic and reach. Comscore tells a much different (and more accurate) story - Google is nearing 100 billion monthly page views; YouTube sees around 16 billion.
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Even newcomer Compete, which measures traffic in a similar way as Alexa, seems to be getting it right. Alexa needs an overhaul. It’s long since become less than useful.
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