But there are all kinds of ways to achieve your quota including various forms of arbitrage.

I read today via the MaxCDN blog that SimpleCDN service is in deep trouble – some of their suppliers have apparently pulled the rug from under their feet leaving them with an inability to supply bandwidth to their clients because they no longer have servers to do it.

Note:  I have a sponsorship deal of this blog with MaxCDN and am one of their affiliates, but I really only worry about the affiliate program for large clients with direct referrals – if you have a large site that has high bandwidth demand or needs acceleration, drop me an email via my contact form and I can help you evaluate whether they would be a good partner.
If you check the blog post I think they have a good deal for former SimpleCDN customers or those that just need some continuity until they can recover – I hope SimpleCDN make a little money from people using the coupon code “simplecdn”

The CDN Dog Fight

SimpleCDN have apparently been using infrastructure provided by SoftLayer and Hosting Services, Inc.

That to me sounds like their 10TB and 100TB offerings.

Who in their right mind would offer 100TB of bandwidth with a single dedicated server and not expect it to be used in some way to serve media in large quantity?
They also have unmetered… of course who is going to buy unmetered unless they intend to really use the bandwidth.

Part of the 100TB terms of service state

A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is prohibited from running on our network. Special requests to run CDN services may be approved on a case by case basis. Failure to comply with this policy will result in the disabling of all hosting services.

I don’t know whether they had special permission, or how long that term has been in force.

If someone was going to rely on a hosting partner for a huge amount of bandwidth it seems to me they would check the terms of service, and make any special arrangements.

But Hosting Services Inc also run VPS.net and their own CDN services. Until recently they were Akamai partners until Akamai decided to pull the rug from under their feet, and in a quick shuffle they switched to using Level3.

• This sounds to me like SimpleCDN had a deal
• Hosting Services Inc had had enough of SimpleCDN undercutting them on CDN services using their own hosting plans and decided to terminate them at very short notice, in much the same way they themselves were terminated by Akamai. The value proposition SimpleCDN vs Akamai compared to SimpleCDN vs Level3 is significantly different, such that SimpleCDN are without doubt more of a direct competitor of VPS.net than they were previously.
• That sucks, hense MaxCDN’s offer and me being annoyed and writing something when I should be working

I haven’t had a chance to contact Hosting Services Inc or Softlayer for comment, I am meant to be working on other stuff so just need to get the news out in the hope that it helps a few friends recover from downtime before Christmas.

For whatever reason you don’t kill people’s hosting just before Christmas in this way

Some Twitter Chatter

@SimpleCDN Heard about your predicament. I'm working at MaxCDN and we may be able to help. Call me at 818-284-9829. Cheers, Samir Said (CSO)

December 11, 2010 5:48 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@sbbsam

Samir Said

Latest updates on SoftLayer illegal actions: http://admin.simplecdn.com/

December 11, 2010 5:59 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

Our engineering team can help you get up and running on CloudFront right away, and we've so far heard great things about MaxCDN.

December 11, 2010 6:00 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@QuickWebHosting Us too, but in our case they illegally terminated our services. Hope that didn't happen to you too.

December 11, 2010 6:03 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@AddToAny We apologize, and are working on alternative service - and we can help you move to another provider in anyway possible...

December 11, 2010 6:11 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@AddToAny We'll post any additional updates on our feed, and via this site http://admin.simplecdn.com/ regarding SoftLayer illegal actions.

December 11, 2010 6:11 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@EastOfAnywhere Right now we don't know for sure - SoftLayer's actions are unprecedented and are doing all we can as fast as we can.

December 11, 2010 6:28 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@TVMeuBrasil We are doing everything we can - at this point UK2 & SoftLayer are sticking to their goal of illegally forcing SimpleCDN down.

December 11, 2010 7:20 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@cloudharmony SoftLayer and UK2 / Hosting Services terminated our infrastructure (hundreds of servers) with no notice and no reason.

December 11, 2010 7:20 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@sidepodcast This was an effort by both UK2 and SoftLayer to remove SimpleCDN from the market.

December 11, 2010 7:22 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@Beaker We feel WikiLeaks pain - we pay these guys THOUSANDS, but still they terminate us for no reason with no notice. SoftLayer is bad bad

December 11, 2010 7:23 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@jprovo They did cut SimpleCDN off without a valid reason and no notice. Sure we'll go to court, but that doesn't really help our custms now

December 11, 2010 7:25 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

SoftLayer is not responding to any of our customers or complaints at this point - please keep contacting them, but they may hang up on you.

December 11, 2010 7:27 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@sidepodcast Obviously we have a lot to share about this - but you know how it is; waiting for the lawyer okay first, etc.

December 11, 2010 7:52 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@sidepodcast Our goal is to minimize impact to customers, even if we have to move them to other providers. Thanks MaxCDN for helping out!!!

December 11, 2010 7:53 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@hareemca Many customers lost everything, as our pricing and feature set is / was second to none.

December 11, 2010 7:54 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@Beaker As soon as we can release more details we will- but the actions were definitely directed specifically at SimpleCDN - yes we pay bill

December 11, 2010 9:15 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@SoftLayer A lot of businesses rely on SimpleCDN, at least give customers time to find a new provider before cutting them off so soon.

December 11, 2010 11:20 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@Y3com

Y3.com

@eluis Believe me, we understand. We are happy that MaxCDN is offering our customers a discount - but yes our offering is / was the lowest.

December 12, 2010 1:44 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@SimpleCDN

SimpleCDN

@SimpleCDN do you guys have backup of the files? Freakin out here... have 750 customers relying on SimpleCDN + no backup! who do I contact?

December 11, 2010 10:47 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@leebensondotcom

Lee

VPS.NET Twitter Statement

This is interesting – when questioned, the VPS.NET MD knows nothing about it

interesting goings on the CDN market. first @akamai pull the rug on @vpsnet, now uk2 pull the rug on @simplecdn: http://bit.ly/hVtxFH

December 11, 2010 4:00 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@sidepodcast

Sidepodcast F1

with uk2 & @vpsnet effectively being the same company, i wonder if the two incidents are related? thankfully we moved content away long ago.

December 11, 2010 4:09 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@sidepodcast

Sidepodcast F1

@sidepodcast As the M.D. of VPS.NET - I knew nothing of this...so I can assure you it's not related to VPS.NET at all. ^NN

December 11, 2010 4:29 pm via CoTweetReplyRetweetFavorite

@vpsnet

VPS.NET

I have also checked cache dates on the 100TB terms of service and have a screenshot from 8th December which contained that clause.

I have had interactions with Ditlev from VPS.net and he always seemed like an honest guy who works hard to satisfy his customers.
However… the prime benefactor of SimpleCDN.com being killed off as a competitor to a UK2 service would be the CDN services within the UK2 group… which are run by VPS.net

So How Can You Get uQast For Free?

uQast For Free

• Be patient – eventually a version will be launched with a reduced feature set. You won’t have a /yourname or /yourkeyword URL and someone may even be using yours if it is at all competitive – a bit like domain names
  I don’t own andybeard.com Youtube.com/andybeard myspace.com/andybeard skype:andybeard and probably quite a few more.
  I regret not grabbing hold of those when they were available
  The exact details of the reduced feature set are not decided or I haven’t details, plus the feature set is a moving target with continual innovation. uQast Pro users will remain on the leading edge.
• Join the uQast affiliate program – I know it is a little corny but as an affiliate all you have to do is refer one person to uQast as you get UQast Pro for free. I am not sure whether that covers some of the other bonuses such as the V.I.P launch seminar or the magazine subscription, but it is a very fair deal.
  If you have a number of SEO clients this is an easy way to rack up one or more valuable media profiles that they control with high quality multimedia presentations and lead capture. It could possibly pay for itself with affiliate referrals as well.
  This is just the affiliate program for the launch – after launch everyone who has a uQast account is a uQast affiliate.
• Domaining – in theory there is a “domaining like” opportunity for premium names, though be warned there isn’t an interface set up to handle transfers – not strickly free but potentially a way to offset the cost of a portfolio

Why & Who Should Sign Up As A Founding Affiliate?

I am going to avoid “forward looking” statements about features that are just on the drawing board or have yet to be implemented.
This is intended to be “no hype” – my own evaluation of the potential of uQast some of it based upon what I initially saw in the platform, and partially from my work with the uQast team.

• Amazon S3 For Free – with some caveats

  If you look on using Amazon S3 for hosting streaming video for your sales pages or members areas, uQast can currently provide a very useful service with no bandwidth charges ever for uQast Pro users. This is especially useful for anyone doing a product launch where the bandwidth costs can be significant.
  10,000 optins watching 400MB of video is 4000GB of data – that is probably at least $500 in fees with Amazon S3. With Kajabi that is $1880.
  What you can’t offset in this way are things like theme CSS files, javascript & images for which you might use a conventional CDN service.

• Reputation Management With Lead Capture

  It is my belief that uQast is going to become an unsurpassed platform for lead capture from syndicated media. I have written blog posts about how unhappy I am with current offerings.

  If you have clients with budget (my readership between them probably have 100,000 clients with budget) – now is the time to get in, secure their names and keywords and not have to pay $200/month which is what I have heard the uQast Pro will eventually be priced at.

  uQast will be a landing page of choice to push up to the top of the SERPs for your clients because they will be able to present great content, and capture leads directly.

  I should note this isn’t a “Leapfish” like pitch – there are no guaranteed search rankings or placement for buying a URL with a uQast Pro listing that I am aware of. Rankings internally are based on quality, and external are in the hands of Google & Bing.
  A URL might offer a small SEO benefit, but the biggest effect is for branding.

• Existing sellers

  If you are selling digital products already, this is another marketplace that you can leverage. You might make some extra sales. The product listings are based upon a patent pending algorithm which focuses on quality and reviews, not how much money you have to pay for advertising – oh and being listed is free.
  Some systems focus only on the newest products currently being promoted – the hope is that products on uQast will have significant longevity with an emphasis on quality not hype.

• Upsell System

  For those selling digital products the upsell system in uQast is extremely easy to implement and doesn’t have some of the restrictions of competing services.
  Of note is you can track the upsell process whilst maintaining session for Google Analytics.
  Up until relatively recently the popular solution for 1-click upsells was Infusionsoft – $300/month for the version with cart and affiliate program. Then there is the added cost of reliable integration and support – I have seen figures of $15k-$20k mentioned by multiple people though there are cheaper alternatives.
  I have tried other systems, but the technology wasn’t necessarily as straight forward as you might assume from the sales information, and they relied on having your own merchant account.
  Clickbank can do upsells but last I heard that was limited to existing high volume partners.

• No Merchant Account

  Some people don’t have a merchant account or would have great difficulty geting one for a number of reasons, yet a merchant account or the equivalent from Paypal is the only way to do an upsell chain effectively – all uQast sales are processed by uQast – they handle all transactions, product delivery, refunds, chargebacks (cross fingers very few) etc
  Don’t ask me how much the fees are – in testing they were set somewhere below that offered by competing market places.
  I also can’t say how long it takes to receive funds – likely initially it would be subject to the refund period – I am not going to speculate on longer term possibilities.

• Revenue & Actions

  You can’t currently include opt-in forms, micropayment and a shopping cart in many other competing offerings. Ooyala does some of it but at a price – I believe Slideshare can do lead generation on a video embed, but that uses their proprietary system which as far as I am aware doesn’t post directly to your autoresponder forms.
  Note: uQast does not currently support document embeds.
  Some of the players that support payment or lead generation “in the player” actually achieve this using javascript. Whilst it is technically possible to get that working for viral syndication, I have yet to see anyone do it and there are other complications.

• Free player

  The cost of players can add up depending on which you use. JW Player isn’t free for commercial use yet I often see “6 figure” & “7 figure” marketers using an unlicensed player. Flowplayer in theory you can use the GPL version as I believe is used with some Amazon S3 solutions – I have never seen any WordPress plugin or other solution that actually used all the features of these players in a user friendly way – some come close, but add other incompatibilities

  Note: Forward looking statement – There is a major issue with hosting your own player… trust – to get a player accepted for embedding in Facebook, Twitter, WordPress.com, Google Buzz & appearing in Google Reader the owners of those sites need to trust the code. That isn’t something that will ever happen for self hosted code for small sites.
  If your long-term media strategy is based on using your own player, no matter how well the player is coded you are guaranteed reduced virality.
  The best you can expect if you used html5 is that the html5 video would be shown, but without your custom features.

  This is a forward looking statement in that achieving trust and geting the coding right for uQast will also be a long term currently unfulfilled goal, but as an established community it is a goal that is at least achievable.

My Offer For uQast

As I have mentioned in the comments it is hard to dedicate a huge amount of time for an extended period, and I have full time obligations currently with the uQast team in various ways.
However both for work and in various communities I have experienced the immense value of being a member of private chat groups on Skype. So I am going to set up a private Skype group for all my uQast Pro referrals where they will have direct access to me, and to each other. That means there is a little bit of a self help aspect if I am not around for an extended period of time, but I generally have Skype on most of the day.
The intention isn’t as a general chat room – high signal to noise.

I expect for this founders launch that room is going to be pretty exclusive for a few months and will help people get up to speed fast. Even if it ends up one-on-one that just hopefully means it is just better signal to noise.

It is also in some ways a benefit to me to get direct feedback from customers, though my bandwidth is limited.

This won’t be a route to unannounced information or special access to features, but there are likely some methods to do things that work better than others, strategy discussions etc which would be worthwhile.
This is not intended to be a supplemental channel for support issues of various kinds, as for many of those kinds of problems I am certainly not the person to contact
It also isn’t hand holding, and would most likely suit more advanced users with some technical skill.

Here is an affiliate link again so I can track things

It is hard to place a real world value on such a group/room – one SEO membership I belong to has such a group on Skype of typically 60 people and at times that can get a little noisy as there is general chat, but the level of direct feedback from experienced people is unsurpassed. The value certainly exceeds the $30/month you might pay for that if that is the type of community you can gain a return on time invested from.

As noted in my previous post, I have been subverted/assimilated by uQast and am working for/with them full time in various ways. Thus whilst I try not to be biased I am sure in some ways I am – I am aware of future plans, whatever bugs might be lurking etc, but I am trying to portray things as neutrally as I can and avoiding any hype.

This service is in many ways the successor to FreeIQ, but retains hardly any of the old code (which was pretty good and ahead of its time) – FreeIQ & uQast were founded by Brad Fallon who also is a founder & CEO of Stompernet.
I personally look on uQast and Stompernet as different entities (and legally they are). uQast isn’t about training – it is a software-as-a-service platform that enables stuff you can’t do anywhere else.

If you are not inclined to comment publicly, and you have questions my contact form is available or you can always find me on Skype:call-andybeard .

You really don’t want your clients stuck with uQast.com/HGDFSREW/brandname or uQast.com/LJHTDRSW/keyword

Cloudflare is a distributed DNS, website security, & distributed Nginx powered reverse proxy (for static content) & caching proxy with content delivery network with some additional tracking and reporting ability.

That is a whole load of technology but what this means to you is:-

On average, a website on CloudFlare …
… loads 30% faster
… uses 60% less bandwidth
… has 65% fewer requests
… is way more secure
All for free!

This is how your website is normally exposed on the web.

You are in direct line of fire for everything that can possibly be thrown at it.

With Cloudshare you have an intelligent doorman in the way, only allowing through certain requests. Some high volume menial tasks such as answering the door to the postman and deliveries of groceries get handled by the caching proxy/cdn – unlike a normal CDN the URL for any file doesn’t have to change so it is very much like you set up a reverse proxy with Nginx or Squid yourself and assigned the traffic to a media server.

Simple Setup

The basic setup is fairly straight forward and only requires changing your nameservers. It is only as complicated as your initial setup, so if you have a little bit more going on… Google Apps, domain keys etc, though it looks more complicated those actually get bypassed.

There are also some extended settings

I haven’t explored these too much, but there are some things to be careful about with a blog. As an example some services such as feed readers often pull images directly and thus might be blocked by any hot linking prevention.

There are some interesting options for identifying geolocation and content obfuscation from certain types of visitors, though that doesn’t mean they are designed for cloaking content from search engines.

This is also where you assign security level with the recommendation being to use high security. You could look on the security as being a little similar to Bad Behavior, though with a CAPTCHA. I wonder if they have thought of monetizing the CAPTCHAs?

Security

The threat control is pretty interesting in that it can block web spammers, botnet zombies and exploit attackers of various types, and that is just with the free version.
The team has a lot of pedigree in this area as they were behind Project Honeypot. With the CAPTCHA and I believe also a message facility, there is also a very effective safety net in case of false positives which do happen, though some bots won’t fill in CAPTCHAs is caught by mistake such as Googlebot. I noticed today some discussion about Google’s sitemap crawler being blocked, and some suggestion of lower crawl by Google resulting from this.

In many ways Cloudflare could be looked on as an extension or next generation Project Honeypot, with the additional bribe of actually providing active protection and a huge bribe by caching content.

Analytics

The analytics features look quite interesting as an aggregate view.

They mention why the numbers might seem so much higher than javascript stats though don’t mention browsers pre-fetching content which is fairly standard these days.

Cloudflare seem to (or claim to) have knocked a second off my load time, though from what I have read that is based on the load time of the home page from another server in various locations.
Overall performance and relative performance will depend on what other optimization you are using.

I am currently using:-

W3 Total Cache Enhanced static page cache to disk
W3 Total Cache Database Cache using APC
W3 Total Cache Object Cache using APC
Autoptimize for combining/minification of CSS/jscript
Header & Footer – I discovered this gets added after Autoptimize has done it’s thing, so useful for adding things that I don’t necessarily want cached such as tracking stuff I am testing.
Cloudflare effectively as my only CDN (though I have a Amazon Cloudfront/S3 and a few other alternatives)

I could possibly improve performance a bit by locally caching lots of javascript, combining/minifying and then having it loaded from the CDN, but there is a lot of bug checking.

I don’t use APC for page caching as I found, at least on my Liquid Web Storm On Demand server that that was a lot slower for time to first byte.

Advanced Setup

You will initially hit problems with IP referrals and your server logs – the ideal solution is to to install “mod_cloudflare” on your server.

There is also this alternative (one of 2) for dealing with just the referrer within WordPress, but this won’t fix your server logs.
You would add this to wp-config.php

if ( isset($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR']) && !empty($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR']) )
{
$X_FORWARDED_FOR=explode(",", $_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR']);
$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']=trim($X_FORWARDED_FOR[0]); //take the first element in the array
}

Security For Premium Content

This isn’t a secure solution for paid membership sites – you might be better using a real CDN which can either domain lock or generate one time links.

I haven’t actually tried it with video yet.

Mindblowing for e-Commerce

If you are using an e-Commerce platform such as Volusion or BigCommerce which charges you a fortune for bandwidth, but you have control of your Nameservers and DNS this is the most amazing product / solution you will ever find.

Ideally you would go for the pro version with better security and performance which for most e-Commerce stores would likely be just $20/month. The savings for many store owners would be $80+ per month.
Then without messing around with remote hosted image hosting you can have CDN performance and a massive reduction in bandwidth excess fees.

This isn’t the only reason people face extra fees on services such as Volusion and BigCommerce, but it is a major one, and the extra performance and killing the bots makes it a best in class solution.

For further reading I came across this great post comparing the performance of various technology blogs earlier while doing some testing.
TechCrunch: The slowest tech blog, or one of the fastest? Turns out, it’s both.

p.s. I get to use Cloudflare for free, but everyone can – no barter deals for links & currently they don’t have an affiliate program.

Note: This is beta – there seems to be soe problems with some bots currently – most notably Googlebot seems to be having a few problems with this service and my crawl rate dropped by 90% and time to index a page more than doubled – I have currently switched back to my normal nameservers, and a conventional CDN

• Daily Visits
• Unique page views
• Promotion of a link by Twitter Delicious & Facebook (currently)
• The traffic you send by a specific channel

One True Fan Toolbar

The main interface for One True Fan currently is the toolbar.

Here you can see the toolbar on my screen just as I have become One True Fan of Techmeme – actually quite a hard challenge because Techmeme isn’t really a site with 100s of pages that you might normally browse.

You can gain more points by linking there, which I assume Louis has done a few times over the last couple of weeks as well as daily visits. I did manage to catch up though it is not something I could normally maintain as I don’t use Twitter.

The toolbar can get a little annoying – quite often I have forgotten to switch it off when taking screenshots, and for hardcore SEOs access to footer links can be impaired. Having to hide the toolbar on every page view when doing some work can be a pain, plus at times you are looking at lots of client sites which you might want to not permanently block, but turn off temporarily.
During the last month of alpha testing I even uninstalled the toolbar for a whole week due to these problems, and I know a few others have done the same. It is something that will hopefully be fixed soon.

One True Fan Profiles

The profiles provide a nice record of where you have been, which sites you have “captured” and which have fallen to your enemies or friends.

You can see I have been having a few small battles over various sites… well at least that is what some normal useage patterns can look like – I suppose if I was really “invested” in one of these sites then that would matter.

Being the One True Fan of Google will no doubt make a few readers LOL.

MyBlogLog Roots Empowering Marketers

3 years ago I explained why social media marketing sucks. I realise that monitoring of social media has improved a lot in the enterprise space over that time.

The team behind One True Fan are the original team members of MyBlogLog – all of them as far as I can tell. They have been off doing their own things for a few years. Eric was a co-founder of Gnip which is still doing well, but they are back to take another bite at the cherry.

MyBlogLog started off life as a tracking application – Eric wanted to see which links were popular on his blog. The widget came later as did the social graph, the collation of data etc.

I don’t think they have any plans with One True Fan to tackle content in quite the same way, though the questions I have asked have admitedly been focused on marketing features. I am a marketing geek after all.

Those still at Yahoo… please forgive me… I am going to refer to MyBlogLog in the past tense. There isn’t an indication what Yahoo will do with MyBlogLog.

One of the unique features of MyBlogLog was the ability of the widget to tell a site owner who was visiting. I am not referring to just looking at a widget, or an expanded list of the last 127 visitors that people played around with.

You could grab their user id as a javascript variable, and then use that to mine their social graph – only recently I discovered a WordPress plugin that works with that feature for some data mining, though it was a little bugged.

Big things are made about how Facebook is now expanding their special partnerships with a few sites to provide them with data about visitors before they have even logged in. MyBlogLog could do this 3 years ago, linked with lots of social graph information if a visitor included that on their profiles – you would also get a list of all their favorite blogs, and those in most cases were automatically added to after 5 or 10 visits.

You could also use the data to see what individuals were doing on your site, in some ways like expensive CRM systems such as Infusionsoft can tag people.
My friend Rob had a cool little tracking script that would log all the visitors to each page, so you could determine who were your biggest fans – I tested it for a little while. One day I was shocked to see one new visitor… a human not a bot read 52 pages of my blog in a single very long session – I think it was a Saturday and he just hung out reading.

You could also use the data to do all kinds of dynamic content targeting and data mining. In many ways Facebook are late to the game.

The problem is to actually use the MyBlogLog data there are some… issues

• You needed to be able to program and the API access had to be applied for on a per domain basis – not mass market.
• There were privacy concerns – if you started visibly profiling people and giving them rewards based on visits, and lots of people started doing it, there would have been a stink – this was the aftermath of the Facebook Beacon problems.

Tying similar technology into a toolbar of some kind makes sense because it is then installed specifically because people want their movement’s tracked to become the “One True Fan” or earn other rewards.

One True Fan Rewards

Things are a little vague on the rewards side – I have questioned Eric Marcoullier quite extensively about what will be possible, but you could really liken it more to a brain storming session than Eric explaining planned features.
There will be a way of delivering some kind of rewards – what criteria, how the delivery works etc we will have to leave for another day until things are a little more finalized. Things like coupon delivery in some way are a given, so are custom badges/patches.

Possible criteria:-

• Number of referrals (by some 2 way API integration or goals)
• Driving traffic
• Visiting certain pages
• Attaining a certain number of points
• Being One True Fan
• Visiting a certain number of times
• Visiting a certain number of consecutive days

A social media tell-a-friend rewards system on steroids.

Widgets

Apparently there is meant to be some widgets coming – I have no idea whether these might work with other platforms such as Facebook as an alternative for identity, but they are comimng all the same.

One True Fan Analytics Dashboard

One thing immediately “missing” is any kind of analytics, even as a toolbar user. If you are looking for click stats for links you share you are going to be disappointed for a while. You can get some idea from the number of points you gain.

Competitors

Badgeville – also launched at Techcrunch Disrupt – seems to be a white label solution for each brand site – mybe I am biased but I think it is the wrong solution for 99.9% of websites. They are a “solutions” provider for large sites, which means I am sure they are also charging a lot of money for implementation.

Chirrps – this seems like Entrecard 2.0 – despite having launched it is nowhere near the same level of sophistication.

Comment Luv – it might seem strange, but any incentive to visit other blogs, even if it is a just the ability to leave a comment is competition – in some ways even being a dofollow blog is an incentive as well – they have a referral program so I used a referral link.

Contest Burner – currently off the market but it is a WordPress plugin to run your own incentivized contests, rewarding things like tweets, comments, email subscriptions etc.

I don’t look on MyBlogLog or Blogcatalog to be competitors, as there isn’t really any competition for attention. One True Fan you gain points for visiting websites and promoting them which is complementary to other blogging and social media activities.

More details on Techcrunch, Louis Gray and Techmeme

For me it isn’t the game that excites me but the ability to identify those fans that are not immediately obvious.

I would be lying if I didn’t also appreciate the enhanced viral (incentivised) distribution of content.

Note: It is and Alpha version – for me, Beta starts around 90% feature complete for what should be there at public launch. Development is gong at an extremely rapid pace. Techcrunch reports $1.2M in the coffers but it was obvious there was going to be some significant investment with the number of early stage investors playing for the last few weeks.

I did a little test signup yesterday with a spare email account and received an email to signup within a few hours so signing up is worth doing – they are not going to keep you waiting forever.

I have my own thoughts on the topic of course that I have mainly left in comments.

There was me thinking the whole point was to form a syndicate

• Better deal flow
• Stronger negotiating position
• More value add with varied skills and contacts
• Dispersed risk
• A players working with A players

Who wants to invest their money (or that of their LPs) with someone who isn’t maximising the chance of success.
Success is the balance – if the deals don’t maximise the chance of success of the startup then the investment strategy fails.

This also has parallels with the disturbing trends in Internet Marketing that are also being likened to collusion.

I also understand that the more (legitimate) money someone makes selling training or services to online marketers, in theory the better they can serve their customers.

You could also look on any form of press embargo as collusion – those with access to news in advanced have commercial advantage.
Would access to news in advance influence the tone of news coverage? Who wants to shoot the goose that lays the golden eggs after all?

Does it affect reviews in some industries? If someone has written a negative review of one of your products in the past, are you more or less likely to get access to review a product in the future.

Is being given beta access as a member of the press or a blogger with the future intention of writing about it in some way collusion? In some ways I think it is.

Confidential Letter – Redacted

In the latest episode of Angelgate Michael Arrington has posted a confidential letter from Chris Sacca to some of his fellow “Super Angels” – it is 3000+ very passionate words and a very interesting read.

But one section of a highly personal nature has been redacted.

Chris Sacca email

My days have been driven by a passion that makes it impossible for me to avoid the opportunity to help. Right now, 94% of my net worth is tied up in startups and I [REMOVED BY TECHCRUNCH]. I have every shred of my money alongside my founders, often buying their same common stock. No one but an obsessive idiot would ever allocate their money that way. But, I love what I do. And I know that goes for everyone on this list.

[REMOVED BY TECHCRUNCH] hmm?

I have already seen on Quora one person ask what could possibly have been removed from that 3000 word email that could possibly be more personal, and a few comments on techcrunch have jokingly added some suggestions.

So Lets Have Some Fun With It

Complete this sentence in the comments

Right now, 94% of my net worth is tied up in startups and I [REMOVED BY TECHCRUNCH]

Thus: Right now, 94% of my net worth is tied up in startups and I wish I hadn’t invested in Crunchpad.

Here is a template if you want to do your own.

Image Source: Crunchbase

Rules

• Keep it family friendly
• Stretch the truth as much as possible
• We want dead ringers to be redacted (for whatever fictional reason)
• This is just for fun/humor

Angelgate Recap

For anyone who hasn’t been following this story for the last week here is a quick recap, but there have been 100s of posts.

• A Blogger Walks Into A Bar
• Dave McClure Gets Mad
• Dave McClure Gets Really Mad
• Ron Conway Goes Nuclear
• Ron Conway Clarifies

p.s. I have no idea if Chris has any connection with Crunchpad in the slightest, but if he did, a reference like that in the email would be a dead ringer to be redacted.

Via Techmeme

Update

For another view of the troubles in Internet marketing Dan Thies (with a new blog) is well worth a read.
p.s. Dan seems to be testing duplicate meta tags (my tests show Google take the most restrictive)

This could turn into something of epidemic proportions and is not the first barren period they have had to face, as evident by the supporting data from Feedburner.

The red lines signify days that Friendfeed hasn’t been collecting my RSS feed. There could be other days that they haven’t collected other feeds as a fair amount of my online activity should be appearing in Friendfeed.

The problem isn’t even just with Friendfeed which historically has been pretty reliable – I have seen this happen at times with Facebook as well with imported notes from my RSS feed often appearing days after a blog post is first published.

On Friendfeed I have 2856 “subscribers” – of those I regard maybe only 56 as being active humans using the service.

This also isn’t an isolated case.

As an example we have a user reporting an issue twice on the Feedburner Google Group… as you might expect without any answer.

For once this probably isn’t anything to do with Feedburner… it is almost certainly Friendfeed.. or now parent company Facebook not collecting content, and thus at the same time not preporting subscription numbers.

Facebook doesn’t report subscriber numbers that I am aware of, but that may be dependent on how you add RSS content to your profile or pages.

If this is a sign of a final death knell for Friendfeed, and with Bloglines already disappearing at the end of this month, very soon 80% of feed subscribers (of those actually reported) will be in Google Reader for this blog.
When Friendfeed was added to Feedburner reporting, it wasn’t universally accepted but in some ways it did reflect a swing in attention.
The direction of that swing is very much towards Twitter and Facebook now.

Google Buzz doesn’t seem to be aggregated into the Feedburner numbers yet.

Why Do Zombies Eat Brains? (Return of the Living Dead – probably NSFW)

Update: Within a few hours of this being posted, Friendfeed was suddenly up to date – I don’t know whether they missed anything.

But when I see the tech media oohing about a 3rd Party captcha service that uses ads, I feel I can add something to the discussion.

4 or 5 years ago one of the best though slighly naughty Adsense tricks was to slap a adsense advert right next to the submit button of any forum form. People make mistakes and occasionally click by accident, or at least the ads get seen.
Worst case scenario was you at least got an advert impression.

Microsoft have a patent application for using advertising as part of a captcha from February 2008, as pointed out by Tim when that application was made public a year ago, and he felt he was being squeezed out of the advert captcha market.

Tim’s solution is slightly younger than Microsoft’s patent, launched commercially in December 2008 to existing customers.

However the concept of tying a brand to a captcha goes back at least 5 years to this post.

Your Captcha Adverts In Action

This is what the output from the Captcha Adverts WordPress plugin looks like.

This is what the Microsoft patent shows

This is what the Solve Media captchas look like.

I would hope the Solve Media (pending) patents are related to turning a captcha advert into an advertising network, and not based on a 5 year old concept that isn’t theirs.

Captcha As Part Of Sales Funnel

In practice for many sites captcha adverts are a terrible idea unless they are part of the site’s own sales funnel.

• You don’t or shouldn’t show a captcha to members – you have their email address confirmed
• Many sites are moving over to using a shared comment management system despite the synchronization issues and potential privacy issues. Again a vastly reduced need to use a captcha.
• The primary reason to use a captcha these days is at the time of account signup.
• If your site doesn’t gain tons of comments, a payment based upon completed captcha’s is fairly pointless.

A far better scenario is to use a captcha that is either part of the lead acquisition funnel, or to increase awareness for an advertising message that is shown immediately after the captcha is completed such as a one-time offer.

I am sure there is a value to the advertiser – the problem is for most publishers they should be integrating their own messaging, not 3rd party advertising.

Media Memo state

Playing along so far: Advertisers including Microsoft (MSFT), GE’s (GE) Universal Pictures and Toyota (TM), and publishers including Meredith (MDP), Tribune and AOL (AOL).
AOL is also an investor in the company (previously named AdCopy), via its AOL Ventures arm. Other investors, who have collectively put something like $6 million into the company, include First Round Capital, New Atlantic Ventures and angels like Chris Dixon, Roger Ehrenberg, Aydin Senkut and Shervin Pishevar.

Captchas for users who are not logged in for most media publications should be to enhance lead acquisition.

But how about for logged in users?

Captcha For Logged In Users

Completing a captcha is a one time event that is currently looked on as a barrier, when it could be turned into a reward for interaction.

Imagine members (maybe even non-members) could give answers to questions related to the content or other recent events for a prize, but they could only enter by commenting. Blogs run giveaway competitions all the time which reward entry points for placing a comment, though it isn’t really as scaleable as it could be, and the presentation needs to be refined.

For non-members such a competition could be the first step in a subscription funnel.

More on Techmeme but most of it seems like reworked press releases plus a video using Vimeo (who are not for commercial use)

Michael Arrington’s sources suggest this is permanent.

That is $33 Million down the drain in research, development, infrastructure for the search engine crawlers etc.

But that is a fair investment… the investors new there was a significant risk, and based on the Crunchbase profile there were a whole load of smart people involved.

To misquote Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem In Memoriam:27, 1850:-

It is better to have tried and failed than to never have tried at all.

But Leapfish… it is not just investors who will end up losing their money… if they haven’t already pulled their investment out.

Traffic numbers between Cuil & Leapfish are very similar i.e. Leapfish hasn’t gained any traction.

No amount of paid reviews is going to revive a flagging product – Google instant just blows any unique qualities away – before anyone suggests that somehow Google are copying Leapfish, there have been various “instant” type search implementations for the last 5 years and meta search engines are a dime a dozen.

“Boiler room” sales practices – an interesting way for a startup to get “funding” from people who in some cases were borrowing money of family member’s credit cards so they didn’t miss the great opportunity to “invest” in a guaranteed listing at the top of a search engine noone is using.

Up until fairly recently you might have thought their traffic was growing… and that that was search based.

However under the surface you have the Leapfish directory http://directory.leapfish.com/

That looks like the search engine traffic (from other search engines) has taken a hammering, and all that is left of their traffic only compares to a mildly popular, though niche blog such as my own.

Mark Kithcart, Director of Marketing whenever Leapfish are criticized comes up with amazing quotes such as:-

Also I think a few clarifications around our advertising model may help. We are not the traditional PPC modeled platform where you rent space and pay per click. We offer advertisers an opportunity to actually register Keyword Positions outright. We do charge a yearly renewal fee, but advertisers are able to benefit from both the traffic and equity side of the Keyword Position as the engine continues to grow over the next several years.

Equity equity equity…

But Leapfish doesn’t grow… maybe the only way it grows is by buying traffic in the hopes of luring in more people to buy keywords that are guaranteed to rank on a search engine no one is going to use… well other than the people who have purchased keywords.

I would have thought there were government departments in the US who were meant to investigate things like this – SEC, FTC etc – maybe the total investment isn’t as large as the Madoff scenario, but people are being hurt in a similar way.
I can’t understand why there would need to be a class action lawsuit against Leapfish.

If you are looking for some indepth research, Matt has a full dossier on Leapfish, and there is mention here of a formal complaint to the BBB & FTC about Leapfish.

Matt’s analysis is actually important to add balance to this blog post because at one time he equated Leapfish traffic number to the amount of people the Leapfish boiler room sales people could call in a day to sell keywords to, many of who would check out the site before hopefully saying no.
It is quite possible the massive drop in traffic displayed in the Alexa graphs is due to a reduction in phone calls.

This blog post is all personal opinion, based upon the limited information I have available and public statements by official Leapfish representitives. I have never been cold called by Leapfish, but then I am a crazy guy living in the middle of the Polish countryside.
I have previously covered another startup by the same founder, Ben Behrouzi called ePerks.com – that website ripped off lots of Real Estate people and no longer exists.
My prediction is that Leapfish is heading in the same direction… the deadpool and I am sorry that so many people may have lost their “equity” investment without the typical safeguards you would expect for such a high risk undertaking.

Update

I knew I should have checked one more resource as for a long time Vlad was monitoring Leapfish though mostly on Twitter where I haven’t been very often in the last 6 months.

He had posted last year on one blog that he was no longer interesting in covering Leapfish.

UPDATE May13, 2010: Things pertaining to LeapFish.com, their founders and management, along with related startups are no longer of interest to me, therefore no further comments are allowed on this post. There are also more reliable sources out there (such as Better Business Bureau) to help you make an informed decision about LeapFish.

However on his real estate marketing blog there have been a few updates to the Leapfish saga, most notably this one covering the Leapfish financial situation.

Staff laid off at parent company
Class action from employees that hadn’t been paid… won by employees, and then DotNext, the parent company failed to pay the award.

My Personal opinion – Leapfish is now a Zombie – the living dead – the search box on the site is about all that is left, a meta search engine that no one uses.
A note for any Leapfish affiliates – if the can’t pay their employees, the chance that affiliates will be paid I would class as slender.
If you are interested in buying lots of keywords, there is this staute on Staten Island you might also be interested in. ;)

I can’t remember ever linking to it, but it might have happened – a quick search of my archives doesn’t reveal anything.

However delving into indexation issues webmaster tools can provide some interesting results.

What I had at the time was a custom design based on my site, created automatically, including all my side bar navigation.

Most of my sidebar navigation from that time doesn’t exist any more, but a few pages do including my contact form.

My Tradepub subdomain does not show up as backlinks in Yahoo, so might go unnoticed…. well actually it did.

Killing it off may have an effect on other metrics but without doubt this isn’t adding any value to the search engines and has never generated any revenue.

I am sure something like this works well for maybe Arstechnica, but it doesn’t work well for me.

How To Kill Off Tradepub

There might be an option to delete the pages, but that is actually suboptimal

The solution I have used for now is also suboptimal because it is quite possible that Google will only delist one page, or only the pages I link to – this one http://andybeard.tradepub.com/

What I have done is use a meta redirect in the header with zero delay which is meant to act like a 301 redirect.

That doesn’t necessariliy mean that Google and other search engines will redirect all the pages but we can see how quickly it occurs.
I have also included a noindex on all the pages as well as Sebastian suggests.

Even with a 301 redirect in .htaccess or php it can take months for the URLs to drop out of the index.

I used the beta RevResponse interface to add the redirects.

The optimal version? Just noindex, drive Googlebot to actually crawl the pages, then 301 redirect/meta redirect once they are all out of the search results, possibly with a temporary sitemap file to encourage crawling the 100s of pages (maybe 1000s).

I don’t know the answer as to whether RevResponse & Tradepub could harm your search results, but there are enough forgotten wastelands on the web full of duplicate content and worthless links – just doing my bit to clean up the rubbish.

Google Instant Video – Marissa Mayer

p.s. For those who think SEO still has no purpose, you would think between all the millions Ooyala have invested and a top tier user like Techcrunch they would somehow get their video optimization and embed code perfected for syndication.
Then again – Google must have a huge budget and that video won’t appear in a feed reader.

With the launch of Google Instant there has been a lot of chatter and I am joining the “me to” chatter with a few thoughts.

The Long Tail & Pareto

A lot gets written about the Long Tail… of anything and there are so many diagrams trying to explain the long tail in various scenarios. The long tail is very similar to Pareto’s 80:20 when applied to search marketing – what is worthy and provides measurable task ROI.

From Google Image Search

There are 2 ways people look on Long Tail search queries

• The likelyhood that someone will enter a particular search query
• The number of keywords in the search query

With the increased emphasis on the use of search suggestions, for some users that is going to change significantly.

I say some users, because it will be interesting what happens when people who can’t type effectively use Google Instant – they are constantly looking at their keyboard rather than what is appearing on their screen.
They might have an incresed incentive to learn how to touch type because with every keystroke something changes on their screen in a very visible manner, but it will also encourage lots of pausing – not because what is on the screen is relevant to what they are looking for, but becasue it takes time to look up, see what has changed, look down again and find the next key.

Such a scenario of course is only going to happen with familiarity – eye tracking data currently suggests that regular Google users just bash out their queries ignoring the instant suggestions.

The thought is that what people typed was what was appearing as a suggestion anyway, but people still typed. It is impossible to tell if what appeared as a suggestion might have guided their typing in some cases, especially with slower typers.
Google suggest (now Instant) could be subliminal too.

I know people who take 3 seconds to find each key on the keyboard. I am sure you do too.

That rubberneck effect will skew search data in some way.

Google themselves state that for both Organic search (the impression data in Webmaster Tools) and for Adwords Impressions, things are calculated in the same way.

Impressions are measured in three ways with Google Instant:

1. Your site is displayed in search results as a response to a user’s completed query (e.g. by pressing “enter” or selecting a term from autocomplete). This is the traditional model.With Google Instant, we also measure impressions in these new cases:
2. The user begins to type a term on Google and clicks on a link on the page, such as a search result, ad, or a related search.
3. The user stops typing, and the results are displayed for a minimum of 3 seconds.

Google Revenue

Regarding total revenue for Google, I think Greg Boser said it best

The only real game changing aspect of Instant is the additional money G will make by attaching adwords to the Suggest tool.

September 9, 2010 3:26 pm via Seesmic DesktopReplyRetweetFavorite

@GregBoser

GregBoser

Smut

I mentioned to Laurie that Google Instant wouldn’t change search at all for 20% of searches. That seems to be highlighted by the number of filtered words and the ability of Google to adequately cope with the naughty word vocabulary of modern society.

Just a note if anyone from Google reads this, image search universal results do not give a warning for sites that may harm your computer from the main search index – do all browsers now have safe browsing protection?

Keystroke Optimization

• Is your website on speed dial?
• Does your domain name or brand trigger a competitor first?
• Should you go for brand or topical keyword?
• How many keystrokes is too many?

Just to highlight this, I have an “issue” with online reputation expert Andy Beal.

Andy Beal (marketing guy) has a problem to overcome.. Andy Beal (Billionaire) in Wikipedia, but I am sure he will eventually overcome that hurdle. $1B would however buy a lot of links encourage lots of university benefactor links to a Wikipedia article.

That reminds me, I should have a chat with Jann about my image links.

I obviously need to rebrand as “Andy B” – don’t think that isn’t possible, and it could influence search traffic.

How many keystrokes are needed to bring up your site in the SERPs?

Rooting around the SEO blogosphere 6 or 7 seems to be very good – some sites it was as many as 14 keystrokes. That is a lot, with tons of competitors for attention in between.

We Have Seen It All Before?

I realise we have had Google suggest for a fairly long time in internet years but different brains work in different ways – and different searchers are looking for different content in their results, which is why visual search results with various forms of multimedia elements become more prevalent.

Googlers were claiming that Google Instant changed the way they internally performed queries – you can probably assume a high percentage of Googlers can touch type. They did beta test this for a while and rolled it out for everyone. If they hadn’t seem some positive gains from a general audience I doubt they would have launched it.

Google’s business is search.. the one area they can’t really afford total failures.

Oh and SEO Is Not Dead!