I use Skype for team communication for uQast, direct customer support & 1-on-1 training, large group chats with my SEO friends from the SEO Dojo, and to keep in contact with friends & family.

With uQast we are also moving towards using a Skype based virtual PBX and Live Chat for a large proportion of our pre-sales communication.

Officially announced, what had previously been confirmed that Microsoft is buying Skype for $8.5B – significantly more than the valuation when Ebay sold a large chunk to investors whilst releasing its grip in preparation for a possible IPO.

So I thought I would take this opportunity to mention directions I would like to see Microsoft take the platform in the future, rather than speculate on how they will ever make a return on their investment.

Open Platform

Microsoft – please make Skype more open – other IM clients talk to each other – actually… do the same with Live Messenger as well.

Support XMPP / Jabber – forge open standards for other forms of communication

This page of clients that support XMPP actually asks “See Something Missing?”

Sure do… Live Messenger & Skype.

If you chat over XMPP feel free to nag people in some way to “upgrade” to a more secure or flexible client… if that is the case.

Some of the things we want to do with Skype we currently can’t because custom development costs would be to prohibitive, so many of our staff may end up using Google Talk or another XMPP supporting client, and client records may end up fragmented.

Screen Sharing – One To Many

I know that the big push has been for video chat to support more users, but adhoc screen sharing to multiple users on an audio conference is much more useful.

That being said I am not saying that is something I want to pay for – for large pre-arranged webinars you can use a dedicated service.

Conversation History & Search

Skype search is terrible – a conversation between Joe Bloggs and Andy Beard is different to a conversation between Andy Beard & Joe Bloggs, and you can only search within a single conversation history at a time.

I typically have updates in 10-20 conversations every day, across 2 Skype accounts and finding a reference someone made in one of them, even if you remember who made the reference is like finding a needle in a haystack.

There also needs to be significant improvement in the way historical conversations can be migrated between multiple desktops and mobile devices – some current conversations do get populated over time, but it is a very hit and miss affair. I want to be able to access 6 or 7 years of history which took place on multiple PCs.

Online Business Integration

This can come in a number of ways

• Click to Call
• Live Support
• CRM Integration

I can certainly see Microsoft buying an outfit like Invox or IfByPhone in the near future

If small business owners have to get in the habit of having Skype always on, because that is the direction their leads come from, there is without doubt a way to monetize that with advanced features, and Skype Out will also become more prevalent.

System Hog

On my windows laptop I used to deliberately run older versions of the Skype client and switch the extras off because I found the resources it used only surpassed by Firefox among applications I needed to have “always on”.

These days I am running 2 copies of Skype side-by-side using the /secondary option you can set by the command line, and my 64 bit Windows 7 desktop system can cope with that comfortably… but that doesn’t mean the client isn’t a system hog.

Always on applications such as IM clients need to be more streamlined.

I’m Sure You Have Your Own Bugbears

These are just a few things that affect me on a daily basis – what would you like improved on Skype?

Translation

Microsoft is dumping these blogs anyway, and maybe gaining some other value from giving 30M users to Automattic.

This is like upgrading Windows 7 to Ubuntu (yeah yeah yeah)

Problem?

Of those 30 million live spaces blogs, I bet 15 million of them don’t comply with Automattic’s rather strict terms of service, and of course Automattic don’t support any form of advertising unless you are a V.I.P.

Over a six month period, beginning today, Windows Live Spaces users will have the option to move their blogs to WordPress.com. To make this possible, we’ve created a brand new importer for Windows Live Spaces to WordPress.com. New Windows Live users will also be offered a WordPress.com blog when they choose to create a new blog.

That phrase is a little ambiguous but try this comment by raananbarcohen

@liamdaly — redirects will work forever and you can pick any WordPress.com URL you would like, and then map it with a custom domain.

Free Unrestricted 301 Redirects – Data Portability 101

I have complained in the past quite vocally about how badly Blogger/Blogspot treat people who leave their service by sticking interstitials in the redirects… I ended up a couple of months ago removing 100 pages of historical content back to Blogspot to effectively let it rot because there was no effective way for it to be an integral part of this site.

Microsoft need to find a way to 301 redirect their existing bloggers to whereever they require, as a free service, or WordPress need to provide that service for them. WordPress haven’t done that up until now.

The only way to move from WordPress.com is to pay a $15/year service fee for domain mapping. That is on top of the fees you pay for domain registration.

In many ways the most valuable thing you create when blogging is not the content, but the links to the content. You can always improve content, merge it together, even delete an article totally, but you have the option to redirect a visitor to something more current, and there is a search engine benefit.

Microsoft & WordPress.com need to come up with a better option because I know many real bloggers on Live Spaces who actually make a living from the occasional advert or affiliate link.

The headline from Techcrunch is misleading – this isn’t outsourcing it is selling out.

Their small businesses are effectively being terminated.

Both might be correct in their connections.

Just like you couldn’t see the dark side of the force, and you can’t see the dark side of the moon, you can’t actually see all of your traffic that originates from search on the internet.

This is something that Tim O’Reily seems to be forgetting.

Search is only one way to find things. It’s the most easily monetizable, so it gets the lion’s share of the attention. But take a look at (and report on) what percentage of techcrunch’s traffic comes from search. For the O’Reilly Radar blog, it’s about 35%. Significant, sure, but hardly a sign of lack of competition. If Google absorbed both Yahoo! and Microsoft, the share of our visits coming from search would still be below 40%. (That tells you what a small share of our search traffic comes from the other guys today.) And that’s just the web traffic. Count in RSS (which is much bigger than web for most blogs, including ours) and the Search share of traffic goes down to a much smaller amount. So there’s not much worry about people not being able to find information.

Flour Water or Yeast

Based upon photo by Gene Hunt

Which is the most important ingredient in a loaf of bread?

Search is a vital ingredient in the online ecosystem. It might be possible to get by without it, before the Yahoo directory in the early 90s people did get by without any significant method of searching for information on the internet, but it wasn’t until “meta crawlers” were introduced, indexing individual pages that search really came of age.

Whilst it is easy at this stage of internet development to discount the value of search as only a small percentage of the whole, the source of traffic to your landing pages doesn’t necessarily mean that that was the starting point even for that single internet session, and when you factor in how a visitor entered preceding traffic funnels, you find multiple occasions where search may have “touched” a visitor before they visited your site.

How did a visitor to your site first become acquainted with Facebook, Digg, Stumbleupon, a subscriber to a blog which linked to you, subscribed to a mailing list, or even come to use Google.

Certainly a percentage of “original origin” comes from offline referrals, but how did the referring offline agent come into contact with the service they recommend?

This is very much like the six degrees of seperation

If you take that diagram, and make 40% of the dots represent a search engine, the path from A to B will very rarely be devoid of direct search engine involvement, amd on a macro scale the chances are infinitely less.

It is great to look on social media sites as a better filter of information, but that isn’t effective unless you again implement some method of searching.

If you removed all forms of search from the internet, finding information when you need it would be highly inefficient.

• Get one page indexed and ranking
• Write a second post linking to the first (which will also then trackback to the second page)
• Use the same primary keyword in both posts

The second method I use, for topics that get frequent mentions, are tags.

• My post with the highest number of links on a topic will most likely rank well
• My tag page which leads to further posts on the topic will form the secondary listing

Examples Of Title Based Google Indented Listing

I have at least partially recovered my search ranking since yesterday for Players With Money, and achieved a double listing, though how effective depends on which data center you look at, and geographic location.
Players With Money is being promoted to a number of very large email lists currently, and this is bringing me search traffic – as I wrote yesterday, it is a great service, and worth checking out.

I also have a double indented listing for Stompernet Site Seer – but I am not ranking anywhere near as well for Stomper Site Seer – I have tweaked the page, and also added a tag page for that specific search term.

A search just on Site Seer does however bring the results I hoped for.

Another money terms I rank comfortably for is Social Power Linking – this new link will probably help the page which mentions the new price rank in the top spot and add a little more longevity. Jack has to settle for 3rd and 4th place for his own product, but I am sure he doesn’t mind.

Example Of Tag Based Indented Listings

I don’t want to get too graphic heavy on this page, so I will just make a quick list of a few examples

• Blogcatalog
• Dofollow
• SocialSpark

I really should get one for Blogrush and knock Tamar down a couple of spots. Since I wrote about the free traffic from Blogrush that Alex received, I have actually had one day when Blogrush combined with Traffic Jam was my highest referrer.
It is not server breaking traffic, but it is targeted, and 100+ targeted visitors is not to be sneezed at.

You would think I would actually have one for PayPerPost by now – I do have a first page ranking with a tag page, but my most linked to post used “Pay Per Post” in both the headline and title tag – that was easily fixed, and with the additional link I will probably give that post a boost up the SERPs to go knocking on the door of both Wikipedia and Techcrunch.

Techcrunch with their “Crunchbase” in many ways kill their search engine traffic, especially with the way they frequently don’t interlink between posts with keywords. Linking to yourself with keywords is just as important as to other people.
You would think that with all the times they have written about PayPerPost they would have a double listing… they don’t.

Crunchbase is slowly rising up the SERPs but are 2 listings on different domains really a good alternative to a double listing?

Old… Old… Stompernet Video

Ok, so it is not that old, it is from the launch of Stompernet Smarts

Who do you think ranks first for Stompernet Smarts? I do

This video is just 22 minutes, and Andy Jenkins shows you how to get indented listings the scientific way.

Now if Michael Arrington was a member of Stompernet, he or his web developers would know how to get double listings at the top of the search engines.
Currently his team have managed to get a single listing for Facebook… with Crunchbase… just below a 2 year old post from Mashable.

A similar query for Myspace, and both are out of the top30

Lets be a little more topical, the current Microsoft Yahoo deal – all they would probably have to do to have a double listing for a search term like “Microsoft Yahoo”, without quotes would be to do a little interlinking between these 2 posts

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/01/wow-microsoft-offers-446-billion-to-acquire-yahoo/

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/05/04/microsoft-pursues-yahoo-takeover/

Though they should also be getting these newer posts linked in

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/03/breaking-microsoft-walks/

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/18/yahoo-microsoft-back-at-the-table/

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/19/microsoft-v-yahoo-this-isnt-even-funny-any-more/

Fresh search engine results isn’t just a job for Google to handle, site owners who know what they are doing can heavily influence them too.

There are plugins which can probably do enough interlinking to make a difference, and keep the search listings current, and help these top blogs remain looking fresh in the SERPs, or it can be done manually.
Linking purely off-site to Crunchbase, and then back to newer posts isn’t going to achieve double listings.

Now Techcrunch is doing very well for itself, at the start of the year they were hovering around 600,000 subscribers, and now they are 940k+ – I am sure a huge amount of that is related to the Microsoft / Yahoo deal, and possibly Facebook.

Could they be over 1,000,000 if they had their search results current?

If you look at Google trends data, the number of people searching for “microsoft yahoo” without quotes over the last few months has been very similar, and in some cases more than the people searching for stock quotes with MSFT or YHOO in Google.

For a blog looking to sell advertising, that is an awful lot of potential subscribers left on the table, probably reading their Microsoft Yahoo news… somewhere else.

This is the kind of stuff the guys at Stompernet teach for free, you should see some case studies.

Stompernet will be reopening their doors tomorrow, and it is unlikely I will be mentioning them again. They provide great material for free, but ultimately often it seems like I am beating a dead horse.
I certainly didn’t come close to winning that MacBook Air at the weekend, though I expected as much… in fact over the course of this week I haven’t managed to encourage enough people to sign up for the various locked FREE resources to win… even a digital picture frame

What ultimately is the value of building an authority blog, and dominating search results, if you don’t at the same time leverage your traffic into a responsive email list?

Update

Yesterday Andy Jenkins released a sneak peak inside Stompernet

Now if you haven’t already, make sure you have downloaded all the free videos to your Hard Drive – they are available for download in the right hand navigation.

You never know when you might want to refer to them again – I have lots of Stomper videos recorded on DVD as well.

Also make sure you have signed up for the 100% Free Stomper Site Seer – I know for many the first version might seem a bit basic, but the guys working on it really know their stuff, and I expect it to be immense value in the future.

I am however an interested observer, and I have a number of questions buzzing around in my head that remain unanswered.

This is more a collection of “what ifs” than anything else, discussion points that have no real factual basis, from someone with very minimal knowledge of how the financial markets work.

Microsoft Should Only Increase Cash Offering

Yahoos seem to want $40+ per share, which would effectively value the stock at close to a 7 year high. If Microsoft stock was similarly valued based upon their own 7 year high (which wasn’t over 2 years ago), then the original equivalent of $31 per share in stock would be very attractive.

Most of Yahoo’s investors are institutional, possibly long term investors, who also have holdings in Microsoft, Google and Time Warner.

For me the strong play from Microsoft would be to offer $35 per share cash, or keep the existing $31 stock equivalent based on valuations the day it was made public.

Have some kind of firm “either/or” clause, and some additional guarantees based on stock performance for those that choose the stock.

My gut feeling is that many of the institutions want some kind of deal, there just has to be a viable alternative for those Yahoo investors who still regard Microsoft as the big Satan.

An increase in the cash offer, and a slight rewording of what is on offer could well reduce the amount of cash that Microsoft have to fork out rather than increase it.

Yahoo – AOL

It is funny, a Yahoo <> AOL deal would essentially create a monopoly situation in Email and Instant Messaging worse than a Yahoo <> Microsoft deal, so I am sure we can expect another post on the Google blog objecting to such a merger.

The synergies between Yahoo & AOL are such that the sum of the individual parts would be greater than the whole, thus a merger would be a defensive move rather than one that would stimulate the kind of potential growth Jerry Yang is predicting.

Microsoft To Buy Google?

This is never going to happen, but just to compare notes

• It would create the best shareholder value
• It wouldn’t create any new monopolies in a specific vertical
• They are polar opposites, but the combined company would have so many synergies, it would be frightening

Put Larry and Sergey in charge of the combined entity, open source not only all Microsoft products, but also all Google’s. In some way get rid of software patents.

The crux? Back to the old browser wars – competitors to Internet Explorer rely on Google for financing.

Previous $35 Bid?

Even if Microsoft previously bid $35, that was based upon their own stock price at the time of the bid, which was above $34 per share.

Poison Pill or Suicide Pill or Sandbagging

I know so much about investment, I had to look up all the terms, browsing around on Investopedia

Ultimately I know that I currently use Yahoo and Microsoft online services so rarely, both must be doing a lot wrong.

You are never going to get a deal where the synergies are as compelling, but equally as impossible as a Microsoft <> Google merger, so you have to look for second best.

Google have an unhealthy share of my online attention, thus I would like an alternative. I am not sure forcing Microsoft to pay more is good for the long-term future of a combined company.

What I don’t appreciate is poor reporting – I can see in the numbers that Microsoft isn’t actually offering less than it did previously as far as a stock deal, and this is more to do with timing with Yahoo’s Annual General Meeting than Microsoft taking advantage of a drop in share price that has affected all major stakeholders in the sector.

A Quagmire Of Ineptitude?

My brain is the one which is bogged down in thoughts about things I really shouldn’t be thinking about, thus writing something hopefully will clear the mind and I can get on with something constructive. Maybe others will do the same or at least improve the quality of their reporting so I don’t have to think too much.

Microsoft <> Yahoo doesn’t seem like a perfect deal, but I can’t see another deal stimulating enough growth to offer Google any competition.

Update

It looks like Microsoft have responded to being given the cold shoulder – I suppose it adds a little insult to injury that Microsoft press releases seem to always appear on Yahoo news first, and that is the source that often appears on Techmeme.

Not everyone agreed with my review and there were 4 major arguments against using the service from various corners of the blogosphere.

• PayPerPost don’t provide a marketplace for their bloggers using PayPerPost direct, and that without a marketplace it would be hard for a blogger and an advertiser to connect.
• Bloggers should sell direct – supporter of this argument suggested that the 10% additional fee that PayPerPost added ontop of what a blogger receives was excessive, and it would be better to have an advertising sales page, and handle any transaction directly
• The icons provided by PayPerPost were ugly
• No High Paying Advertisers – it was believed that all PayPerPost advertisers were “low budget” and that the service wouldn’t attract major brands with deeper pockets.

$7 Million in New Funding

Companies don’t receive a second round of funding unless investors have taken a very close look at the future of a company, and their ability to meet goals and deliver based upon their business plan.

Tomorrow PayPerPost will officially announce $7M USD Series B funding led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson whose Managing Director Josh Stein joins the board, and additional participants Inflexion Partners, Village Ventures and new investor DFJ Gotham.

With Series A funding last year of $3M plus initial seed funding by the founders, that brings total investment of over $10M USD.

PayPerPost mean business and are in this for the long haul, and with that much money in the kitty, they can afford to be generous to their marketplace of bloggers.

I notice Michael Arrington has already posted his views on the new round of funding. He seems to think the fact that the same investors are involved this second time to be a sign that other investors want to keep their hands clean.
That is possible, because Michael has been giving them constant bad press, and who knows, maybe the numbers don’t add up for other investors.

An alternative could be equally well said that the current investors don’t feel the need for a lot of fresh blood on the board of directors, are happy with the ability of PayPerPost to deliver based upon their development schedule, and they don’t seem to be having problems finding bloggers or advertisers.

Michael has also got a podcast available with Ted Murphey, CEO of PayPerPost and Josh Stein, the new board member.
Update:- I should have checked out the link first – it is actually the old podcast from back in November, worth listening to if you haven’t heard it, though a lot of it is now out-of-date.

New PayPerPost Marketplace

Time for some pictures:-

The initial PayPerPost Marketplace view is unfiltered. It allows you to sort through PayPerPost’s 28000 bloggers either by price in ascending or decending order, or by “tack” which is based on the rating a blogger has received from advertisers.

It should be noted that posties (the bloggers) who have been very active in the PayPerPost system prior to the launch of PayPerPost direct are more likely to have higher quality ratings at this stage. New bloggers who have been attracted to PayPerPost because of the new direct service may have been writing reviews for competing services. I would think it will be a while before this situation becomes balanced out, but it is great for those that have been supporting PayPerPost as bloggers for almost a year.

So lets apply a filter and see what we find, in this case we will go for primary categories Business and Technology, and set the filter between $50 and $200.

The result for that filter is 30 bloggers sorted in alphabetical order (though you can still sort by price or quality), who match the category and price choices.

The display only shows a snippet of information about each blogger, but it is possible to click through to a profile for more information.

Power User Tip For Posties – You will notice in this next screenshot that I did some experimentation, and that you can use some HTML in your description. Hopefully that will remain because it helps you improve your presentation.
Also note in the preceding screenshot that my snippet displayed isn’t very inviting. It will be important to optimize you first paragraph to encourage people to click through to a full description.

Statistics such as Pagerank and Alexa Traffic are available on the profile page – Technorati Authority is not used, because PayPerPost made the decision recently not to use Technorati ratings, because they can be fairly inaccurate. As an example a theme designer could have a much higher authority with Technorati than major blogs such as Techcrunch, Engadget and BoingBoing.

You will also note that tags are displayed, but there currently isn’t a way to sort blogs based upon tagging – hopefully this is something that will be added in the future. I also hope they move away from having bloggers enter space separated tags, and them being displayed comma separated.
It would be much more accurate to have comma separated tags being entered, and then displayed without adjustment. This would allow tags to be multiple words, such as used by Technorati.

Lets look at the other shortcomings raised 2 weeks ago by other bloggers

Bloggers Should Sell Direct

I thought in my review of PayPerPost Direct 2 weeks ago that orders that will be coming from a new direct marketplace would have a higher charge for processing payable by advertisers. It looks like that is currently not going to be the case.
A 10% fee for order processing, technology, and providing a marketplace and escrow service really isn’t a major concern, especially with the way PayPerPost promote their bloggers to advertisers.

I imagine the level of blogger promotion is set to increase, and that bloggers will be rotated through the system.

The Icons Are Ugly

You could always include them on an advertising sales page rather than in your blog sidebar, and that might be an option I will consider in the future.
The system also allows you to use your own custom icons, or just a text link.

I think a more valid argument, which I don’t think I have heard anyone raise is the ability to customise the popup when someone clicks on a link.

If I only want to allow neutral tone orders, I don’t want any other option available to an advertiser, and I would also prefer to give links in an editorial context, and not have advertisers specify link text – I have a fair amount of SEO experience, and I am not going to give people junk links, but I want to have the choice.

No High Paying Advertisers

In the press release going out tomorrow, PayPerPost confirm they currently have over 6500 advertisers, and those advertisers have ordered, and PayPerPost have delivered 125,000 blog posts – that is probably a turnover of over $1,500,000 in the last year. Not huge by any means, but that number is increasing. I am sure more than $1m of that is in the last 6 months.

Zookoda

PayPerPost purchased Zookoda not too long ago and that business has a lot of potential if they expand into a similar territory as that previously occupied by Feedburner.

Feedburner were recently acquired by Google

Ted, Dan & The PayPerPost Team

Investors invest in people, not just ideas. Dan is one of the investors in PPP, but in many ways is also one of the marketing team, and highly dedicated.

Ted is charismatic and smart, and doesn’t seem phased by anything. Whilst many startups are founded by geeks and don’t have a business plan, PayPerPost was founded by a marketer who saw a need for a certain product in the marketplace.

My blogging friend Jim Kukral frequently calls Ted a Marketing Genius and PayPerPost have certainly capitalised on the controversy that they have caused since they were launched.

The PayPerPost team seem to be very dedicated, and you can tell if you watch any of the videos on RockStartup that they are a well oiled machine, and having fun and delivering development milestones like clockwork.

Calling Microsoft & Yahoo

PayPerPost is a disruptive business model, not just to the blogosphere, but also to advertising. It could be argued that it is also disruptive for search results, but generally it is successful companies who offer good products who can afford to advertise on a large scale, and bloggers who work for Microsoft or Yahoo, and even Google effectively promote their own company products all over the blogosphere whenever something is launched.

Surprise surprise, there are some major companies who offer great product who don’t already have 1000+ bloggers on their payroll, and they would like bloggers talking about them as well.

If Microsoft or Yahoo buy PayPerPost, it would be extremely disruptive to their major competitor, Google, both by offering an advertising model Google can’t touch because of prior criticism (though not official), and one that affects Google’s search quality (supposedly, though there is very little proof)

6 months or less to a major acquisition?

Expect more information on the PayPerPost blog tomorrow and here is a direct link through to the new PayPerPost marketplace.

Update:

Think I covered everything? Think again…

Kat for instance pointed out how well PayPerPost are promoting their bloggers, with the rotating spotlight on bloggers at the top of the bloggers page in the new design. She also highlights some very interesting demographic information that is currently available.
To give you some idea of the misconceptions among the tech sector that “mommy bloggers” are not a worthy audience for advertising, I know Kat gets more traffic than I do every month.

I think the Forbes reporter has been reading Techcrunch too much, and should maybe vary his reading habits more. Whilst the coverage is reasonably accurate on the facts, there is a definite negative slant without looking at what really happens in the blogosphere by employees of INC500 companies who happen to be bloggers.
Colleen again was being misquoted by the press, but in what must be a fairly unique situation, actually gained 2 links from Forbes.

It looks like Jules has found the press section on the new PPP site and is taking advantage of the photos provided.

Update2:

Compensated reviews can be of high quality, all you have to do is take pride in what you write. This article by SapphireKnight in a sponsored post for PayPerPost about the latest funding goes into detail about the difference between the original PayPerPost Marketplace and the new Direct Marketplace.