knofun

I finally made it to Pownce, check out my profile here. Seems pretty cool so far, I will probably post more thoughts here later.

Let me know if you need invites, I have a bunch.

geek stuff, ventures

“Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.”

Agnes de Mille

other

So I was stumbling along when I was supposed to be working as usual when I stumbled on this article about getting stumbled. Whatever, I give a lot of seo/webmaster/affiliate stuff the thumbs up so that makes sense. But wait! I stumbled back into my memory (yeah I know, but its funny to me) and remembered this SU vs fark shoemoney article that I stumbled on a few days ago. Must have worked well for shoe cuz he followed it up with the oh-so-classic digg vs SU post the next day. Seems to me that Stumblers like stumbling on stories about StumbleUpon!

Zeropaid gets a lot of traffic from StumbleUpon, and we are featured on the front page of digg about once a week on average. Here are the main differences between Digg traffic and SU traffic:

• I get about 3 times as many visitors from digg as I do from SU
• Digg users have a bounce rate of 90.27% and SU users have a bounce rate of 31.69%
• Digg users spend an average of 28 seconds on the site (we are a tech news site, I’m guessing all they need is the first paragraph?), and SU users spend on average 5 times that
• Neither of them are all that good for making adsense revenue

The lion’s share of Google Adsense clicks come from visitors that get to our site from…. Google Search. This is the real beauty of SEO, the holy grail of leisure income: get users from Google, send them out through Google and every once in a while check your bank account. Great in theory, but harder than it sounds. So why bother with Digg or SU? Well, I like traffic. All kinds of traffic, I don’t discriminate!

Real reason? People blog. And link. And what do they blog and link? The things they see every day, on their favorite news site or through their favorite website discovery toolbar. So get stumbling!

geek stuff, ventures, web marketing

So some company called Mint won Jason Calacanis’ TechCrunch40. Looks pretty cool, kind of like Wells Fargo’s old One Look service (yeah shoemoney said the same thing) in their site that showed you what you were blowing spending your money on. Pretty cool, except when I tried it it told me it couldn’t connect to my tiny little bank named Wells Fargo. Pretty lame first experience guys, but congrats on the 50k.

update: Wow, the CEO responded to my little blog post! That’s impressive for how much attention they have been getting of late and how busy he much be. Kudos for paying attention to technorati and us little guys. Being so impressed by this attention, I gave mint another try. This time it took my wells fargo info but is stuck on “downloading transactions.” It even logged me out, then when I logged back in it had the same widget up with the status bar staying “downloading transactions.” Wierd, but maybe I just have a lot of transactions?

Either way, let me just congratulate Mint on winning the TechCrunch50, which by all accounts had some really great companies presenting, and give Kudos to its CEO Aaron Patzer for being on the ball.

ventures

Ok so I have been cathing a lot of static over the leaked mediadefender emails since there is a thread where I was emailing them:

From: Ben Grodsky
Sent: Monday, July 09, 2007 2:06 PM
To: MIIVI
Cc: Randy Saaf
Subject: RE: miivi plans

i think so. he then went on to dial my number and hung up immediately when i said “i [wouldn't] do an interview, but he should talk….” i have no idea where he got my number from.

From: Dylan Douglas
Sent: Mon 09-Jul-07 12:46
To: Ben Grodsky; MIIVI
Cc: Randy Saaf
Subject: RE: miivi plans

Is he just randomly emailing miivi@mediadefender?

From: Ben Grodsky
Sent: Monday, July 09, 2007 12:27 PM
To: MIIVI
Cc: Randy Saaf
Subject: RE: miivi plans

LET RANDY HANDLE THIS.

IGNORE E-MAIL.

From: Chris Hedgecock [mailto:chris@zeropaid.com]
Sent: Mon 09-Jul-07 12:24
To: Randy Saaf; MIIVI
Subject: miivi plans

Hey Randy,

We are doing a followup on the miivi situation and wanted to do a quick
call with you for a rebuttal if possible. My info is below.

Thanks,

–
Chris Hedgecock
President, Zeropaid Inc.
skype.zpchris aim.kingt17
fax.858.270.9773 mobile.858.395.1444
chris@zeropaid.com
http://www.chrishedgecock.com/blog/

We were leaked the majority of these emails by an anonymous source (obviously now the guy who had access to the gmail account). We ran through them, and really found nothing to report. I was trying to provoke a response from the mediadefender, and since I had all their cell phone numbers from the emails I called Ben and Randy. I never hung up on him though, he made a pathetic attempt to say “Yeah I am busy with another issue can I call you back” and hung up on me.

file sharing / p2p

Ok, so Yumm.com is somewhat live and floating around in the wild. Right now it’s just the restaurant listings section, but users can register, rate and comment on restaurants. To me, this is the most interesting part of launching a site. We are doing all the initial work with Google, submitting sitemaps, linkbuilding, etc. and its so much fun to watch the traffic grow. This is the stage where we look at the user db all the time, check traffic and keyword stats twice a day, and really can be hands on all portions of the site. Once you get beyond a few hundred users you really can’t, and you have to rely on graphs and trending documents. Lots of fun!

Zeropaid is doing really well traffic wise, but pretty soon we may be losing a key member of our staff. Jared Moya, or SoulXTC as he is known on Zeropaid, is joining the Army. Kudos to him for having the courage to volunteer to serve his country, especially at a time like this. He will most certaintly be missed on the site, and we are taking resumes for one or two people to fill his spot.

geek stuff, ventures

Hey friends of mine! If you have a second, scoot over to restaurants.yumm.com and do some poking around. We are far from an official launch but are at a stage where we could use some user feedback. Play around, try and break stuff, and INTERACT, please. You can leave feedback here in comments or email em to me. Thanks!

geek stuff, play, ventures