Own as much of your content and distribution as you can.

Earlier this month when Google acquired Feedburner, it was yet another company getting assimilated into the Google borg. It is getting more and more difficult not to feed the voracious Google data mining machine. I used to have a Jotspot account, that got acquired by Google. If you had a YouTube account, Measure Map, or Dodgeball account, your data is now owned by Google. If you use Feedburner (I do), your data just got assimilated into the Google machine.

» Continue reading “Don’t Feed the Google - Why You Should be the Master of Your Own Domain”

Yesterday I was reading Aaron Wall’s Google as the Invisible Hand and something curious came to my mind. How many Google Adsense publishers have any idea what their website is promoting, linking to, or being associated with?

I would guess very few - because the system is designed for you not to know.

» Continue reading “Do You Know What Your Google Adsense is Promoting?”

Original content may be king, but the queen has to be aggregation.

Lists, compilations, and roundups of other resources are found on the home page of Digg, Reddit, and just about any other influential site every single day. Why? Because there’s a lot of value in sorting the wheat from the chaff (so to speak). It helps people save time and organize quality resources.

A quality top 10, top 43, or 100 great [fill in the blank] ’s types of posts and articles receive lots of attention and are probably one of the most bookmarked types of content online.

» Continue reading “Can’t Create? Aggregate!”

Branding tip of the day: When naming your new company/website/concept - do not use generic or common words.

Can you spot the difference between these?

• Commentful
• Co.mments
• coComment

They are 3 separate services doing a very similar thing - tracking comments you make on other websites - but I’d fail a multiple choice test if you asked me which is which. (looking them up as we speak)

Commentful installs a blinking light in your browser, coComment attaches itself to forms you fill out online, and co.mments works via a bookmarklet that allows you to select what posts to track.

» Continue reading “Comments, Commenting, and Comment Tracking”

The other night I went downtown to take a photo of this sign:

This is Infinium’s sign that (for now) still graces a building in downtown Sarasota, Florida. The company moved to Seattle some time ago.

Infinium Labs was the former name of Phantom Entertainment Inc., the company behind the Phantom Game System. Aptly named, it was one of the biggest examples of vapourware anyone has ever seen.

The company burned through $75 MILLION dollars of investment capital with nothing to show for it, except a laptop keyboard that to this day has not materialized.

» Continue reading “The $75 Million Keyboard: Infinium’s Phantom”