Recently I’ve added a MyBlogLog widget (top right) to my blog and I’ve seen many other bloggers do the same.

I’ve had it running for a few weeks now and I think it’s one of the best widgets out there. It’s unique because it gives you a glimpse into who your regular readers are. It helps you build a community of readers effortlessly.

» Continue reading “How to Make your Readers Look Good: Change your MyBlogLog style”

Earlier this week comscore came out with numbers that showed Fox/MySpace had surpassed Yahoo in pageviews for the very first time. There was a lot of buzz in the blogosphere about this and many people took these numbers to mean that MySpace was more popular than Yahoo.
» Continue reading “How to Lie with Statistics 2.0: Using Pageviews as a Metric”

… or at least their respective “answers” services do.

Today I saw that the very first product of Google Labs (launched back before “beta” was in Vogue) Google Answers is finally shutting down. This stands in stark contrast to Yahoo Answers, which launched just months ago and has enjoyed pretty impressive growth and adoption. It’s not really fair to compare them side by side since they’re significantly different products, but I will do so anyway.

» Continue reading “Can you drink water from an Air Conditioner? Google says no, Yahoo says yes”

Several years back it looked like Circuit City was really spiraling downward. Their business model was outdated (commission-based), they suffered some losses from a few bad moves like the DIVX fiasco and in-house appliance sales, and it seemed like the company was really losing market share.

In the last few years they have gone through a bit of restructuring, had gotten quite a bit of a facelift and once again seems poised to give Best Buy (17% market share) a run for its money.

They took some bold moves in the process, like offering customer reviews of all their products on CircuitCity.com. Best Buy must still fear a supplier backlash because they are not offering that feature to this day, which is a shame. Amazon has been doing this for years successfully, so I don’t know why a major chain wouldn’t.

I believe the next step should be bringing those reviews right into the store. They should setup either a number of kiosks that allow you to look up any shelf product or offer a “shopping companion” handheld device that allows you to scan any product and read the aggregated customer ratings and reviews for that product.

What made me think of this? I went to Best Buy yesterday to buy a printer for my mom. I wanted one with decent quality and low ink replacement costs. All the associates were busy and after waiting for 10 minutes I left and drove to Circuit City. I asked if I could get some help with printers and was told an associate will be right with me. After 10-15 minutes of waiting I got annoyed and left. I will now purchase it online.

Both stores lost that sale because no one could help me and I am too busy to wait half an hour for an associate who may or may not know the answer to my question. If I only had a connection (from a kiosk or a handheld) where I could browse socially-tagged and aggregated reviews, I would have made my decision based on other people’s experiences, without a paid associate’s help.

I think that’s the holy grail of retail stores - bridging the gap between online reviews / socially aggregated information and the physical store where you can instantly buy the product. How about it Circuit City? You have the data - just bring it into the store.

Well, not really - but it might as well be. Squidoo is Seth Godin’s web 2.0 redheaded stepchild. It’s a user-generated experiment gone bad. The basic premise is that anyone can create a “lens” and become a “lensmaster” of a page about anything they want or are passionate about.

But lately the only time I hear Squidoo mentioned is when somebody talks about parasite SEO or ways to get easy trusted one-way links. About five months back Techcrunch blasted Squidoo. There are just so many problems with the Squidoo concept once reality sets in. Here’s a few notable ones:

1. Most non-seo’s probably build a page and never come back to it. There is just nothing to come back for. The site is 0% sticky.
2. Once someone claims a lens it’s theirs. This means there’s a crapload of really empty pages that will just stay that way because of point #1 and nobody will fix them. It’s like wikipedia without the wiki or the pedia.
3. The whole payment/revenue-share concept is ridiculousy complicated and confusing - how the money splits before and after expenses, what those expenses are, how much of it goes to charity and under what circumstances, etc. They even have trouble explaining it themselves.
4. The children in a Bangladeshi sweatshop earn more than the top Squidoo lensmasters. The highest payouts (if you work really hard and promote it) go all the way up into the low 2 figures range. Cha ching!
5. Even their best content (Top 100) is utterly useless and complete crap. I sure hope the Magic of Harry Wong makes it into the top 10 to overtake Chocolate Obsessions. (Did John Mark Karr shadowrite the “Wong” lens?) I’ve seen content on scraper sites that puts Squidoo content to shame.
6. Visually the whole site looks like a bunch of IRS agents decided to create their own Friendster, but with instead of writing, they scraped a bunch of articles from a network of grandma blogs. The visuals on the site are really bland and the users have no control over layout or style.

So I went ahead and created a new lens called Spamdoo. Do me a favor and go give it 5 stars. I want to see just how easy it is to move up the “most popular” rank. This is assuming the editors don’t get offended and remove it before you read this.