CLICKHERDER

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Joel and Michael share the details on Dapper, make sense of AuctionAds, and navigate the Borders-Amazon split.

Filed by Joel at 12:34 pm under The Clickherder Roundup
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Inaugural episode: the Helbling brothers discuss Microsoft’s Gatineau, prop Meebo and let fly at Registerfly.

Filed by Joel at 8:06 am under The Clickherder Roundup
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I’m all set to look at a new apartment in Muncie this weekend. It will be great to be able to have a place to stay when I’m in town instead of constantly staying at motels. I’m not planning to get cable or internet access. With my trusty Motorola Q I should be able to get my Windows XP laptop or PC connected to the net whenever (all the time).

Anyway, it should be good.

Filed by Joel at 12:35 am under Uncategorized
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Snap. No posts in three weeks. Stick a fork in this one, it’s done.

I’m sure we all have our excuses for not posting. Here are mine: I’ve been really busy doing things that are only tangentially related to SEO/WebMarketing/WebDevelopment. During the last three weeks I have magically morphed into a CRM guy. My employer’s CRM product runs on linux servers and so I’ve had some opportunity to do some shell scripting, and some Perl coding, which is always a blast. And I guess that’s why I haven’t done either of those two things at night, and thus haven’t had anything interesting to blog about re: anything to do with this site.

Except for one thing. I wrote a rudimentary word commonality indexer which just pulls down one site, strips out the html and counts up word uses for all human-readable words on a page. My diabolical plan remains: build a broad index from xty-million websites and then cross reference all available single-word domains against the commonality index to see which available single-word dot coms are the most commonly used words. Phase two would be to separate the commonality index into different signatures (i.e. tech sites signature vs. my Space, Yahoo Groups and Multiply.com vs corporate web presences vs government sites. etc.). Then generate popular availables in each signature/sector. It’ll be great.

Filed by Joel at 12:22 am under Web Development
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Right off the bat I don’t like Gavin O’Reilly. He’s the guy who thinks that Google became Google by leaching off of media sites in order to populate aggragators like Google News. Yeah, that’s right. Google got great by grabbing RSS feeds from the Pucksetawnee Tribune Gazette.

Gavin’s also the president of the World Association of Newspapers. The WAN is leading a bunch of newspaper, magazine and book publishers on a chumps’ crusade to gain a slice of the search engine souffle. This gaggle of would-be Google-busters claim the aggregators are aggressors. Never mind all the traffic these aggregators send to the news sites. The half a paragraph Google uses to send you to the content providers’ actual site is, to use Gavin’s own word, kleptomania. Unbelievable.

My dearest wish is that Google and other aggregators would setup a “please do not syndicate me” list, and then simply comply with their wishes. Don’t send traffic to any idiot dumb enough to accuse the referrer of theft. Yeah, that dog’ll hunt.

Somehow they think the reading public will sympathize; old media is trying to start a slow clap. But that doesn’t work in the middle of a montage.

Technorati: syndication, RSS, Google, old media, Gavin O’Reilly

Filed by Joel at 8:53 pm under Web Marketing
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Guy Kawasaki wrote an article for people operating businesses from their bootstraps. This post is great as usual. Some critical take aways for a new business:

• Focus on cash flow, not profitability - You are dead when you don’t have any money. Until then you are still alive.
• Focus on function, not form - In other words don’t insist on Herman Miller chairs before you ship a product that is going to make you some money
• Position against the leader. - Something like only slightly crappier than Microsoft

This is great advice. There is such a huge shift in thinking that must take place to transition between corporate thought and entreprenurial thought.

Filed by Michael at 2:15 pm under Web Marketing
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I had to re-generate my single English word dot-com database due to a weird problem with duplicates in the AGID list and other niggling problems. But now I know that the last domain on the Internet is registered: zyzzyvas.com is just a great big ball of fun, I don’t care what the dictionary says.

Filed by Joel at 7:49 am under Domainers
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I read lots and lots of blogs. I only do this because it is my hope that by doing so I fall in line with the overall demographics of blog readers.

Today I want to highlight the oft overlooked but oh so important blog subtitle. Also known as the tag line it was invented in 1972 by Ralph P. Siunsinn. Ok not really, but it is important, because in the 50 milliseconds that someone takes to evaluate your site you better say something snappy and cool.

Here are five that are worth noting.

1. “Where Nothing Beats a Good Rank.” - David Naylor
2. “Blogger. n. Someone with nothing to say writing for someone with nothing to do.” - Guy Kawasaki
3. “I’m feeling lucky today.” - Jim Boykin
4. Gettin hit by traffic. . .not cars. - Stuntdubl
5. THIS IS GETTING REALLY HARD - Me

I gotta go figure out how to write table-less CSS.

Filed by Michael at 10:41 pm under Web Marketing
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My first domain name was Cahootspcs.com. My friends and I were trying to build some kind of Project Collaboration System which I wanted to call “Cahoots.” Unfortunately, cahoots.com was taken.

My friends all ridicule me for choosing the domain name “Cahootspcs.com.” So do my siblings. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone say, “Hey, cool domain name, dude. Wish I’d have thought of it.” And that really hurts.

But I like to think there’s hope for me yet. I’m building a big list of available single-english-word dot coms. Also, I’m the guy that thought of ClickHerder.com. Yeah, that was me. Get it? Click-Herder? It’s an SEO/web marketing/link building/traffic gluttony kind of thing, where people click –ok, you get it.

Plus we get type-in traffic all the time. I think it’s because a lot of people have mice with buttons that stick. And when somebody visits them and asks to borrow their computer so they can use an online project collaboration system, the mouse button doesn’t work, and they just sorta shake the mouse back and forth and look confused, and then the computer’s owner speaks up and says “Click harder.” And the guest thinks his gracious host is talking about a website and starts to type it in. And this all happens in Wisconsin, where people flatten oot therr vowls, almost like Canadians do, and so the guest, who’s from New Orleans Parish, and has been living there since hurricane Katrina, thinks the host is saying “Clickherder” and the rest is history.

I love it when I find stuff like that in my Google Analytics.

Filed by Joel at 1:20 am under Domainers, Web Marketing
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For those of us not in the know the official defintion and first know use of the word…..

domainer n. A person who makes a living from domain name speculation or by purchasing popular domain names and filling the sites with advertising.

Earliest Citation:
1. Do you own your own domain?
-yeah 560 of them—im actually a domainer.
—sohail, “Other ways to make money,” geek/talk, March 26, 2001

This was found on Word Spy.

Filed by Mike at 3:16 pm under Domainers
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