Tony Wright dot com

I’ve posted a lot more detail and accompanying thoughts over at the RescueTime blog… To summarize:

• RescueTime has been funded by YCombinator, one of the most prestigious seed-funding outfits that’s out there (in geek circles, anyways). If you aren’t familiar with it, here’s a bit of info. YC was founded by Paul Graham (startup guy, writer, and crazed Lisp advocate) and have been funding very-very-early-stage startups for just a few years. Since they spun up, they’ve funded dozens of great companies including Xobni, Loopt, Reddit, Justin.TV, Scribd, TextPayMe and more (scroll down for a list).
• Part of the YC program is that the founders must relocate to Silicon Valley for a period of 3 months (starting Jan 08). During the three months, there are weekly dinners with assorted Valley luminaries. At the end of the three months is Demo day (now, by popular demand, spread to 2 Demo days), where you pitch what you’ve built to a big room full of early-stage investors.
• The financial part of the funding is such that we’re still effectively bootstrapping. So please don’t call trying to sell me expensive services of any kind.
• We just got coverage on TechCrunch. Neat!

I can’t express how excited I am about the opportunity. RescueTime started as a hobby project to “scratch an itch” that we had. With incredible enthusiasm from our users and a handful of advisers, we’ve been happily dragged into taking RescueTime to the next level.

Every month, Marcello Calbucci diligently posts a list of Seattle Tech Startups sorted by their Alexa/Compete ratings (including details about their movement on the list). The November SSI is out! It’s a great resource and (quite honestly) exciting to see so many Seattle companies doing interesting things. And it’s gratifying to see RescueTime (which is still in private beta, mind you) continuing to climb the list (we’re at #70– well ahead of quite a few funded companies).

Can’t wait to see where we end up when we actually launch.

Of course, it’s important to note that Alexa and Compete are complete and utter bunk. It turns out that most sites/services that try to understand where people are going on the web aren’t reliably accurate. Don’t believe me? Check out SEOMoz’s exhaustive study. Still, just because you can’t trust it doesn’t mean it isn’t interesting. Marcello is smart to include both Alexa and Compete data.

I’d love to see someone create some sort of meta-score… Pull data from Alexa, Compete, Technorati, Comscore, and a few dozen other sources and present the mean/median/standard deviation/etc.

I’ve been running WordPress for this blog since the beginning. It’s a great platform. I’ve officially been drinking the Kool-Aid. I tell my friends about it. I heard Matt Mullenweg speak (at SXSW last year) and I rave about that.

So when it made sense for us to spin up a little blog for RescueTime (my fledgeling time management software business), Wordpress got the nod. Rather than host another WordPress blog, I opted for a hosted WordPress account. WordPress offers barebones options for free, but I opted for a few premium options, making me a paying supporter of WordPress. It felt good.

The other day, I got an email from a few strangers telling me that the PowerPoint deck I had posted on my most recent blog entry (“DIY Web Marketing: 16 Resources for SEO, Social Media Marketing, & Viral Marketing”) was a dead link. It HAD been working (I know several people who downloaded it). No big deal, I thought. Tech glitches happen. As a guy who runs a SaaS biz, I’m quick to forgive on such things. It was inconvenient timing though– I’d just had a speaking engagement at Seattle Tech Startups and the PowerPoint deck in question was my deck for the presentation (I’d promised at the end to make it available– which is why I was getting peppered with emails).

My first step was to log in to see if I could fix it myself. No go. In fact, I couldn’t even log in. It told me my account was suspended.

I dutifully researched their message board (I know how expensive support is, so I figured I’d try to help myself) and found that random/accidental suspension issues were occuring as a result of a recent bug. Ahhh– that made me feel a bit better. When I finally got an email response, I was dismayed.

Your blog was suspended because it violated our ToS.
Basically, we don’t allow blogs created solely for commercial purpose,
or for Search Engine Optimization purpose.
I’ve temporary unsuspended your blog, so that you have a chance to review our ToS,
and clean it up a little bit…

www.wordpress.com/tos

Trying to keep my cool, I replied:

What?

It’s a blog about a tiny web service with 8 or so posts (so far). It doesn’t have any advertisements or any revenue generation capability whatsoever. I mentioned SEO in my last post because I did a little presentation at SeattleTechStartups.com a few weeks back– but RescueTime (http://www.rescuetime.com) has nothing to do with SEO (and, at present, isn’t even remotely a commercial enterprise). I reviewed to ToS fairly carefully and see no violations.

Are you SURE it was purposefully suspended? I’ve read several threads (covering the last few days) that seem to indicate there is a bug going around:

http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic.php?id=16792&page&replies=5
http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic.php?id=16787&page&replies=10

It seems a heckuva lot more logical to me that I’m a victim of this bug… I assume that if someone shuts down a blog for a breach of ToS that it would have some sort of note attached to it (to discriminate it from a bugged account)?

Several days have passed with no response. I have no idea if my blog is temporarily not suspended, if it was a bug, or if there truly was a breach that I’m not aware of. The blog is a simple product blog (I know a lot of startup guys who have such a thing– presumably that doesn’t count as “commercial purpose”?). I understand that suspending blogs is something WordPress has to do to be vigilant in the fight against spam, but would an automated notification hurt, citing the ToS clause in question? Given that I was actually a paying customer (not just freeloading off of their free offerings), would it kill ‘em to respond to my last email?

For the record, the blog gets VERY little traffic (thousands of uniques a month is all).

WordPress will continue to be my blog platform of choice– I’m too darn used to their fabulous interface. But (if nothing changes) I won’t be spending money with them again and I certainly won’t be recommending them as I have in the past. As they say, “customer service is the new marketing“.

Absolutely priceless. Someone took the time to show us what Google.com would look like if they had to care about SEO.

Let’s face it– Google’s search algorithms rock. No search engine has succeeded in creating a system where publishers are incentivized to create high quality content.

You can take the high road, and just focus on high quality content and fabulous usability. Wikipedia did it. It can work.

But the smarter play is usually to know the rules that your playing under and optimize… There are plenty of great SEO techniques that don’t hurt the user experience (or barely hurt it).

Awesome quote shamelessly pulled from TechCrunch (I’d link to their Crunchbase entry if I could), who shamelessly pulled it from Yossi Vardi, who shameless pulled it from Theodore Roosevelt:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

This really resonated with me in light of the public (and anonymous) attacks on Jason Goldberg (CEO of Jobster) on the Seattle PI blog. I make no bones about the fact that I wasn’t always supportive of Jobster’s (or Jason’s) strategies. But the guy deserves credit for making a run at it (and I wouldn’t count Jason or Jobster out of the game yet!). He also deserves a ton of credit for getting an entire industry to look at Jobster to save online recruiting… If it turns out that Jobster doesn’t save online recruiting, there’s a small army of people who should step up and share part of the blame (including myself). Scapegoating is just stupid.

First off, for those of you who haven’t been exposed to the phrase yet, here is WikiPedia’s take on LinkBait. The definition doesn’t feel complete to me. I’d probably add a bit of language along the lines of “baits users to bookmark the link” (because many social bookmarking sites convey “SEO link juice”) as well as a bit of language along the lines of “baits users to click on the link” (because Google is dabbling in having link performance on search results pages effect SEO).

For a pile of linkbait examples, you need to look no further than PopUrls, which aggregates the top links around the web (Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Slashdot, etc). You’ll see a lot of commonalities in word selection, title structure, etc. As I look right now, I see “The 6 Most Terrifying Foods in the World” topping Reddit. “30+ Free 3-column Web Site Templates” tops Del.icio.us. “Don’t Mess with the Marine Corp. Calls for Fox News Boycott.” is near the top at Digg.

Getting back to the title of this post… I sent out 700 invites to the RescueTime Beta yesterday and noticed some REALLY interesting data. Before this, invite emails have been opened about 65% of the time (with about 90% of openings resulting in a clickthru). So far so good. I haven’t been thrilled that 35% of people don’t open the email, but it’s understandable given how long it’s been since they’ve signed up for the beta. Hey, don’t blame me– we got a LOT more interest in the beta than we’d orignally imagined we would!

Yesterday’s email, I decided to make a slight change to the subject line of the email. Previously, the subject was “(Finally!) Your RescueTime Beta Invite”. I decided to remove the “(Finally!)”– as we’re working on a business/team offering, I thought maybe we ought to be a touch more professional and a bit less self-deprecating about our beta invite delays.

I was surprised to see that the open rate dropped to about 51% (a pretty significant change). There are other factors at work here– potentially the time of day and the day of the week could change things dramatically… But I tend to think that the culprit is the subtle language change.

Which prompted me to wonder– What if I changed the subject to map to linkbait style? “(FINALLY) Your RescueTime beta invite– Know exactly how you spend your computer time!” or some such? Anyone have any suggestions? I’m happy to experiment.

My thinking about linkbait also made me wonder about page title tags (the SEO-critical bit of code that determines what the window title is and what the link title is on Google search result pages (SERPs, if you wanna get SEO-geeky). When I do a quick search (say for “plasma tvs“) and look at the blue links through the lens of linkbait, I’m not bowled over.

Would results in search engines perform dramatically better if the title tags adhered to the rules of linkbait? Related, could SEO geeks like me craft a title that was linkbaity and still had the right keywords while remaining under the 65 character limit that Google displays? If we could, would it drive everyone crazy to see bombastic claims and top 10 lists on search engine results?

It’s possible that the world of search engine results and email subjects need to be more mundane to be effective. Maybe marketeers have created so much mistrust in these arenas that anything remotely smelling of linkbait will be dismissed as spam. Any thoughts?

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/10/01/nokia_launches_anti_iphone_campaign_amid_controversy.html

“In the meantime, the whole iPhone mess is garnering national recognition from the the mainstream media and slowly snowballing into a public relations nightmare for Apple. The New York Times recently ran a piece that quotes Apple spokesperson Jennifer Bowcock as saying those iPhone owners who are experiencing problems following the recent iPhone update should “purchase a new iPhone.” And overseas, the Guardian syndicated Gizmodo’s updated recommendation to its readers, which is “Don’t Buy” an iPhone…”

I wonder if Steve Jobs is going to give everyone another $100?

In the last few weeks, I’ve had a rash of opportunities come my way via email (the majority of which were job opportunities from 3rd party recruiters, but there were also 2 different co-founding opportunities)… It occurred to me that politely responding to offers that were clearly a bad fit was fairly time consuming. I don’t know if it will do any good, but I whipped up a page detailing the kinds of things that interest me.

Incidentally, this is tangentially related to a feature that I always advocated for at Jobster… The “what I want” part of the online resume. In times past, resumes were sent directly to employers didn’t need this. If I send you a resume, the “what I want” portion of it is generally the “objective” (”To find a position that gives me the opportunity to grow professionally blah blah blah”). As the resume has evolved into something more generalized that you post publicly and then wait for the opportunities to roll in, it seems like it needs a more expanded section detailing what opportunities the job seeker really wants.

For the record– I’m NOT a job seeker. I don’t want a “job” (though I suppose I’d jump at the right one). This site isn’t a resume (but it has enough resume-esque information to suffice), so I figure I’d add a page that details what sort of offers I’d entertain.

What do you think? Dumb idea? Will it fend off recruiters who aren’t sharp enough not to offer me entry level .NET coding positions?

For many years as a consultant, when a small business said they wanted a site search engine, I was flummoxed. The best site search option was clearly Google, but it was ugly (you had very little control over the appearance of the search results) and, of course, laden with text ads. I generally settled with a premier version of Atomz, but the quality of the search was fairly mediocre.

I’m pretty stunned that it took this long for Google to offer it (given the obvious demand), but here we are! Google is now officially offering “Google Enterprise: Google Custom Search Business Edition” (they are clearly taking their cue from Microsoft on product naming… Sheesh). “Custom Search Business Edition turns off Google Adwords advertisements in search results that regularly appear in the free version of the Custom Search Engine. If you wish to significantly change the look and feel of your search engine, you can build your own user interface and integrate an XML feed of search results.”

Before you get scared off by the name (”Oh no! Enterprise?!”), here’s the pricing rundown:

* Search less than 5,000 web pages: $100 per year
* Search less than 50,000 web pages: $500 per year
* Search less than 100,000 web pages: $850 per year
* Search less than 300,000 web pages: $2250 per year

I honestly think they are shooting themselves in the foot a bit with the high end pricing (I think they could charge a lot more), but it’s nice to see some small-biz-friendly pricing on the low end.

Of course, a big problem remains here… If I build my own non-google search engine, I can make the results pages happily spiderable and they’ll get indexed by Google (which means a swath of resulting organic traffic). If my results pages are generated by Google, I’m darn sure I can’t talk them into indexing them and treating them like high quality content pages.

Tomorrow evening I’ll be speaking at the SeattleTechStartups meetup (starts at 6pm– click the link for details).

The topic will be “Bootstrap Marketing for Web Startups: SEO, SMM, and Viral Marketing“. For the uninitiated, that’s Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing, and Viral Marketing.

If anyone has anything in particular they want me to chat about, feel free to drop me a note (or leave a comment here). I plan to post the PowerPoint Deck and a “Related Links and Resources” page afterwards (which I’ll make available here as well).

Hope to see you all there!