Bad Stats are Holding Back Web 2.0
I use “stats” generically here because, at its simplest meaning, what is holding back web 2.0 is bad statistical planning. You have to ask the right questions with the right controls to get the right answers so you can make the right recommendations. The napkin business plan generation apparently has not learned its lesson in the web 2.0 sphere, with new sites and communities launching by the dozens. Unfortunately, web 2.0 communities commonly make the following assumption: massive data, regardless of its quality, is sufficient. What we need is a more complete measurements (questions) and common, controlled subjects (wines). To illustrate this point, I would like to identify 3 wine Web 2.0 communities (Corkd – BottleNotes – TasteVine), 2...
Profitable Web 2.0? That’s Probably Worth $5.35 Million
It was bound to happen. Many people have pointed out the link between the tech crash and today’s Web 2.0 venture frenzy. It always seemed backwards (traffic -> venture capital -> make money). In the “real world”, businesses are expected to prove their worth before they get venture backing. You know, actually posting profits before getting funded. Well, it has happened. iContact (formerly intelliContact by Broadwick) has managed to do just that. With over 11,000 clients, the company turned itself to Web 2.0 by building RSS / Blogs and Syndication into its already hugely successful Opt-In Email Marketing Platform. Updata Partners recognized that, for once in the history of the world, a young, successful, profitable company was able to seamlessly...
Super Smart Experiment – Surviving the Digg Effect
Definitely one of the smarter experiments I have seen these days. This site tries to promote 1 story with 9 different hosting companies loaded up in Iframes. That way, each site gets the exact same amount of traffic from the exact users. Then he just pings them to check which are still up. I absolutely love this kind of attitude of bootstrap experimentation, especially when it is crafted in a way that makes it really accurate. I have seen stories before where they just pound 1 host, but not one where they can really compare multiple hosts at the same time. Kudos! No tags for this...
Digg Noise Filter Back Up!
for those of you that missed, the digg noise filter helps you find hot digg stories before they go popular After a massive 28 GB of bandwidth usage in under 8 hours (woohoo!), we were forced to move the Digg Noise Filter and the site as a whole to brand new spanking hosting. We also added a few new features (fixed the 0 diggs bug and added a no-refresh option). Now that we are on a dedicated box with more bandwidth/month than we could ever imagine, go ahead and start using the filter again! Thanks again for everyone’s interest in the tool, I found it really useful. No tags for this...
Digg Noise Filter Tool: Find Better Stories Fast
One of the commonly mentioned “reputation” measurements on Digg is the ability to find great stories early. If you Digg a bunch of stories early on that all go popular, theoretically your reputation increases. Thus, your vote counts more in the future for stories you submit and Digg. So, how do you find good stories earlier, when most of what is submitted is spam? A really simple solution that updates the latest 500 entered stories and allows you to filter them by minimum numbers of diggs. You can quickly find the stories that are hot well before they hit the front page! No tags for this...
7 is the new 10
So I lost a bet. Top 10 lists have long been the staple of bloggers, online writers, and one particular late night comedian. But like any “too much of a good thing”, I got into a discussion about “why top 10 lists”. Why not top 6 or top 9? A few interesting queries later, I was able to determine: do people really like top 10 stories? or has that number become so trite, so overused, that top 10 lists are ignored and overlooked. My guess, top 6 stories would be the most successful, my adversary (VP Malcolm Young) guessed top 7 lists. Top ? StoriesSubmitted StoriesPopular SuccessRate Top 12 34 16 47% Top 11 34 10 29% Top 10 1690 653 39% Top 9 10 2 20% Top 8 25 1 4% Top 7 90 53 59% Top 6 18 1 6% Top 5 558 162 29% Top 4 17 1 6% Top 3 40 3 8% At...
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