Have you noticed that the vast majority of published ideas will not increase your business or personal revenue? If someone has a truly great idea for increasing earnings or creating new revenue out of thin air, they will implement or trade it themselves and will never share.
At the point a great (tech sector) business concept is shared, it enters the highly efficient ideas market that is the Tech Echo Chamber (HN, Reddit, Slashdot, TC, etc..) – which efficiently propagates it out to the rest of the world’s population of innovators. At this point the idea is undifferentiated, rapidly being implemented by all, and you’re in a price or other kind of efficiency war.
This, combined with the truism that it’s not a bad idea to completely ignore your competitors and focus on your customers, makes it a pretty darn good idea to avoid spending too much time on tech publications and social media outlets. You will learn nothing new and what you will learn loses much of its value the moment it’s published. The temptation to imitate will probably harm your business as you’re bounced along in the current of swarming incompetents.
The main (possibly only) thing I use blogs and social media reporting on tech news for is to keep track of landscape changes. Changes in the economics of a sector or changes in technology. Either of these almost always signal the start of a firestorm of innovation.
Focus on your customers, find the truly brilliant ideas that solve customer problems and beware of sharing them too early.
The wannabe economist in me has been following the BitCoin phenomenon with great interest during the last few months. The algorithmic side of bitcoin is fascinating, but a few things bugged me about the system. One of them was that the maximum number of bitcoins that can ever exist is limited to 21 million.
Adam Cohen took a wonderfully lucid stab at bitcoin on Quora recently, focusing on the built in deflation that is a result of the hard limit on the number of coins that can exist. He makes the point that early adopters holding bitcoins will automatically get richer and it smacks of a scam.
While scam is clearly not the intention of the creators, deflation is any economists worst nightmare and built-in deflation will probably result in bitcoin being stillborn.
The Alexa graph above only shows the ycombinator.com domain, but most of the traffic to the domain is HN. Also HN is visible on several other domains like hackerne.ws, which isn’t counted in the above graph, so it’s probably already passed Slashdot.
Footnote: This post was something more political re comment scores. But I decided I don’t have the stomach for that fight, so editing and leaving just the data.
This is the OK-GLI, part of the Soviet Shuttle Buran program, the largest and most expensive space program in the history of the Soviet Union.
The OK-GLI completed 25 test flights between 1985 and 1988 before being retired. The OK-GLI was powered by four AL-31 jet engines with the fuel tank in the cargo bay. The highest altitude it achieved was 6000 meters or 19,000 ft. It never reached space.
A sister ship in the Buran program, the Buran Spacecraft did reach orbit and completed two unmanned Earth orbits. It was the only orbital flight in the Buran program.
Computer-generated image of six insulin molecules assembled in a hexamer.
At the 1998 Winter Olympic Games in Nagano, a Russian medical officer asked the Olympic Committee whether the use of insulin was restricted to athletes who are insulin dependent diabetics. The incident drew attention to insulin and the IOC were swift to ban it as a performance enhancing drug.
I recently posted a question on Quora asking what the best nutrition book is, and Nutrient Timing by Ivy and Portman came up. The book is excellent and has a huge amount of physiology data on how the human body makes and uses energy. The core concept is this:
In the 45 minutes post exercise, your body has very high insulin sensitivity. This period is referred to as the Anabolic phase. By consuming a drink of protein and carbs in a 1:3 or 1:4 ratio, you can significantly boost your insulin level during this period. You can also prolong this period and increase recovery and growth by continuing to consume said drink 2 hours and again at 4 hours post exercise.
Boosting your insulin levels post exercise reduces protein loss from muscles and improves protein retention. It also speeds recovery by replenishing glycogen and creatine stores. Ivy and Portman spend much of the book citing supporting research from many studies including the Marine Corps.
The book also recommends taking an anti-oxidant post exercise to reduce muscle oxidation.
According to Ivy and Portman and many other nutritionists, the best source of protein is Whey Protein Isolate (links to the one I bought recently) which is rich in branched chain amino acids (BCAA’s). The best source of carbs in their recipe is good old Sucrose (table sugar).
Dara Torres at the 2008 summer Olympics.
I was chatting to my wife about the book and she mentioned that Dara Torres (three silvers in the previous summer Olympics and the oldest swimmer to ever be on the US Olympic team) drinks chocolate milk as her favorite recovery drink. Chocolate is rich in anti-oxidants, it contains sucrose and milk has some protein, but not enough to make the ratio 4:1. (The sucrose to protein ratio is probably more like 16:1). So I’m guessing that Dara adds a source of protein like whey protein isolate to the drink.
I’m training this year for either a half or full ironman next year and doing a half and full marathon this year to build up to it. I’m currently doing two 5 mile runs and one long run (currently 10 miles) each week. I also swim 2000m two to three times a week and I do the occasional core strength workout. As I built up to my current volume my energy level collapsed – both mental and physical. Once I started looking at my nutrition and using a post workout recovery nutrition plan I came back with a vengance. Two weeks after starting the plan I ran the fastest 5 mile pace I’ve ever run and felt great afterwards.
After doing further reading online I’ve modified my recipe to have a 1:1 ratio of protein to carbohydrates post workout. A 3:1 or 4:1 ratio seems to build a lot of muscle and my goal is to stay lean but recover fast.
My current post workout nutrition plan is:
1 whole raw egg, 56 grams whey protein (two scoops), two tablespoons of molasses (high in phosphorus), a tablespoon of brown sugar, two cups of skim milk, a heaped spoon of cocoa powder. Blend and drink two thirds.
Drink the remaining third 1.5 to two hours after workout.
It’s been a year long break from blogging and getting back to writing and getting a so many new visitors this soon is cool. [Thanks HN!]
This blog runs on the smallest available Linode 512 instance for $20/month. It runs several sites including family blogs and hobby sites. I run nginx on the front end and reverse proxy to 5 Apache children which saves me having to run roughly 100 Apache children to handle the brief spikes of around 20 hits per second I saw yesterday.
Five years ago many companies or bloggers would have used a physical box with 3.5 Gigabytes of memory to handle 100 apache instances and the database for this kind of traffic. About $300/month based on current pricing for physical dedicated servers from ServerBeach which hasn’t changed much since 2005.
With the move from hardware and multiprocess servers to virtualization and event-servers, hosting costs have dropped to 6% of what they were 5 years ago. A drop of 94% in a variable cost for any sector changes the economics in a way that usually causes disruption and innovation.
So where is the disruption and innovation happening now that anyone can afford a million-hits-a-month server?
Footnotes: An unstable version of Nginx was available in 2005/2006 and Lighttpd was also an alternative back then for reverse proxying. But it was for hardcore hackers who didn’t mind relatively unstable and bleeding-edge configurations. Mainstream configuration in 2005 was running big memory servers on dedicated machines with a huge number of Apache children. Sadly, much of the web is still run this way. I shudder to think of the environmental impact of all those front-end web boxes. I also don’t address the subject of Keep-Alive on Apache. Disabling Keep-Alive is a way to get a lot more bang for your hardware (specifically you need less memory because you run less apache children) while sacrificing some browser performance. The norm in 2005 was to leave keepalive enabled, but set to a short timeout. With Keepalive set to 15 seconds, my estimate of 100 apache instances for 20 hits per second is probably way too optimistic. With Keep-Alive disabled you would barely handle 20 requests per second with 100 children when taking into account latency per request for slower connections. Bandwidth cost is also a consideration, but gzip and running compressed code, using CDN versions of libs like jQuery that someone else hosts and running a stripped down site with few images helps. [Think Craigslist] With a page size of 100K, Linode’s 400GB bandwidth allowance gives you 4,194,304 pageviews.
Clarence from Panabee pinged me a few minutes ago mentioning Panabee.com. I hadn’t heard of it and along with nxdom.com I’m going to add it to my toolkit to brainstorm available domain names.
My attitude re names these days fluctates between the-name-is-everything and back to sanity.
A week ago I was obsessed with the domain name WordPrice.com which a friendly cybersquatter wanted to sell me for $700. I even contacted the owner of a very similar mark and kindly got the OK to use it for what I intended. Then backed off at the last minute because a) I refuse to support cybersquatting and b) names are more about creating a well loved and well remembered brand than pretty words.
Keep in mind the relative strength of different types of trademarks when you’re thinking about future brands. Make sure you do a USPTO search and at some point spend $500 with a TM attorney to get your use of your new mark on record and start the trademark clock. I also tend to screenshot a few 100-result google searches for any new potentially strong mark I’m going to use. I date them and file them. [Once you’ve had your ass handed to you in a trademark lawsuit like I have, you get paranoid]
“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” ~Maybe not Steinbeck, but it’s cool and it’s true.
As temporarily embarrassed millionaire programmers I feel we sometimes don’t pursue projects that could be buying awesome toys every month, making up for that underwater mortgage or adding valuable incremental income. Projects in this space aren’t the next Facebook or Twitter so they don’t pass the knock-it-out-the-park test.
There are so many ideas in this neglected space that have worked and continue to work. Here’s a start:
Do a site:.gov search on Google for downloadable government data.
Come up with a range of data that you can republish in directory form. Spend a good few hours doing this and create a healthy collection of options.
You might try a site:.edu search too and see if universities have anything interesting.
Enter keywords that describe the data sets you’ve come up with. Enter a few to get a good indication each category or sector’s potential
Look at search volume to find sectors that are getting high search volumes.
Look at CPC to find busy sectors that also have advertisers that are paying top dollar for clicks.
Finally, look at the Competition column to get an idea of how many advertisers are competing in the sector.
First prize is high search volume, high CPC, high competition. Sometimes you can’t have it all, but get as close as you can.
Now that you’ve chosen a lucrative sector with lots of spendy advertisers and have government or academic data you can republish, figure out a way to generate thousands of pages of content out of that data and solve someone’s problem. The problem could be “Why can’t I find a good site about XYZ when I google for such-and-such.”
Give the site a good solid SEO link structure with breadcrumbs and cross-linking. Emphasize relevant keywords with the correct html tags and avoid duplicate content. Make sure the site performance is wicked fast or you’ll get penalized. Nginx reverse-proxying Apache is always a good bet.
Tell the right people about your site and tell them regularly via great blog entries, insightful tweets, and networking in your site’s category.
Keep monitoring Googlebot crawl activity, how your site is being indexed and tweak it for 6 months until it’s all indexed, ranking and getting around 50K visits per month (1666 visits per day).
That’s 150,000 page views per month at 3 pages per visit average.
At a 1.6% CTR with 0.85c CPC from Adsense you’re earning $2040 per month.
Update: To clarify, “competition” above refers to competition among advertisers paying for clicks in a sector. More competition is a good thing for publishers because it means higher CPC and more ad inventory i.e. a higher likelihood an ad will be available for a specific page with specific subject matter in your space. [Thanks Bill!]
Update2: My very good mate Joe Heitzeberg runs MediaPiston which is a great way to connect with high quality authors of original content. If you do have a moderate budget and are looking for useful and unique content to get started, give Joe and his crew a shout! They have great authors and have really nailed the QA and feedback process with their platform.
This one is short and sweet. A new domain recently wasn’t getting any SEO traffic after 2 months. As soon as the registration was made non-private i.e. we removed the domainsByProxy mask on who owns the domain, it started getting traffic and has been growing ever since.
Correlation does not equal causation, but it does give me pause.
