MarkMaunder dot com

Is Jamaican Blue Mountain Coffee Worth $45 a pound?

About 3 weeks ago I had the worst cup of coffee imaginable – whole beans from the local supermarket and just unbelievably bitter. So to get over my coffee PTSD I decided to spring $45.55 (incl. shipping) for a pound of Jamaican Blue Mountain. I ordered it from Coffee Bean Direct. It arrived on time […]

July 29, 2011 | Coffee | No comments

It's all about the default (Google Search Traffic)

Seems like there’s a lot of fear out there. This is my search traffic for the last 72 hours to this site and pretty much 90% of it is people Googling the consequences of a US default:

July 29, 2011 | SEO | No comments

The Today Show: Journey performs Don't Stop Believing this morning (Video)

Today Show: With Arnel Pineda’s new haircut, Journey performed Don’t Stop Believing at the Rockerfeller Plaza this morning on The Today Show. Apparently it’s famous again thanks to Glee and the Sporanos. Check out the guy at 3:00 in the video. He’s just itching to rip that suit off.

July 29, 2011 | Music | No comments

If you read hacker news I want you to do something for me…

I want you to do a little sanity check, because I’m worried it’s just me. Read the top moderated comment for the top items each day on HN and tell me if you’re also noticing that around 75% of them are posted by this guy:

July 28, 2011 | Hacker News | No comments

Orange Juice just got ruined for me

If you buy bottled orange juice, read this. Now. And ruin your perception of OJ forever.

July 28, 2011 | Cooking and Food | No comments

The job of kings

My favorite facebook tweet or whatever you call it in your stream. A Fweet maybe. Dave Lefkow, creator of BaconSalt and Bacon Lip Balm, playing in their R&D lab at J&D Foods with bacon and a bottle of Jack. Dude, you have my dream job!  

July 28, 2011 | Awesome | No comments

I'm selling a 6 month old viral business in a hot space.

In January this year I started researching keywords with high search volume and high earnings per click. I wrote a tool that extracts data from Google AdWords Tool and Traffic Estimator. I built intelligence into it that spotted high earning keywords, retrieved more suggestions and recursed in that fashion. I then looked at at the resulting […]

July 28, 2011 | Startups, Viral, Viral business for sale | No comments

I'm calling it: Google+ is a flop.

Does anyone else not care about Google plus? Hitwise released a report that says Google+ traffic had declined by 3% for the week ending July 23. Google are of course in damage control mode and claiming that Hitwise ignores Android, iPhone and traffic to the web app and only takes into account traffic to the site itself. […]

July 28, 2011 | Rants | No comments

Why burger stands, gas stations and politicians tend to cluster

Presh Talwalkar has an elegant explanation on why competing entities in an environment where demand is linearly distributed (like two burger stands on a beach) tend to cluster in the center of demand. The intuitive explanation is this: Imagine two burger stands on a straight beach a mile long with the beach crowd evenly distributed along its […]

July 27, 2011 | Economics, Marketing | No comments

Listen to this podcast on the budget process, you must

Keith Hennessey does a spectacular job of explaining the complicated process of arriving at the federal budget and where it is currently stuck in this week’s Econtalk. He also breaks down who has the power to move things forward right now. It’s so good I was tempted to transcribe selected bits here, but I just […]

July 27, 2011 | Economics | No comments

My name is Mark Maunder. I've been blogging since around 2003 when I started on Movable Type and ended up on WordPress which is what I use to publish today. With my wife Kerry, I'm the co-founder of Wordfence which protects over 5 million WordPress sites from hackers and is run by a talented team of 36 people. I'm an instrument rated pilot and I fly a Cessna 206 along with a 1964 Cessna 172 in the Pacific Northwest and Colorado. I'm originally from Cape Town, South Africa but live in the US these days. I code in a bunch of languages and am quite excited about our emerging AI overlords and how they're going to be putting us to work for them.