Blog

  • Is the budget "crisis" an exercise in self promotion?

    One side effect of the so called “budget criss” is that everyone who never heard of congressman John Boehner, speaker of the house of representatives and representative of Ohio’s 8th congressional district, has now heard of him.

    Here’s Google trends showing the rise of Boehner:

    Google Trends showing Boehner's popularity

    The longer this spectacle continues, the more famous Boehner and everyone else involved in the process becomes. One wonders if this is self promotion at the cost of massive market uncertainty.

    It’s hard to believe that Boehner and everyone else in the process doesn’t dream of a scenario where they get maximum publicity until the very last moment and then pull a “solution to this criss” out of the bag on 11:59pm on August 1st.

    I doubt he’s crying now.

  • 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 and in great condition. The bag is pictured on left. Whole beans, already roasted.

    My first cupping was, I must admit not as impressive as I thought it would be. I didn’t grow wings. Angels did not sing.

    I drink my coffee black with no sugar or cream. I grind whole beans in a regular old $10 grinder and use a french press. I’ll use 2 tablespoons of beans for 1 cup and let it brew for anywhere from 30 seconds to 5 minutes depending on how rushed I am.

    After drinking blue mountain for a little more than a week now I am on the fence. It’s great coffee. There’s no bitterness and it has a wonderful mild flavour. But it doesn’t quite have that $45.55 feel to it that I was hoping for.

    I usually get my coffee from Peets. Don’t bother with the supermarket stuff. Get it from the Peets store because it’s better quality, more selection and they clear out old stock after 10 days – and probably send it to the supermarkets. Peets Major Dickenson is almost as good as blue mountain. The bean quality, which I think is really important, is great with both coffees. Peets has one or two dull or smashed beans but on the whole they look almost as good as Blue Mountain.

    So I want to be able to say: Blue Mountain is all I drink because it’s the only real coffee. But it’s only about twice as good as Peets and 10 times as good as SB.

     

  • 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:


  • 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.

  • 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:

    Duty Calls
    Duty Calls

  • Orange Juice just got ruined for me

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

  • 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!

     

  • 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 high earning keywords and analyzed the search results for each keyword or phrase. What I was interested in was finding a space where the earning potential was high, the search volume was high but the top ranking website or websites were of poor quality and innovation had stopped.

    I found it in the Nutrition and Weight Loss space. The top ranking site is low quality and is owned by a media empire, meaning they’ve stopped innovating. Paydirt!

    I grabbed a huge pile of government nutrition data and developed a large nutrition website. I employed someone to add a high quality meta-data to the site that made it more useful and attractive.

    To make the site truly competitive, I added a viral model that tied into SEO. The viral hook is not a “Facebook Like” button or other gimmick. It’s a full blown application that other websites install, providing the site with valuable backlinks and increased marketing and distribution.

    I launched the site in late January. Three months later it had enough credibility with the search engines to start getting traffic and the SE traffic took a nice jump.

    Thankfully the site survived the Panda Google update and has continued to grow. In the last week it’s taken another healthy jump in traffic.

    Here are the current stats:

    • The site currently gets over 700 visits a day from a vertical audience interested purely in nutrition.
    • Over 500 visits per day are from search engines.
    • SEO traffic is rising.
    • 50% of traffic is North America i.e. USA and Canada.
    • Hosting costs are $20 per month on Linode and costs will remain low because the site is well engineered and optimized.
    • Yahoo Site Explorer lists the site as having 5,377 backlinks from external sites.
    • Site currently has 350,000 pages of content indexed by Google with more crawled daily.
    • Site has over 7,000 photos that were hand added by my staff.
    • It has several features in the space it’s in that are unique and useful.
    • It provides a needed and genuinely useful public service that is unique in the nutrition space.
    • The site is barely 6 months old so it has a ton of growth potential.
    While this site will continue to grow with very little incremental work from my side, I’d like to see the project taken over by someone firmly in the Nutrition space. Someone who can complement the great online distribution the site has with a bricks and mortar nutrition business.
    I’m selling the site for $29,000 which includes handover and some of my time to get you set up. I’m looking for the right buyer that can take it to the next level and get a great long term ROI. If you’re interested contact me at mmaunder at gmail dot com.
    Here’s the traffic going back to April.

  • 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.

    Shouldn’t they all be growing virally? Google claims they’re in limited field trials, it’s invite only, etc, but I can get in and so can you I’m sure.

    What worries me is that a social app that is truly engaging and social should have a very strong viral loop. New users invite new users.

    If you’re Google, you’re starting with an audience of over a billion people. That’s a pretty good seed for your viral loop. They should be having to fight the traffic off with a sharp stick.

    I think their strategy of softly-softly when launching new products hurts them in the long run. They’re so worried about down-time they’re sacrificing valuable PR buzz and new product momentum to avoid it. Twitter still goes down regularly and that hasn’t hurt them yet.

    But the real problem I have with Google Plus is it’s fugly.

    I don’t mean purely on design. The language they use to describe each product feature is like something out of The Boo Hoo Bird: “Circles”, “Hangouts”, “Sparks”.

    I also think the designers are still suffering from PTSD from the Google Buzz debacle:

    [box]Circles let you share with just the right audience.[/box]

    i.e. We didn’t screw up this time. Pinkie promise!

     

     

  • 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 length. Customers will gravitate towards the closest stand. If one stand was a quarter mile from the left and the other was a quarter mile from the right, they would have an equal number of customers.

    But if one of the stands moved slightly towards the center, it would gain more customers and the other stand would lose those same customers (a zero sum game). So the optimal position for both stands is dead center i.e. on top of each other. That gives them both 50/50 market share and prevents the other stand from gaining more market share.

    …even though it causes people on the beach to have to walk further to get a burger.

    Check out Presh’s blog entry for a full explanation and accompanying graphics. He relates this to why politicians tend to position themselves in the political center and why news channels all carry the same stories.

    Bringing this back to the real world, I wonder about things like goodwill, brand loyalty, pricing power, brand cachet and so on. Positioning yourself in the center of the beach, in the center of the political spectrum or, if you’re a news channel, carrying the stories everyone else carries does not engender much love in your target market.

    If a competitor were to come along and position themselves off-center, they may sacrifice a portion of the market, but develop fierce loyalty among their customers for being better and being different.

    This brings to mind many famous brands who started with a cult following: