Jason Putorti –lead designer for Mint.com, the first personal finance application I’ve actually been able to maintain an interest in–did this great presentation on “10 Things CEOs need to know about Design”.

Great if you build, design or market web applications.

Love this quote:

“The best marketing tool you can have is a well designed application”

That is the absolute truth. I feel like I need to watch this presentation every monday just to get my mind focused for the week. So good.

View it on slideshare here

Great content, good mix of web app, open source topics, and just interesting discussion if you are that certain kind of web geek into that sort of thing — like me.

You can follow them on twitter here: http://twitter.com/devshow
And, here’s an iTunes link for The Dev Show.

Here’s my iphone/podcast listening tip (if you can call it that) : Listen to your podcasts at doublespeed. Twice the podcast goodness in half the time! It only takes a minute to get so used to the speed that it sounds normal.

And, here’s tip #2. Don’t do this while listening to a podcast:

Here’s the official Google AdWords blog post on the subject.

We’ve used a number of lead aggregators — companies that essentially sell quote requests to a pool of potential service providers. BuyerZone, and Resource Nation are two examples. These companies typically derive much of their traffic and leads from natural and sponsored search.

Often, the math works in their favor, allowing them to out-compete individual service providers in sponsored search. For example:

Say the Service Provider has a CPA (cost-per-acquisition) target of $75 for their search leads. That’s a level where they know they will be profitable. If their site converts 5% of search traffic to a lead overall, they could pay ~ $3.75/click in sponsored search.

The Aggregator however will take the leads they generate and re-sell them to anywhere between 3-7 individual Service Providers for typically $15 to $35. If they can sell these leads to six providers at $30ea, they’ll be able out-bid those same providers.

6 x $30 = $180 revenue/lead
assume 100% gross revenue return target, and 5% conversion rate

The aggregator can spend $4.50/click, while expecting to earn $9/click. To the Service Provider they are still getting leads significantly below their $75 target.

The Aggregators also often out-convert Service Providers because they have such a clear and simple goal and benefit proposition — complete this form and you’ll get six quotes from qualified providers.

You can see the impact conversion rates (and closing rates) have on the economics of this situation. It may be in your best interests as a service provider to pay a little more for that exclusive lead, knowing that you’ll close a larger portion of them.

Now, it looks like Google is going to get into the lead gen process themselves–which has the potential to totally disrupt the existing market, with the greatest potential losers being the Lead Aggregators.

Should be interesting to watch.

I was reading this post yesterday, and it made me want to estimate how much the GeoCities sites were really costing Yahoo.

I tried to make some order-of-magnitude estimates of how much the hosting of these domains was costing Yahoo. Was it really a cash drain?

Hosting:
7.5 million hosted sites.
5 Megabytes of data/site (this is probably way high)

That’s 37.5 TeraBytes of data to store.
Using the highest tier Amazon S3 pricing (we know it would be cheaper than this) of $0.15/Gigabyte, that’s $5,625 in storage/month.

Bandwidth:
10 MM Visits/month.
Assume an average of 3.5 pages/visit (probably high).
Assume 100k transferred/page (also probably high).

That’s 3,500GB transferred/month.

Again using the highest S3 data transfer price of $0.17/GB, we’re looking at $595/month.

Add the per/request fees of $0.012/1000 requests. We’ll assume there were 15 objects/page, 35 million page views, that’s another $6,300 in request fees.

So, looking at storage and bandwith costs of serving the GeoCities requests we’re talking about somewhere on the order of $12,520/month. That doesn’t seem like a lot of money just to keep the geocities pages alive. To cover those costs you’d need to generate just 3.6 cents out of every 1,000 pageviews! It seems like some contextual links could have covered that?

I’m making a lot of assumptions, and to be conservative I’ve tried to estimate on the high side of things. They’ll also need to maintain some of their own infrastructure, or outsource the actual serving of the sites–but I’d think they probably have that down to a science. Yahoo would also likely need at least some staff to manage and support the service, and some staff to plan and manage marketing campaigns to your GeoCities audience. These salaries would far outweigh actual hosting costs—but still, seems like they could have made it work.

Ways they could have made money from that traffic:

1. Cross Sell other Yahoo! properties from the GeoCities pages. Use a small top-of page banner of some kind.
2. Serve their own PPC contextual ads on the Geocities pages
3. Remarket Yahoo’s hosting services to the Geocities site owners (they made a small effort in this regard at the end, but you could continue to market to your 7.5 million site owners month after month.
5. Add AdSense to the GeoCities sites — Heh, heh, just kidding but it would work

So, what do you think? What am I missing?

In the end they probably just decided the revenue upside was just not worth the effort. But it makes me wonder what other Yahoo! properties are in exactly the same situation.

Four years ago IAC bought Ask Jeeves for stock worth 1.85 billion (at the time). But, since that IAC stock is now worth about 30% of its value back then that would place the deal’s present value at about 550 million—still way, way too much. Now it seems IAC is ready to put Ask (minus the Jeeves) on the block.

We were Ask Jeeves advertisers once upon a time. Back when they had their own ad management system instead of the horrible outsourced Looksmart clone they implemented in 2006—a decision I’ll never understand.

Back there in late 2005 there did seem to be a glimmer of hope that Ask Jeeves may grow their 3% search share to something bigger. They had a memorable brand with the Jeeves butler. But, IAC showed him the door in a rush to turn them into the next ho-hum online destination.

The butler didn’t fit with their rush to be just like Google. See, they’d upgraded their search technology so you didn’t have to do your searches in the form of a question. But maybe asking a question to the butler was the only fun thing about the site! I mean he was in the Macy’s day parade. Come on!

Interesting Utah factoid, one-time super-star Utah agency DSW created the original Jeeves brand (along with Intel Inside among others). DSW also gave COGBOX one of our very first jobs back in ‘97.

Good luck unloading Ask.com. I can’t imagine who would line up to buy it.
You had potential at one time, and it was squandered.

Here’s more on the topic.

Fast Company pulled all the videos of their other robots together here.

The company is called Boston Dynamics.

That first day also marks the zenith of banner ad click through rates. A banner with just two words, “Click Here”, achieved a 78% click-through rate. Each click was followed by the user sighing and saying “oh, it’s just an ad”.

Here’s an interesting account by Frank D’Angelo at AdAge.

Yesterday, while working on a COGBOX.com refresh my up-till-now trusty iMac suddenly froze. And, on restart I saw the dreaded flashing-question-mark-folder screen—not good.

While my iMac is still not back in service, I’m back in action with a combination of my laptop and other office machines.

There are a few choices that have made this hard drive crash much, much less painful than it could have been. I thought I’d post them here to give credit to the products/services that have helped. Maybe my experience will help you.

Hosted Subversion Repositories – Beanstalk
We use Subversion for version control on all our client sites, and we host our Subversion repositories off site with Beanstalk. Beyond all the other many benefits of version control, hosting at beanstalk makes picking up development right where I left off super-fast. Three other development tools we use that are subversion friendly : Versions, BBEdit, and Coda.

Google Apps – Gmail, Calendar and Tasks
About two years ago we moved all our cogbox.com email over to Gmail for Business. It would be impossible to go back. Besides the amazing speed with which I can search through 40,000 messages in my inbox, having our email as a web service means no hiccups in the case of disasters like yesterday’s. Just lately I’ve started using Tasks from in Gmail and really like it, easy fast to-do lists (they look good on the iphone too).

So I’ve got my client’s sites & development projects, my email/calendar and my to-do lists. What about other work files?

Time Machine
Fortunately, Apple came through for me. I’d stopped paying attention to whether my backups were working months ago. But Time Machine was there in the background storing my files every hour.

My only regret is excluding some of my system files and applications from my Time Machine backups to save space. When I do get my iMac back in working order I’ll have to spend some time re-installing a bunch of apps. What I should have done (and will be doing in the future) is let time machine do a whole system backup to a larger network storage device like a Drobo. Then my recovery would be as simple as a hard drive swap and restore from Time Machine.

All-in-all, relatively painless. I’ll update my post as my recovery proceeds.

Update:
I forgot one other app that has made my life much easier with this crash —Yojimbo. It’s another app from the makers of BBEdit that allows me to store (and encrypt) thousands of logins, notes, code snippets and other bits of information, then sync it between multiple machines. With all the mental space I’ve freed up with this app I can now sometimes even remember where I’ve left my keys!

Update 2:
I found the difference between an Apple HD replacement and a local Mac Reseller (MacDocs) HD replacement is about $150 and 1 TeraByte. Apple Store: Replace my 500 GB drive w/another just like it – $350. MacDocs: Replace with 1.5 TeraByte drive $200.

(Normally something as simple as a HD replacement is something I’d do myself, but the Aluminum iMac replacement process involves suction cups and major dis-assembly—well worth avoiding for the $75 mac docs fee.)

Search Submit allowed you to pay a fee to guarantee inclusion of your pages in the Yahoo Search index. We actually used that service years ago. It was a convenient way to ensure that you had new pages indexed quickly, and that large sites like ecommerce sites were fully indexed.

These days failure to get your site fully indexed has more to do with poor site design than with failure to cough up some extra cash to Yahoo. And, for commerce sites there is always Yahoo Product Submit.

The program will end at the end of this year. Buh bye.

You can nominate a location here.

From the size, it looks like the street view trike would be a thigh-burner:

According to the article over the course of 3 hrs the story went from:

1. Entertainment Niche Site
2. Larger Entertainment Site
3. Wikipedia
4. CNN Twitter
5. first Bit.ly link (others tweeting)
6. Story hits Digg front page
7. massive RTing
8. MSNBC confirms
9. CNN confirms
10. Story on Google News

The story really took fire on social media, with the MSM and Google News following later. I don’t think a 3 hr delay is too bad on Google News’ part, but it is interesting to see how quickly stories like this can spread now.

Read the rest here

http://www.getpersonas.com/persona/31913

To install:

Go here: http://www.getpersonas.com/
and click Get Personas for Firefox.

Then go here: http://www.getpersonas.com/persona/31913
and click “Wear this”.

That’s it.

They asked 30,000 web types their opinions on topics from their “level of excitement” to “how long since your last raise” for this year’s survey. And, if you are so inclined you can even download a copy of the raw data yourself to play with.

Go to the survey.

“lexpionage, the sleuthing of new words and phrases. These aren’t “stunt words” or “sniglets,” but new terms that have appeared multiple times in newspapers, magazines, books, Web sites, and other recorded sources.”

Here’s one that I’ve experienced myself at times:

semisomnia n. Mild but chronic exhaustion caused by poor sleep habits.

More here: Word Spy

Pretty cool, and something I think I’ll actually use.

This is backed by Sequoia Capital, who’ve previously been involved with little web companies like Google, YouTube, Yahoo.

As a side note, one of the first speakers we saw after starting COGBOX in 1997 was Mark Kvamme, now one of the partners of Sequoia. This was at an AIGA brand design conference, and really got us excited about our new business. Our paths have remained almost eerily synchronous ever since. He went on to fund Google, we…ok, maybe not perfectly synchronous.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

So Yahoo!, for your own good, and mine, grant me these three wishes:

1. Get rid of “match driver”.
Six years ago GoTo.com, Yahoo Search Marketing’s ancestor, dominated the Sponsored Search market. At the time, there was no AdWords. Their closest competitor was FindWhat (now Miva). Yahoo, MSN, AOL all distributed GoTo search listings. Feeling their power, GoTo decided it would be a good idea to artificially boost the number of competitors for each particular term by consolidating like terms together into one bidding pool.

Here’s how they described it:

“Our Match Driver tool takes search term misspellings, singular/plural combinations and other variations, and maps them to a primary term so that consumers get the best and most comprehensive search results we can offer.”

See, they were really looking out for the consumers. They also did this favor to advertisers:

“In order to maintain your competitive advantage in the search results, we take your highest bid on any form of a primary search term. You therefore need not bid on multiple versions of mapped search terms in the future. Any given search term can be listed only once per advertiser, so we removed all duplicates and retained only one of each term.”

This could alternatively be read as “We’ve now forced you to pay a higher amount than what would otherwise be warranted for less desirable terms that we’ve pooled together with other more valuable terms. If you want to be competitive with the valuable terms, you’ll have to pay for our other junk as well”.

There was of course a lot of dis-satisfaction with this decision at the time in the still relatively small Search Marketing world. What GoTo was trying to do was drive up their average revenue per click to attract more potential distribution partners.

Times have changed, but this bad idea hasn’t. It still sucks. Jerry, it’s time to ditch it.

2. Give me an Adwords Editor for Yahoo.
One of the things that we hoped for most in the new Panama system was that the campaign management interface would be improved. And, to give them credit, it has improved over the old system. They did finally do away with the notion that each keyword had to be associated with its own creative and moved to a more AdWords-esque model where you can associate creative (ads) with groups of keywords.

But, in the meantime, Google has come out with something absolutely fantastic–an offline account editing application. This tool allows you to download a snapshot of your account to your local machine, then very quickly execute thousands of changes. Cut, paste, search, replace. I love it. And, I love how Google took the almost counter-intuitive step of building a desktop app as an upgrade for their online platform.

So, Yahoo, take a look at the AdWords editor and try to make managing very large campaigns through your system as easy as it is now with Google.

3. Let me opt-out of specific partners.
This is really a pet peeve. With Yahoo, you can’t opt out of specific publishing partners–even if you absolutely know that they never, ever, result in quality traffic.

We have a nice little ROI tracking tool we first built about 7 years ago. I keep thinking that with all the great analytics platforms out there, we’ll eventually retire this. But, it is hard to beat having direct access to the raw data when you are doing an analysis. So, it lives on. One very handy component is the ability to identify the referring URLs from any particular campaign. So, using this, we can easily see the conversion rates for Yahoo publishing partners.

For instance, the site BlurtIt is a Yahoo search publishing partner. It is similar to Yahoo answers (but not as good). Every month, Yahoo delivers (and charges us for) traffic from BlurtIt, and every month that traffic immediately hits the back button upon arriving at our client’s sites. Eliminating that traffic would instantly improve the ROI of our overall Yahoo campaign. But, it can’t be done. Why is that? I’m sure they are sick of hearing this but… Google lets me do it.

What these three wishes really boil down to is this: Yahoo, change your mindset from one of fear that giving your advertisers total control over their campaigns will cost you revenue, to one where you are helping advertisers find profitable marketing relationships, and avoiding those that are not profitable. Trying to hang on to marketing dollars by giving clients fewer options is just not going to work.

So, c’mon Yahoo, grant me some wishes.

The interesting part of all this to me is that:

1. It is a lesson in damage control gone awry. Clearly if your entire rights management scheme relies on keeping one bit of information under lock and key, you’ll have a very difficult time once that bit of information is released in the wild. And, if your plan is to brand anyone who later passes that bit along a criminal, you’ll be again putting yourself in a very bad position, at least from a public relations standpoint. And by doing so, you may just accomplish exactly the opposite of what you intended through your attempts at enforcement.

2. I think it is interesting that Kevin Rose titled his post with the key. Obviously that is a risky choice, but also in fact the only thing that could have short-circuited the massive wave of copy-cat postings that were rising up the digg ladder–short of just taking the site down. Another example of a kind of rule of opposites of online damage control : heavy handedness fed the fire, capitulation snuffed it out.

I’m not saying that I think what happened on digg was right (I’m not exactly sure it falls into the realm of right and wrong).

But, it is an example of something that is particularly despised among programmers, developers, and security types online (a big part of the digg audience), and that is an attempt by a perceived powerful group to protect an inherently flawed system through intimidation, rather than through an improved system. It is analogous to the scenario where a company like Microsoft responds with a threatened lawsuit when a security expert (aka hacker) releases a discovered bug in their code. Most smart businesses (including Microsoft) have figured this out by now, and instead treat it as an opportunity to improve their product and methods.

I think that sentiment is a big part of what fueled the Digg takeover.