Marcelo Calbucci

 

    At 8:28 this morning, I moved one of our domains (brainuse.com) to use the new DNS service. The day before, I've made sure that all records had a TTL and expiration of 1 hour so that if something went wrong it wouldn't be for more than 1 hour.

 

   At 9:20 I started checking the new DNS and things were not going well. At 9:30 I was in panic because a lot of queries were failing. The DNS requests were not in the expected format.

 

   So I started a frantic search for some answers, debugging, investigating, reading about a dozen RFCs, and... I found RFC 2671 that makes a breaking change to the DNS infrastructure if you don't support it.

 

    I decided to revert to our old DNS and implement 2671. Implementation is done and tested and I'll try again in a few minutes. Need some time to catch my breadth.

 

    The good thing is that I really minimized impact for our users. First, because I set the DNS cache to 1 hour. Second, because I was relatively fast to roll back. And third, because I didn't do a full roll out, just 1 domain which is, by the way, our least used domain.

 

    On MSN, I'd say that 80% of downtime that we had during a year was related to network issues. So, every time you are making changes to the software or hardware of the network infrastructure you must be prepared (and expecting) the worse.

 

 

    Sampa was selected to present at the Eary State Investment Forum this year. This is a pretty good timing for us since our growth on the last 3 months has been a consistent 40% M-o-M and this is the kind of news that investors like to hear.

 

    If you are an investor, you can always question the strategy, products or ideas of a company, but you cannot question customer uptake. If customers are using the product / service there is nothing that can challenge that.

 

    In another news, we were also selected to present at Keiretsu next week, which is an organization focused on bringing the best deals to angel investors in the region.

 

    In a third news, we've been rejected to present at the WSA Investment Forum, which at this moment I'm thinking it is a good thing because they are kind of disorganized. They were supposed to contact the selected/rejected companies more than a week ago. They didn't, and I had to ping them to find out we were not selected and they were running behind schedule on their selection committee.

 

    The rejection message was very funny because despite the fact they didn't select us they insisted that we participate in the event. Of course, they make money out of every attending person. In other words, they punched us in the stomach and are asking for our lunch money.

 

 

    Now, here is a quick lesson for entrepreneurs:

 

    If an investor tells no, or "call us back when you have more traction", or "we are interested but not now", just say thank you and stop all communication with them. Those non-deals are a drag of time with emails and phone calls. Learn as much as you can why they said no as quick as possible and then stop. We spend more time than we should explaining to investors that already declined investing in us about the technology, the market, the consumer and the competitors.

 

    A lot of times we do that out of courtesy because they don't have a good grasp on Web 2.0, but it is simply not worth it from a business perspective.

 

    There is no such thing as closing the doors, or burning the bridges. They are investors and venture capitalists. Money talks and if they think they can make money investing on you, you won't have to say sorry because you didn't call them after they said no the first time.

 

    Taking from Kathy Sierra: Focus on the customer, not on the competition [or on investors].

 

    Do we need another one? Maybe not, but today I'm launching Seattle 2.0 as a site/blog with resources from startups, entrepreneurs, investors and geeks talking about startups, entrepreneurs, investors and geeks. So it's all in the family.

 

    My first post talks why and what.

 

    The second post is a new list of Seattle Companies ordered by Alexa Rank.

 

    Subscribe to our RSS Feed and help divulge if it won't hurt you.

 

    You'd think that if takes about 1 hour per week to maintain 1 server, it would take 2 hours per week to maintain 2 servers. Right? Wrong.

 

    With 1 server, I had a simple batch script that would upgrade the server whenever there was a new build. Now with two servers, I have to do staged deployment (one server first, then the other server), have to make sure that configuration settings are replicated across servers, have to add more scripts to get even simple tasks done, etc .

 

    So, going from 1 server to 2 servers is more than twice of the work. The good thing is that once you are prepared to handle multiple servers (in an automated fassion), adding more and more servers become very easy. So, the third server will add just a nominal amount of work for me and running 10 servers is not that different from running 40 servers.

 

    Today my Technorati rank is 108,629, which is pretty amazing in my opinion.

 

    If Technorati is tracking 60,000,000 blogs, it means I have more inbound links than 59,891,371 blogs. What's that worth? Nada.

 

    On the beginning of this month, I asked on this blog if I should upgrade to Office 2007. I was mostly worried about Outlook being slow.

 

    Well, that blog post has generated a lot of buzz (on my blog-scale-buzz-meter).

 

    Not only we had a few good comments, but I got a bunch of email and not less than 185 times someone searched for "outlook 2007 slow" and found that entry on Google.

 

    A lot of people are having problems with Outlook 2007. Microsoft should quickly release some fixes to the perf issue.

 

    Here is my help to Microsoft...

 

    I run a very unusual setup because I have two Exchange accounts. One is my personal account (calbucci.com) and the other is Sampa's (sampa.com). Since Outlook doesn't allow me to have 2 Exchange accounts on the same profile I have two profiles, and I switch back and forth between them all day long (I know, very annoying).

 

    When I'm at the office, and I run the Sampa profile, Outlook is quite fast and effective (except when I'm opening messages with images on it, either linked or embedded). When I open my Calbucci profile things don't go so well. The difference? On the Calbucci profile, the connection is always RPC over HTTP. On Sampa it is not. That should give some clue to some perf tester at what to look for. Good luck.

 

 

    In case you are a Sampa user, but not a Sampa Blog reader... We are a doing an upgrade tomorrow.

 

    This is to switch over our DNS to the new code. Cross your fingers.

 

    Without DNS you would have to remember IP addresses for emails and websites, which would be clearly bad for somebody like me.

 

    Right now all Sampa sites run from a single server. Yeah, you heard it right. A single low end server hosts all our sites, and serves thousands of users every day.

 

    But we bought a new server and is ready to roll. Except by one thing. All Sampa sites DNS entries point to the same IP address. That is done with an catch-all entry in DNS, like in "*.sampasite.com -> 207.115.80.185".

 

    To enable the second server, our DNS will have to query our database to where each site is located, on server 1 or server 2. The existing solutions for DNS are very unfriendly when you have thousands (or millions) of DNS records. You would probably need multiple dedicated DNS servers for that, which is what large ISPs and Host providers do.

 

    So, I decided to write my own DNS Server. How hard can it be? Turns out, that the RFC 1035 is pretty clear and easy to understand. There is way more to DNS than most people think of. It wasn't that hard and it took just about 3 days.

 

    I just finished implementing the DNS Server code, and I'm almost done with testing it. The beauty is that the entire DNSServer code has only two functions exposed. One to start the service and one callback to get the Resource Records (RRs) response (ok, three functions: one to stop the service). Now it is just a matter of hooking up to our database (and add some caching) to make it work.

 

    That will be fun.

  

    A minority of blogs still use excerpt feeds. This is when just a couple hundreds characters of the original post are shown on the feed. The intent is to bring users to the website and generate a visit and page view.

    The popular blog of Robert Scoble uses partial feeds. Very annoying. John Cook's Venture Blog also use partial feed. Probably he is forced by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to do that (maybe not).

    Here is my case for partial feeds. Go to Technorati and search for "Sampa BlueDot Trumba" (without quotes). John Cook made a post about the Seattle area Web 2.0 startups, but his post is nowhere to be found on Technorati. Why? Partial-feeds. Try the same thing on any blog search engine, and likely the result will be the same.

    On the short term, partial feeds might drive more traffic, but on the long term you are losing important search traffic.

 

    I'm not a marketing guy. I'm a "technologist" (at least, this is how Hillel Cooperman kindly referred to me), but, I was just reading a blog post on Read/WriteWeb from Emre Sokullu "teaching" entrepreneurs on how to market their product and saw this:

"...You want to reach thousands of users as quickly as possible. Aha, you think, the cheapest and shortest path is viral marketing - via blogs and social news sites.  ..."

    And just to be clear -- again -- I'm not a marketing expert, but I had to learn a lot (I mean, *a lot*) about marketng to make sure I didn't ruin Sampa. And from the phrase above I can guarantee you that Emre Sokullu is not a marketing guy either. Heck, he knows even less than I know.

 

    What he describe as "viral marketing" is not viral at all. That is PR -- good and old traditional press release work. This is also not new. Decades ago, having a big hit on a mainstream publication would be the equivalent of TechCrunch for a Web 2.0 company today. If you've got mentioned on Newsweek, NYT or CNN you could see your product fly out of the shelves, or your phones non-stop ringing. And that still happens today, independent of the Internet.

 

    That begs the question: What is viral marketing?

 

    Maybe I don't have the best definition, and I'm sure if I go to Wikipedia I'll find a great explanation (or a bad one, it depends on who edited it), but my definition goes like this:

 

Viral Marketing is when the customer is doing the marketing for a company.

 

    What do you prefer to have, one excellent VP of Marketing, or 10,000 extremely satisfied customers that can't stop talking about your product and referring new customers?

 

    Now, every company will have a viral multiplier. That multiplier is a rate of the existing user base. Some companies will have a very low multiplier. Maybe each 50 existing customers will bring 1 new customer. Some companies will have a very high multipler, as in each customer will bring 6 new customers.

 

    Since we did a lot of work on the last 3 months at measuring, understanding and tweaking our viral rate, I could go on and on of how you do those things, but that is a very long blog post for now.

 

     My recommendation is to not trust a technical guy with tips on how to do marketing. Get a marketing guy (or gal).

 

    John Cook just published an updated version of the list of all Seattle Startups on the Web 2.0 space. I took the idea from Greg Linden and compiled the list of Seattle Startups sorted by their Alexa Ranking.

 

    Now I just need to update the Seattle Startups Blogs List and that might take a while (or not).

 

UPDATE 1: Josh Petersen from Robot Co-op wrote on the comments about their various domains. I felt I needed to add those to the list because the Robots have a lot of popular (and different) services.

 

1. Zillow (Rank: 1543)
2. 43 Things (Robot Co-op) (Rank: 1714)
3. Newsvine (Rank: 3782)
4. BuddyTV (Rank: 7201)
5. Wetpaint (Rank: 7329)
6. Jobster (Rank: 8548)
7. PayScale (Rank: 10932)
8. BlueDot (Rank: 11749)
9. ProgrammableWeb (Rank: 12980)
10. Judy's Book (Rank: 13322)
11. Mpire (Rank: 18707)
12. Farecast (Rank: 18825)
13. Trumba (Rank: 20333)
14. GarageBand.com (Rank: 21913)
15. Trailfire (Rank: 22278)
16. SnapVine (Rank: 24786)
17. ImageKind (Rank: 25126)
18. 43 Places (Robot Co-op) (Rank: 26011)
19. Twango (Rank: 27306)
20. Redfin (Rank: 31371)
21. Bag Borrow or Steal (Rank: 31396)
22. Findory (Rank: 37198)
23. Picnik (Rank: 41723)
24. Shelfari (Rank: 41738)
25. Menuism (Rank: 45270)
26. Pluggd (Rank: 46976)
27. Mixxer (Rank: 51367)
28. Sampa (Rank: 61553) - That's us!
29. HouseValues/Homepages (Rank: 78345)
30. ZooDango (Rank: 78359)
31. All Consuming (Robot Co-Op) (Rank: 79930)
32. Lists Of Bests (Robot Co-Op) (Rank: 82210)
33. NewsCloud (Rank: 92808)
34. XoomPad (Rank: 103139)
35. Broadband Sports (Rank: 110189)
36. JamGlue (Rank: 116337)
37. ShackPrices.com (Rank: 121617)
38. Zoji (Rank: 149453)
39. Jott Network (Rank: 154242)
40. TripHub (Rank: 157166)
41. Cozi (Rank: 158956)
42. PixPulse (Rank: 159722)
43. Melodeo (Rank: 161437)
44. PhoneSherpa (Rank: 174294)
45. Atomic Moguls (Rank: 178001)
46. PixPo (Rank: 183014)
47. BeRecruited (Rank: 191396)
48. Others Online (Rank: 194332)
49. Urban Spoon (Rank: 194425)
50. Biznik (Rank: 205264)
51. Robot Co-op (43 Things) (Rank: 207788)
52. Openomy (Rank: 220317)
53. HomeMovie (Rank: 221445)
54. EyeJot (Rank: 231859)
55. Healia (Rank: 236871)
56. SmartSheet (Rank: 238539)
57. Vizrea (Rank: 250626)
58. Etelos (Rank: 271743)
59. Treemo (Rank: 284245)
60. Musicmobs (Rank: 288563)
61. PrestoGifto (Rank: 305022)
62. Synapse (Rank: 306956)
63. Jookster (Rank: 366431)
64. ReelTime (Rank: 388404)
65. TrenchMice (Rank: 430617)
66. Curious Office (Rank: 432506)
67. Yodio (Rank: 446003)
68. MegaBuzz (Rank: 476037)
69. Weedshare (Rank: 477517)
70. Cdigix (Rank: 483147)
71. CampusChai (Rank: 513050)
72. Avvo (Rank: 573489)
73. HelpShare (Rank: 593584)
74. Jackson Fish Market (Rank: 601198)
75. SecondSpace (Rank: 659023)
76. GridNetworks (Rank: 720130)
77. Ontela (Rank: 722844)
78. Yapta (Rank: 723122)
79. SnapTune (Rank: 891187)
80. Inrix (Rank: 935992)
81. LiveMocha (Rank: 1030132)
82. Conenza (One Degree) (Rank: 1043121)
83. Peppers and Pollywogs (Rank: 1189714)
84. GoGoMo (Rank: 1276971)
85. GeoJoey (Rank: 1281542)
86. Pelago (Rank: 1316948)
87. Icebraker (Rank: 1794557)
88. Trendi (Rank: 1899945)
89. NimbleBee (Rank: 2061337)
90. Grads Wanted (Rank: 2695699)
91. Super Oyester (Rank: 3035485)
92. Ripl (Rank: 3110165)
93. Grouped.com (Rank: 3155234)
94. Bill Monk (Rank: 3815238)
95. ClayValet (Rank: 4554985)
96. goChongo (Rank: 5431162)
97. Beet Inc. (Rank: Unknown)
98. Pheromone Trail (Rank: Unknown)
99. GimmeNow (Rank: Unknown)
100. DigWorks (Rank: Unknown)
101. Positive Motion (Rank: Unknown)
102. Joingle (Rank: Unknown)
103. TextPayMe (Rank: Unknown)
104. SwitchGear (Rank: Unknown)
105. Human Proxy (Rank: Unknown)

 

    Do you add a period at the end of sentences?

    I have this debate with myself over and over again. I'm not talking the traditional text writing, but when you write a blog title, or a tooltip for a button, or bullet points on a powerpoint presentation.

    Paul Gross and had this discussion with regards to PowerPoint presentation. He strongly believes that you should *not* add periods (or semi-colon) at the end of bullet points in powerpoint. He calls it noise and a distraction. He won that argument.

    But what about buttons and input boxes tooltip. Most of the time those a very short phrases, like "Bold", or "Align left", so it is easy to say that you leave the period off. But what about when you have a long phrase, like "Click to increase the text editor area". That almost begs for a period

    We have postponed for too long to add a user's discussion forum to Sampa. We are looking for a great forum solution for us to use. Do you know any?
    Here is what I describe as the perfect solution:

• It must allow users to do all the basic tasks of forums;
• It must have an administration panel, that allows us to control posts, moderate, create/delete forums, etc.
  
• It must be secure and proven (not XSS vulnerabilities, spam prone, etc.)
• It must allow us to override the authentication system, this is, Sampa users already have their account with Sampa. I don't want them to have to create an account on the Forum.
• We must be able to "skin" it to fit the Sampa brand;
  
• It doesn't matter if it is hosted or server-install;
• It doesn't matter if it is Open Source or Proprietary;
• It doesn't matter if it is free, shareware or cost real dollars;
  

    Do you know any?

    If you've been reading about this, I'm not adding anything new. This is just my opinion on the lawsuit filled by Viacom against Google/YouTube for the videos that they are displaying without permission, like Comedy Central, MTV and Nickelodeon.

    "Viacom has no vision" == irrelevant point
    "Viacom is creating more viewers" == irrelevant point
   
    For me, there are only two points to this fight. First, Viacom owns the copyright and it can do whatever it wants to. Second, YouTube never took copyright ownership seriously enough and didn't put the tools and people in place to manage that.

    Who is the real loser? You! I mean, us, because I also watched a ton of Jon Stewart on YouTube. Every time I missed something that was hot, I would go search for it on YouTube. Will I ever go to ComedyCentral.com? Very unlikely.

    Brady just announced the date and rules for the next edition of Ignite Seattle. It will be on the Thursday, April 5th.

    Ignite is a really fun event. All the entrepreneurs and geeks making history in Seattle are present and you can always find some known faces from Microsoft, or from other Startups.

    If I'm not sick I'll be there*.


* I've been sick 4 or 5 times on the last 2 months. It might have something to do with my son just starting on day care.

    That is probably one of the most wise advices I ever received.

    They have a hard time seeing your vision, no matter how flushed out and clear it is. If they don't see screenshots, flash demo or a real prototype, you better have had a few successful Startups exits, otherwise... "no money for you!"

    Here is my own advice, which I just gave a friend that is thinking about leaving MSFT and starting his own company: Customers have no imagination.

    Maybe it is too generic, like the title of this post, but the reality is that if you explain customers your product, first, they are more likely to agree with you than not (so they don't look stupid? arrogant? negative?), second, most of the time customers don't what they want until they see it. Again: screenshots, flash demo or prototype.

 

    This is a bit of a shocking news to me. Or maybe not.

 

    Todd Bishop from the Seattle PI reports that Christopher Payne is leaving Microsoft.

 

     I worked very close to Chris in 2003 when I just become the Dev Manager of Search. Chris was just getting back to Microsoft after a few years at Amazon, and my manager, John Krass, reported to him.

 

    Chris was (is) an outstanding Vice President at Microsoft. He was super smart, engaging and business oriented. He was not "dev smart", but he was "business smart" and that is a big difference. Most of the VPs I've met at Microsoft were very good technically, but tremendously bad in business and leadership.

 

    Chris can make you believe in a vision without bullshitting you. When he talked at meetings and presentations people would listen. He was (is) very open to critic and feedback, which is a rare thing. Most execs and managers say they are, but they will get back at you if you say something that is not aligned with their beliefs.

 

    Why this is not a big surprise?

 

    When Chris came back to Microsoft he told me the reason was that Amazon was not exciting as the software business was and that he missed the rush of shipping software (not 'shipping' as in 'package shipping' ). 

 

    I guess that he just saw a window of opportunity with so much happening today. I'm sure he will be flooded with offers to join existing VC-funded startups, but he is unlikely to do that. The same way I was unlikely to join any company, for any offer once I decided to start Sampa.

 

    Good luck Chris.

 

 

 

    No, not the $355 MM, but the amazing sum of $21. And no, that is not all mine, I have to split with 29 friends. Yay!

 

    Today it was announced that Geni.com has raised $10 million on a valuation of $100 M. That is quite a handsome sum of money. According to TechCrunch they claim to have 100,000 registered users and 2 million [tree] nodes.

 

     First of all, 2 million tree nodes don't mean anything. 100,000 registered user is what matters, and according to Alexa quite a few of those registered users are non-Active and don't even visit the site. 

 

    Actually, on the next couple of weeks Sampa will surpass Geni in reach. Of course, this might change because of the TechCrunch readers going to Geni (a luxury that we don't have).

 

    It is funny to see companies that raise a large (sometimes huge) venture capital round and they are either flatline, or were just hype. Meanwhile, Sampa continues to grow at a steady and healthy rate.

 

    Live every ex-Microsoft, I became a huge critic of the company's product, business strategy and attitude in general. But I have to agree that Office 2007 is out of this world.

 

    I haven't played with Vista yet, and have no plans on doing so on the next year. But Office is a productivity suit, and if it could make me more efficient and faster at doing simple tasks it deserves my attention.

 

    Last week I installed Office 2007 and... wow! This is the real 'wow' campaign that Microsoft should be doing. Office 2007 gave me the same feeling when I ran Windows XP the first time. XP was a huge leap from Windows 98. Not only in reliability, but the whole user experience. Office 2007 gives the same impression from previous versions of Office (2003, XP, 2000, etc.).

 

    I don't think Microsoft innovated so much on the Office UI ever.

 

    Enough with the abstract, here is the concrete:

 

• The Ribbon is great. I'm still struggling to find where things are, but that is just a matter of getting used to it. The first thing that I noticed is that I get things done with less clicks.
• The entire experience is consistent.
• The UI look great. Just something about the soft-blue gradient colors and the orange highlights that work well togheter.
• I haven't tried the new PowerPoint yet, but heard nice things about the new presentations.
• Outlook works like before. That is pretty much my bar to install it. I like the ClearType. Like the "To-Do Bar".

 

     My only complaint so far is about Outlook. There are two features that I'm desperate to have:

 

• Ability to have two Exchange Mailboxes on the same profile. Ok, that is a very rare user scenario, but I have my professional and my personal Exchange servers. Now I have to keep closing Outlook and opening on a different profile all day long. Very annoying.
• Ability to configure the Reminder box "Snooze" options. It has too many options right now and I always need to scroll the listbox. First, the list box should be 10 items high, and have my own timespan. And just in case you are curious, this is what I want: 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 4 hour, 18 hour, 1 day, 4 days, 1 week, 2 weeks.

 

     On the neutral side, but it could be better:

 

• Outlook continues to hang and be slow from time to time. Some emails take a minute to appear (usually if they link to external images)
• HTML rendering of Outlook has changed. Some of Sampa's emails look like crap. I'll need to fix that.
• Nobody has Office 2007 yet. I just had to re-send a Word document because I mistakenly saved in 2007 format.

 

    I continue to believe that improvements to Outlook is the number one reason Microsoft can maintain its leadership in the office-productivity suit for a long time.

 

 

    At Sampa we have 4 different versions of the business plan, excluding all the variations on PowerPoint presentations. Why a company need 4 different business plans? That is easy to answer: Because each investor or investment forum have different requirements on length and content.

 

    That is close to absurd, but it is the reality.

 

    We just finished writing our canonical business plan. It has twelve pages, some charts, comprehensive information, yada-yada.

 

    Today is the last day to submit the business plan to the Early Stage Investment Forum (ESIF), which is an annual event by the Northwest Entrepreneur Network (NWEN).

 

    They have this 5-page crazy rule. Why is it crazy? Because from their site "submit...executive summary of the business plan... no longer than 5 pages".

 

    I don't know if you ever send an executive summary to an executive with 5 pages, but if you do that he (or she) will absolutely not read it, shred it and ask you to try again.

 

    In my book, an executive summary always has 1 (one) page only. In extreme cases it can be two pages. But that is it.

 

    Now, the ESIF email to participants asks for the following: "You have until March 6 to submit your final business plan" and "...your plan must be no more than 5 pages...". They remove the "executive summary" part, but the problem now is that a 5-page business plan is short, very short.

 

    If you think a business plan must describe the state of the market, the competition, the opportunity, the company, the product, the customer, the directions and goals, financials, team, marketing plan, and a few other elements, you can see how hard it is to fit everything into 5 pages.

 

    Anyway, I believe the ESIF is not asking for an executive summary, but for a short version of the business plan, which is fine. The problem with the shorter version is that you have to trim information that might be exactly what they were using as a key selection criteria. Of course, the obvious stuff will be there, but the devil is on the details.

 

    I've just got my spanking new copy of Office 2007 two days ago. I am thinking about installing it today.

 

    My biggest concerns revolve around Outlook 2007, more specifically, if it will work well with my Exchange 2003 server. I'm sure Microsoft consider this a key scenario and tested it, but you never know. So I went to the web to search for blogs, articles, forums, etc. talking about that case. I didn't find it much, on the specifics of running Outlook 2007 with Exchange 2003, but I found quite a few (angry) customers complaining at how slow Outlook 2007 is.

 

    It concerns me a lot.

 

    Outlook is probably the most used application on my machine. I depend so much on it that it would be sad if it didn't perform well. I certainly can disable indexing and the Business Contact Manager (which some people pointed as the two primary slow down reasons).

 

     The thing with searching for information of this kind on the web is that you find clusters of people that suffered the same problem. Sometimes hundreds or thousands of people. But are those 1% of the customer base or 0.001% of the customer base? It is hard to find people praising Office 2007 or Outlook 2007.

 

     Do you have any good/bad experience with Outlook 2007? Should I install it?

 

 

    Reading how the Wired reporter Annalee Newitz bought her way into Digg it has become very clear that Digg is done.

 

    My first Digg happened more than a year ago and it was amazing. The crowd was really in control and it was a fair and legit system: users vote for the articles they like the most, and the best bubbles to the top.

 

    Now, "diggers" have grouped into gangs, and "digg" or "bury" stories using obscure agendas, mostly because of monetary rewards.

 

    So, immediatelly I started thinking how can Digg be fixed...

 

    TechMeme uses a different method of defining what is popular and what is not: how many people have linked to that page recently. What if Digg would use a TechMeme-like technology just to validate the votes.

 

    I mean, when my story got "dugg", quite a few blogs linked to it because it was truly interesting (IMHO). If you see a Digg story with 100 votes, but no backlinks it sounds very suspicious.

 

    Another solution is to add a reverse weight to each Digg user based on the number of votes they have. If a user votes just 2 times a day, that is worth more than a user that votes on 20 stories a day. Or, is it? Hummm... Just thinking out loud now.

 

    I just read a post by Don Dodge on the Google Click Fraud data, where he quotes a Google report showing that less than 10% of all clicks are fraud and that less than 0.02% of the frauds get through to the advertiser.

 

    That sounds too good to be true. Let me give you some data to prove my point.

 

    We've been tracking ads-clicks on Sampa sites. Since Google Adsense doesn't report back to us which pages were the most effective, we created a solution that sounds very reasonable (lots of services do that).

 

     Here is the last 3 days of data that we collected:

 

• Feb/28: 60 clicks on Ads
• Feb/27: 45 clicks on Ads
• Feb/26: 42 clicks on Ads

 

    Now, this is what Google Adsense tells me:

 

• Feb/28: 29 clicks
• Feb/27: 28 clicks
• Feb/26: 28 clicks

 

     That is anywhere between 40-50% less than what we are measuring. So why is Google eliminating so many of those clicks from our account?

 

     There are some explanations from our side:

1. Our data is collected in UTC timezone and Google's data is on PST.
2. The script that we use to measure clicks might indicate a click on the "Ads by Google" or "Announce on this site".

 

     First of all, the timezone shift can't really be responsible for multiple days. If a click was counted today in our system, but yesterday on Google's system everything should even out at the end of the month (or pretty close to it).

 

     The possibility that users are clicking on "Ads by Google" or "Announce on this site" are pretty real, but it is unreasonable to think that 40% of our clicks are on those links.

 

     So, here is Google telling us that only 10% of clicks are fraud, and I'm seeing them removing more than 40% of clicks on our sites. Sounds like a pretty big disconnect to me.

 

    And, yes, there is the possibility that Sampa sites have a larger percentage of click fraud then other sites, but it is hard to see the motive since our users don't make money out of Adsense, and nobody associated with Sampa is allowed to click on any Adsense ad (we are that afraid of Google cutting us off)

 

     Just one final note (for the purists), we do remove multiple clicks from the same IP, because we assume that Google does the same, so the number of logged clicks on our side is much larger, but we do our own "fraud detection" and cut that down by about 50%.