Hi everybody. Quick update:

SneakyFeelings.com is growing nicely. I had to fix a bug in the location search thing a little while back. (thanks to Lrobby99 for pointing that out!) It was returning people from all over the country no matter where you searched from. Oops. :) All better now.

I've recently been talking to a friend of mine about going into a partnership on SneakyFeelings. He has an background in marketing and event promotion (he used to run a nightclub in New York City), and will no doubt help tremendously in raising our profile as we take our advertising offline and into the real world. More on this as new developments arise.

Work is progressing on my next venture, a social/business networking site that I'm putting together with two partners. While I can't elaborate in too much detail yet, I have great hopes for this project; the guys I'm working with are top-notch and we've already made several important connections that will make the roll-out go smoothly. I'll link to it from here when it goes online.

In other news:

Funny article on Slashdot the other day about "splogs;" apparently lots of folks agree that it is one of the biggest threats to the internet. One poster even went so far as to call Google "useless." What to do about it is less clear. I have great respect for those guys in Mountain View, but the fact of the matter is that there are lots more people who try to get rich gaming their system than there are people who can police it.

According to some reports I've read, Google makes user satisfaction their number one goal. They would even go so far as to give up revenue if they perceive it as potentially hurting searchers. We may be reaching the point that having the biggest index in the world shouldn't be the number one priority. AltaVista, for instance, didn't die because their index wasn't big enough, but because they didn't return useful results to searchers, at least relative to Google.

What it comes down to is this: computer programs (like Google) take in input and try to produce useful output based on this. For a search engine the inputs consist of search terms entered by the users, an index of pages that they have spidered from the web, the links from those pages to other pages, and perhaps a history of what users searching for similar terms have clicked on in the past. There may be some more, but not a whole lot more; the web is a pretty basic device. While it isn't all that difficult for a service like Google to gather data, it is challenging to use the limited inputs at their disposal to turn this data into information. It becomes much harder when you have an active community of people trying to take advantage of the limited inputs to profit. This wasn't a problem when Google was first created, but it has become that way now. I'd like to see what their next move is.

In my quest to find new places to advertise SneakyFeelings, I've started to notice some trends on the internet that never really caught my eye before, and they are pretty troubling.

Quick rewind: Earlier this year I was shopping for a color laser printer to do the literature for my company, 18th Street Software. A particular model (the Samsung CLP-550) seemed to be everything I wanted, but when I tried to google it to do some research I was disappointed to find that there were next to no original reviews to be found. Those that were there were way down in the results. Almost every site used Amazon's web services (or a similar mechanism from another content creator) to pull down their reviews and then offered a "comparison shopping" engine to let the visitor chose a place to buy the printer from. These listings were also generated by web services most likely. So, basically, there were hundred of sites that contributed nothing to the world but more static.

Recently I found the culprit: affiliates.

Basically, many websites (including most online stores) use affiliates to try to drive traffic to their sites. They reward their affiliates with some sort of commission either for the traffic itself or for the purchase of any goods or services on the site.

I think this is pretty dangerous. It's gotten to the point where you can generate a website (or more easily still, a blog) with a few clicks of the mouse. Much like spam, there is virtually no cost to do this. Then you just need to sign up for affiliate accounts and go wild putting links on the site. If you are feeling particularly plucky, you can create several of these sites and link them to one another to help search engine placement, or join a reciprocal link network to trade traffic with similar sites. There are even people selling books to tell you exactly how to become a "rich jerk" doing this.

More close to home for me, I've recently come across a dating site network that functions in just the same way. You run a script to create your dating site, and it links right in to a ready-made database of "singles." After that you just need to convince people to join and get your commission. Crazy.

While there is no point in trying to stem this tide (too many people make cash too easily) I'd really like to see a second internet evolve which is immune to this sort of exploitation. Maybe a second Google will pop up one day that doesn't let so much junk through. I wonder who could do that? ;)

Well, we're a little more than a week into the SneakyFeelings.com experiment, and things are going nicely so far.

After running the first ads on DCist and Wizbang, we expanded to a few more within the blogads.com network. While the sample size isn't yet large enough to draw statistically meaningful conclusions, I've noticed that the location of the spots in the blogs seems to be one of the primary factors in their success. Appearing on the top right or top left of the front page seems to be worth more than a couple thousand page views. Our ads are consistantly getting a click through of between .25 and .5%, and we've been good at shifting resources to the better-performing blogs.

One surprise: in trying to reach out to female users, I purchased ads in two pop-culture related blogs. They receive an obscene number of page views, but the click-through has only been about a tenth of our average. I'm going to tweak the ads until we can get them more in line, but I get the feeling that not all page views are created equal. We will see. In brighter news, we also have another ad that is getting a 1-2% click through rate. With numbers like that (over a small sample size, granted) I can see how the early dot-commers got drunk on extrapolations. :)
If any of my faithful reader(s) out there know of some good places to find potential female online daters, please let me know!

Finally, we've taken on a mascot: that loveable toy donkey you have seen in the ads. We're still trying to name her; so far my favorite name is Dagny Lipsdonkey. We are taking nominations, though. Originally, the donkey was created for one of our "progressive dates" spots but it was so cute that she started popping up elsewhere too. She may make an appearance on the main site someday as well. I wonder if the pets.com sock puppet needs a home... :)