lawrence

Self employment in Mexico City is a bit different than the startups you find in San Francisco.

No, it's not a bit different. It's completely different. It's another universe.

The vast majority of self employment in DF is a fruit stand or selling cigarettes at traffic lights (not that there's anything wrong with that).

I spent some time with an Italian entrepreneur a few weeks ago and he told me "we have three VCs in our country. and two are out of money."

The Sobering Reality of Entrepreneurship in the US is that we have it better than everybody else in the world, and even more so if you are an entrepreneur in SF, NY, Boston, Austin, etc.

I enjoyed his "curious choice" description of Apple choosing to go with default wallpaper that looks like a series of deep scratches on the screen. Glad I wasn't the only one who gasped "crap, it's scratched!" when I booted it up.

This is incorrect. AdSense was 31% of their revenues in Q409. They did more than $2B in AdSense revenue in Q4 alone:

http://investor.google.com/releases/2009Q4_google_earnings.h...

Awesome linkbait / PR execution by these guys. This has mainstream media potential - it's easy to imagine a hysterical CNN headline.

I hope they have a plan for how to put all this great buzz and inbound links to work on a real business.

I find Alexa stats sad. Om could add the Alexa toolbar today and rocket up that chart.

While I think the author was a bit heavy handed in his reaction (why not ask for better privacy tools or checkin a little more selectively?), the privacy + location services conversation is a pretty interesting one.

Understanding this sort of backlash is probably a pretty big deal to folks trying to build location into their applications.

Google and Yahoo have tons of reviews as well.

Yeah, this list was more about pure play review sites. Obviously Amazon pretty much invented the space.

The space is really cool. It's right next to San Francisco's best scifi bookstore (Borderlands), and in the heart of some of the world's best taquerias and dive bars.

That's a great story. Here is an interesting macro data point that might help to explain why we are seeing growth from a number of How To video sites:

http://google.com/trends?q=how+to

While I agree with SEOBook that Demand Media and their ilk are the story of the year in large scale content production and optimization, I disagree that this necessarily ushers in a new generation of low quality content in the SERPS.

Long tail search results have always been about "good enough" content as opposed to superior content. Why? Because there isn't enough volume to support superior content production at the tail.

As a searcher, I don't care if I'm looking at good enough search results / content from a niche player, or from a big company like Demand Media.

And if Demand has found an efficient way to own a big chunk of the previously fragmented long tail of search, hurray for them.

You could almost make the case that one company with economies of scale is MORE likely to be able to afford to produce quality content for low volume queries than the thousands of displaced niche publishers.

I didn't see much whining in here.

Aaron is pointing out that there might be big changes coming to far and away the biggest source of referral traffic on the web.

I probably don't have to spell this out for you, but it's a big deal if Google shifts focus from driving traffic to other sites, to driving traffic to its own sites.

This is the best argument for considering venture capital that I've read in a while, and it barely mentions venture capital.

Exactly. This problem is why the friending / follower / newsfeed format has won. Everyone's accountable for curating their own feed. Want to expand the universe? Allow friend of friend, or friend of friend of friend views.

To me, this is the killer paragraph:

"Reese is a tall Texan who serves as Demand’s chief innovation officer and who created the idea-spawning algorithm that lies at the heart of Demand’s process. To determine what articles to assign, his formula analyzes three chunks of information. First, to find out what terms users are searching for, it parses bulk data purchased from search engines, ISPs, and Internet marketing firms (as well as Demand’s own traffic logs). Then the algorithm crunches keyword rates to calculate how much advertisers will pay to appear on pages that include those terms. (A portion of Demand’s revenue comes from Google, which allows businesses to bid on phrases that they would like to advertise against.) Third, the formula checks to see how many Web pages already include those terms. It doesn’t make sense to commission an article that will be buried on the fifth page of Google results. Finally, the algorithm, like a drunken prophet, starts spitting out phrase after phrase: “butterfly cake,” “shin splints,” “Harley-Davidson belt buckles.”

Eh, you have a big stage. You are difficult to ignore. Seems a bit heavy handed to try and put these guys out of business, but I don't care enough about the issue to make a stand for pay per pitch guys (who I choose not to pay).

Rock on.

I always get a little nervous when third parties, whether it be the government or folks like Jason Calacanis, try and tell companies how they should price their products.

I don't want anyone telling me how to price my company's products.

Pay per pitch is sleazy. But it's not illegal.

(not talking about the deceptive pay per pitch, that's a different story)

Here's a few more vague and Hallmark-esque tips: 1) just be yourself; 2) don't do drugs; 3) it's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice.

Not to get too snarky, but I was hoping for a little more given the headline.

Agreed. Ripped off implies something unfair or sneaky. There's nothing to prevent content producers from moving down the sales funnel.

The coupons / deals for mayors offer a more practical reason to use Foursquare. Judging from Foursquare's funding announcement, more resources will be given to that aspect now.

As an entrepreneur, I see this aspect as very Tom Sawyeresque - I love the idea of getting third parties to pay your users to use your service.

Wow, that's way harsh. This wasn't a he said / she said piece of gossip. This was a feature that they saw on Facebook.com, that they reported. They are a tech news site and all.

Lighten up.

A fake user review on the Internet? Say it ain't so. Surprised this made the WSJ.

Agree with Micah. It's great that you are thinking business model already, but I don't think you can indiscriminately charge everyone, especially the folks that will create the community / value that will bring the advertisers. I paid to download the app, and then I paid to add my content to the mix. For what?

You might want to consider making the app free for most users, but you have to pay to drop a link.

50M visitors and 800K posts per day are massive numbers. If those numbers are true, this post is way, way off base.

Or as others have told us, when are you going to accept postcards and faxes as well? And what about phone calls - voice to text?

Search is a very crowded space. And someone should ask Sequoia what would prevent Google from doing this?

I don't think this is a defensible model. I think I'm going to pass.

the "netscape.com's Jason Calacanis" was kind of a giveaway.

Better for us entrepreneurs that they are suing the Twitter user as opposed to Twitter itself.

I prefer to follow the founders, not the corporate accounts.

Thanks for the heads up. For a long time, this blog ranked on the first page of Google in Saudi Arabia for the keyword "sexy." Lots of useless traffic.