ggrot

It's certainly more creating than adding a link to your commission junction page. It'll probably get more visibility too.

Just guessing, but it's probably because most browsers heavily cache the favicon image.

I'd be very interested in knowing what your site was. My email can be retrieved via my profile/blog. Maybe my similar experience can help you.

In a previous life, I ran tag-board.com, which placed a little javascript widget on your website that let your users interact with each other much like an irc channel. This was before ajax was even coined a term. The site still exists, but it's run down and I don't have anything to do with it anymore.

When I first started it, I never thought more than 100 people would ever use it. At it's peak, there were 600k accounts and tons of traffic that went along with that. At first I didn't care to make money, I was just happy that people used something I created, but when I realized I would need more than a $5/month hosting account, I started looking into options.

The first plan was actually a premium model - hack up a bunch of new features that would only be available to paying users and sell accounts for $20/year. It worked, and might for you as well. At some point, I had over 1,000 paying users.

After awhile, the problem was that hosting costs of the free accounts were eating a good part of the profits on the paid accounts AND I was spending a ton of time on maintainance. I felt responsible for pretty decent uptime/performance/bug-freeness since I had people paying money. A friend of mine pointed out that the amount of time/stress I was putting into this wasn't worth the money. This made a ton of sense to me. At that point, I strongly considered just keeping paying users alive until their year ran out, and then axing the whole thing. I then realized that if I was willing to get rid of all my free users anyway, I might as well try something aggressive - I found an ad network and ran popups on the non-premium accounts. This was ~2002. To my surprise, I got fairly minimal grief, more premium signups, no noticeable drop in usage, and enough income to make it worth my while to keep going. This lasted awhile, but popup revenue slowly dried up - firefox and other browsers started killing the popups. I had handed the whole thing off to someone else well before that happened though.

If I were to do it again, I think I'd do the obvious thing that nobody recommended and just charge everyone for the service, although a much smaller fee (maybe $5/yr). I'd let people sign up for free, use the account for a month, and then switch it over to showing an "ad" of sorts on the owner's website where the widget otherwise would be. Clicking through would let the user interact with the widget, but on the "ad" would also be an option for a user of the website to buy the site owner a subscription to this widget. This would dramatically increase the number of potential customers and would essentially be like a tip jar for the website owner. Users could buy the widget as a gift for a website they like to use. At the same time, I wouldn't try to stop people from just creating a new account and getting another month of free usage, but I'd annoy them forcing them to do this every month.

I don't actually know if this would work, but I think it would. I suspect there would be fewer users. However, as a side benefit, you would know what this is worth to those users, which is a nice feeling. The negative here that scares many people from going this route is that if you suddenly start charging, you really do have to provide a service. You can't go down for 2 weeks. And you have to do a little bit of customer service (emails, refunds, fix bugs) or find someone to do it for you.

The link would be there regardless of whether or not you (as an advertiser) ran an affiliate program.

Agreed, don't go the SEO route - it's not a long-term play.

One kind of ad you could run that wouldn't have trouble with cramming into a widget is popups.

Don't downvote me because you hate popups, so do I. It's a legitimate possibility that you might consider looking into. If it's a question of shutting down the service because of bleeding costs or running popups on 5% of pageviews, its an interesting question.

I've long wondered if this kind of approach is actually something that affiliate programs would allow if you got big. You are not promoting their wares, you are simply profiting off of organic promotion that would have occurred anyway. I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon or whomever decided to close your account if you started making significant amounts of money.

Maybe a minor quibble, but isn't DDG powered by Yahoo BOSS with features added on top? Yet, Rob then goes on to say "Yahoo can't be taken seriously" and points out queries where Yahoo does a poor job of handing synonyms - DDG has the same problem for the exact same query if you try it. Furthermore, the other queries which he suggests give irrelevant results on Google seem to give me irrelevant results on DDG.

That is alot of speculation for something that the article says is "rejected by the scientific community at large" and "yet to be verified".

http://google.com/search?q=sunset+in+paris - this will even tell you when the sun isn't going to set or rise in extreme latitudes.

If you like Buddhabrot, a friend of mine used MapReduce to create a high-res image of Buddhabrot's cousin: Nebulabrot. Kinda fun.

How it was done: http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2008/01/databases_are_hamme...

Images: http://www.danvk.org/wp/2007-04-06/nebulabrot/

In a sense, Google already has something like this, the Custom Search Engine: http://www.google.com/cse/ - the interface is a little different though, you create a "search engine" which has something like the slashtags built in, rather than specifying a slashtag as part of the query. Has it's pros and cons.

I'd prefer to see these where each step in the algorithm was a fixed width that is the same across all of the images. As-is the step width is dependent on the number of steps. This fails to show the speed of convergence.

But watts/dollar is quickly decreasing. I wonder if performance per dollar spent on energy is increasing or decreasing. I wouldn't be surprised if it's decreasing.

Business Opportunity. Selecting for guppies with specific people's names in their spots.

On ubuntu this is getting really much easier than it used to.

I think they are trying to point out the options - MS office vs. Open Office. People visually scan lists like these and ignore the rows where the both products are identical. If they checked that MS supported open office, the natural way to read this list is that Ubuntu doesn't support office of any kind, which isn't the point they are trying to make.

But I don't see them calling that out very well.

Not likely since the j/s is hard-coded into website templates. Even if they did change the domain, very few websites would have the new domain for awhile.

Not exactly correct. If the URL you click on is HTTPS, then the referrer is sent. HTTPS->HTTP no referrer. HTTPS->HTTPS referrer (even if the domain changes). The encryption is preventing the network from seeing the data, not the remote hosts. If the browser sends the referrer encrypted, even to a different remote host, the network still can't see it.

I guess either you announce it after everyone's already seen it anyway or you announce it before it's released everywhere.

Seems reasonable. It protects users too because they can't track the cookies across these domains even if they wanted to.

Another fun approach would be using google code search which allows for regexp searching. Looking for stuff of similar format to {D1531,1000,1501|}, I find these two results. The results indicate that this might be related to printers.

http://www.google.com/codesearch?q=\{D[0-9]{4},[0-9]{4},[0-9...

What you did was a more than a PR stunt. The "betting the company" line is just dramatic hyperbole. I consider "betting the company" to be saying - OK, if X happens I'll shut down the company, if !X happens you'll buy my company for 100M dollars.

In reality what you are saying is that if X happens, you waste alot of time, if !X happens then there is still no guaranteed outcome.

At least in the US, Law is really defined by court precedents, not by some stupid wording.

This is a good thing. Imagine a "Don't murder anyone" law. Without a court to decide what that actually means, I could argue that if I put a timer on a bomb, I didn't murder anyone - the bomb did the killing, and I didn't even trigger it directly. How is a bullet any different except that the delay is shorter? Dumbass didn't get out of the way, I say. No different than someone standing in the middle of a highway. The english language isn't like a programming language - its remarkably open to interpretation as to meaning, hence the need for courts to define what the law means through actual examples.

IANAL

Yes, such as experts-exchange.com

The argument here is that even if the user never would have responded to any of the ads anyway, the website loses money when users don't view the ads. I call bullshit.

An advertiser is going to pay as much for ads as they can profit from them. At the end of the day, the advertiser wants to spend less on ads than they make in profit from running those ads - they don't care about # impressions, # clicks, or whatever. If an advertiser can make $1.01 profit for every 1,000 random ad impressions, they'll pay $1 or less for those 1,000 impressions. If I can identify half my audience that will never respond to the ad, I'm essentially making $1 for 500 impressions instead of 1,000. I'll happily pay $2 for 1,000 of those more effective impressions.

I don't care if you get paid CPM, CPC, or CPA. You aren't making money of the users who don't respond to the ads.

You and I don't disagree in the least. I never claimed as a publisher that I didn't want to write to a specific audience, just that I didn't want to write to a specific platform. The audience I want to reach doesn't hang out on just one reading platform unfortunately.

You use one single web browser when you use twitter, facebook, blogging, email, buzz, and HN, don't you? You are standardizing on HTTP and HTML, but you already knew that.

I am certainly not suggesting only ever using one platform to publish. In fact I specifically mentioned 3 as a strawman that I might use (flickr+twitter+blogger). They serve different writing styles, but are not necessarily different audiences. My wife might be interested in following all 3, you might only be interested in my blog. That makes sense.

In the analogy to the internet, there are a million ways to run a website: apache, frontpage, nginx, blogger, geocities, angelfire. Yet, these websites all work in the same way at some level. I can read them all in one browser (*mostly), I can link between them, I can crawl and index them, and they all participate in the same DNS system making it easy to find them.

PS: The need to choose a title for a blog post isn't really relevant - there is nothing about blogging that requires content to have specific titles. Some specific blogging packages do of course.

Imagine that to read my blog, you had to first sign into your blogger account. And that to read a wikipedia article, you first had to sign into your wikipedia account. And, when you want to read your email from your AOL friends, you have to first sign into your AOL account, but to read your email from GMail friends required first signing into your GMail account. And imagine this was the case everywhere. You could even take this further and imagine that to read techcrunch, you first had to load the techcrunch browser.

To various degrees this is the current state of microblogging services (or whatever you call them). I can't read my friend's facebook updates in google reader. I can't read the boston big picture in twitter. Even if my friends wire up their accounts so that their tweets end up in facebook, my facebook replies don't appear in their twitter stream. It's a big bucket of suckage.

As a user, I don't care about how the electricity gets to my house, but I really really care that all my appliances can use that electricity, not just the ones that PG&E made. So I care that someone else cares about the how and standardizes this. As a publisher, I want to be able to pick my publishing platforms - maybe more than just one (flickr+twitter+blogger) - based on how well their features meet my style. I don't want to have to choose my platform based on where my readers might be. As a reader, I want to pick my reader application(s), like Google Reader, Bloglines, or Facebook, but only have to pick one or two and to pick them based on features and usefulness to me, not based on where the people I'm interested in reading publish their content.

Is ostatus important to this? Maybe not. Are open communication standards important? You betcha.

Please make it stop.