jaybol

I love the product and mission. I'd be happy to volunteer some time to help with the messaging and content. Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn or X. - Jason Lankow

Segment.io and Zapier have been making our lives easier on this front.

can you explain this title for me?

It isn't contradictory to congratulate someone and state honestly that he is confused about how the app is meant to be used, and therefore won't likely try it again. For example, I admire what Zynga has accomplished but won't ever play one of their games myself.

bar spending? $50/weekend * 52 weeks in a year = $2600/year. I did much worse than that I have to admit. And don't start with 'most college students are under 21' because most people I knew were resourceful when it came to age modification, not to mention our proximity to Mexico :)

I've been really happy with Chrome after using Firefox for a long time. I couldn't bear one more Adobe Flash Plugin crash. Has any Chrome user here switched over to Firefox 4 and been pleased with it?

It's a chopper baby

Hi Brian, I met you when you stayed with my cousin Caitlin (using your own service!) in Denver back during the Democratic National Convention in 2008. It is really cool to see how much your company has grown since that time. Congrats! - Jason

For many t-shirt brands, typical cost to produce is $3-5 or so, with wholesale to stores at $9-12, retail at $18-24

In other news, a lot of people are using Google to search the Internet.

Thanks for sharing this...my wife has a Droid X and our eight month old daughter is named Lucy :)

Wow very nice work!

Blame it on the a a a a a alcohol

A conveyor belt will deliver him filet mignon at a rate of one per minute

There is something in the ventilation system on University Ave that breeds success. Congrats to Milo!

People have really short memories for the most part...most PR disasters blow over in a week or less, really big ones maybe take months

I also think that there are similarities here to the 'sister' Reddit community/mentality (especially r/programming which is cross-posted back and forth regularly), in that people are willing to support people that they personally identify with or like. I don't see that as detrimental to a community, but rather as a key element in fostering community (unless it gets too insular and discriminating in who is able to get that treatment). Any news about a Ycomb grad will rise to the top because of the tight-knit culture and identifying with each other from the early stages of their respective companies, so I don't see any issue with someone posting to the community with a transparent "this is my post" statement by someone from outside the group of grads.

Regardless of previous success, I think we can appreciate someone who is still excited by a new opportunity and sharing his content for anyone who might find value and/or support his quality content. Many financial fundamentals have been taught before, but can be repackaged and interesting and valuable to readers, especially those who haven't read his book (which I haven't). Like Mike says here, some overly promotional agendas get drowned out, but there is also a certain amount of community appreciation for people who just come out and say "this is something I made, what do you think?" Of course, in a social voting system, if people think "wow that sucks" then they downvote the content and leave a "that sucks" comment.

I think that you will have the willpower to finish all four :)

I took a screenshot of contract guy!

I'm pretty happy with getting Crystal-Lighted http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeMJOPlK-0E&feature=playe...

Nice find, thanks for the link!

Definitely worth the $1/month and happy to support such a great product

More on that magic 165 University address http://milo.com/blog/lucky-165-university-ave/

I honestly believe you and you are right

who doesn't want to be like ee cummings

This is really cool, I dropped 66 images in there and it went very quickly...I'm always jealous of the Weekend project that some people pull off. Nicely done.

Good point that the users are the product...and no one would assume that you could keep customers happy without paying attention to your product, although I must say that Digg is doing a pretty decent job of responding to user concerns and clearly communicating the order that they will be implementing changes. I have noticed far fewer 'broken axles' and now everyone will be watching to see how quickly they implement features from v3 that everyone is clamoring for.

I think you have touched on something here. As you mentioned as well, what ultimately frustrated the individual who posted IAMA, is not that the content was hastily put together or is even inaccurate, in fact it was very carefully crafted with the intention of being interesting. As such, infographics have become a viable medium that people like and share, and the sum of the message/information is easily shareable on blogs (which is why most on the web are long and skinny)...most people wouldn't grab an entire article to repost on their tumblr or whatever, but a whole graphic looks cool on their site. Like you mentioned, this is the simple formula, but in itself isn't malicious anymore than realizing that people like big photos and funny videos and link to controversial/inciteful headlines.

That said, these campaigns have been tremendously successful even using completely irrelevant topics to gain links back to sites for very important keywords, and the content is not showing them to be an authority in their niche, be it financial or insurance or travel or gambling...they have shown that they can attract attention very well, that they are VERY good at SEO, and that they can (some of the time at least) design decent looking content.

I do agree with the individual answering the IAMA that it is an example of the internet being broken, and I found myself wondering if/hoping that somehow Matt Cutts would have a dream that would allow him to teach the Google bots to crawl a .png file to determine if the content in the graphic was relevant to the term in the links (or hello, at least the freaking title?). I am a co-founder of a company that creates infographics along with written content as part of an overall social media strategy and we spend a great deal of time finding the balance for each client between content that has mass appeal and content that relates to their core customer base/readership. You have to bring in new people somehow, but as many people have learned, irrelevant content doesn't convert, which is why so many people either craft content with no intention of converting and simply say 'social media traffic doesn't convert' or rank sites to sell them to someone who knows how to monetize them down the road (assuming these SEO rankings hold up).

Finally though - if it builds a site's reputation for being a relevant resource for interesting and useful content that does do the job of educating, it is ok if it looks pretty and does it with chart junk no matter how many purists out there say they would rather just pop open the .csv

You might also like dailyburn.com - you can pick a challenge and see how other people are moving along to the same goal

I think you are absolutely right...it will be extremely tough to gain instant traction without a previous network. However, as fast as the tech world moves, I think taking a bit of an old world approach can really pay off. Take a step back and think about forging real friendships and loyalties, and letting it happen slowly. You can build a lot of social capital by just doing favors for other people...but obviously try not to be Don Vito Corleone "Some day, and that day may never come, I will call upon you to do a service for me, and you won't refuse"

So, I want to encourage you to start building that network now that will become your 'previous exposure or network' by fostering genuine relationships with people you want to meet and even your current competition.