BizThoughts

Just for yucks, I decided to create a new website. It's an idea I had years ago - The Mike Lee Project.

Back in 2005, a filmmaker named Grace Lee created an entertaining documentary called The Grace Lee Project. It chronicled all the Grace Lee's she knew, showing how utterly common her name is.

I too have a common name. Really. Back in college, I knew of at least 23 Mike & Michael Lee's. At a previous Big Five firm at which I worked, there were around 17. My last company had 5. We'd get each other's emails and packages all the time. I once received a lunch invite from a cute coworker. When I replied, "Sure!" she wrote back, "Oops, wrong Mike Lee. Sorry." Awww. *sniff*

So when I wrote to Grace about her project, she joked that I should do a Mike Lee Project too. Well, I'm no filmmaker. But as a web developer, I figured, why not put up a website? The Mike Lee Project is currently a wiki built off of free MediaWiki software. Any other Mike & Michael Lee can add themselves to the list.

In seeding the wiki with starter content, I found a heck of a lot of Mike & Michael Lee's. There's a Michael Lee who's been the drummer for Robert Plant & Jimmy Page, a Michael Lee character in the show The Wire (great show, BTW), and all sorts of politicians, journalists, actors, programmers, designers, and professors. They're white, black, Chinese, Korean, and who knows what else.

BTW, in case you're wondering why I didn't call it The Michael Lee Project, it's just because I've created a personal brand around "Mike Lee". And also because michaelleeproject.com is a bit longer to type. But in any case, I nabbed that domain name too. Heh.

P.S. I also just added a survey so other Mike & Michael Lee's can indicate whether they're Chinese, Korean, English, Irish, or something else. I don't expect a lot of responses, but hey, why not?

Naming a business can be as hard as naming a baby. Well, maybe not AS hard. But it's still pretty damn hard.

I've been reading Seth Godin's Small is the New Big and came across his collection of riffs on business naming. Fortunately, he blogged about these as well, from as far back as 2003. (Hey, did he just grab blog posts to make his book??)

Here's what Godin recommends:

1. A name that is too descriptive could be too limiting. The less it has to do with your industry, the better. International Postal Consultants is too limiting. Starbucks, Nike, & Apple are good.
2. Use real English words. Axelon & Altus are bad. Jet Blue, Ambient & Amazon are good.
3. Make sure it's easy to spell and pronounce. Prius is a bad name because it can be tricky for some people to spell and pronounce.
4. Don't obsess over getting a short name just so you can have a short domain name.
5. Add a descriptive tagline. Like "Lemonpie, the easy way to learn scuba".
6. A name should be unique enough to appear in a web search without a lot of competitors and flexible enough to gain a secondary meaning if you wish to expand your brand.
7. If you're creating a whole new product or service, give it a whole new name, not an incremental one. Sneakers is better than athletic shoe.
8. If you have lots of products and services, come up with a clear naming hierarchy, so customers can understand your offerings. Honda, Honda Civic, and Honda Accord are good. Apple, Apple iPod, and Apple Powerbook are bad, because the "i" prefix isn't consistent or defensible.
9. Names with generic words like Central, Land, or World are meaningless. They add no value and are difficult to defend.

Godin's blog posts:

• Naming a business - June 21, 2003
• The new rules of naming - October 16, 2005
• Being brave with names - June 1, 2006
• Sloppy naming - July 9, 2007
• A dumb branding strategy - March 27, 2008

This is an oldie but a goodie. SEO specialists know this already. You should too, if your internet business depends on traffic from Google at all.

Back in August 2006, AOL released the search records of 500k users collected over a three month period. The data was removed as quickly as it was published, due to privacy concerns. It is still available on various mirrors on the internet, however (nothing is ever completely erased from the internet).

Then Richard Hearne of Red Cardinal took the data and figured out the average click-through rate of each position on Google's search results page:

SEO specialists and internet marketers can then use this data, cross-reference it with the Google's Keyword Tool, and figure out potentially how much traffic they can receive per keyword if they're able to achieve a high search engine rank.

How reliable is this data? Pretty reliable, since the selection size is so large. There may be some bias (they were all AOL users), but I'm guessing it's fairly accurate. Ed Dale believes it's pretty spot on.

A couple of months later, several researchers from Cornell University did an eye-tracking analysis of Google's search results page. They came up with slightly higher click-through percentages, as Oleg Ishenko of SEO Researcher shows with the following heat map:

The Cornell study is less reliable, however. Their sample set was only 26 undergraduate students who performed 397 Google queries in a usability lab.

In either case, these results show a strong click-through rate for the first result (no duh). The rates taper down until the last result, which enjoys a slight uptick. It should also be noted that this data only shows rates for organic search results and not PPC/sponsored listings.

Cool stuff though. I love free data.

I'm sad. The makers of Scrabulous have decided to disable their game for all North American users. Sniff.

This is the result of a struggle with Hasbro (HAS) and a suit filed against the Brothers Agarwalla—Scrabulous' founders—for violating copyright law under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Facebook Scrabulous vs Hasbro Scrabble

Fans of Scrabulous are now in an uproar. Don Reisinger of Masable says this move makes Hasbro look stupid. The official SCRABBLE® Facebook app is littered with comments like, "Boo, hiss. Way to alienate your corporation!" and "I'm going to extend my boycott to all Hasbro toys, etc." And a campaign has been started on The Point, calling for Hasbro to work with Scrabulous instead of shutting it down (though there only 6 members as of this post).

This has led to a great deal of negative PR, especially in the blogosphere. At a quick glance, I see a "RIP Scrabulous", a "No, I Do Not Want to Play Scrabble", and a "F U, Hasbro. F U."

On the other side of the equation are people defending Hasbro's actions. Or at least raising the issue of copyright infringement as a business benefit: is it "worthwhile to go after pirates, thieves, and copyright-infringers, or… simply let them be and consider it free advertising", writes Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb.

And… I don't see that many other bloggers supporting Hasbro in my Technorati search. Oh well.

Let's Make a Deal

All of this drama makes you wonder why Hasbro didn't just offer to buy Scrabulous, right? Well, apparently they did. While Hasbro and Electronic Arts (ERTS) collaborated to build the new SCRABBLE® app, RealNetworks (RNWK)—another company given the rights to create online Hasbro games—has been working with Scrabulous to "bring the official Scrabble game to Facebook users", writes Heather Timmons of the NY Times. (Funny, I thought that's what Hasbro and EA just did.) Furthermore, according to Peter Kafka of Silicon Valley Insider, an offer has been put out to & rejected by the Scrabulific Duo:

The hold up? Money. A source familiar with the negotiations say Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla want too much.

What's the gap? The brothers say they're generating $25,000 a month, or $300,000 a year in revenue. A 10x-20x multiple on that would make Scrabulous worth $3-$6 million, but for argument's sake let's say they'll have a hockey stick growth curve, and that their game project could be worth more than $10 million.

Sound fair? Maybe. But our source says the brothers want a "multiple of several times that" $10 million, and the four corporations they're negotiating with think that's ridiculous.

If that's true, then that's perhaps a bit optimistically presumptuous of the Brothers Agarwalla. $10M is a tidy sum for what is technically a copyright infringement.

Feeding Your Scrabble-Lust

In the meantime, to satisfy your Scrabble fix, you'll need to add the new SCRABBLE® Facebook app (or the SCRABBLE beta Facebook app; I'm not quite sure which one is the official official one). Unfortunately—oops—the app isn't working. Instead, you're slapped with a big fat "We'll be back up shortly. We're working on some tech problems and Scrabble will be ready to play as soon as possible!" message. This isn't their fault though. Alex Pham of the Los Angeles Times reports that this is the result of a hacker attack. (Perhaps from some die-hard Scrabulous fans?)

A No-Win Scenario

All of this amounts to a major catch-22 for Hasbro. Fighting against Scrabulous means loads of negative PR and possible damage to their business. Aligning with Scrabulous means setting a potentially damaging precedent to their business. (Yossarian lives!)

The Discussion Boards of both SCRABBLE apps are full of rants and more rants. And just how many pro-Scrabulous Facebook groups are there? Over 500, with Save Scrabulous clocking in at over 47 thousand members so far (including me). Wow.

The Scrabble board game may have enjoyed a surge in popularity due to Scrabulous, though it's impossible to confirm this since Hasbro isn't releasing their sales figures. I wonder if those sales will drop with this negative fallout.

However, I totally understand Hasbro's actions against Scrabulous. If they supported Scrabulous, they may unleash a disastrous tidal wave. Say Hasbro purchased Scrabulous for $10M, this web business formula could have emerged:

1. Build an online version of a popular offline game
2. Gain spectacular popularity
3. ?
4. Sell out for millions
5. Profit

And if you didn't gain spectacular popularity, the offline game's parent company would probably just ignore you, like Hasbro has of dozens of Scrabble knock-offs already on the web. Lots of upside for very little downside! Dollars galore!

Either way, Hasbro is sure in a pickle. In that context, I can see why they'd opt to shut down Scrabulous. Months from now, as the public backlash dies down, Facebook users may begin adding the new SCRABBLE apps to quench their Scrabble thirst, and perhaps forget about this whole ordeal. It's possible. Take jetBlue, for example. Back in February 2007, a severe ice storm took down over a thousand of their flights, leading to a major PR black-eye. Since then, they've rebounded from that episode. And if that's not a great example, take Martha Stewart and the ImClone scandal in 2004. Despite being jailed, she's back and arguably as strong as ever.

Hasbro could have handled the situation a little smoother though. But I doubt they had a web-savvy/social-media-savvy team of PR specialists on board (and if they did, WTF?). I would have recommended that they reach out to the community in some way. Maybe to solicit suggestions, maybe to implore an understanding. Even if people argued against them, just having a genuine public voice can sometimes earn a lot of empathy. At the very least, it could have softened the blow. This could have also come from Electronic Arts and RealNetworks, the makers of the online SCRABBLE apps.

Personally, I'm bummed as hell that Scrabulous is gone. I had quite a few games going there. I wish a compromise could have been reached, though I wouldn't have the foggiest how that would have looked.

R.I.P., Scrabulous.

Will Google's Knol start taking over Google's search results? Who knols?

Ha! Sorry, I was dying to make that joke. Moving on now…

Just a week after it's launch, Google's Knol is beginning to stir up some controversy. First, Wil Reynolds of Seer Interactive noticed that a Knol article was already ranking high on Google for the search phrase "how to backpack". As of this post, the article is ranking #1 on Google. (Incidentally, the author, Ryan Moulton, is a Google employee.)

"Really?" exclaimed Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land. "I mean, how many links could this page have gotten already?" Then Aaron Wall of SEO Book tried a test: he created a Knol that replicated content he's published elsewhere—an article on SEO basics. Just compare the two (original and duplicate) and you'll see they're a word-for-word copy.

Say you tried to search for that exact article (using an exact sentence from it). What would you expect would happen? You'd probably get the original article—since it's older and thus more likely the original—and perhaps the Knol article somewhere below it if Google has started ranking its Knol articles, right? That's what Wall expected too. What happened instead was the Knol article ranked higher than the original. Of this, Wall says (emphasis his):

Some may call this the Query Deserves Freshness algorithm, but one might equally decide to call it the copyright work deserves to be stolen algorithm. Google knows the content is duplicate (as proven by the notification they put on their page), and yet they prefer to rank their own house content over the originally published source.

Whoa boy, time to copy some of my old content and slap it into Knol! But… aw rats, the "create a Knol" function seems to be down right now. Perhaps there are too many other people trying to do the same thing?

Quite a few others feel similarly to Wall. Dare Obasanjo of 25hoursaday.com also tried his own test similar to Sullivan's, and concluded that (emphasis his):

Google is clearly favoring Knol content over content from older, more highly linked sites on the Web. I won't bother with the question of whether Google is doing this on purpose or whether this is some innocent mistake. The important question is "What are they going to do about it now that we've found out?"

This observation kind of runs counter to what Google told Sullivan earlier:

Google assured me that the authority of Google's domain wouldn't give Knol any additional trust. Knol pages will be scored based on the links and PageRank pointing to individual pages.

Huh, really? Doesn't quite seem that way, does it?

Mahalo.com's Jason Calacanis isn't very happy either. He blasted Google in his latest email:

Now, Google says they will do no evil and since I've worked with their team across three companies I tend to believe them. However, with the launch of Google Knol I feel like they are not being totally up front with us–their partners. It feels like they've stabbed us in the back to be honest. I'm not the only one who feels this way–even if I'm the only one stupid enough to say it.

If Google is going to be in the content business and compete for the top ranking in the operating system they control why not be honest about it? Why not have David Eun say, "listen, we're experimenting with content and we want you to be involved in it. Put your content in Knol!"

Frankly, it's insulting to say you're not in the content business and then launch Knol and compete with content companies for their authors, users, and placement in the rankings that you control.

For the record, dishonesty falls under evil in my book.

Tell us how you really feel, Calacanis. Heh.

Business-wise, this is pretty smart. They're adding more instances where users could interact with their properties. More instances means more pageviews, more ad space to sell, and more control. And in their eyes, if Knol's content really is of higher quality than, say, Wikipedia's content, then it deserves to rank higher.

Also, just to compare—Yahoo's search engine already does this. A search for Dark Knight yields a search results module from Yahoo! Movies at the top, above the official movie site from Warner Bros. and IMDb. No one's cried foul on Yahoo for this.

But then again, Yahoo! Movies has editorial content from Yahoo, whereas Knol has user generated content (that is rated and possibly written collaboratively). Plus—to Calacanis' point—Yahoo makes no mistake that it's a media company, whereas Google has always stated that it's not

Controversy indeed. I wonder what's going to come of all this. Whatever it'll be, I agree with Internet Entrepreneur Joe Duck: "I expect knol to be a huge topic at the upcoming search conference - SES San Jose." It sure will be.

I'm going to try an experiment. Google launched a new service called knol this past Wednesday. It's been billed as the Wikipedia/Squidoo/HubPages alternative, though perhaps more akin to the latter two because of it's monetization offerings to entry authors, via a Google AdSense revenue-sharing model.

Seeing this made me wonder: could knol be used for search engine optimization purposes?

I know, I know. It's not the most altruistic thought. But I'll bet others are thinking the same thing too. So with that in mind, I whipped up an entry on "Michael Lee". To be fair and still offer hopefully useful community content (though, erm, I guess that's debatable), I linked to a bunch of other Michael/Mike Lee's as well.

That's not too smart, SEO-wise, since I just gave link love to my "competitors" (and by competitors, I mean others who rank high for the name Mike Lee on a search engine). But then I also filled out my knol profile, which seemed to create another entry for "Mike Lee". Both entries seem to have equal weight in a knol search, even though I thought one was just a profile page. Hmmm.

So will this give me any link love?

My guess is: probably not. I really doubt anyone's going to be searching knol for the name "Mike Lee". And since Google isn't surfacing any of this content onto their search results (yet), I doubt many people are going to see it.

But will it help my search engine ranking to have a link from the google.com domain? Perhaps? I'm not sure. I'll revisit this little experiment to see if it's had any impact in a week or so. Stay tuned!

Who doesn't love free stuff? I sure do. And when they can be used to make your business offerings even better, I call that Awesome with a capital A.

I was just reading Dharmesh Shah's Embarassingly Gushing Praise for TechCrunch And The New CrunchBase API on OnStartups.com and it got me thinking.

What Shah is so excited about is CrunchBase's new & free API. CrunchBase is a "free directory of technology companies, people, and investors that anyone can edit", much like a wiki. It's not technically a wiki yet (I believe that's in the plans though), but pulls in a ton of data (from sources like LinkedIn and Google Maps) in addition to offering manual input from editors and the community. In short, it's a fairly robust database of business information for the high-tech & internet industries.

To put it another way, it's a valuable resource for competitive intelligence. Which means if one of these online competitive analysis services were to jump on the API and start including this data, they'd have quite an attractive offering. Or aat the very least, they'll make things easier for business researchers.

Plus, CrunchBase's API is free. So why the hell not?

Happy happy, joy joy! Google has updated their Keyword Tool. You can now get the exact number of searches on particular keywords.

That may sound pretty benign to you, unless you're an internet marketer of some sort. In which case, it's HUGE news. Enormous. In the past, you had to guesstimate the amount of traffic you could receive from each keyword. But without exact numbers, all you'd have were relative measures of effectiveness.

So why is knowing the number of searches on a keyword important?

You'll know which keywords are important to your customers

Say you sell portable GPS units. If you use Google's Keyword Tool, you'll find that the phrases "navigation system" and "portable navigation" are typed into Google much more often than "portable GPS unit". With this information, you can write product descriptions with those keyword phrases and bring in more traffic to your site.

You'll be able to estimate customer demand

If you are thinking about a new section to your site, the number of keyword searches can give you an idea of customer demand. This can even apply to non-web businesses. In John Battelle's book The Search, he calls search engines a "database of our intentions." Want to find out if there's existing customer demand for a new product line or service offering? Google's Keyword Tool can give you an answer to that.

You'll be able to estimate potential revenue for a new web niche

Affiliate marketers are always on the look out for new and untapped web niches. However, not all niches are created equal. Some generate more traffic than others. With Google's updated Keyword Tool, exact searches can be determined. This can be plugged into a financial model used to estimate monthly revenue per keyword. With this data, you can know accurately which new niches to tap into.

Up till now, internet marketers have been using the handy keyword service Wordtracker. One of it's more useful features was offering an estimated number of searches on particular keywords. Google's update now trumps that, since Google is able to provide the exact number of searches.

This doesn't mean Wordtracker is out of the game, however. They still offer other useful features, such as estimating the level of competition per keyword and a Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI), which helps find untapped keyword niches within a general topic.

The internet marketing world is buzzing with this news right now. Ed Dale, internet entrepreneur and marketer extraordinaire, even provides some information on how to determine the exact number of searches from Google's Keyword Tool.

And as Dale says, this is enormous! ENORMOUS!