On the 'contextual' Adsense ads the CTR just over 1.34% up from 1.32% last month! (total number of ads shown / total clicks on ads). An other way to look at this is during Oct. 3.92% of the pages my domains served generated CPC revenue. Not bad at all considering the sites are on autopilot.

It's disappointing to see the organic search traffic fall off a cliff as that's WhyPark's value add. One month doesn't make a trend and this is still far far better than my Sedo parked domains that only recieve type-in traffic.

The good news from a privacy perspective is that no cookies were dropped during the ad click-through and the items initially purchased at Walgreens were (to the best of my knowledge) not shared with the advertiser.

A year and a half ago I wrote a post about this very topic but in that case it was QuickBooks Online that I thought should have an ad sponsored offering. Fast forward and I was wrong about the 'free' edition. Ads in QuickBooks would be incremental revenue to Intuit and if done correctly a great service to their customers looking to reduce accounts payable/expenses.

Back to Citi. I am curious to hear how this deal was structured (CPM, PPC...) and how effective it is. I certainly clicked on the ad but that was more out of curiosity than any motivation to save money. I'd imagine we will see a lot more of this type of in-process advertising on financial services, package delivery, and eventually health care providers' websites.

If only Drugstore.com offered to pay my Walgreens line item in exchange for my future business.... One can dream.

There are times when I'm looking to make a decision and I find myself asking, "what would somebody like me want or do in this situation?"   Recommendations engines first look to those who have come before me to make an intelligent suggestion (who the hell are these people?) and now they are starting to look for answers in social networks. The assumption being, if a friend likes something maybe I will also like it. Come on, give me a break. While I see some value in this approach I know my friends don't have all the answers and I know certain topics each friend is an authority on but each friend is certainly not an authority on all topics. Also, let's not forget there are topics I wouldn't want them knowing I am asking about and topics for which they won't digitize their experiences.

There are a lot of companies circling these problems but there is a piece of the puzzle that I haven't heard much talk about - it's personal preferences i.e. "why" did 'somebody' 'like that' 'thing'?  Identifying personal preferences is a difficult problem.  Preferences often change based on mood, location, time of day etc etc   Take deciding where to eat dinner as a simple example: who am I planning to eat with, are they driving me home, who's buying, what did I have for lunch that day, are the kids joining us, how much time do we have etc etc. The answer to each question will alter the final decision and ultimately where I decide eat dinner. Furthermore there is 'brand performance' and how well it preforms against my personal preferences for in this case a restaurant that has vegan options, is kid friendly, is new/hot, etc etc

It isn't enough to know my friend "Kathy dines at Loving Hut Restaurant".  Companies that are pioneering the semantic web are marking up the Subject, Predicate, and Objects triples (SPOs if you will). e.g. "Kathy", "dines at", "Loving Hut Restaurant"  What I really want to know is 'why' does my friend Kathy dine at Loving Hut? Is it the all Vegan menu, the convenient location on University Avenue, the fact that it's kid friendly, has interesting tea menu, is spotless.....  In order to infer 'why' Kathy likes Loving Hut one needs to chain together SPOs  e.g. 'Kathy' 'is' 'Vegan', 'Kathy "likes' Clean Bathrooms' and "Loving Hut' 'has' 'Clean Bathrooms' and 'Loving Hut' 'is in' 'Palo Alto' etc etc 

Marking up SPOs may be an essential first step to identifying the connections between things but IM(very unscientific)HO it's ~3 to 7 times more valuable to know 'why' the connections exist and how strong the connections are.  It's the history and circumstances in which 'things' are related that holds the value- more so than the relationship itself.   

My strategy was pretty simple, don't try to cook Tofu stick to vegetables and beans i.e. things I already know how to cook and go out to eat- a lot. I've also tried to stay away from replacement products like veggie burgers or tofu dogs. That said, I couldn't resist the Smart Bacon and I am glad I didn't. S-BLTs are delicious with Veganaise. (side note Veganaise is better tasting than Mayonnaise IMHO) Needless to say this past month I've made a lot of soups, salads, veggies, and cupcakes. Yes, cupcakes. The reflex to going vegan is to make certain 'junk food' is available in times of need.

My staples to date have included:

Oatmeal, vegetables, cereal, toast, peanut butter, celery, bean & veggie soups, salads, popcorn, spaghetti w/ marinara, chips, salsa, guacamole, veggie chili...

Here are a few restaurants in the bay area that have accommodated my vegan requests or have vegan options:

Loving Hut - Palo Alto

Flea Street Cafe - Menlo Park

Darbar Indian - Palo Alto

Lulu's on the Alemeda - Menlo Park

Zibbibo - Palo Alto

Red Lantern - Redwood City

Le Boulanger - Everywhere (soup only and not available everyday)

Cafe Solestice - San Mateo & Palo Alto

PF Chang's - Palo Alto

Cookbooks I've found to be very useful include:

Vegan with a Vengeance 

Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World

So far so good. Julia has slide back to the comforts of cheese and vegetarianism but I'm sticking it out for now.

http://lovinghut.us/

One of my favorite living artist's work was featured on CSI NY last night in an episode call Page Turner. JoeJoe Web (goes by JoeX2) has found a following among influential folks in the entertainment industry.  His graffiti artwork appears regularly on the television shows CSI and Everybody Hates Chris.  This is great news for collectors and dealers of his work (and JoeJoe too).  When I bought a piece of his work (from the Lifestyle series) I was wondering if Graffiti art was just a passing fad made popular by the hip hop music videos of 50 Cent and Snoop Dogg.  What I've learned since is how vast this 'sub' culture is and how much history there is in this art form (goes back to the Greeks).

Anyway, check out JoeJoe Web's website if you like graffiti art.

Two full months have passed since moving 100 domains to WhyPark.com. Read here to see the 1 month results. Sept. ended with an increase in Visits of 56% over August. I did nothing different in September than I had done in August. These domains are essentially parked and on autopilot with WhyPark rotating in fresh, relevant content from the public domain. Search engine traffic still represents about 3/4 of the Visits.

On the 'contextual' Adsense ads the CTR just over 1.32% up from 0.78% last month! (total number of ads shown / total clicks on ads). An other way to look at this is during Sept. 4.75% (up from 2.66% in Aug.) of the pages my domains served generated CPC revenue. Not bad at all considering the sites are on autopilot.

The absolute dollars earned is barely enough to qualify for the monthly Adsense payout but it's certainly going to more than pay for the 1 time WhyPark fee in an other 2 or 3 months.

For me, I remember hitting three walls with Compendit - one at 1M$ which we plowed through pretty easily by increasing administrative support, one at 3M$ so we hired senior people that know our industry, starting recruiting out of colleges, and on occasion tapped into our credit line to finance expansion and the last wall at 10M$ as we were selling the business. 

Whether it's measured in revenue or head count every business is bound to hit the entrepreneur's wall. The wall may be one of limited capabilities, financial constraints, increased competition, lack of supply, decrease in passion, lack of a shared vision with a partner etc  In order to get over these walls entrepreneurs change the way they and their companies operate.  In my friend's case she has tried to hire full-time HR, re-assign key personnel, and a host of other tactics as she climbs the wall.

I could feel her frustration but at the same time I found it energizing.  The conversation has had me thinking about how privilaged we are to have these challenges and opportunities to climb the entrepreneur's wall.  Screw the ecomony, it's a great time to start a company.

Automatically retracting color markers. 

While there are retractable markers (think click top pen) there don't appear to be automatically retracting markers (e.g. retracts 10 mins after it's opened, put down etc).

This would be pretty straightforward to design but I'm not convinced the savings (longer marker life) would offset the increase in component parts.  Maybe the other benefits (my rug has fallen victim to several left-open markers that have rolled off the table, no lost caps, etc) and novelty of the markers would carry the product to market acceptance but I'm thinking for now this is just a better mouse trap.

I was surprised to see Flea Street Cafe in Menlo Park show up as a 'best vegetarian restaurant' in a local weekly newspaper. The first thing that comes to my mind when I think of Flea Street is a three way lamb dish I once ate there, It was amazing. So, now that I am on the no animal products diet, Flea Street wasn't my first though for a vegan friendly meal but sure enough they do it.  Keep in mind just one Vegan dish on the menu is enough to make me happy.

Jessy Cool the owner (and author of Simply Organic) puts a lot of thought and care into the menu serving local seasonal foods often from her own garden.  The restaurant is unfortunately not perfect and for the price it should be closer to perfect. The wine list is solid but be prepared to put 70$ into a bottle. We've taken to bringing one from home and paying the 20$ corkage.  I'd sum this place up by saying they need to invest more in service and ambiance. The food is good but the entire package for the price is a just a bit off.  But then again, Vegan's don't have too many non-Asian themed restaurant choices on the Peninsula (which probably explains why they received the award). 

The August results showed 75% of the traffic coming from organic search and 25% from type-in traffic.  That's not bad and when compared to the type-in only traffic received with Sedo this is pretty compelling.  CTR was the real surprise.  On the 'contextual' Adsense ads the CTR just over 0.78%! (total number of ads shown / total clicks on ads). An other way to look at this is during August 2.66% of the pages my domains served generated CPC revenue. Not bad at all considering the sites are on autopilot thanks to WhyPark.

This link has an example of a whypark parked page. You'll see I put Adsense at the top and bottom of each page's content that Whypark provides from the public domain articles they find matching my site's 'keywords' (that I configured). It's a nice service if you have enough domains to justify the 100$ one time sign-up fee.

It will be interesting to see the traffic figures once all the domains have sitemaps verified by Google. It will take a bit of time but I'm tempted now to move all my domains to Whypark.

FULL DISCLOSURE- if you click the first link above and sign-up for WhyPark I'll get spiffed as a participant in their affiliate program. It's working for me. Hope it works for you too.

I've often thought there is a market for a service/company that 'caches' the web and offers cloud computing capacity at a premium in order to access the cache.  Yahoo has started to do something similar with the introduction of BOSS but as far as I can tell you still need to 'move' the search results onto your computing capacity (think Amazon's EC2) and you are limited to what is in Yahoo's index (vs the entire HTML).  Amazon has a service that can get you pretty close but it too doesn't provide access to to the entire page. It's called Grep the Web and is an option on the Alexa web service.

I'm waiting for a company like Cuill.com of maybe Metaweb to create this offer...or a variation that is 'free' if your output is placed into the public domain (which would be accessible via e.g. cuill.com).

Why aren't these calls a thing of the past? LinkedIn gets you pretty far as an hiring company looking to verifying a recruit's employment history. Other than the base salary question the caller could have found everything about my former colleague from a LinkedIn profile.  Reference checks I get those from time to time but employment 'history' verification? 

The accuracy of LinkedIn profiles is something I have always thought of as pretty accurate. Sure there are times when you may not update the end date on your last gig before establishing a start date on your next (cough) but other than that the profiles are as get as it gets for employment/education history....read a 'recommendation' or two to help validate the self reported history and you have a trustworthy source. 

UPDATE - I just connected with the former colleague. I was listed as a 'reference'. The third party company that called me only did an employment verification. Shame on them.

EAT
http://www.farmhouseinn.com/ - order Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit
http://www.cyrusrestaurant.com/ - Think French Laundry without the snobbery. Our favorite restaurant outside of Paris.
http://www.hotelhealdsburg.com/ - Dry Creek Kitchen is their restaurant - very good, Sonoma wines no corkage.
http://www.willisseafood.net/ - for lunch/snack, order the garlic flat bread
http://www.jwine.com/ - make reservation for Bubble Lounge and have a light meal while sipping wines

STAY
http://www.farmhouseinn.com/ -remember breakfast is included and fantastic
http://www.drycreekinn.com/ - cheaper, last minute decent cancellation policy- ask for Tuscan wing or don't stay hear!
http://www.hotelhealdsburg.com/ expensive/stylish on the square and walk to/from dinner

DRINK
http://www.amphorawines.com/home.html - insist on barrel tasting with Rick the winemaker
http://www.siduri.com/ - not much to look at but fantastic wine - call first (in Santa Rosa industrial park)
http://www.jwine.com/ - make reservation for Bubble Lounge and have a light meal while sipping wines
http://www.thumbprintcellars.com/lounge/ - just off the square in Healdsburg, indie/organic/funky

Have fun!