Here is a slide that I presented at a recent RateItAll Board meeting

RateItAll's traffic numbers are pulled from our own logs.

Here are my brief comments on each property:

Yelp: The monster of our space.  Brand recognition that goes beyond early adopters.  Massive amounts of quality content in a number of markets.  Awesome SEO, strong mobile presence.  With the rumored Elevation round, Yelp will have raised $81M in funding.  Now taking on Gowalla and Foursquare.

TripAdvisor: The top travel review site. Owned by Expedia.

Flixster: The top movie review site.  Flixster recently purchased Rotten Tomatoes, and is very strong on Facebook and MySpace.  $7M in funding.

Epinions: Acquired long ago by Shopping.com, which was then acquired by eBay.

InsiderPages: Owned by CitySearch (which also has user reviews, but is known more for their editorial reviews of local businesses).

ViewPoints: Privately held, out of Chicago.  $5M in funding.

UrbanSpoon: Acquired by IAC.

Buzzillions / Power Reviews: Privately held out of San Francisco.  $26M in funding.

RateItAll: Privately held out of San Francisco.  $1.4M in funding.

LivingSocial: Privately held out of DC.  Moving aggressively into collective buying, taking on Groupon, Townhog and others.  Strong on Facebook.  $10M in funding.

AngiesList: Privately held out of Indiana.  $66M in funding.  Traffic apparently in free fall.

With devices and browsers getting better at detecting and communicating location, and more people choosing to live in public, we are on the cusp of big some big changes in how web meets world.

Here is our first post:

MyBlogLog was the first service to really bring the concept of distributed, cross domain services to mainstream bloggers.  The list of companies they influenced is long and important - you can see elements of MBL in JS-Kit / Echo, Disqus, Google Friend Connect, Facebook Connect, The Facebook Fan Box Widget, and many more.

Many of us that followed MyBlogLog closely were disappointed that they chose to take a quick exit, selling out to Yahoo in early 2007. Though, who can blame them? 

Here's Fred Wilson speaking at the Widget Summit in 2008:

"MyBlogLog is the most interesting widget I ever used.  I realized then that widgets were more than just showing content…. but introducing new functionality.  My blog had become a (lightweight) social network. 

"Tried to invest, had a signed agreement, but before we could execute, they sold to Yahoo.  I don’t think they realized the potential of what MyBlogLog could become."

And here is a collection of quotes from SexyWidget about MyBlogLog from over the years:

On the innovation of not just building another social network (2006):

"At a time when it seems that everyone is looking to build a destination social network, MyBlogLog has found an intriguing angle – cobbling together all of the mini communities that exist in the blogosphere through the distributed provision of some basic social networking tools.  There’s a lot of blogs out there that could benefit from some enhanced community.  This is a big, useful idea."

On MBL providing value to both readers and publishers (2006):

"MyBlogLog is already providing clear value to both blog publishers and blog readers.  Publishers benefit from enhanced community on their blog because properly executed, online community can complement content as a way to pull folks back to your site.  Blog readers benefit, because the MyBlogLog service recognizes their presence and is a step towards putting them at a more equal footing with the blog owner."

On the value of swimming against the current (2006):

"When I think of the hundreds of destination site social networks (many of them funded) vying for visitors attention, and a look at the tiny handful of businesses trying to enhance community functionality for the millions of blogs out there, I see a big disconnect.  If I were investing in these sorts of opportunities, I’d be a lot more interested in hearing about MyBlogLog’s plans that some “MySpace of ______” site."

On MyBlogLog's potential (2006):

"My sense is that MyBlogLog is on to something big.  If you play this concept out a bit, and you imagine a scenario where MyBlogLog is capturing traffic and user data from thousands of a high traffic blogs, there are all kinds of revenue models and services that could emerge.  They could facilitate introductions between people and blogs, blogs and blogs, and people and people.   They could capture statistical benchmarks and best practice data for various segments of blogs.  They could develop a blogosphere wide reputation management system.  The possibilities are almost limitless."

On MBL's influence on the industry (2007):

"The promise of cross domain features with a single login is one of the most compelling aspects of the new generation of cross platform, cross domain web services.  MyBlogLog is a “presence” feature – one that could be considered a spinoff of the popular “who’s online” feature on social networks.  It works anywhere, and if you’re logged in to this feature on one domain with a MyBlogLog widget, you’re logged into all of them." 

On MBL's massive backlink machine, and the missed destination site opportunity (2008)

"I was doing a little research on Yahoo Site Explorer on a widget provider that is claiming some pretty big traction (more on this later).  In the process, I did a reality check of backlinks againstMyBlogLog. MyBlogLog is showing up as having more than 3.5M backlinks.  Gulp.  If these guys would build out a destination site with some landing pages that people actually search for (as opposed to MyBlogLog profile pages), they could turn a fire hose of organic search traffic on."

MyBlogLog lived fast and died young, but it certainly left its mark.

Here is a full list of my posts covering MyBlogLog:

MyBlogLog Widget - A Review (October, 2006)

The Promise of Distributed Social Networks (February, 2007)

On MyBlogLog, Cookies, and Resource Allocation (February, 2008)

MyBlogLog: Build out your Destination Site Already! (March, 2008)

Here are my quick thoughts on the rumored Google acquisition of Yelp.

- As an entrepreneur, I'm sorry to see Yelp sell out.  As a competitor to Yelp, I'm thrilled.  If past acquisitions are any indication, it won't be long before the visionaries leave, and Yelp becomes a feature and not the vibrant community with a cult following that it is today.  See Epinions.

- Some questions: will Yelp content be integrated into Google's local pages or will the property be left alone?  How will this affect Yelp's already dominant organic search rankings?  How will Yelp's outspoken community react to the new overlords?  Will Google be able to retain Jeremy, Russ, Nish, and the rest of the Yelp team, or will they bounce to new startups in two years?

I was remarking to a co-worker yesterday how nice Google's local business pages are looking.

Check out this example page for a restaurant in my neighborhood in San Francisco, Luna Park.  It's pulling in a whole bunch of reviews from various sites, it's now parsing ratings by different criteria, there are tons of images, there are maps and Google street view, and plenty of structured data like hours and payment information. 

It's a very nice effort, that draws heavily from content aggregated around the Web, as well as Google's own properties.

And if you are a content publisher that currently gets traffic from organic Google traffic, it's a damn frightening turn of events. 

The Luna Park page above is a destination page. 

Sure, you can click off to check out the original source of some of the review and image content, but you don't really have to.  Pretty much all the information you could ever need is right on that page.  And if this page were in play in Google's organic search results, it would certainly rank near the top.

And that's the thing, for a brief period a few weeks ago, I was seeing some of these pages in the organic SERPS.

Was this a foreshadowing of the future, or a glitch?

Google's product pages are starting to look like destination pages as well - here's one for an 8GB iPod.

And here's an example person destination page.

I tend to be a bit paranoid when it comes to Google, but it would appear that they are starting to build out destination pages for every thing - business, product, person, etc. - in the world.

The question is not, "What does Google's move towards being a destination mean for Yelp?"  The question is, "What does this mean for the Web?"

Google has become a dominant company by being the most powerful online middleman in history, sitting between the searcher and the destination website.  It appears that they may be starting to wonder what would happen if they became the destination.

I've been talking a lot on this blog about the rise of big, horizontal content sites like Demand Media and Answers.com. 

Perhaps we should be adding Google into this discussion.

"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.”

But if I were Demand Media, I would start getting a bit nervous about this second wave of press.  Their model won't work without Google's help, and the last thing Demand Media needs is Google proactively moving to bury "fast food content."

This helpful pyramid from Clara Shih also reflects this behavior.  In the typical online community, there are more taggers / voters than commenters, and more commenters than content producers.  It's hard work to write a blog post or a review, slightly less hard to comment on said post, and really not a big deal to vote / like / or tag that review.

Current media darling Foursquare is built around an action that is even simpler than commenting or tagging - Checking in.  On an iPhone, a Checkin is just a single tap of the phone.  If other patterns of UGC participation are any guide, a community built around a single tap has a better chance of going mainstream than a community built around a more in depth behavior like writing an article.

But is there any value in the content created by a single tap of the phone?  On Foursquare, yes.  My Checkin tells my friends where I am.  It tells the business that I am a customer.  That Checkin gives the (awesome) future me a historical list of the places I've been.  And on the aggregate, those Checkins tell Foursquare what places are hot at any given time. 

One little tap can carry a lot of data.

By now, if you're like me, you are probably thinking about how you can let folks check in to your web service.  And taking a quick look around the social media landscape, there are plenty of Checkins to be found.

You can Checkin to a place: companies like Foursquare, Gowalla, and the mysterious DoubleDutch are all over this.

You can Checkin to a piece of content on Facebook: try "liking" something in your newsfeed.

You can Checkin to a product: try clicking "I want this" on GDGT.

You can Checkin to a link: just click it.

And on and on.

Checkins are easy, fast, lightweight, and most importantly, are a data point tied to a larger intention.  For Foursquare, a Checkin represents a person's connection with a local business, their location, and probably an indication of a dollar spent.  For Facebook, a Checkin is a signal of the content preferences of the "liker," a newsfeed story in its own right, and a gentle, hugely important tap of encouragement for the content creator.  For Google, a Checkin is revenue, a signal of content quality, and on the aggregate, a view of how the world surfs the web.

The dirty little secret of User Generated Content has always been that a tiny percentage of the population contributes most of the content. 

Perhaps the proliferation of Checkin-like actions can begin to change this.