My specific experience is from three companies I have co-founded: Netscape, sold to America Online in 1998 for $4.2 billion; Opsware (formerly Loudcloud), a public software company with an approximately $1 billion market cap; and now Ning, a new, private consumer Internet company.

But more generally, I’ve been fortunate enough to be involved in and exposed to a broad range of other startups — maybe 40 or 50 in enough detail to know what I’m talking about — since arriving in Silicon Valley in 1994: as a board member, as an angel investor, as an advisor, as a friend of various founders, and as a participant in various venture capital funds.

You can hop over to his site to read the full article which is very detailed or check out my summary below.

PROS To a Startup

• The opportunity to be in control of your own destiny
• The opportunity to create something new
• The opportunity to have an impact on the world
• The ability to create your ideal culture and work with a dream team of people you get to assemble yourself
• Money

CONS To a Startup

• Emotional rollercoaster
• Absolutely nothing happens unless you make it happen
• You get told no — a lot
• Hiring is a huge pain in the ass
• At some point you’re going to have to hire executives
• The hours
• It’s really easy for the culture of a startup to go sideways

I started out as a huge Bloglines fan.  I use it throughout the day to get the latest articles and posts from all of the sites that I like…roughly 300 as of today.  I used to think it was a really helpful aggregator that saved me time and kept me up to date with the latest info.  When I load it up it shows me all of the sites I’ve saved and highlights those with new content, showing me how many new articles or posts there are to view on the site.

But, lately it is starting to piss me off.

More and more I’ll click to view new posts and all I see is the same old shit I’ve already read and seen at least once if not twice.  I don’t know if the feed owner is specifying that the post has been updated or if its a Bloglines bug, but it wastes my time as I have to sift through old posts to get to the good stuff.  Look, if I’ve already clicked on a highlighted site and viewed the NEW articles they should not be highlighted again, or at least not in the same way.  This appears to be a relatively new issue…or maybe it’s just happening more frequently now.

Anyone else having this problem?  Know of a solution?  Is it time for me to switch aggregators?

Anyone else seeing this?

Wonder what’s up…..

iLike has gotten a reported three million users since its launch last October, and its growth is exponential, now that it’s on Facebook. The music website is gaining nearly a million new users every month, and is looking to become the most used music application on Facebook. iLike’s Facebook app lets you personalize incoming information based on your Facebook music and that of your friends, and get alerts for when your favorite artists will be in town.

Are you building a Facebook widget?  Have one live already?

Why try to build your own community when you can utilize one of the largest ones out there for free?

It’s a fairly user friendly interfact that allows you to easily search all of the major search engines and social media websites within a few clicks.  Just enter your query and then click on the icon of your choice to view the results at that engine or website.   There are plenty of options listed on the site but Sputtr also gives you the option of suggesting a new search site if you feel there is a good one missing.

From their about page:

Welcome to Sputtr. A refreshingly clean way to search the things that matter the most.
Now you can save valuable time by having all the right searches on just one page!

It’s simple - reeeaal simple.
It’s fast - faster than most others out there.
It’s a collection of all your favorite search engines - all on just one page!
It’s pretty - at least we think so.

He breaks down the three styles and shows some good examples of titles and headlines.

How To Distinguish Paid vs Organic Listings
A lot of people probably don’t even realize that the listings are paid and not organic. The listings themselves may look the same if the manager has used the same Titles & Descriptions for their pages. You can be identify these paid listings by this in the string http%3a//rdrw1.yahoo.com/click.

• Sample Search Submit Pro CPC Listing

Why Do I Care?
On a given Yahoo! search results page there are 10 organic listings and 14 PPC listings. When more and more paid listings creep into these natural 10 it reduces the amount of real estate left over for organic search results. Do you know how many organic spots are left for the keywords you’re targeting? While doing a few spot checks on popular keywords I noticed an alarming amount of CPC listings, some 50% or more. That means there are 19 PPC listings and 5 organic listings. That’s horrible. I was curious how this affected the different keyword markets. I grabbed the top keywords for each market KeywordDiscovery.com’s “Industry Terms” directory and to get a feel for the impact on heavily monetized keywords I then took the top keywords from this list of “top paying keywords“. I then checked the top 10 rankings for each and documented the # of paid listings found. Below are the results.

As you can see the top keywords listed in each industry are not heavily saturated with Search Submit Pro CPC listings. Only 32 of the 132 keywords, 24%, have CPC listings and only 4 of them, 3%, have 5 or more paid listings. This could be due to many of them being domain names and brand names. We then see that 70% of the keywords in the “Top Paying Keywords” list have Search Submit Pro! CPC listings, and 33% of those keywords have 50% or more CPC listings.

Reviewing these keywords you can see that the financial industry is pretty saturated. The majority of the keywords with 50% or more of the top 10 rankings being CPC listings are finance related. I decided to pull and evaluate the top searched keywords for the “loans” category. In the left column of the first graph below are the top 30 keywords returned for “loans” by KeywordDiscovery.com and the number of paid listings found in the top 10 rankings for each keyword. The second table is the same keywords and paid listing data but sorted in descending order of number of paid listings. When checking the rankings I see that 26 of the 30 keywords have at least 1 CPC listing representing an 86% saturation. Of these, 16 of the 30 have 50% or more CPC listings, representing 53% saturation. Some keywords like “home equity loans” and “online loans” are 100% CPC listings which means there are ZERO organic listings within the first page of search results on Yahoo!. Other gems are “loans”, “home loans”, and “cash loans” which weigh in with 9 of the top 10 results being paid listings from Search Submit Pro. Damn…that’s brutal.

I found this article from 2002 on SEW where Danny evaluated the Paid Content Disclosure on each search engne. As Danny states:

Yahoo: Paid listings sold by Yahoo are clearly labeled as “Sponsor Matches,” along with a helpful link that says, “What are Sponsor Matches?,” leading to a further explanation. As for paid inclusion, some “Web Site Matches” will be for sites that appear because they had to pay a mandatory fee to be reviewed. This is not clear on the search results page. Further, clicking on the “Help” link on the search page, while bringing up a page describing the search results, does not make clear some sites must pay a fee to be listed with Yahoo. Fail. Finally, for content promotion, this happens in the “Inside Yahoo” area, a clear-enough heading and which is also explained on the search help page.

Danny’s comment on the lack of disclosure within Yahoo!’s search results is still true today. That said, they have updated the information within their “About this page” section that is linked from the search results. It now states:

Web Results and Local Results may have financial relationships with Yahoo!, but have not paid for placement. Web Results may include links to sites that participate in the Content Acquisition Program (CAP). CAP enables content providers to submit web content directly to Yahoo! for review and inclusion in the Yahoo! Search index; content providers that participate in CAP through the Search Submit program pay for these services.

Web Results: Web Results are the most relevant web pages found in response to your search query. Web Results are generated from the billions of web pages discovered, crawled, reviewed, submitted, or otherwise included in the Yahoo! Search index. More than 99% of web pages in the Yahoo! Search index are included for free through Yahoo!’s web crawl process.

So, how does this factor into YOUR campaign and rankings?

Are the organic listings for your keywords being taken over by CPC listings?

Do you think consumers need to know these are paid listings?

There is a lot of coverage out there, including Andy, Tech Crunch, ZDNet, Threadwatch, Mashable, and Search Engine Land to name a few.

But I think Brian at Scoreboard Media said it best.  Check out his review here…it’s classic.

There are dozens of groups within Yahoo who manage hundreds of products and properties that maintain some of the largest, most trafficked sites on the internet consisting of millions of pages and gobs of new content being pushed out all day long every day. This operation involves a good chunk of our 11,000 employees including project managers, designers, engineers, marketers and partners. For all of this activity and mayhem, there are a handful of us SEOs checking, recommending, emailing, chatting, educating, researching, reporting, testing and generally playing SEO supermom(/dad) .

No question that this is a difficult role and there will be things that slip through.  Sometimes in a company this large the best you can hope for is the 80/20 rule.

Kinda funny misunderstanding, but I could imagine the overcrazed, overhyped, yahoo doesnt follow their own rules, what on earth is going on, oh my god the world is coming to an end blog posts & comments like these if that engineering manager hadn’t caught this at the last minute.

I’m not sure if everyone else read it as such but I certainly didn’t think my post had the tone of “the world is coming to an end”.  But I did point out the hypocrisy and I stand by it.

We do continue to work on processes here for automating all SEO checkpoints on all pages that go out every day using a complex system of publishing and CMS tools, by automation, by hand, and/or by partners. In the meantime, we will continue to whisk through the halls like SEO superheroes with a keen eye for white on white, doing our best to save the Yahoo! properties from unintentional villainous blackhat ways.

First, I’d say that it looked pretty intentional.  Whether it was her intention or someone else’s intention is not the issue.

Second, I think it’s a great idea to have an automated system for SEO QA.  It wouldn’t be difficult to develop a system that would dynamically crawl a new site or product and analzye it for unique Title tags, Meta tags, <h> tags, etc, on each page.  The program could also check the keyword density on each page, ensure all pages are crawlable, report duplicate content, etc.  Checking for IP or agent delivery could also be built into this sytem.

To be continued……..

According to Techcrunch:

Feedburner is in the closing stages of being acquired by Google for around $100 million. The deal is all cash and mostly upfront, according to our source, although the founders will be locked in for a couple of years.

Congrats to the Feedburner team.  The people I’ve met there are good guys and I wish them the best in the acquisition.