TagJag Thoughts

Uncategorized, ,

I had a very brief comment during Chris' session "Should TagJag get funded?" On the stage with Chris and Rick Segal were two of my favorite members of the venture community, Brad Feld and Jeff Clavier. My feedback may have been phrased more negatively than I meant it to be, but what I was trying to constructively criticise is that TagJag would be a lot more unique and valuable to me if beyond merely listing the results pages of the different services it aggregates, it presented the results interesting and timesaving ways. For example: better categorization of time-based vs. authority-based sources; combining different results into a single list; de-duping and filtering results; filtering the spam that the different providers seem to be unable to catch; providing different notification thresholds and mediums beyond RSS and HTML, like email, SMS, IM. All of these would provide value to me beyond what the individual services provide, save me time, and provide something greater than the sum of its parts. tagjag freedbacking

Amazon Grocery

Asides

I don’t go to the grocery store much, and when I do it’s usually for toiletries or non-perishables, so Amazon Grocery seemed like a pretty good fit. I’m already a Prime member so everything has free shipping, and I’m pretty comfortable giving money to Amazon these days. For my first test purchase I decided to go for something bulky that would be a pain to walk several blocks with. So the first purchase was some Cottonelle toilet paper. Now there are two immediate problems: first I didn’t realize it was a four-pack. I don’t know if I have enough storage space for that much toilet paper, so I might end up giving some of it to friends. (That’s what friends are for, right?) Second I ordered it on June 18, and it still hasn’t shipped 10 days later. Good thing there was no urgency! My initial experience with Amazon Grocery has been pretty disappointing.

Bloglines DOS

Asides, Bloglines

Bloglines is DOSing blog providers. Every other major crawler implements some sort of per-resolved-IP throttle, why can’t Bloglines? Even if there were a way to opt-out of their hundreds of simultanous crawlers descending on your service, it seems to me the default behavior should be to not be harmful, and then work with large providers on a case-by-case basis to increase the concurrency of requests. We don’t have this problem with any other aggregator or crawler, hosted or non-hosted. Test: freedbacking

Paid Support

Automattic

We just launched the Automattic Support Network which is a place for companies to purchase paid support for WordPress and MU. Originally I didn't think we'd need to do this, simply because the WordPress.org support forums are so amazing and there is such a good community around it. That hasn't changed, but some big companies and enterprise folks are uncomfortable with volunteer support, and want (and insist) on paying someone before deploying a product. Based on that feedback and a lot of input from Podz, we put together this new product, which is basically VIP support with a guaranteed response time. Toni has some more thoughts here. We also rolled out new pricing for commercial Akismet use a few days ago, and the response has been great so far.

Dodgy Mouse and Keyboard

Asides

After several days of mysterious mouse jumps, keys getting “stuck” on the keyboard and repeating over and over, and varioun non-responsiveness of my computer, I was extremely frustrated. I tried moving the wireless reciever five different places, re-compiling synergy, scanning for spyware, etc. Of course everything was fixed by putting new batteries in the wireless mouse and keyboard. Noticing a theme? I should get sponsorship from Energizer.

At Webvisions in Portland

Asides

About a month from now I’ll be speaking at the Webvisions conference in Portland on “Scaling for Your First 100k Users.” The talk will be part tech, part social. It’s a very reasonably priced conference with a lot of great speakers, I think they’re going to sell out soon so if you’re interested in going book soon. It’ll also be my first time in Portland, so I’m looking forward to exploring the area a bit and meeting WP users.

Banned from Google

Asides, Google

Something really weird happened when I had the password problem last week — I completely disappeared from Google. It’s not just the search for Matt, but almost every page on my site has disappeared even for super-obvious searches. This happened within a day of the guy getting into my blog account. I have two theories, one is that when all my links started pointing to blogspot (he changed my siteurl) that triggered some sort of anti-spam flag, and my second theory is that [H]e turned on the new Blog Privacy feature in WP that adds noindex,nofollow to the header of your page, and Google was crawling me that very instant and removed my site. BTW, as an update to the previous entry, I have since found out that I did not have a super-obvious password, but rather he found it embedded in the source code in the SVN repository of a new project I’m working on that hasn’t been released yet. I’ve axed the repo, but at least now I don’t feel so bad about having an awful password on my blog. Regardless, the event was a good excuse to review my password strategy and make sure everything was fairly locked down. Update: I’m certain it was the noindex thing, which looks like it was on for about a week. Let’s see how long it takes to bring everything back and if I rank the same. Update 2: Everything is back to normal. 🙂