Review of web sites

The last time I did a review on Stephen Colbert's web site it had some issues. Stephen mentioned on his show it was due to a server crash, which on the Internet often happens. This made me just a little disappointed in his online performance, or lack of.

Stephen Colbert has said he hates the Internet, maybe because the Internet Business is bit by bit taking over his world even if likes it or not. The good news is it is my opinion that the talented people like Stephen Colbert will been the main show soon enough.

Currently the show has a massive potential for its online counter part which may come to bear fruit. I am placing my bets on a upstart like rockboom.com taking the audience vs Colbert being able to keep his.

Hopefully the changes keep coming as this battle will be interesting fire fight between the old and the new.

Evan Williams made a round up of the podcasting segment. Podcasting site Roundup

Simple storage


Simple messaging

These types of services are great for decreasing development time and makes things easier to manage for larger scaled sites. The problem is reliability and backup.

Amazon may have 99.99 % on their network, sadly when running a site with millions of users you notice when a certain geographic area or network can not access your web site. This happened due to every network does not have many routes and many providers. Saying this amazon could easily become inaccessible by the server causing down time. Add that on to regular downtime caused by random events and your site is starting to look unreliable.

Worse case I seen for Internet failure is providers in the financial district after Sept 11 Terror attacks. With the power out and the servers hot every thing cooked at a nice 120 F.

Of course everyone promises that they are going to be 99.99 % there, what happens if you are that 0.01 % and all your data is lost ? Once again with large sites this WILL happen at one point or another. Therefor you have to have backups.

Worse case I have seen for backups is having a data center destroyed. I had the customer setup with three backup systems in place. Two where on site and the third was remote site. Only the remote backup server was active, in a 24 hour period the customer went from four copies of their data to one.

On the flip side, these services do make things faster to develop and if you do have a backup of what is on amazon you are all set tell you need to move in house. For many sites this will never be needed.

Amazon has released a beta of their Elastic Compute Cloud (or EC2) for you to outsource computing power. This service appears to be another form of virtual private servers. The main benefit is that if you use this service in joint with previously mentioned ones your site could be as reliable as amazons assuming they assigned the same priority to this system as their own.

EC2

The Amazon Mechanical Turk is an interesting spin on managing small projects. It allows people to enter tasks which are easily done by people and not quite worth it to automate. Small tasks like this are often difficult to get done if the infrastructure is not there. This is why sites like Elance where created as well.

This model of business appears to have its roots in the temporary agency. Where workers signup and people with tasks post their jobs to be done.

Some call centers handle things like this as well, they have a certain amount of computer stations and the workers are all given the same training. It is up to them to choose which desk to sit at and login. Once they are logged in the computer starts feeding tasks from the queue.

With Amazons Turk system is it looks more like an api the all ready had internally and someone said, hey for a little bit of money we can make this public and it may or may not work out. As for working out it appears to only created press and blog attention, the cost to pay for this awareness is most likely more then it cost to make this system. In that sense it is a success and does not really need to go any where else.


Before thinking of making a business on the temporary agency system, make sure you have a source of people with projects of value and people who can do the tasks.

While going threw technorati.com blog's search I stumbled on to techeast.ca

A good site on east coast tech news.

Chalk gaming, based in Halifax has a blog a http://chalkgaming.com/chalk-blog.php it is wrote by Scott Neil, President of Chalk.

The rental listings market is all bits and pieces. There are many small web site and large ones which have rental listings.

There are Rental specific,
GoRent.ca
viewit.ca
rentboard.ca
rentalmonster.ca
rentalshalifax.com

The herald, hfx4sale.com and craigslist all have rental sections.

On top of all that, most rental companies with more then a few units all have their own listings sites.

The Halifax local paper has Wheels Press and Jobs Press both appear to of done well. The news paper has command of the local market and has done well of creating a web site to carry its print ads online. The web sites do not need to be pretty or have lots of functionality.

The paid alternatives are Canada Auto Trader and the free alternatives are hfx4sale.com, hfx.forsale and halifax.craigslist.com.

Canada Auto has a local office and its web site looks much better then wheels press.

Today, wheels press has 564 listings and autotrader for Nova Scotia has 301. As competitors I bet they have close to the same users and traffic. Trying to work your way into general online classifieds for cars would appear to be difficult for the province of Nova Scotia. The only way I see getting a good market would to create more of niche.

thechronicleherald.ca The Herald has a fairly standard local news site. The paper has a viewer ship of just under 300 000 daily and the web site 170,000 unique visitors monthly.

The paper its self does fairly we, expect as an all ready established business I do not see it adapting to the modern trends on the Internet fast enough.

This in my eyes means that eventually someone will grab the market share for the local news online from the Herald at one point or another. Of course there is some of these sites already in development.

YouTube.com has made a splash in the Internet world taking what all ready existed and fine tuning it for the masses. Sense Napster has made the waves before in copyright issues chances are that YouTube.com can avoid being killed by lawsuits. Reality is that Tv is turnning into a video segement rather then a clear Tv only.

They have the big names helping them out http://www.sequoiacap.com/scpartner.asp?pid=4406 Roelof Botha, Past CEO of paypal.

The founders are Chad Hurley, 29, and Steve Chen, 27 which from reading this article they used a illertivate model where they started small to see if it would work then listened to people.

Though their domain was created in feb 2005 and funding by nov 2005, 7 to 8 months to venture capital funding.

http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=14376&hed=YouTube+Scores+%243.5+Million

blockbuster store / day in nov 2005 , 8 terabytes. So if they had thousands of stores that would be one hell of data.

A client of mine was playing with google ads and amazon ads, one thing they noticed is that google's bot came by less often with amazon ads are in place with no google ads. Is google pushing out the competition ?

live.com is microsofts attempt to take some of googles search market. Currently its results are just like googles expect with a fancy Interface. The site looks good in a IE browser and works fine. My guess is that they will follow the usual, copy a good product, obtain customers, modify to keep them hooked so they can not go back.

The the data for calculating revenue per hit was found in an article on youtube's law suit. At the end it mentions that Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz made a hit movie. They posted it on http://www.revver.com only to have it pirated on sites like youtube. The word is they made 30 000 on 5.5 million hits while posted on
Revver. They figure another 30 000 was lost due to the copies.

Some simple calculations of their hit movie shows they made a little over
a half of penny per hit. From various businesses I have worked with which
are not splash hits like this clip was I can guess at the per hit
earnings is one eighth to one quarter of a cent. Which goes to show that
video is a high earner on the net.

http://yahoo.businessweek.com/technology/content/jul2006/tc20060726_601698.htm

Wow, you have to love it when someone puts Tweenland.com :: Owned and Operated by Paperless Commerce, Inc. < adz@paperlesscommerce.com>

In their from feild for email. Looking at http://www.paperlesscommerce.com , it appears to be a bit low budget on the graphics side.

As for tweenland the web site does not look that pretty as well, on the other side it is functional.

It came to my attention from a comment by a user at mediapost.com about walmarts teen web site.

No idea how well they will do, first is not always best or most successful...