Los Angeles Tech Launched - Hot List

I'm happy to announce the launch of the Los Angeles Tech Content Community. This is the beginning of a content community that collects and organizes the best content from blogs and web sites. The goal is to create a place where it's relatively easy to find current content and highly relevant content surrounding Los Angeles Technology.

To be clear Los Angeles Tech is a jump off point. The content comes from other places. This is mostly from bloggers, but also from pages being included by members. The bottom line is that Los Angeles Tech is trying to help find and navigate that content.

There are some very cool new features being released all the time as part of the software that powers this system. One of the more interesting new features is that the site now takes into account social signals. In other words, it uses what is happening:

• with the content out in the network
• with searches that land on the site,
• what happens when people visit the site,
• and various other kinds of behaviors.

Together these social signals indicate content that is likely of higher quality (or at least of higher interest). This technology allows us to see what is hot. So here's the

Hot List for 1/1/2009 - 1/15/2009

Top 5 Posts

1. The 7 Ways to Get Traffic on the Web
2. Why You Need To Lead A Tribe - Seth Godin
3. LA Gets Dugg, Hammered, Screwed
4. How To Get The World Excited About Your Business –The James Siminoff Interview
5. Viral analytics and metrics - go viral young startup

Top 20 Keywords

1. SEO
2. Metrics
   
3. Marketing
4. Social Media
5. Alelo
6. Google
7. Yahoo
8. Mahalo
9. MySpace
10. Tech Coast Angels
11. Idealab
12. Mission Ventures
13. Clearstone
14. Hollywood
15. Santa Barbara
16. Venice
17. San Diego
    
18. Santa Monica
19. Twiistup
20. Mixergy

Notes on the keyword list. This is based on occurrences during this time period as compared to other time periods. It also includes some other social signals such as traffic, clicks, etc.

Also, I can't claim that I can explain why certain things are in the hot list. The social signals seem obvious in some cases, but not always clear to me in other cases. Still I would claim that most of those posts are pretty good ones - certainly I'm happy seeing that list.

I'm very curious to hear any reactions to this idea of a hot list.

Google Personalized Results

Google now shows me an option to push things in my search results to the top. It's an interesting choice. Doesn't it seem like it's inviting problems. Basically the only people who will spend time on this is people trying to improve their search rankings. The rest of us signal with lots of other things like links, bookmarking, etc.

Not sure I buy this approach from Google.

Meetup - Avoiding Negative Comments

As a follow-up to my last post on Meetups SEO / SEM, I was just booted from the group and any of my comments about issues I had with the way the group was handled along with my negative vote about the event were deleted from the group. It makes me wonder if Meetup is actually encouraging this kind of thing.

Value and Meetups - SEO / SEM

I went to a meetup yesterday that was on the topic of Internet Marketing / SEO / SEM. The meeting had a decent case study and some pretty good discussion around the room of different tools that you might consider using. Then the organizer went into a 20 minute sales pitch around his new training/coaching offering. It felt like a bad time share presentation.

At the end, he said that going forward the focus of the group would be around his commercial offering and that the only value that an organizer and participants get is when they can pitch their stuff to the group. Yikes.

What's interesting about that opinion is that there were people in the room who were more than happy to share their ideas around tools and techniques to use as part of the discussion. They weren't explicitly pitching. However, you understand that you can talk to them about it and possibly pay for their help if you want to know more. And I doubt that any of them were providing that information because they were trying to pitch. Instead, they were trying to share and help. None of it was that revolutionary. But it's helpful to share ideas, methods, compare your approach versus other people.

It's unfortunate that this event is going the way it is. I'm hoping to figure out a way to spark a meet-up around SEO / SEM in Santa Monica / West Los Angeles / South Bay.

Hard to Build Large Advertising Support Business

Found this via Ben Kuo - The math behind Internet advertising businesses

The advertising equivalence principle?

So if we assume that a $1 CPM is about right and figure out what audience is required to build a $100MM annual revenue business, we find out that we need 8.33 billion monthly page views and over 300 million monthly unique visitors creating 25 page views per user.

With these assumptions, we would need a site that ranked fourth globally. Of course we could assume that we get 10x the page views per user, but we’re still at 33 million unique visitors per month. It’s a non-trivial feat to develop a $100MM annual revenue business through online advertising.

Great point that you would have to have massive traffic, highly valued traffic, or some other factor involved in order to build a $100MM business which is normally the hurdle used as part of investment decisions.

Web 2.0 Strategy

Fantastic post by Dion Hinchcliffe - Ten Aspects of Web 2.0 Strategy That Every CTO and CIO Should Know. Raises some interesting points, but the general theme is: just figure out ways to get it to happen.

Technology Impact - Performance Spread

Fascinating article by Andrew McAfee - Technology Beats a Full House - discusses how variation in performance spread decreases over time as systems become optimized. He shows that the spreads in IT heavy industries has greater variation over the past decade.

... winners were increasingly separated from losers.