Shanti’s Dispatches

There was just a 5.6 Earthquake here in the Bay Area. It was pretty trippy when it happened, but only lasted about 5 seconds.

Seth Godin just announced Squidoo’s licensing agreement with ever.com.

Now instead of a single destination site (squidoo.com), they have gotten into the tools business. IMHO this is a very, very savvy move.

From this example page, you can also see why Jason Calacanis would view Squidoo as a competitor.

Always the wily one, prior to launching Mahalo, Calacanis was fond of pointing out some spam issues that Squidoo was going through at the time. Of course, anyone who opens up a system to the public faces these challenges.

Calacanis’ Mahalo and Squidoo are very similar ideas. The major difference being that only paid Mahalo editors can edit/create Mahalo pages. (that’s how Mahalo avoids the spam issue)

Squidoo pays its users, but this happens after the fact and is done through affiliate/ad revenue. Some page authors have reported earnings as low as $2-3, others, in the hundreds.

UPDATE: I wrote the previous version of this post hastily and incorrectly implied ever.com and the Squidoo engine had a spam problem. The ever.com pages look very slick; and of course any open content site like Squidoo must combat the wrath of spammers & those who attempt to game the system.

Not that it’s unordinary, but I was just assaulted with a popup traffic-stats booster.

I really don’t have a huge problem with popups; the educated users will block them. (this time Firefox let me down)

The problem is with non-sales-based sites using popups to boost their impression records. If you’re selling a product (like, say, wireless video recorders — i.e. the ubiquitous X10.com ads of the early 2000s), then you’re totally in the “semi-legit” zone when you use popup advertising to drive viewers to your site.

When you’re just some random content site, and using popups to boost your Alexa / Compete.com / Quantcast / Hitwise / etc. ranking, then that definitely falls on the side of shady.

I wouldn’t even bother posting this, but it was a local RoR-powered devshop that powers these sites behind the popup that I just saw.

Make it as braindead simple (for me to donate) as is humanly possible. I’m going to download your album at 320k off BitTorrent anyway, because it’s just easier that way.

So a “Donate any amount via PayPal now” button would go a long way towards my $5 ending up in your bank account; making me fill out a 14-input form adds a lot of unnecessary friction (”time value of money”) to the overall transaction cost.

According to this article, the founders of Kiva (Matt and Jessica Flannery) actually did want to create a for-profit entity at first, but didn’t due to regulatory hurdles:

First of all, Kiva is a non-profit. As Matt and Jessica Flannery have explained, it’s very difficult to become a SEC-registered broker/dealer - even more difficult when you’re running Kiva from your living room on the nights and weekends. (See pages 37-38 of the Innovations article for Matt’s take on this decision.) MicroPlace, on the other hand, had the institutional and financial backing of EBay, allowing it to go through the complex regulatory application process and to put up the necessary money for the SEC to sign off. Upshot: Kiva wanted to be for-profit, but had to stay a NGO because it was a regulatory nightmare to register with the SEC. As a result, lenders on Kiva only receive their loans back - without interest. MicroPlace, as a broker/dealer, can pay interest to lenders - thanks to its ability to navigate the aforementioned regulatory maze.

This makes sense. Several people whom I’ve told Kiva about said they would consider loaning if there was a small percentage rate available to lenders.

I view the loans more as donations, only with the hopeful expectation that they will be paid back, and can then be re-circulated to other entrepreneurs.

Snipes was the first network game I ever played. After school on fridays, Mrs. Kepchar would let us play Snipes and Civilization on the PCs in the computer lab. (networked via Novell Netware)

Via Text Mode Games:

One of the coolest things about text-mode games is the way so many of them are steeped in computing history. It is well known that a number of great software companies—Apogee and Epic Games, to name two—got their start by selling text-mode games. But did you know that the computer industry giant Novell Inc. also began life as an unassuming little text-mode game?

Mirors

I’ve mirrored two versions of Snipes below. The first is more of an earlier, single player version. The second can be networked via Novell Netware.

SNIPES.EXE

NLSNIPES.EXE

Hat tip, evilzenscientist,

This combo rocks:

Airport Extreme + Airfoil for OS X + Anywhere.fm

Once you’ve got all your music uploaded to Anywhere.FM, next get Airfoil for OS X. You’ll have to Hijack the audio from Safari (or Firefox).

The UI for Anywhere.FM isn’t as nice as iTunes, but this (imho) is primarily due to limitations of it being a webapp instead of a desktop app.

For a web-based music player, I don’t think you can get much better than Anywhere.FM. What made it go viral for me (to tell friends about it) was that it only required a username/password to get started. Anything more complicated and it just distracts from the whole experience.

Plus — When your iTunes library is 30GB, loading the entire thing onto your MacBook’s 80gb hard-drive just isn’t an option!

Just came across scrivs new site, on the domain oreoceo.com.

This was the post:

Holy shit, if you didn’t know Google just kidnapped everyone’s first born, had sex with your grandmother and told the IRS you’ve been skimming a bit off the top on your tax returns. Nothing like changing the PageRank (PR) of a ton of sites across the web to really show humanity what is important in the world.

Right on, brotha.

So… A Pagerank 6 is the new Pagerank 8? That’s cool - advertisers can still get down with that.

It just means there are infinitely fewer PR7s/8s/9s. The web was built on interlinking, so it’s a little presumptuous to want the entire interweb to stop doing things the natural way, just because it makes it harder to run some algorithms on the global linkspace.

As I understand it, Kiva operates solely on the basis of donations. They encourage their investors to donate as much as $5 per $100 that they loan to entrepreneurs. Thus 100% of the loan goes to the local lending organization, who then dispurses it to the local entrepreneur.

I do believe, however, that this local lending institution takes an administration fee (or points, however you want to look at it) to administer the loan.

So you might lend $100, which goes into the pool for the chosen entrepreneur. Then you are asked (which you can decline of course) to donate some small amount on top of that to help sustain the parent Kiva organization.

A new site called MicroPlace just launched, under the eBay umbrella of companies.

From the MicroPlace FAQ:

MicroPlace must charge fees to be a sustainable organization.

MicroPlace currently charges a fee to the organizations that offer investments through the MicroPlace website. This fee covers MicroPlace’s costs to support the website, provide customer service and be compliant with security regulations. MicroPlace does not charge any fees to the investor. Any profits generated by MicroPlace will be used to fund eBay’s socially beneficial activities like the eBay Foundation.

I don’t want to rush to judgement here. This might be the same thing Kiva does, with MicroPlace only being more upfront about what exactly is going on.

However, this line sounds really really shady: “Any profits generated by MicroPlace will be used to fund eBay’s socially beneficial activities like the eBay Foundation.”

I’m all for socially responsible enterprises, but eBay’s record isn’t exactly crystal clear on putting its users (entrepreneurial ebay sellers no less) as the #1 priority, above its P&L statement. Pierre Omidyar’s vision for the company was incredible and extremely socially conscious. At times, an overzealous desire on the part of eBay executives to hit earnings numbers, may have veered the marketplace giant slightly off course.

I would hate to see MicroPlace put in a position as to become some sort of shady semi loan shark to developing-world entrepreneurs, because eBay executives believed the division wasn’t hitting its numbers.

OR, as these nations increasingly come online and do global shipping, that entrepreneurs in these countries would be funded, but only if their businesses were selling on eBay and not competing marketplaces (Amazon, etc). (sad that one would even have to worry about this, but big companies like Microsoft / eBay / etc. have repeatedly shown how shady they can be when it comes to competition and their bottom line)

And of course, it should be said that non-profits / not-for-profits can be just as bad, with executives making $250k a year and flying around in private jets all the time.

Kiva’s Field Partners & Interest

Did some more digging, and found this on Kiva’s FAQ:

Do Kiva.org’s Field Partners charge interest to the entrepreneurs?
Yes. Self-sustainability is critical to creating long-term solutions to poverty, and charging interest to entrepreneurs is necessary for microfinance institutions to achieve this. Our Field Partners are free to charge interest, but Kiva.org will not partner with an organization that charges exorbitant interest rates. Kiva.org also requires Field Partners to fully disclose their interest rates.

Microfinance is an expensive business, which is essentially the reason small loans are not provided by large banks. While Kiva.org’s Field Partners do not bear the cost of capital or the cost of default, they do bear transaction costs and currency risk. Charging interest to entrepreneurs enables our Field Partners to bear these costs and achieve self-sustainability.

This makes sense to me. You can’t expect a field partner to operate without some form of income and still be sustainable. It’ll go a long way when Kiva starts publishing these percentage rates on their website.

I was futzing around last night trying to add Pagerank display support to WhoLinksToMe.com, and noticed how utterly and completely a competitor has crushed us in traffic.

The site, wholinks2me.com, when originally launched, was almost a complete clone of WLTM. They submitted their site to digg and landed pretty high up on the digg rankings for a few days, which is when people started emailing me to let me know about the clone wars.

But I didn’t care then, and still don’t care now. I’ve done similar clonish type of sites when I was first starting out, so I don’t hold any hard feelings toward someone who does the same.

Lessons Learned

WLTM was always a side project kind of thing. I’m trying to phrase what I’ll say next so it’ll come out right…

… let’s say you work on a baby for a few weekends but are lacking a critical skill to bring it to market in a big way. i.e. marketing, design, server infrastructure or some other key aspect of getting the thing launched. And you’re strapped for cash.

Bringing someone on board could mean the difference of actually having a living, breathing thing live on the Internets that’s potentially bringing in many thousands of passive dollars to you each month.

But this bargain, i.e. giving away a lot of equity to achieve this, might also mean that working on the baby is not 100% aligned with your interests. i.e. if you are now getting 50% of the rewards for putting in 90% of the effort, these interests are not aligned. There are ways to work around this, but it’s tricky.

The way to avoid this in the first place, sadly, is to have more starting capital up front and just pay someone instead of giving away as much equity. Of course, having a buddy to hack on stuff with can make developing a new baby a lot more fun.

In addition to interests not being 100% aligned towards working on WLTM, I was also super-busy with other projects while all this was going on. If you spend 1 hour a month maintaining a site, and your competitor is actively developing & marketing his each week, you are simply, inevitably going to get crushed.

Congrats to WL2M!

I’d actually like to congratulate the operators of wholinks2me.com — they’ve executed brilliantly, attracting an impressive 400,000+ visitors each month!