SteelPixel Web Hosting and their No-Advertising Model (Word-of-Mouth-Marketing)

Meet Josh and Chris of the Web 2.0 Show and Steel Pixel
I really like Josh and Chris, they’re the hosts for the popular podcast “The Web 2.0 Show” which I’m subscribed to. I first met Josh at the Future of Web Apps conference (my day 1 and day 2 notes), I heard a familiar voice behind me. After a few hours I realized they were directly behind me. I few times I accidentally blinded them with my camera flash while I was trying to take picture of folks asking questions on the mic. If you’re a web developer, designer, or marketer in the Web 2.0 space, I highly recommend subscribing toe their show, they have quite a few interesting guests.

Listening to your marketplace
Recently, we’ve been covering some issues with Andy’s web host Dreamhost (I’m also hosted with them, but I’ve few issues, other than the outage a few months ago). Josh and Chris have a business in addition to the Web 2.0 show called Steel Pixel. They contacted me via email with an offer for Andy and I to take up two months of hosting for free and a discount for anyone else that reads my blog, or just wants to switch.

Here’s the comment they left:

Jeremiah,

I am sorry to hear that your friend is having such a tough time with hosting. We (The Web 2.0 Show podcast guys) run a hosting business and we would like to invite both you and Andy to give it a try (two months free). We would like to also offer a 10% discount to all your blog readers, they can just use the discount code “switch” when they sign up.

We try to keep a very human feel to our hosting, we use IM and campfire to allow real time chat with customers. We don’t really spend money on advertising because we feel the dollars a customer spends with us should improve the services we provide them. We are very much a fan of “Creating passionate users” . You can read more on our ideas at our blog.

Marketing Sherpa Reader’s Choice Blog & Podcasting (Add to your Feedreader)

Michael sent me this link to the Marketing Sherpa Reader’s Choice Blog & Podcasting Awards 2006 awards, very cool list.

Best B-to-B Marketing Blog

• B2B Lead Generation Blog by Brian Carroll

Best Blog on Email Marketing

• Chris Baggott’s Email Marketing Best Practices

Best Blog on Search Marketing

• Search Engine Roundtable

Best Blog on Advertising

• Adrants by Steve Hall

Best Blog on Marketing to a Specific Consumer Demographic

• Andy Wibbels, the Original Blogging Evangelist by Andy Wibbels

Best blog on Affiliate Marketing

• ReveNews

Best Blog on the Topic of PR

• Active Voice by Matt “PodBoy”

Best Podcast on the topic of Marketing

• Across the Sound by Joseph Jaffe (One of my favs)

Best Blog on Small Business Marketing

• Duct Tape Marketing by John Jantsch

Best Foreign-Language Blog

• Marketing-Blog Biz — Besserwerberblog * Marketing für Besserwerber

Best Blog on General Marketing Topics

• Seth Godin’s Blog by Seth Godin

Honorable Mentions: Five More Blogs That Deserve Your Attention

• Adland
• Future Now: A Day in the Life of a Persuasion Architect
• StartupNation
• The WebMarketCentral Blog
• Ypulse

Why Alexa is not Worthless

John thinks that Alexa is worthless but it’s not. Like a survey it’s a sample of an audience, while it may not be completely accurate, there is no other tool out there that can provide measurement across all sites as we don’t have access server analytics on all websites.

My former manager explained that analytics in themselves are pretty useless, they vary from one system to another. The rule is to follow and look for trends, patterns, spikes and valleys and how they tie to events on the websites or around the industry.

John, while it may not be very accurate (and a bit easy to manipulate) it’s not worthless, as it’s the best we have.

Playing with features on new Camera (This is not Photoshop altered)

Taken by Shirley with the new Canon PowerShot SD700 IS ($350)

This photo was not altered in photoshop, it’s a camera feature called “Color Accent”

Pretty cool, once you access the settings, a small box appears on the screen which will help you to select the color (like an eyedropper feature in photoshop)

Once you select that, any color in your photo that is close to that will appear in color, the rest won’t. Kind of like a ‘mask’ in photoshop.

I’m amazed at how camera technology changes so fast in one year. Oh, and the 2gig memory card is only $35, sheeesh. (oh, and there are no easily available Hitachi cameras I could find)

Update: This is funny, HP camera’s have a slimming effect, so anyone can look thinner than they really are.

User/Citizen/Amateur/Participant/People/Consumer created content to increase by 2010

Great article User-Generated Web Content Will Grow Rapidly Through 2010 that reports the following:

• The size of downloads/views are estimated to eclipse 1.1 exabytes of data by 2010, with uploads growing to more than 9.1 petabytes.
• 23% of the dozens of UCG sites studied currently support mobile access, with others making announcements for this support in the near future.
• YouTube holds the highest market share for video, but MySpace has the most visitors.

I heard on the Joseph Jaffe podcast that by 2010, that 50% of all media will have been created by Users. By the way, I don’t know the correct term for content created by ‘the people’ so I just said

“User/Citizen/Amateur/Citizen/People/Consumer”

Online Video and Photography: More Photowalking

I’m learning a lot about photography and watching this artist cruise around SF taking pictures. It’s neat as you can watch the video, hear his insight, and then the actual final photographs will be shown on the video

Part 1: Thomas near golden gate bridge

Part 2: He discusses some of his more advanced tactics, gets wet and crawls around on the floor like a sniper

Part 3: Night shooting the golden gate, and taking pics of people

Part 4: City shooting at night (food porn discussion too)

Online Video is going to be important, here’s why:

• It tells a unique story that text or audio can’t tell alone
• It’s engaging (but requires most or all of your attention)
• Online video can and wiill be distributed in the following vehicles
• Browser (in players)
• Mobile Devices (Like video iPod)
• TV hybrid devices (like Tivo, Slingbox)
• TV (someday, someone will create a channel that pulls in content from web, like Current TV)

Robert, I’d like to see the blue sky, not the washed out white background, is that possible? I know you’re just getting started.

More Resources

• Thomas Hawk’s Blog
• Zooomr.com (Thomas works at this photo sharing site)
• Thomas Hawk’s Zooomr photos
• Thomas Hawk’s Flickr photos
• Robert Scoble’s Blog
• Scoble Show

Dreamhost Talks to Andy and the Blogosphere Reacts

Big thanks to Dreamhost for restoring Andy’s websites, he’s coming out of hell.

You can read his horrible experience on this blog that he created in Blogger called NightmareHost.

Andy has gotten some human responses, so hopefully this will all be resolved.
Several folks blogged about it, such as myself, Julio, and Brian.

I had breakfast with Robert at a podtech session and told him how powerless Andy was, he chimed in and there was a flurry of discussion, Robert blogged about it and there are 23 comments. It seems hit and miss with dreamhost, some have problems and some do.
Robert was compared to Dreamhost using the term “Suck” (As that’s a good way to google a company or product to see how folks think of it) You can see the battle between “ScobleSucks” vs “Dreamhost” Sucks. The results: 74 Scoble, to 24,600 Dreamhost.

A potential customer turned away from Dreamhost, because he read the blog posts. Blogs impact revenue.

I don’t know if Social Media helped to pressure Dreamhost to talk to Andy again, but it’s interesting how feedback and the voice of the customer can be heard and read in near real time.

Lastly, thank you Dreamhost for restoring Andy’s service and communication to him.

Update: Josh from Steel Pixel has left a comment offering Andy and I free web hosting for two months, and also a Discount for you. This is an example of social media spreading the word (and super fast). I’m going to evaluate the offer closely.

Live Blogging From Mountain View at Podtech Breakfast

I’m sitting at PodTech’s breakfast event, it’s a focus on corporate podcasting with John Furrier, and Robert Scoble. Ran into Dave McClure, and met a lot of other interesting folks.

I’m using Google Wireless network for the first time, it asked for some authentication and pushed me to my Google/IG page. Although I’m indoors, I’m clocking about 11mbps. Here’s a few observations, pictures will go up later

• John and I had a conversation about Zune, interesting.
• I talked to Dave McClure about the blog ad model on techmeme, he’s been publishing on the oDesk blog.
• Podtech was started a year ago by John Furrier, he’d publish his interviews on his blog.
• Within a few weeks thousands of downloads were happening of his audio interviews
• Has over 30 employees
• Is ventured funded to build a media company to publish the voices and to document the valley.
• Discussions about the importance of word of mouth marketing and how social media is a big impact
• Dell support and Jeff Jarvis example, Dell didn’t look.
• Techcrunch in the early days added images, and it helped Mike to stand out of the crowd
• Podtech’s videos on the recent Acrobat (there are some wordpress errors FYI) announcement received more traffic than podcasts as videos really stand out.
• Google works by lots of linking patterns, Microsoft research showed that most folks in google results never click the ‘next’ page.
• Discussions about Second life, used for marketing purposes and even a town in east coast that re-created their city to simulate disaster planning.
• RSS is an bottom up driven technology that empowers users.
• Video can be used to demonstrate things that text is not able to convey.
• Questions:
• Q) Is videoblogging or podcasting going to get adoption levels like blogging? Each medium has it’s strengths and weaknesses
• Q) Chapters needed in video and podcast shows , A) It makes the page more complex, but there’s a wiki coming as well.
• Q) What’s the audience and traffic like A) Different audiences, John says: “Bloggers email and podcasers call”. iTunes audience is part of the PodTech listenership. It’s less techy. Most of the audience is Techie elite and early adopters. Create informational ‘info talk’. They didn’t go for the mass audience. 5 million downloads since then, and now they’ve added some metrics to find real listeners and its about half a million downloads a month. Audience is a tough subject, so they are looking for downloads. Many discussions around metrics will occur over the coming time (Jeremiah: Just because someone downloads a podcast to an iPod doesn’t mean they listen to, or if they do, how MANY times they listen to it). There are many ways to track analytics, perhaps looking for feedback. A new audience is emerging is called “tech aware”, which is more mainstream audience.
• John’s Predictions
• Niche Programing, a cross between browser, mobile, tv. Seagate is going to take advantage of this.
• Q: How is PR not scared sh*tless about blogging and pocasting A) they are, but now they have to content with it.
• Q: Audience: digitally savvy, C level, early adopters, Dual degree, and plus all of Scoble’s audience (which is about 30k subscribed a day plus visits)

Hosted at Fenwick and West

John Furrier Prepared

Greeted by Maryam Scoble

We gathered Podtech Briefing

And talked with the Xilinx Crew

“Do you have a Blog? No, I have a Blog 2.0!”

Excellent Tips: 10 Things That Will Make Or Break Your Website (plus one more)

Great summary of all the key learnings from the Future of Web Apps conference in SF, I think this is well categorized and hits many of the major points. Read and print out 10 Things That Will Make Or Break Your Website. I’d like to extend this list just slightly

1. EASY is the most important feature of any website, web app, or program
2. Visual design and copy are extremely important.
3. Open up your data as much possible.
4. Test, test, test.
5. Release features early and often.
6. Be special
7. Don’t be special.
8. If you plan on developing a successful webapp, plan for scalability
9. Watch, pay attention to, or implement right away:
10. User generated content and social software trends

I’d like to add the following:

11) Revenue. I sound evil, but it’s true, and something every investor, partner, and your father in law will ask about. As I understand it there are six potential revenue models: Advertising, Premium, Transaction, Consultation, Partnering and Acquisition. While I agree the best sites come from passion (I make no direct dollars from this passion web strategy blog) putting food on the table for your family is important.

Resources: My notes from the conference are here for day 1 and day 2, I can really appreciate the work that AUinteractive did for these top 10 points.