Style Guidance Official Blog

Did I just catch Techcrunch astroturfing?

So I’m reading Techcrunch, and what do I see?

A story titled: Buy and Sell Proprietary Knowledge Through GenApple.

Interesting…right? So I click to read…and what do I find?

People are continually looking for new pieces of information. We go to school, read articles on a variety of subjects, have free websites such as Wikipedia, and use search answer engines such as Aardvark and Quora for the sole purpose of quenching our never-ending thirst for knowledge.

Now here is where I get a WTF moment. I can see listing Wikipedia, and Aardvark…both = knowledge and both = huge companies(established with large user base).

But Quora? Why on earth, would that be included instead of Yahoo Answers or one of the premium Q&A sites?

Here are some bits of info:

• Quora is in private beta(so you can’t even join without an invite)
• Quora only had 2725 users as of the moment I saw the article(got a 500 error on 2726), and like 99% of them are techies.
• Most questions on Quora are unanswered.
• I searched for the author’s name on Quora, and didn’t find a single mention of him(quora lets you search member names). The only guy I found from Techcrunch on Quora is MG Siegler, and he has 0 Questions and 0 Answers.

So based on that data…how does the author recommend something, without even using it?

Was there some PR Agency involved? And if so, which one, since it’s obvious they know what they are doing. Or was this just a friend helping out his friends(author and one of Quora folks went to the same school)? And if so, where is the disclaimer?

Disclaimer: I run Style Guidance a fashion and style Q&A site.

My typical day running a startup

Info: Style Guidance is basically a Q&A site for fashion and style. So basically style questions, social shopping and decision help. If you are a techie, you’ll probably hate our current design, but you aren’t the target audience(and yes we are already working on a redesign)

My day begins at 10 am, and ends at 2:30 am. That’s 16.5 hours, of being up.

For those 16.5 hours I’m mostly working. The only times I’m physically away from the computer:

• 30 minute break to eat a full supper(steak etc) in front of the TV. Give me a little time to unwind. I use one of those grilles to cook, so I just throw the meat on the grille, and go work until I hear the ding.
• 1 hour break to work out. I kinda let myself go over the last couple of months(haven’t worked out since September), so getting back in shape is my New Year’s resolution. I follow the P90X program, since it’s a good one, and doesn’t require going to the gym. All you need is some weights and a pull up bar.
• 1 hour break to watch Daily Show/Colbert Report. I know I can watch this online, but by that time my brain is more or less fried, so I gotta unwind in a more comfy chair.

That’s 14 hours of work. Poor me right? Not really, I’m actually enjoying what I’m doing, so I don’t even notice it as the day flies by. You gotta have 3 things:

• Food: I mostly stick to a sandwhich in the morning, a steak dinner at night, and a ton of junk food in the middle. Usually I run out of junk food by Monday(I shop Sundays), so Tuesday-Saturday I’m on a “diet”. The key is to drink lots of water. On my desk right now there are 12 water bottles, which accumulated since yesterday.
• Good Music: Gotta have music, I have music running 24/7. Grooveshark is awesome for that.
• Routine: the key is to have routine; mine is as follows:
  • get up at 10, check everything that accumulated over night, blast out a few messages/emails
  • ~10:30 shower/brush teeth, and prepare myself a sandwhich or some scrambled eggs
  • 11-2 work non-stop, things popup here and there write an email, ask a few questions, answer a few questions, blast off a few emails, promote the site. etc.
  • 2-3, turn on mixergy and listen to that while working(at 70%). Lots of interesting stuff, I already changed a lot of things on the site/business plan, based on things I’ve heard on there. Sometimes I pop into the comments to ask a question.
  • 3-7, work non-stop at full blast.
  • 7-7:30 relax, go watch TV, eat a steak dinner(grilles make it easy to cook)
  • 7:30-8:30 work a little bit more
  • 8:30-10:00 work out (sometimes its 43 minutes, others its 1:30)
  • 10:00-11:00 work some more
  • 11:00-12:00 Daily Show/Colbert Report. Although I do check on the site during the commercial break.
  • 12:00-02:30 Work on the actual code/features and the redesign for the next version of the site.
• Obviously in between, I do things like check HN, Techcrunch, Reddit, but it’s mostly tiny 5 minute breaks to see what’s going on in the world.

My weekends on the other hand are a lot more relaxed. That’s why I created a promotion around getting my users more active on the weekends.(they get a bonus on the weekends for asking/answering questions).

This way I can take it easy on the weekends and the users can pick up the slack.

Don’t get me wrong, I still work on the weekends, but thanks to our users, I don’t really have to. On the weekends, I usually put in 8-10 hours a day.  But I don’t really have to.

Has all this effort paid off? You tell me: we’ll be celebrating the 2 month anniversary on Monday, but we are now a top 25K site in USA according to Alexa, we have PR5 according to Google, we had 26K visitors this month and are now getting 500 people a day from SEO.

Sure it’s not much, but we aren’t a lolcat site, so it’s a little bit harder to grow. But there is plenty of time, you don’t grow a site overnight, it takes a long time to do it.

Good for Google

Here at Style Guidance, we’d like to take a moment to applaud Google and its threat to leave China as a response to recent hack­ing attempts.

It’s not every day, you see a big company put ethics above profits. And they are losing money over this, as usual Wall Street doesn’t fail to disappoint.(GOOG is down 1%).

And sure a lot of people will say “blah blah Google was losing in China”…to which I gotta say, really? Sure they weren’t #1 in China, but they still had a huge market share there, which was worth billions.

Remember that whole “if we can get 1% of China we’ll make millions?” …well Google had a lot more than 1% of China, and they are still doing this.

The Crunchies are the Kid’s Choice Awards of the startup scene.

So the latest Crunchies just ended yesterday, and as usual everyone is pissed. How the hell did THEY win?

You can probably say that for every winner(except Dropbox), but the biggest I’ve seen, are in regards to “Best social app: Zynga’s Farmville” and “Best CEO: Marc Pincus of Zynga”….I mean here we have a company that Techcrunch spent over a month blasting for scamming millions out of their users…and then they picked them as one of the top 6 choices(users don’t pick these, they just vote for the picks). The other complaints were to Bing and Facebook winning best new startup or product(if you read the original 2007 TC post, it just talked about startups, not products with millions in the development costs). And I’m sorry, but if you are the #1 company in your space, you are no longer a startup.

And yes everyone will blame Techcrunch, but the biggest reason why this happens every year, is because the people voting, are usually not the ones who follow the startup scene. So in the end it’s just a big popularity contest. The biggest name wins. I mean how else do you explain that Zynga CEO beat out Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh for CEO of the year? One built a company on “scamming” his users into signing them up for rebills, and hoping not to get banned by Facebook, and the other built his company on top notch customer service, which he then sold to Amazon for a large chunk of money. Which do we really want to encourage? What does it say about the startup community, if we actively reward this sort of behavior?

Why don’t we nominate Stephen Colbert for best CEO while we are at it? Chances are he’ll probably win it too.

And this will continue to happen every year, because the Crunchies are user voted(just like Kid’s Choice Awards). So the most popular name always wins(9/10 at least).

Don’t get me wrong, Crunchies are a good idea, but I think the startup scene has grown enough for us to have an Oscars type event too. Something, where winners are picked by the people who live and breathe startups, not a 14 year old who followed a link from a game about farming. Maybe then, we won’t have “startup” winners, who have more users than 99% of countries in the world.

There are two ways I can see we can do this.

• American Idol model - select 10-20 tech bloggers and have them pick all the winners. They should know the tech scene, and hopefully public scrutiny will stop them from picking the biggest companies, just so that they can improve their contacts with insiders at those companies.
• Oscars model - where you’ll have ~1000-2000 startup CEOs making their picks. Once again, these are the people who know the tech scene, and can see how ridiculous it is, labeling Facebook a startup.

So we’ll have two events. The Crunchies with their Kid Choice Awards voting model, and the Starties with the alternative model. Let the best award show win.

Few people I can think of who can pull this off:

• Paul Graham…knows tons of startup people, has a lot of respect in the community…great way to grow the YC brand/recognition.
• Andrew Warner…knows tons of founders and CEOs, also ton of respect in the community, great way to grow Mixergy brand.
• Ron Conway…knows tons of startup people, ton of respect, great way to grow the brand

Pretty much anyone who knows a ton of entrepreneurs, and has a lot of respect in the community can most likely put something like this together.

Your guide to fact checking website traffic claims

Every now and then I see a story, where the reporter just repeats the traffic numbers that were given to them by the company.

You even have to deal with this when you market your site….I even had to deal with this myself, when I was promoting Style Guidance. About 1 in 5 blogs that we contacted, would get back to us trying to get us to pay $250-$500 for posts. Now that’s just not something that we do, but what’s interesting is that all of these blogs, that tried to get us to pay, claimed b.s. traffic numbers. They’d claim 3,000-5,000 visitors a day, when all data showed they had at most ~100(had Alexa rank of 1.5-2 million).

So here is a quick guide, to quickly find out whether or not the site’s quoted numbers are real.

Your first step is to download the Search Status firefox addon. What this will do is add to your browser three little boxes. 1 that tells you the site’s Google Page Rank, 1 that tells you the site’s Alexa rank, and 1 that tells you the Compete rank. The whole point of this is to get all the pieces of the puzzle, to figure out the site’s traffic.

Page Rank: This tells you, the site’s quality. Why? Because Page Rank mostly measures the quantity and the quality of the inbound links. And since Page Rank is trickled down, the higher the Page Rank, the better the quality of sites that linked to it. Here is my break down:

• Page Rank 0……this usually means that the site is either brand new(just launched), and Google hasn’t updated their page rank yet(they do it every 3-4 months), or that the site is dead.
• Page Rank 1-3…these are fairly easy to get, all you need is a few minor bloggers to talk about you..or a few dozen mentions on a bunch of forums.
• Page Rank 4……this pretty much separates the men from the boys. This is the part where you actually have to work for it…approach bloggers etc.
• Page Rank 5……This is pretty much where most “actual” sites on the internet reside. It’s not that easy to get, but if you give it time and a lot of effort you can reach it.
• Page Rank 6…..This you gotta earn. In most cases you need coverage from PR7+ sites….which are pretty rare by themselves. Pretty much this ranking is reserved for the top sites in their niche.(unless it’s some major publication)
• Page Rank 7,8,9,10 - these are more or less reserved for the most popular sites. You need a ton of coverage, and a ton of links. I’ll give you some examples:
  
  • Page Rank 7 - YCombinator - their site gets covered all over. Weekly links from major tech blogs. Coverage from major news sites(WSJ, CNN). Links from hundreds of startups they’ve funded. Yet they are only a PR7.
  • Page Rank 8 - Reddit/Digg - you know these right? The sites that have their widgets on 99% of the sites on the planet. Yet they are only a PR8.
  • Page Rank 9 - Facebook/Twitter - that’s right, the biggest sites on the planet, don’t even have PR10. Or here is another good example…the official White House website…that’s right Google considers CNN(PR10) more important than the President of United States.
  • Page Rank 10 - Official site of United States, Yahoo.com, CNN….the number of PR10 sites is very small

Alexa - the Alexa ranking is a good way to see how your site ranks with the rest of the world. It’s not that concrete, but you can get at least some idea of the site’s traffic. Now the early data is based on my site’s own numbers, and the letter is gleamed from some quick Google searches. Note: a lot of people think Alexa is just stats from the Alexa toolbar, apparently that is no longer true as of Nov, 2008. My breakdown is as follows:

• ~2,000,000 - ~50 people a day
• ~1,000,000 - ~200 people a day
• ~500,000    - ~400 people a day
• ~250,000    - ~500 people a day
• ~150,000    - ~1,000 people a day
• ~100,000    - ~2,000 people a day
• ~50,000      - ~3,000 people a day
• ~3,000        - ~40,000 people a day

These are just estimates. The Alexa # by itself is pretty much worthless. But it can give you a ballpark of where the site ranks. If someone with a rank of 5,000 tells you they are getting 250,000 users a day….well you know they are probably not telling the truth.

Compete: - I don’t personally use compete since it takes a while for them to update their rankings. Alexa tends to update theirs daily. I don’t think anyone actually uses compete to cite data, since it’s not real time.

Next what you need is some graphs. Why? Because they’ll tell you the real story. I like Quantcast.com since they give you a lot of extra data. But they do tend to focus on the more established sites, so you won’t see it for all sites.

But the graphs are useful to catch PR b.s. I’ll give you an example…today(yesterday) TC covered beautifulpeople.com, and how they supposedly kicked out 5,000 people for being fat( kinda what got me to write this up).

You go to their site and you’ll see that they have a PR of 5 and an Alexa Ranking of 16K. Both good stats, but once you check the graph, you see the true story. We see that the site, which has been around since 2001, has been pretty much dead until a small spike in October. And a huge spike in December. So all of that high “traffic” is temporary, and most likely due to some PR drive.

So as you can see, you can use a lot of these tools, to fact check, the site’s claims.

P.S. I know most of this stuff is quite simple, but a lot of people don’t know how to do this.

2 Months Since we entered private beta.

Just so I don’t lose the date. This is just a reminder to myself, that we entered private beta on November 4th. So today marks a 2 month anniversary.

What bloggers need is a union.

I was reading the article about how bloggers need to protect their sources even from gov’t subpoenas. And what bloggers need is a union/association.

Just a disclaimer, I don’t count myself as a blogger, this blog is just a way to bs a little about general things, and once in a while give updates about the site. So consider this a post from an unbiased position.

Anyways, bloggers and unions. The reason bloggers roll over and play dead whenever they get asked to reveal sources, is because blogging is by it’s nature doesn’t make that much money. Even the top 1% of bloggers only make enough to make ends meet. The big blogs like Techcrunch with millions in revenue are pretty much outliers.

So when you get asked to reveal your sources, you really can’t expect to fight it legally, since you don’t have the money for it. And as long as bloggers give up sources, blogging will never be considered real media. Because real media protects their sources. They have huge legal teams to fight any lawsuit or gov’t inquiry, so that they only have to reveal their sources only when the court orders them to.

So to gain legitimacy, bloggers should band together and start a union/association.

I don’t mean a union where you strike unless Adsense gives you all $5 CPM. No…what I mean is a union that makes it easy for bloggers to put their resources together.

Bloggers would pay $40-60 a month, and in exchange the union will give them legal help. Legal help would be provided from donations(monthly drives where every blogger puts up the please donate to the union promo), membership fees and some lawyer bloggers volunteers

Think of it as ACLU for bloggers.

Obviously there’ll need to be some extra perks and benefits, maybe a union wide subscription to istockphoto, maybe a database of contacts, maybe a guest post exchange program, maybe discounted health insurance offers…basically you have to make that subscription worth it, even if you never need legal help.

Of course this union can’t and shouldn’t accept everyone willy nilly. If it did, you’d have all the scammers paying $40 to get free legal advice, for the next time their Acai Berry Flog gets sued. So the union would have to develop an approval process that only lets real blogs in and kicks people who break the rules out. The rules should stay really simple too, you don’t want to censor people. The rules should just be aimed at the flogs and blogs who promote illegal things.

This would have to be a world wide association, because it’s usually the bloggers outside the United States that need the most help. And if they have protection from the union, it’d be that much harder to silence them.

So here is the idea, it should probably be spearheaded by one of the larger blogs, to give it some legitimacy.

So get on it…

Why do people continue to sack ride twitter?

I just read Vivek’s post on Techcrunch titled Twitter and Me! Why It’s The Only Social Media Tool I Use. and I figured, I’d give my two cents.

Twitter sucks. There is too much noise, too little quality, and if you are a business, the engagement time is non-existent. Putting all your eggs in that one basket is insane. You gotta diversify.

But for now let’s focus on twitter. Let’s explore it further.

1. Noise - right now I’m only following 24 people(That number used to be higher, but I got tired of being spammed by people like Guy Kawasaki, who puts out something like 400-500 tweets a day). And even now, important messages get lost in the noise. I had to go as far as create a list for a single person, because that was the ONE person from whom I actually wanted to hear(and the only reason that works, is because I’m using TweetDeck which alerts me when there is activity in the list).

2. Low Quality - twitter is the land of spammers and bloggers. I’d say 99% of people using twitter now, are those who have something to pitch(a product, a blog, a service). Hey..I’m no different, I didn’t even register for twitter myself, until I needed to start promoting Style Guidance. The problem is, that Twitter ranks all messages the same. 10 messages in a 5 minute period, back to back from Guy Kawasaki, rank just as high as a single message from someone who posts once a day.

3. It sucks for business - the engagement time is non-existent! Anyone who follows a business twitter account, will probably be following hundreds if not thousands of other accounts. So your all important tweet will ALWAYS get lost in the noise.

I’ll give you an example…I got my site tweeted by someone with 12K followers. It was glowing praise, and urged people to check the site out. It wasn’t even someone who spams a ton of crappy tweets, this was a person who always puts out quality stuff. He is actually the person for whom I created his own list, so that I didn’t miss any of his tweets.

And do you know how much traffic I got from this glowing praise? 8 clicks. Out of 12,000 followers. How is that for user engagement? Sure if the guy spammed tweets every 5 minutes, that number would be higher, but that’s the whole point! The only way to succeed on twitter from posting updates, is to spam the crap out of everyone.

The only other way to make twitter work for business, is to do what Gary Vaynerchuk(@garyvee) does. Let people @message you, and then engaging them with advice one on one. I actually used that myself a week or so ago…asked him what wine to buy, then got into the car, and drove to Wine Library to buy it.

However, that’s also the reason I don’t follow Gary. Why? Because if I do, my stream would be filled with Gary’s conversations with other people.

I mean let’s be honest here, did 847,000 of Gary’s followers, really care that Gary recommended me to buy wine X? No. But 847,000 followers of his, got to read all about it anyways.

Some Suggestions:

Twitter really needs to make it easier for people to filter out the more active users. And yes I know we can always un follow them, but there is usually one or two gems in that stream of tweets, that you shouldn’t really be forced to miss.

So here are a few suggestions on how to improve twitter, to make it easier to use for regular folks:

1. @Name for example…why exactly are we supposed to hit that to find out if anyone mentioned us? How hard is it to code a counter next to @username so you can know there are new mentions, without hitting that link. Those @username posts are usually important, why isn’t twitter making it easier to find them?

2. Direct Messages, good idea…but why does the thing show all messages, without telling us the # of unread ones? Why am I supposed to always keep in mind that I had ### DMs yesterday, and today I have ### +1….which means I have 1 new one. How about having it say: Direct Messages:   20(3) with 3 being the # of unread ones? How hard can it be?

3. Let us pick who we want in our homepage stream. All twitter accounts aren’t equal, why should someone like Guy Kawasaki who puts out a torrent of tweets rank higher in my stream than someone who puts out one per day? Let us give priority to people, so that any truly important message, gets featured at the top. Let us select specific twitters which we want to show up at the top of our stream.

Twitter could be so much more, but right now it seems like Twitter is perfectly content with letting all the developers do their work for them with the API. The problem with that, is that the only people who use those products by other developers, are the active users. Regular folks who decide to give twitter a try, never hear about that, find the site completely useless, and never come back.

Happy New Year!

Yes I know New Year, is still about 12 hours away for the East Coast of United States, but it’s already 2010 in China…so on behalf of http://styleguidance.com we’d like to wish you a Happy New Year.

Google just updated their page rank…we are now PR5

Thanks to all the sites that linked to us!