I’ll start here: Big. Impressive. People. People. More People.

I’ll need all day to debrief and go through the materials that I gathered, and then will make an update.

Related articles

• NY Tech Day 2013
• NY approves Cornell Tech’s applied sciences campus on Roosevelt Island
• There’s an app for everything – NY Tech Day 2013

Thur, April 25 – NY Tech Day
Wed, May 1 – Client Meeting (2:00)
Tues, May 7 – NY Tech Meetup
Fri, May 17 - NYC Uncubed

I’ve shared this same frustration in the past where I was working on a project and we decided step was to increase traffic by buying traffic through some networks that do this sort of arbitrage work.

These stories first center around some “suspect” content networks that are being credited with millions of page views a month. Good for them? Well the issue is that they really are not very sites and the fact that they are related though a central publishing group makes you question are there really users going to the site and generating clicks.

The problem that crosses the line is when these page views generate millions of page view X multiple ad units per page. When these numbers get tallied the revenue estimates for these sites again reach into the $millions.

Here are the stories:

• Meet the Most Suspect Publishers on the Web – The rise of ghost sites, where traffic is huge but humans are few.
• Alphabird, Digimogul: Tell Us Who’s Behind the Botnet - The CEO of Spider.io speculates on who is behind a massive Web fraud effort
• Spider released data on a new bot network dubbed Chameleon that Spider believes is costing advertisers $6 million a month.

My personal feeling is that traffic buying strategy should be an act of last resort or only used as a primary strategy if you absolutely need to generate traffic today (even that raises concerns of finding a better plan). Our experience is that if you find the wrong vendors they can serve you up the equivalent of traffic-crack where all your traffic loves your sponsored links. From there management loves the spike in revenue, and you’re stuck with no proven strategy that will maintain that new revenue.

I remember the addition of one vendor that caused our query traffic to go through the roof for “Rolex Watches;” suddenly, the whole world wanted a Rolex, and they were clicking on the top ad link for more data. You know it can’t be true, but – Cha-ching! — management loved it and the biggest issue became swapping in a plan to ween ourselves from the purchased traffic and that provided us sustained organic traffic. We were able to pull this off, but it took 4-6 months, which is not surprising for good content and SEO to get recognized, and many “trust me, this is better notes” to the people upstairs.

Related articles

• Massive botnet costs advertisers millions, but hackers may not be to blame
• Botnet defrauds advertisers of £4m per month, may be run by publishers
• Massive bot network is draining $6 million a month from online ad industry, says report – paidContent

This week Yahoo’s new CEO came out against her Yahoo people telecommuting and started to initiate steps to bring them back to the office or find somewhere else to work. This is the part that hurts, I think she is right. Mostly. The mostly part is the equivalent to the classic non-committal: “It depends.”

In this case it depends on the job role. Even the biggest cave-dwelling introvert should know that spending time around people in order to hear their daily issues or to have someone to bounce ideas off of will lead to more “aha!” moments, either for you or for someone else that may be on the brink of a big breakthrough. If you haven’t experienced this, then I would argue that you are missing your big moment

Now, here is where I need to drop in a counter-argument, but like most discussions I have – a conversation in my head, because no one else is around — Survey Says: Telecommuters Happier, Healthier, Better Balanced.

Honestly, I think this survey is all well and good, but if I were the Big Company then I would have to say: I’m glad you’re happier, healthier and better balanced, but where’s my game-changing idea.

One of my telecommuting benefits that I have been able to work into roles is that I have give my employers proximity to New York City conferences and clients that would not have been possible. This should also apply to working on projects with companies in NYC, but so far none have seen the benefit of farming out a project and letting me split time between the main office to research and collaberate and my cave where I can bear down and generate results without the daily commute and office interruptions.

Related articles

• Telecommuting Isn’t the Villain, at Yahoo or Anywhere
• Did a Long Commute Lead You to Pursue Small Business Ownership?

Hakia Challenge

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve seen a re-hash of Bing’s Bing It On challenge where they show side-by-side results with Google and give you one search box. They then ask you to vote on which is best.

Seems similar. Yes, back when I was at Hakia we tried a similar “Challenge” in 2007 as shown in this blog post from Profy. It appears that the Challenge page is down now.

The biggest differences in Bing’s campaign vs Hakia’s is not the search technology; in fact, the inclusion of Powerset’s semantic search technology from their acquisition in 2008 probably makes the technologies very similar. The big difference is ca$h money. Hakia never would have had the budget to promote this type of program.

The other interesting thing I saw in researching this is that there really is no best search results when you get to this level. Results are too subjective and how the user interprets them is really determined by how they search (vague vs detail) and whether they have sense of what they are searching for.

Recently in trying to set-up a WordPress test blog on my lap-top, I found myself using Google frequently for getting help with each next step. What I learned was to start extremely detailed by constructing queries that included all the key differentiators. For instance, this would be my starting point: “upload wordpress photo xampp OSX” (Google | Bing) Grade the results: Maybe even, but it is tough to answer until I read each page to see if it answers my next step.

However, if you keep is simple, like “Red Sox” (Google | Bing) then it comes down to why you searched: news, score, general website, etc. They seem about the same.

Realize that I’m going all in, since I am was always a IBM/Windows user probably based on my former job with Big Blue.  Since getting my iPhone 4 years ago, we have added newer iPhones and an iPad, so it only seems natural to take the path of least resistance and to make them all work together.  This means that since I have also been looking to expand my central storage, a new Apple Time Capsule is also on order.

I’ll keep you updated.

An iKid

So what do you know about good UI? I know one little monster that is glad that the Apple people made life easy for her. In the side picture, she is pictures on the plane going to visit family in Florida about a week after her fourth birthday and , yes, she is playing on an iPhone.

It would be cool (check that, scary) to say that she booked her own flight, but we’re not ready for bringing that up, but she did utter these words on that trip: “you can get it at the Apple app store. Mama, what’s an apple app?”

However, she is very comfortable grabbing an iDevice in the house and scrolling the screens until she finds the photo gallery to look at pictures of herself or her Olivia app, who is a little piglet that also likes to look at pictures of herself.

Friends had suggested around Christmas about getting one of the other new kid-targeted tablets that had come on the market, but the one fear in introducing one of these is understanding the UI and how early frustration can make-or-break whether she would use it. Now, full disclosure, the fear of understanding the UI was about me. I knew that I would be the person that had to set it up and download the apps for this new device, so my first thought was that it had to be easier just to set up the retired iPhone 3. This isn’t an everyday toy for her, but it has certainly worked for longer trips.

In a session “Publishing for Social Media” Jim Bankoff, Chairman & CEO of SB Nation, discussed using social media to drive traffic to generate revenue. It could have been 2005 at AOL where Jim’s content team passed that same message to those of us on the search team. The goal then was to use search to drive traffic to higher CPM pages. Now just change “search” to “mobile” and the story is the same

The first of the two videos is from Rishad Tobaccowala, Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer, VivaKi. He spoke about The People Network and the top piece of advice from him when it comes to working with new technologies is to use them.

The other video is along the same path — it’s not a case study, but it goes more to approach. This is from Adam Kmiec, Director of Social Media at Walgreen’s. He discusses choosing partnerships, asking your agency “explain”, and look for a wow factor that can separate your program from your competitors. He cited Walgreen’s program to donate a flu shot for every Foursquare check-in and how that beat CVS to the punch.

Video:
Rishad Tobaccowala, Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer at VivaKi
Adam Kmiec, Director of Social Media at Walgreens

Related articles

• Walgreens Donates Flu Shots Via Foursquare, Facebook (clickz.com)
• What Does It Take To Be a Social Strategist? [INFOGRAPHIC] (mashable.com)

Today’s Mobile event was split into two sections.  The morning focused more on using mobile as a platform to build brand and the afternoon’s program was called “Mobile Apps.”  It focused more on the business of building apps and using them in your online model.

The one lesson that came out of the afternoon apps session is that the most important thing an app developer can do to get in the top 10 is to be in the top 10.  Because Apple promotes the top 10 in each category the most important move to make is to get into the top 10 because it is so difficult to dislodge an app from the list.

Related articles

• Mobile Apps Economy [Infographic] (trak.in)

Even with some major heat inside the 69th Regiment Armory, the event seemed like a big success.  I was lucky to meet with some good people from groups like Proclivity Systems, Figment.com, 33across, and EveryDay Health, and hope to have some future follow-up.