TechCrunch is breaking the news that Conde Nast (big media company) is acquiring Reddit.com (little technology company). Print media is struggling as readership for newspapers and magazines is declining, and consumers are finding new and more engaging content providers. Don’t count these big media conglomerates out without a fight. At first glance, they may not appear to be nimble, tech savvy players, but they still employ some of the smartest people in the world and have deep, deep pockets.

Magazines have few places left to go but online, and this news proves that they are already on the move. As soon as I heard the Reddit news, I pinged my friend at Conde Nast to get his thoughts. He hadn’t heard of the Reddit or the acquisition, but immediately sent my to Lipstick.com. It would seem that although he hadn’t heard of Reddit, he was very familiar with Reddit given that the Lipstick interface looks almost identical to Reddit’s (and if you scroll to the bottom, Lipstick is in fact, Reddit).

Conde Nast, the unlikely Disruptor. Buying Reddit is telling the world that Conde Nast can play. The fact that Lipstick.com is live, and has been for some time, is signaling that there’s more to this acquisition than meets the eye. bk

Hello everybody!

Great posts and comments, I too would like to initiate the thread where it would be great to share some of the development and management experience.

Some of the major statements that we’re building our typical development day structure around are:

• There are limited types of tasks in development
• Pure-coding time a day usually is not more than 4-6 hours a day
• In order for people not to use Internet in-office for off-development needs, at the same time exchange experience and share experience between each other, also in order to protect intellectual property of project being development and not allow code leaking some specific activities and techniques need to be in the IT companies that I’ll be describing

I’ll be commenting and adding several times a week, so please feel free to look into this thread if anybody is interested.

See you all later!

Oleg

It’s Monday and I’m back in New Orleans after spending the end of last week at the Blog Business Summit (BBS) in Seattle. First, I would highly recommend BBS for people who are thinking about blogging, or for those who have just started blogging. Overall, I didn’t find as much value as I would have liked, I had to dig for it, but it was there. The second day was much better for me than the first day because of Robert Scoble, John Battelle and the Future of Blogging panel (the last session of the conference with Elizabeth Lawley and Matt Mullenweg).

Scoble did a session with his wife titled, “10 Ways to a Killer Blog.” Nothing incredibly insightful here, but their presentation was interesting and organized. They did this whole newly-wed schtick that kept things lively. I’ll dig out my notes and post the 15 (he gave us 5 bonus) ways to a killer blog.

Battelle was great. I’ve seen him speak a few times before, and he brings so much energy and experience to his talks that you can’t help but hang on every word. He told us a lot about himself, and his company, Federated Media, but his most interesting stuff was when he analyzed the evolution of the Web.

I was completely tired by the end of the my second day at BBS, but since Mullenweg was speaking at the end, I decided to stick around. To my surprise, Elizabeth Lawley stole the show. She started her talk by proclaiming that she was a member of the intelligencia and not a tech head (although I beg to differ). The panel was about considering what’s to come in the future, and she had several examples of what she was betting on for the future. Her coolest example was from Microsoft and how they are designing special lenses for cell phones that can scan bar codes. A scanned bar code and the product that it’s associated with can then be searched using global positioning and price comparisons to find the nearest, best price.

In the end, like I said before, I would highly recommend BBS for people just getting started. For someone like me, who gets this whole blogging thing and went seeking concrete take-aways to bring back to my business, BBS may not have been for you this year. Like with all conferences, networking was good, and Seattle was a cool city. This conference could have been much better if they would have assigned moderators to the sessions. Too often, discussions devolved into conversations about the panelists and not the topic that the session title implied.

We are currently in the process of importing data into SiteMighty from our first affiliate partner. We need to get data into it so that we have affiliate offers for our beta users to build their sites around and start marketing. We are starting with what we know, credit cards, because we have been in the business for years, and as the old adage goes: do what you know.

Naturally this isn’t easy, and we’re only at our first affiliate network partner. We hope to have hundreds, and we want to develop a very open format for SiteMighty to read and understand the data about the various affiliate offers that an affiliate network has. One of the most complicating part of it is developing the data structure for creating the affiliate link URL because this contains so much data. It has data about the offer, the affiliate marketer, the hit itself, the marketing campaign and the referring site…. phew, its making my head spin. But, we’ve got the structure, and thanks to Oleg and his team, we’ve devised what I think is a very elegant solution that will make it simple for us to build all sorts of different affiliate links incorporating whatever data we need to feed to the affiliate network.

So, before this gets too boring or I reveal all the secrets about the nuts and bolts of siteMighty, let’s get to the point:

Building an API enhances the value of your site because you can accept data feeds and people will find ways to mashup and extend your service, and the best part is, you provide the standards, other people build it.

But there are hard and fast rules of an API, and it is important to keep these in mind:

1. Never break your API – This means you’ve got to set standards upfront and build flexibility and paths for growth into it from the get go.
2. Keep it simple – skip the bells and whistles, just get the data you need in
3. Build it planning for updates - I mentioned this above, but the worst thing you can do is break it and force people to rewrite their apps.

• There are some great resources on blogs out there about API’s.

This is the first one we’ve built and it is a critical part of SiteMighty, but it is fun learning as we go. I’ll keep people updated as we keep things moving on this project. If anyone has any comments on building an API or helpful links, we’d love to know your thoughts.

PS: We’re going to be extending invitations to the SiteMighty closed beta test soon. If you are interested, please head here and sign up for an invite.

Just wanted to let everyone know that I’m traveling to the Blog Business Summit in Seattle tomorrow through Friday. It looks like it’s going to be really good. John Batelle is speaking, as well as Robert Scoble, Chris Pirillo, Matt Mullenweg and more. There are also attendees from some major players on the Internet, and in the blog world.

I plan to blog as much as I can from the conference. Check back the rest of this week for updates from Seattle! bk

There is some buzz building around the muni wifi project in New Orleans. Is there news here or not? Well, there may not anything breaking, but there is a certain amount of momentum building around the story.

We are excited to welcome Earthlink to New Orleans as a muni wifi provider. Over the next few months New Orleans will be transitioning from a wifi network erected by the city post-Katrina to a wifi network that Earthlink is currently deploying around New Orleans. This is great for New Orleans as it will offer two tiers of paid wifi service at below current market rates for DSL and cable. Additionally, Earthlink will continue to offer the free wifi that has been offered to everyone in the French Quarter and the CBD since Katrina. Earthlink says it will offer the free layer of wifi is temporarily while the city is rebuilding. Let’s hope that it follows through on this commitment as experts predict the rebuilding will last 5 to 10 years.

The free layer of wifi access is a critical component to the goodwill that Earthlink has received from us and many others. It would be a wonderful thing to offer free wifi (albeit equivalent to dialup speeds), subsidized by the paid services, to New Orleanians as long as the company can. This is a city with very low internet connectivity and large poor communities. I feel that the commitment to free access, as long as it lasts, is the reason that I will select Earthlink as my network connection. I am happy to subsidize internet access for people who can’t afford to get online, and I want Earthlink to know that the goodwill that I’ve extended them is based on the commitment to free access. Even though the free access has always been deemed temporary, according to Earthink, we have free access right now, and a socially responsible business model is something that a lot of people in this community can get behind. Keep it around as long as possible guys.

New Orleans Wifi Reading Primer (please add more links in the comments):

• Earthlink Press Release on Wifi Build Out
• Dave Coustan’s blog posts relating to New Orleans Wifi
• New Orleans Times Picayune’s article about unplugging the free WiFi network
• Gambit Weekly’s article about Greg Meffert’s (former New Orleans CIO) boat
• Gigaom’s coverage of New Orleans Wifi
• Dave Coustan’s clarification of the current uproar

A recent Naked Conversations blog post talks about a teacher in Scotland who is disrupting the public school system there.

“Here’s a guy who came up through the public school system and one would think he would be an enforcer of administrative policy. Instead he is a disruptor and he is inserting social media into the Scottish school system.”

This is what I love about Disruptors, how they change things in a big way and for a very long time. Like the post says, imagine the types of citizens these kids will become already being so well versed in communications with peers in their school and around the world. Never before has a generation been so connected to other members of their generation who live all around the world. Talk about ripples.

If you have a comment, question or suggestion about a particular post, we encourage you to comment on the blog. If you would like to contact us personally, feel free to send us an e-mail at one of the following addresses:

Chris Schultz, President: cschultz [at] voodooventures [dot] com

• Chris Schultz
• Voodoo Ventures, LLC
• cschultz@voodooventures.com
• 757 St. Charles Ave. – Suite 301
• New Orleans, LA, 70130
• USA
• 504-581-6446
• entrepreneur new orleans
• This hCard created with the hCard creator.

siteMighty

siteMighty is content management solution for affiliate Web sites. Sites powered by siteMighty have clean user interfaces, with a powerful backend management system that enables clients at all levels (from novice to advanced developer) to easily create and maintain an affiliate Web site.

Find-A-CreditCard.com

Find-A-CreditCard.com is an affiliate Web site for credit card applications built on the siteMighty platform. Every element on the site (from navigation to content) is controlled from a powerful backend management system.

Huckabuck

HuckaBuck.com is a metasearch interface that takes the words you type into its search box, and queries Google, Yahoo!, and MSN simultaneously to deliver results more relevant than those from a single engine. Tune your results using the Search Tuner! Huckabuck was acquired in October 2006. We know it has found a great home with its new owners!

Bliggy Bank

Bliggy Bank is quite simply a piggy bank for blogs. It’s an application that enables bloggers to accept donations on their blogs.

In most respects, we are experts at siteMighty functionality, but there are some new territories we are entering as we develop an interface for the masses. We believe that interfaces and software, for the most part, should be dead simple. So, interacting with siteMighty should be easy and intuitive, but the easier we make it for our users, the harder our job becomes. As with most things, though, it all comes down to common sense (or at least our common senses).

Think of siteMighty the same way you think about blogging software (i.e. Wordpress, Blogger, etc.). siteMighty is a platform on which affiliate marketing sites can be built, and because every site can’t look the same, we have to offer templates to meet the differing tastes and needs of our users. The first thing we’ve realized is that although our templates need to be highly designed (look really great), they also need to appeal to a broad range of tastes. At first this seemed like a monumental task, but then we realized that truly attractive templates will appeal to most everyone.

How do we make our templates beautiful?

We start by standardizing design. We like to keep things simple, so each template basically has three elements: a header, navigation menu & body of the page. With siteMighty the only things that change substantially from template to template are the headers. Over the top of the headers, users are able to name their sites and create taglines (slogans) for their sites. This is simple text that is dropped on top of the header, so in standardizing the design, we need to figure out which font will look the most attractive, including the size and color of the font. We also have to decide where the name and slogan should be placed on the header. Should they be centered, or aligned to the left, or to the right for that matter? These are decisions that we are making on behalf of our users. While in most cases limiting choice is a bad thing, we feel that limiting the options for the user helps them get what we’re offering and feel comfortable when first experiencing the interface. This also helps us because an easy system encourages users to keep using our application.

Making sense. Our rules for design.

Offering a rich user experience means that the user is going to face a barrage of options in the application, but there are levels of priority that the user approaches in dealing with things that need to be dealt with right away and over-and-over, and those things that need to be accessed once in a while. What the heck am I talking about? Here an example to help clarify my point:

Cookie crumb navigation: Also called bread crumb navigation, this is a series of links that offer a point of reference for the user when they are in the application. For instance, you navigate from the home page, to the about us page, to the contact us page. The cookie crumbs would look like this: Home > About Us > Contact Us. This is an important element, but not something that needs to scream at the user. Therefore, we make it small, and use light colors (usually gray).

The bottom line is that we don’t need or want bells and whistles and animations to make our interface successful. We just need things to make sense. In siteMighty, you see a link, you know it’s a link and you know where that link will take you before you click it. Also, you know what’s important and what’s less important at a glance.

This still seems like an introduction. I’ll get some screenshots together and post more examples of what we’re talking about here. bk