Startup Energy

When you have a startup it takes an enormous effort to get it going at
a velocity to make it in a market.

I've had to learn to avoid the energy sucker. Worry. Nothing does
less for yourself or your company.

Note to self. Apply all energy to opportunity and progress.

(waiting for the J)

Exchange Push Email with iPhone

The iPhone is missing push email integration with Exchange for the business user BIG time. If it had this, I'd really, really like my iPhone. Until then, it's a good consumer device, but not ready for the business all-in-one user.

Believe the Hype at HypeFly.com

This is a little plug for my brothers style blog. HypeFly rocks. I'm the first to admit, I'm not the coolest guy around, but they have twice nailed just what I was looking for. I got tired of being told that my fashion faux pas of a crew neck under a dress shirt, so I was in the market for some V necks.

Also, I was just thinking, I need some new loafers. Mine are a bit worn out.

Thinking Time

Riding the J muni is a good place to think and blog. Today, I'm
listening to "His Excellency" the biography of George Washington on my
iPhone and thinking about the best way to allocate our resources at
HubPages for our near term objectives.

And wondering where we'll find our next engineer to hire.

Parental Help

My wife is eight weeks pregnant and a bit tired. So we called in my
folks to come help us out for the week as Robin gets through the
morning sickness period.

What a tremendous help!

Startup Planning

One of the advantages of a startup is speed. When it comes to
planning and specs, they can take valuable time from development. So
we opt for broad work-items, and rely on the lead engineer to figure
out the details. This optimizes for speed.

I have also learned to put fewer items in the next release. My
suggestion is to try and shoot for monthly releases. If it takes a bit
longer, you're still OK.

Summary: Plan the strategic work at a high level. Trust engineers
to do a good job and constrain development cycles to a month.

HubPages Designer

My little brother, James, has come to intern this summer at HubPages.
I'm hoping he'll get the opportunity to improve the usability of some
of our features.

HubPages Fights Poor Content

HubPages has had to develop lots of technology to slow spam down (GigaOM). I left a similar comment on Jason's blog that if you want to prevent SEO spam, then the best thing to do is to stop the benefits. In SEO language, noindex the page (prevents google, yahoo, msn and other search bots from including the page in their index) and nofollow outbound links. SEO guys love link juice. They want a high quality link and any traffic is just a bonus.

HubPages uses a scoring system called HubScore to apply this type of system to the content. The scoring system includes direct inputs (thumbs up/thumbs down and others) and many algorithmic inputs as well. It's improving all the time, but it still represents a challenging question for open publishing systems on the best way to be open, fair, and accept the differences in the wide range of content that people want to publish.

HubPages allows all types of content to be published. Mature content is much less visible and all of the content is marked with nofollow meta tags. We also don't display mature content on all the interlinked pages that have correlated tags (you may have to browse HubPages to understand this - click one of the green tag links), but you can find it in search if you are looking for it. We thought this was the right user experience. Since we implemented it, we received many positive comments from the HubPages community.

When Squidoo allows a spam page to be visible to search engines they are allowing the search engine to decide if the page should or should not rank for search terms. If the domain becomes too polluted, the risk is that Google or any other search engine will simply stop ranking pages from the domain so all traffic is effectively cut off.

Paul Edmondson
HubPages
CEO

No Parking Sign

I think I understand what coach Durant meant when he said, "There are
football players and there are football players, and he is a football
player," after I saw a no parking sign today.

In similar words of coach Durant "There are no parking signs and there
are no parking signs, and this is a no parking sign."

I'm never going to stop telling on you

Today my daughter let me know, "I'm never going to stop telling on
you, even when I'm a grown-up." Somehow, I believe her.

Hayes Valley Patricia's Green

Wakeup Call

Who needs a 6 am wakeup call, when you have one of these?

iPhone Box

I bought an IPhone

My blackberry was having a bit of trouble so I bought an IPhone
Sent from my iPhone

Al Gore 2008

I keep thinking Gore will join the election in 2008. I hope he does. But if you caught him on Larry King, it seems unlikely.

Baby Widget

Notice the baby in the sidebar. This will track our baby due April 1, 2008. I'm not sure why it says 12 weeks old today. Since it's not due for a year. Hmmm.

Hub on Gift Ideas for Dads

My dads gift idea Hub may seem a bit grumpy, but I bet lots of fathers would agree.

My Visitors

Just testing this out. Apparently this gets a fair amount of traffic and makes good money for them. I say weak, but a possible business model for widget makers.

My 2007 NCAA Bracket Picks

Moving to HubPages

I'm going to probably post very rarely, but I will be posting more Hubs on SEO, startups, etc at HubPages. I might even move these posts over there...