When you have .net, you need to market your site with .net on it, else all the traffic meant for you is going to go to .com.
Perfect example is Box.net - they have made .net as part of the branding.
Great site, well designed, neat. Concept is good. But I wonder how you can/should sustain the avg readers/writer's interest to come back to your site again and again. I love Scribd's ePaper viewer, and I believe you can add that to your site as well. Providing a pdf download should be optional and should be upto the creator to let people download. Scribd viewer lets people stay on the site, and then you can throw related essays, related categories, etc outside the reading pane! Build a community around the writings. If I were a writer, and am willing to publish my writing free on your platform, (at least) I would like to create a following around my writing. Letting people download the PDFs doesn't solve much purpose.
Is this your website statistics or a general stats? Because it makes sense if YOU are getting that many hits from IE6. Depending on type of biz you are in, say a modern web2.0 app, most likely the user at other end is little savvier than a user locked in IE6 jail.
Hmmm... I have! I admit.
Well no v1agra :-)
Just that VistaPrints spams like crazy with their 500 bizcards for $9.99 deal, and I have bought clicking on that ...
If you haven't, you might want to as well...
Thanks - I would like to hear form you, and from anyone else, who has been able to successfully break away from Google, Amazon etc to go on their own, esp early stage companies. Once you are known, and (may be) a popular site, then sponsors will flock to you.
Additional thoughts: you can be successful selling a vitamin, but can't convert success to $$ (think Facebook & Twitter again). At the same time, not all famous pain-killers are easily translated to monetary success! Think youtube (they killed the pain of online video), but where is the moolah?
Many smartphones will allow you to attach an image to an addrbook entry, use it to consciously! Everytime you call and recv a call, you will see the name+img together - so you can associate name with a img and vice versa!
Didn't they read/listen the "Free" book by 'Chris Anderson' (posted here on HN few days back)? Who will pay to read the news? Who will pay to read the blogs? I feel sorry for the news site and the business in general, but I am afraid this strategy isn't going to work. Will be happy to be proven wrong!
In fact donation may work even better!
Totally love the fact that, you have enabled login with yahoo/google/facebook/openID - that pretty much covers 99% of the people!
Overall great site... though somewhat Hunch'ish!
I personally think the outsourcing is quite ineffective for a startup. Early on, the companies (usually few founders/hackers) go through a lot of design discussions, architecture, feature prioritization, whiteboarding - do you think that kind of synergy is possible with outsourced model? I don't!
I once had David Pogue on my twitter, becuase I reallly loved his talk at EG conference. But took him off in about 2 weeks. I just hated his rate of tweets. It wasn't all that inane tweets (lunch dinner)... but c'mon.. go easy man!
May be, don't die on Jan 1st as well. People are in hangover, and party mood in general. They don't want a party-pooper! However, if you want to be born (again!) on Jan 1st, you are most welcome ... join the party!
Is it just me, or everyone feels the same about when someone hands over a business card with an aol.com address on it? Almost feels like, you don't want to do business with this pre-historic animal!
Designers/film-makers use it a lot to draw attention to particular subject, such as the all B&W except the girl in red coat depicted in Schindler's list was perfect example.
They didn't talk about Frremium on iPhone apps. In my opinion, that's a classic freemium model to pull in the crowd by the free app, and later sell the (pro) paid app. AdMob reported that, this model really works to get traction to your paid app.
I am not concerned about AAPL or any cool products it makes. To me, Jobs is a visionary, and embodies what the company preaches "Think Different"! And agree with someone said here, his medical condition is his private matter, and we should respect that.
Start attending meetups on meetup.com, there is a lot of interesting things happening on there. You can get connected to a lot of like-minded people, and take it from there.
If you write your skillsets and interests in general, I know a few folks in my circle are looking for hackers to join their venture, so I can connect up.
Preaching 'College is a waste of time' and dropping out of college makes you a Facebook founder, isn't healthy! If you are studying Computer Science, you need to learn Artificial Intelligence or Architecture design, you cannot say it has no relevance to the industry. It does, and it helps to shape up a young mind to look at the BIG picture. YCombi is great, but how can you replace that for College education? Its narrow in scope.