Imagine, instead of the “IT” compaign, we could’ve gotten “I Bought on eBay.” Instead of humming to the Monkeys, we could have been humming to Backstreet Boys . . . ah. . . only if. . . .

Ok, I’m totally kidding. . . but this is hilarious. . . my favorite is the “A+++” part. . .

Just being a complete couch potato for the afternoon. . . after close to 5 hours of TV, I realized I must have seen those “law offices of james sokolove” commercial atleast 3 times.

As usual, my overly imaginative (and unrealistic) brain started to churn and I decided that what the world needs is a class action search and lead gen engine.

I did more sleuthing around to find the top paying keywords on google/overture. Search yahoo. The list is pretty old, but I think the point is that law suit related keywords are a gold mine. . . even more so than finance/mortgage/real estate related keywords.

$100.00 - structured settlements
$100.00 - mesothelioma attorney
$33.50 - cord blood - what the he** is that?
$29.75 - student loan consolidation
$25.01 - tax attorney
$19.13 - contract management software
$18.99 - drug rehab
$13.00 - lemon law
$10.24 - brochure printing
$10.01 - cerebral palsy
$ 9.99 - term life
$ 9.51 - software escrow
$ 9.20 - document scanning
$ 9.00 - cash advance
$ 8.60 - refinancing
$ 8.00 - payday loans
$ 7.16 - auto insurance
$ 6.93 - donate to charity
$ 5.99 - defibrillator
$ 5.00 - scooter

The funny thing is that James Sokolove is not even a real law firm. Yes they have lawyers and practive law in MA, but they are mostly a lead generation business since license/bar is state by state, and thier referals comes from all over the U.S. (since they advertise in CA and probably all 50 state). Law firms pay significant amount of money to firms that bring them into class action firms (this website say its 35%) . Now, I’m no expert on legal industry’s business model, but this seems like a gold mine to me. . .

From one of my favorite economic blogs, Marginal Revolution

Morgan and co-author Tanjim Hossain, an assistant professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, held 80 auctions of new music CDs and Xbox video games to test how consumers respond to different price schemes. In the eBay study, they varied the opening bid price and shipping charges on identical CDs, ranging from Britney Spears to Nirvana, and video games, including Halo and NBA 2K2.

…A perfectly informed and fully rational consumer will merely add together the two parts of a price to obtain the total out-of-pocket price for an item and then decide whether to buy and how much to bid based on this total price.

But that’s not what happened in their eBay auctions. Instead, they found that lowering the opening bid price while raising shipping charges attracts earlier and more bidders and ultimately leads to higher revenues compared with doing the reverse. Those findings suggest consumers pay less attention or even completely overlook shipping costs when making bids…

Full paper here. But more snippets here.

While the finding is interesting. . . I think there is couple of flaw. . .

1) sample size is too small, a quick price check for completed listings on ebay will show pretty decent variations for prices of the same item

2) I bet the results wont hold for fixed price listings

3) price variations are probably driven more by (ie correlated with) opening bid price than with shipping. . .

anyways. . . who am I to question someone with a PHD?

Yesterday, one of my favorite bloggers decided to end a noble experiment. Jason wanted to focus on his career and relegate blogging to a “part time” hobby. No one can really doubt the quality of his posts or his dedication. Indeed, Jason is a A-list blogger with a huge following. Getting 40K in donations to blog is not an easy task. Jason writes of blogging,

The site became a normal job, a 9-to-5 affair, which meant that I could keep up with it, but growth was hard to come by.

Ofcourse, Jason doesnt really host ads on the site, so he can potentially make more money blogging than just asking for donations from patrons. But I think money is not the only thing. . . its that in order to really generate the amount of content to be a top blogger, blogging has to be a 9-5 dedication. Looking at the top bloggers out there, it is usually their fulltime job. . . as a journalist, as an “evangelist” for a company, as a “consultant,” or a part-time entrepreneur. Where their schedule is not dictated by someone else but by themselves. In the end, blogging is a means to an end (personal fame, company buzz, credibility, deal sourcing) . . . money is secondary. Jason simply thought there is better ways to dedicate his 8 hours a day.

Lately, I’ve been feeling like Jason. As my project has ramped up at work, I have much much less time to read blogs and write on my own. . . as a 9-11 blogger, my content contribution has certainly been lacking for the last couple of weeks. I still love having a soapbox so I’m certainly not going to stop but many times, there are more important priorities. . . for now though, my readership will suffer. . . for that I apologize I promise to getting moving soon!

UPDATE:

Another data point, apparently a lot of A-list bloggers at big companies are being paid to blog . . . Jeremy Z for one. . . (see comments sections). . . saying nothing about the guy’s blog (which is on my blogroll), but that the sustainability of the whole culture is at risk if a lot of blogs are not really self-motivated . . . I think Scoble gets paid to blog too (dont hold me to this, but I read it somewhere). . . .

There has been a lot talk about the “edge” lately. . . not the least of which is Edgeio, which is a classified edge aggregator. The whole idea behind the rise of the edge is that traffic patterns are getting more distributed on the web and that core portals/walled gardens are getting less and less of the total traffic while “edge” sites are getting more. . . or using another term, the long tail of websites is growing longer and longer as niche websites gain traction and usage.

There are some preliminary data that is actually pointing to the fact that the pendulum MIGHT be swinging to the other direction. That “edge” site traffic growth is slowing and that concentration is actually growing. Looking at Google Q4 #, it appears that adsense (edge advertising) revenue is pretty flat and that adword (core advertising) revenue is growing significantly faster. Furthermore, I am willing to bet that TAC concentration is also up for adsense and that the sites that adsense are acquiring now are much lower quality (traffic/click through) then only a year ago. While Google is an edge aggregator, it is still a “core” site (wall garden or not . . . actually very much a one way walled garden!, value comes in but never leaves!).

I think there is actually 2 trends that is driving the slow down in edge growth. . .

1) PageRank or any other relevancy algorithm favors the incumbent/core sites FOR EACH KEYWORD. In 1999, most of the web was dominated by huge portals that had dominated “relevancy” very broadly . . . in the ensuing years, the edge grew as niche sites found dominant niches (symbolized by “keywords”). It looks like each one of those niches has essentially been filled up and that 3rd or 4th (actually more like 20th because average page click is 2 in a search engine) entrants no longer could gain the traffic that they need from search engines to survive.

This will be an even harder issue to solve for edge commerce aggregators who need to rely on “relevancy” to determine not only relevance but trustworthiness. In essense, posting “a classified ad” in any blog will be a futile exercise because traffic will eventually be funneled to a select few sites with encumbent relevancy history. . . . and those sites will eventually be smart enough to “farm” out their reputation to host listings . . . again augmenting the core rather than the edge. This is not to say that Edgeio or the likes wont be successfull. . . it is to say that their key differentiation/barrier to entry will be their DIVERSIFICATION algorithm and not their reputation/relevancy algorithm. (Barrier to entry/exit is extremely low in the aggregation space and will be their achilles heel)

2) For now, the segment of users that are likely to “own” their own digital presence has probably peaked. Most will likely rely on “core” destinations like typepad or myspace (to give 2 really different examples) for hosting needs. These “mainstreet” consumers are truly the long tail, not the blogosphere or the technorati crowd. . . . even more likely they will still rely on vertical sites for specific purposes rather than a generic presence aggregator. In many ways, task specific core sites does a much better job of serving the true long tail than a persistent digital presence. This might not be a permanent trend as Gen Y grows up but for now, the growth of pure edge URL’s might be slowing until then . . .

About 6 month ago, I had thought that the world of entrepreneurship has really changed and that various factors had make it much much more accessible to the “average joe.” I called it the rise of Armchair Entrepreneurship

Today, I realized I was somewhat wrong . . . Nicholas Carr of Harvard wrote an enlightening post, FON’s unsavory buzz, reflecting on a WSJ article regarding FON’s blog-lebrity advisory board.

The blogosphere works on the echo principle. When an influential blogger says something, his or her words reverberate across other blogs in the form of, usually, brief excerpts. Disclosures in the original post are unlikely to appear in those excerpts. The effect is that the buzz builds, but the fact that some of the sources of the buzz may have conflicts of interest gets lost. It may be that, to protect their integrity and that of the blogosphere, bloggers will need simply to refrain from blogging about any startup in which they have an interest of any sort.

The is something else here that Nick is implying . . . which is that getting in good with this virtual “blog-lebrity” network has replaced the old boy network of yester-years as the pre-requisite to generating buzz for a startup. For anyone that has been reading tech blogs for a while, he/she would have already realized the amount of ass-kissing in the comment section of any of the famous blogs.

Furthermore, many lesser known blogger spent most of their time trying to get link-backs (read pagerank juice) by posting “me-too” posts that does nothing but “second” the opinion to the original one . . . creating more useless noise for search engines to crawl and index . . .(you can call this post one of them ) .

So what does that mean? It means, if you dont have millions to pay for a real marketing campaing, you better get to know one of these bloggers by creating an useless “echo” blog or just commenting religiously on their blogs with lemming like comments trying to “build” a virtual relationship hoping that once you start your company, you get some coverage.

We used to call VC’s lemmings and sheeps for the way they chase after the latest trends and the hottest startups. . . we need to take a good look at ourselves for the way we behave . . . otherwise, the pace of innovation will slow . .. not increase if this keeps up. . . the real contrarian voices are being drowned out by the group-think lead (certainly not purposely) by the “blog-lebrities” . . . and perpetrated by ourselves. This virtual cast system needs to end . . . soon. . .

Being an entrepreneur is like being naked. . . at a club. . . AND required to hit up every single women in the room. . . .

All your flaws are left wide open for the world to see, especially those who might judge you the most. Everytime you get a phone #’s you feel like Brad Pitt, everytime you get rejected, you feel like . . . Pauly Shore? (actually no, that guy gets play ) … Deuce Bigalow. One moment you are at the top of the world and the next the lowest of the low. Not only that, you HAVE to sell sell sell to everyone at anytime and everywhere. . . even the ugliest girl in the room. . . and most likely, she’s gonna reject you too. . . cause you are the freak who goes to a club naked!

Being an entrepreneur is NOT for the faint of heart. . . everything is on the line, and no one will hold you up except yourself. You keep going cause pausing and thinking is not good for anyone sane enough to realize all the risk and improbabilities required to make your vision come true. For the tens of dependencies that need to happen, even if all of them are highly likely, the compounded probability of it ALL happening is probably close to 10% . . . if you are ultra lucky. . .

In my life, I’ve met generally two types of (successful) entrepreneurs. . . 1) the strong silent type and 2) manic depressant. Type 1 is strong enough to shoulder the responsibilities and cope with all the stress and not externalize it too much. You see them at meetings . softly asking some tough questions but always polite and considerate. Type 2 is the social butterfly, the networking fool . . . they guy you wish you can become . . . but once in a while, they cross the bounds of passion into mania and irresponsibility. They might scream or yell at employees, partners, or VC’s . . . than they get depressed or contrite for being the way they are . . . the world is black or white, and so is their mood. . .

For now, I’m not sure which one am I. . . maybe neither . . . ?