Intense Web Media

I had a great time Friday night at the TechCrunch party in Menlo Park, California.

I met some great people including Salim Ismail, who heads up Yahoo’s Brickhouse, Joe Dipasquale from Collegewikis, Duncan Riley, and lots more people from many different startups.

There were basically three types of people attending:

1)Entrepreneurs

2)Venture Capitalists

3)Women looking for mates

I was under the impression that there was a lack of good looking women in silicon valley. I guess they all decided to attend the TC Party.

All things considered, I am glad I made the trip. More people know about Intense Debate than they did before and that is all I could ask for at a networking event.

I am especially excited for this weekend. I will be heading to the TechCrunch party this Friday and hopefully meeting lots of people.

I consider this a great networking event for me and for introducing my company to people who may not have heard of it or don’t know much about it.

TechCrunch has really evolved since it started two years ago. I started reading it in early 2006 nearly six months after it launched and have been a loyal RSS subscriber ever since. They are going to do great things starting with the TechCrunch20 conference they have coming up this Fall.
I will definitely blog about it when it is over. This will be my first time in “the Valley” and I hope to meet some of the people I read about. Expect a full report this weekend.

We have had a productive week over at Intense Debate. Earlier this week we announced the beginning of our Alpha period with a silent launch. The purpose of this is to grow organically and slowly ramp up our system while simultaneously trying to break it. The more we break it, the more robust it gets.

We have added another blog to the list of blogs using our system, davidgcohen.com/blog. David is a great mentor over at TechStars and has provided us with invaluable advice over the course of the last two months.

We will be adding new blogs all the time. If you would like to be included in our ramp up, head over to Intense Debate and sign up.

If you have any issues or feature requests you can make a comment on our blog or log into our forums.

I have been wanting one of these for quite a while. The Jawbone bluetooth headset is touted as the best Bluetooth headset on the market by the likes of CNET and PC Magazine.

They are being sold alongside Iphones at the Apple Store, but I wasn’t willing to dish out the $125. So, I went to Ebay and just won an auction with the final price being $82 including shipping for a “brand new in the box” Jawbone.

Some of the demonstration videos are incredible on the Jawbone website here.

I also saw a story on CNBC about them stating they were going to expand into other product lines.

Long story short, I can’t wait to get mine in the mail and I will open it Engadget style (take pics) upon the arrival.

I am buying one more out of safety than for any other purpose. I have had some close calls the last few weeks on the roads. The noise cancelling technology incorporated into the Jawbone is amazing and I couldn’t help myself.

Over at Intense Debate we have been conducting alpha testing as of this past week. Anyone can sign up on the homepage. We will be phasing in blogs slowly to keep our system stable. There are bugs, especially for you pesky IE6 users. This is not a finished product.
Our latest blog post explains our progression over the last few months and how we got to this point. If you are interested, here is the link.

The Boulder County Business report just wrote a nice article about us as well, here.

Please feel free to leave any and all feedback with your general user experience in the comments here or on the ID Blog.

One of the things that amazes me is the growth of social networks. There is a social network for everything and the latest example is found in the knitting industry.

I found this via TechCrunch and found it humorous. Creating a social network is not novel, but it is your users within the network that make it amazing and successful to the developer.

What I mean is that you are only as good as your end user when it comes to creating social networks. You want people who are dedicated to your subject matter and motivated to interact with others who feel the same.

So, yeah…you can have a social network for every subject and be moderately successful (ie Dogster).

I congratulate this site and the creator and wish you success. Hopefully, your 17,000 beta testers get what they want. Rest assured…now that people know there is a market for this, there will be more people entering the market.

…they may not be good long time members. The reason for this comes from some of my own anecdotal evidence. I was talking to a friend who owned two blogs which received about the same traffic. They wrote the same amount of posts and the quality was generally the same. What was not the same were click thru’s.

One could theorize that one of the blogs had a subject matter which did not open itself to clicking on an ad. Another theory might be his ad placement. While potentially true, I would postulate that geeks are far less likely to click on an ad and someone would be better off making a site specifically geared toward non-geeks.

Non-geeks are much more loyal because they are not up to speed on how to search for something on the internet. So, once they have found what they like, they stop looking and bookmark your site. They are also more likely to click on an ad because they do not surf the internet as much as a geek and therefore is not deluged with ads on every page.

I could be totally wrong or my theory off, but I believe that in the long term a person is better off developing a site and marketing it well to the non-geek and they will soon find themselves making more money and have a more solid base of traffic.

I am interested in what others have to say on the subject….

I was just introduced to this service through TechCrunch and I must say, “Well done” to the creators. This product makes it incredible easy for someone to put a shopping cart on their site.

My main point in writing this is to ask people to exercise a bit of caution because the safety of such an app is unproven and I don’t know about you, but being a pioneer isn’t always the right idea. It is like my dad says, “Pioneers are the ones with arrows in their butts.”

So, I think anyone would be wise to proceed with caution.

After a short hiatus I am back. My team and I at Intense Debate have been hunkered down in our underground bunker in Boulder, Colorado creating, editing, troubleshooting, etc. BTW, the Intense Debate corporate headquarters is literally underground, I swear (Pictures to come).

There are some great things coming out of TechStars and I would like to introduce you to some of them.

The guys over at J-Squared Media have a great post on what has been happening with their Facebook App. The post is about dealing with the Facebook problem of instantly scaling to meet market demand.

The guys over at Zemble are creating another product call MadKast and you can follow their blog here. So far, MadKast has a widget which allows you to share a blog post via email, text message, AND instant messaging, very cool.

Check these out and continue to comeback to this blog as I will be introducing more fellow TechStars companies you should know about.

Sometimes simplicity wins.

Last week I began the search for a new look and settled with something simple. Although this theme is widely used, I am enamored with the simple elegance of it.

After searching through hundreds of themes I began to realize how popular wordpress has become. The sheer amount of themes people are creating certainly speaks to WP’s popularity.