Welcome to Smuggle Me

Ted Murphy, founder of IZEA recently launched a personal microblog. If you are part of the IZEA family or a fan or rockstartup this is your chance to interact with Ted. You can check out the site here.

I was the 61st member of PayPerPost when I joined 3 years ago. You can imagine that over the 3 years Ted, myself and PayPerPost (now IZEA) have been through so many interesting experiences. While I’m not nearly as active in IZEA now, I still follow them and am interested in what their doing. Ted’s one of the most creative people I know so it will be interesting to see what Ted does with his blog and if he’ll have the time to do much.

A little while back Ted asked the PayPerPost community if their blog sucks? I actually avoided saying much at the time. However, I think that it’s pretty clear what’s happened to the PPP blog. They stopped announcing almost anything!

There has been months and months of marketing hype over Argus which turned out to be Izea and SocialSpark. That’s the best way to kill a corporate blog. Spend months and months and making only superficial changes and not announce anything that significant.

When PayPerPost first launched the blog was hoping with new features and exciting announcements. In fact, I seem to remember someone even sarcastically complaining that it had gone 3 days since a major announcement. It was really exciting to be apart of a dynamic organization that was changing weekly.

It amazes me that this all occurred almost a year and a half ago. Well, times have changed. PayPerPost has an incredibly large community and too many employees to keep track of them all. No more videos of stressed out employees getting vitamin water. No more $10 million funding announcements. However, most significantly very few feature releases in MONTHS!!

The worst part of it all is that the Argus announcement at PostieCon was a big disappointment. Not because the changes weren’t good. The quick information that was given at Postie Con has potential. However, no one would ever know it, because nothing has been released. No one has access to argus Social Spark. The PPP community was left waiting for months for the holy grail they called Argus only to receive a rushed announcement and now over a month of waiting (and no end in sight) for the actual release.

I’m sure that someone will come and say that the release of Social Spark was delayed because of the release of RealRank. This argument misses my point that PayPerPost has released very few interesting features in months.

This isn’t to say that PayPerPost isn’t thriving and that it isn’t going to be huge. I’m just saying that’s why the PayPerPost blog sucks and has definitely affected the community around it. It may have been the best corporate decision for PayPerPost to take these months and rebuild PayPerPost from the ground up. However, I think you could make a good argument about why it would have been better for PayPerPost to release features early and often. Wordpress learned this lesson which they took from Ubuntu.

I think it’s also worth mentioning Christopher Herot’s recent post explaining how he wasted much of his now failed startups time discussing and implementing features that users didn’t care about. Sure makes a compelling argument for an agile development environment with frequent releases of features. I guess we’ll see if the months of rebuilding PayPerPost and adding new features suffers the same unneeded feature fate that Christopher Herot experienced.

I hope this post isn’t seen as complaining. PayPerPost is welcome to do whatever they want with their product. I couldn’t care much either way. Although, I do appreciate them offering me a front row seat as I watch and learn from their experience building their company.

Someone emailed me about a website called Pick A Blogger. It’s a cheap attempt to compete with PayPerPost. I didn’t sign up, because it didn’t seem like there was really anyone on the site. It was like a ghost town. I’ve often said about PayPerPost that they needed to focus on advertisers and making sure there were plenty of ways for bloggers to make money. They’ve done that and done well. Unfortunately I don’t think that Pick a Blogger has done the same thing.

PPP/Izea has rolled out their new RealRank measure for blogs. Honestly I don’t personally believe that this rank will have much meaning outside of those blogs that participate in PayPerPost. However, it will have significant meaning to the 70,000 (or however many it is now) bloggers that use PayPerPost. Plus, it will be great for all of those stats addicts out there like me.

Of course, I’ve been in Hawaii and so I haven’t been able to check my PPP tools (now called ITK) to make sure it was installed properly. Looks like when I was trying out the Argus beta stats I messed up my PPP tools. I’ve fixed it now and tomorrow I’ll finally be able to see my RealRank.

If anyone else needs help with this let me know. I’m always happy to help people when I can. Even if it will be a bit busy over Thanksgiving.

Well, I must admit that I’m really tired right now and in a couple hours I’m getting on a red-eye flight with my wife and 2 children to go to Hawaii. Ok, I’m sure that no one will have sympathy for me going to Hawaii. However, I’m kind of dreading the flight. Hopefully I can sleep quite a bit.

I must also admit that I’m a little sad to be going to Hawaii now that PayPerPost announced SocialSpark. Well, Hawaii should be a lot of fun and it will be really interesting for me to present at the EMR conference I’m going to attend. Hopefully I can get on in the evenings when the kids are asleep.

Update: TechCrunch finally put up their coverage of SocialSpark. Pretty weak coverage since Mike didn’t cover much of the announcement at all. Maybe he was busy since it’s the weekend.

I’m currently sitting at PayPerPost/Izea’s user conference called PostieCon. In 30 minutes we’ll be seeing the unveiling of Argus to the world. I’ve previously blogged about how Izea is planning to take on Google. We officially know that Argus is now called SocialSpark. I’ll place a screenshot of the new site at the bottom of this post.

I think the most groundbreaking feature they are announcing with SocialSpark is allowing advertisers to sponsor blogs.

In addition to sponsored posts, SocialSpark has created a viable alternative to traditional online display ads designed to provide a higher return on investment for both advertisers and bloggers. The revolutionary new form of advertising allows marketers to set a price range they are willing to pay to sponsor a blog via an interactive ad unit called a Blog Welcome™. The new unit welcomes a user when they visit a blog and then collapses into a small persistent sponsorship bar that remains at the bottom of a browser.

I’m not so sure about having a permanent bar at the bottom of a blog, but I guess I don’t see any reason why it’s a bad idea. I think I’ll have to see the full implementation before I make final judgment. Plus, I think it’s important to know how much that’s worth. Can you have multiple advertisers? Does the toolbar have a set price for a certain time frame? I think we’ll find out when Ted shows it in a few minutes.

As expected, Izea is going to have a whole group of stats.

Analytics tools installed on a blogger’s blog allow SocialSpark to provide traffic data on the blog’s public profile. Advertisers are provided with a complete picture of a blog’s influence including visits and page views, along with other demographic information such as aggregate gender, age, location, interest and other visitor information. That data allows advertisers to build their street teams based on the audience of the blogger. Once a campaign is launched, advertisers can monitor CPC and CPM as well as gauge brand awareness and campaign impact across the blogosphere.

Looks like SocialSpark should be pretty interesting. They are also unveiling a blogger’s social network. It doesn’t look that interesting to me. Although one feature I know about does look interesting. It’s essentially a way to manage your blog roll using PayPerPost SocialSpark. For advertisers the idea of creating your own niche social network of bloggers is a pretty unique way for advertisers to find their target market.

Another important part of this announcement is required in post disclosure. A great step forward.

30 minutes and we’ll be able to see it in action and I’ll be able to tell you more about what I think of SocialSpark.

Here’s a video that Ted posted with a few more details about the Argus release.

Honestly, I think for myself as a PPP/Izea follower, the release of Argus at PostieCon won’t be anything special. I think we’ve already heard all the good stuff that’s happening. There might be one or two things that I didn’t think about, but I’m afraid that it’s going to be somewhat of a disappointment after waiting so long for PPP to update. I guess they didn’t get the memo that people like regular updates all the time as opposed to major releases. Major releases never live up to the hype, but minor updates are often better than we expect.