This past Thursday, our new media site, israelplug, reached digg's home page. As we watched in disbelief, tens of thousands of readers flooded our site (and brought it crashing down in the classic "digg effect"). This was both exciting and frustrating. We learned a lot from this experience, and I would like to share some of these lessons with you. First, here's some background: we started to officially launch our new site on Thursday. As part of our launch strategy, we began to bookmark articles on the major social media sites, including digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and Facebook. Within minutes, one of our articles was picked up by diggers and the number of ...

LessAccounting is an online, web 2.0-type of application that allows small businesses to track income, expenses and invoices. Since I am always on the lookout for tools that will make my small business life easier, I signed up for the beta and was therefore informed of the launch via email. The website has a clean look and feel to it, and the following introductory text: Things We Aren't... We choose not to function, act or even smell like Peachtree or Quickbooks. Wesabe is great, we just aren't anything like it. (But we do import from it!) Freshbooks or Blinksale: we invoice, just no robust calendar time tracking functionality. Not a robust CRM by ...

On July 30 I wrote a post asking whether we are reaching the saturation point for social media sites. The reason I wrote it is because it seemed to me that with the growing number of sites that exist that depend on ad revenue for profitability, there can't possibly be enough advertising dollars to go around. A day later a study was released by the University of Texas and Chitika that shows a different problem in the ad revenue business model: the top 1% of blogs are getting 20% of the revenue. In 2006, the top 15% drew in over 80% of the revenue. This means that the ...