Gadgetopia

Amazon.com The Kindle Store Bestsellers: The most popular items in Gadgets, PCs & Consumer Electronics. : According to this page, Gadgetopia is the third-most purchased blog in its category Amazon Kindle store.

There are 14 sites in this category, and Gadgetopia is ahead of sites like Scoble, Crunchgear, Techdirt, etc. I find this frankly amazing, and I suspect we may have been purchased once, which put us ahead.

Even more interesting is that we’re #8 of 44 in the entire “Internet and Technology” category.

I have no raw sales figures. I’d be curious to know who purchased this feed to read on a Kindle and why. If you’re out there, speak up.

We took a cue from our arch-rivals over at Electric Pulp and finally created a Flickr account (give us six years or so, and we’re bound to pick up on a new trend or two).

Our first activity is a photoset of the Blend Offices. So, take a tour and learn about the safe, the robot, the gnome and everything else that makes Blend a fascinating place to work.

So FM has sent me a new gig from Microsoft, where I have to make two audio posts every week for 10 weeks. So, like, 20 times I have to talk into a microphone, say something intelligent, and then post it here through an apparently snazzy little system they’ve built.

I have zero idea what I’m going to talk about. In fact, my first post might just be about how hard it is to do audio posts.

If you guys think I’m an idiot in print, trust me — audio isn’t going to change that perception.

I looked through Google Analytics and found the top posts of the last year.

What you have to understand, however, is that 80% of our content comes from search engines (most of that from Google), so this list doesn’t represent what Gadgetopia readers were interested in. It just shows an intersection of (1) what the public was searching for, and (2) what Gadgetopia posts got well-positioned in Google.

1. Tea Games
2. The Cell Phone Water Detection Sticker
3. T-Rex
4. Installshield Update Manager
5. Bitlord

Notice a pattern? Each post was named for the subject, and nothing else. So the TITLE tag of the post page was for the exact same search phrase someone would use to find it. Some things in SEO ain’t that hard.

Here are the top posts by comments gathered throughout the year.

1. The Cell Phone Water Detection Sticker
2. Intelius
3. Geek Squad
4. Why Macs Suck
5. Why Mac Ads Suck

As for numbers #4 and #5 there, I can only assume that “Macs” and “suck” just go together when searching the Net.

Just a quick note to everyone that I’m in DisneyWorld this week. I was hoping to be able to post something from here, but Internet access is sadly expensive from the room, and every time I go near the laptop, I get the Evil Eye from my wife.

I’ll be back in action after the holidays.

One quick story —

We were at the Animal Kingdom today, and my son was sad to find out that the Expedition Everest roller coaster was closed due to “technical difficulties.” The truth, however, was a little more sinister.

(Interesting note: right about the time this would have happened, I remember several stern-sounding announcements over the PA that went “would [name] or [name] from Navarre, Florida (I specifically remember the city) please pick up a courtesy phone and dial [number].” It’s sad to know now why they needed to find these people.)

Someone mentioned to me today that this post has risen to #17 on Google (#15 in Canada) for “content management system.”

I find this extremely cool. I’m really proud of that post, though it was so long I don’t know how many people actually read it. It only got one comment.

Amazon.com: Gadgetopia: The Kindle Store: Due to my association with Federated Media, Gadgetopia is available for purchase at the Kindle Store (along with all the other FM blogs). For only $1.99 per month, you too can read Gadgetopia on your Kindle.

What’s kind of neat is that Gadgetopia now has its own Amazon page. Which means you can rank, rate, review, and tag Gadgetopia on Amazon.

Gosh, this should be fun to watch.

I own the “big six” Gadgetopia domains — com, net, org, info, biz, and us. Beyond that, I never bothered to get all the country domains, because how could you, really? There are so many of them.

So, I guess it was just a matter of time before I stumbled across something like this: gadgetopia.co.uk. It appears to be a very cool little gadget store and spy shop in the U.K. I like the little “good vs. evil” theme they have going there.

I had an email exchange with the owner of the domain this week. Seems like a nice guy, and we both celebrated our extraordinary taste in domain names.

In a larger sense, I looked into trademarking the name “Gadgetopia” once. I was told by an IP attorney that trademarks are industry-specific, so the best I could probably do is trademark Gadgetopia in the context of “a Web site about computer topics.” I didn’t think there was much danger of someone infringing on me in that regard, so I didn’t bother.

The fact remains that the odds of someone using the name “Gadgetopia” for something is very much lessened by the fact that there’s no good, universal domain for them to use since I (and this other guy) own them all.

I was offered $15,000 for this domain once by a guy who wanted to set up cell phone kiosks in malls. I declined, and he told me that he was going to change the planned name of his company because I wouldn’t give up the domain.

I have cool friends. (It’s a big, chocolate chip cookie, if that’s not obvious.)

Gadgetopia turned five-years-old today.

Reprinting Our Content, Again: This is just too ironic not to post. Seriously.

I take this to mean that these people read this post earlier today, and are flipping me the virtual bird.

Nice. Really nice.

Similar to a situation of a couple years ago, I’ve found another Web site that’s reproducing selected Gadgetopia articles in full, and surrounding them with ads. In no case does this site discuss my posts or write any original posts of their own, they just take some Gadgetopia posts from my RSS feed (and posts from other sites), and put them on their site, amidst a ton of ads.

To add insult to injury, when there’s an image, they don’t even save the image on their own servers. They just hotlink to my image, stealing both my bandwidth and my content. (Yes, I know, there’s an opportunity here to make a point. Goatse (SFW) has been notified and is standing by.)

I contacted the site at their posted email address and asked them exactly what they’re doing. The email bounced.

I’m pretty sure I know what they would say anyway: “We’re just aggregating technology news for our readers, like anyone else.” Yeah, maybe, but there’s a fine line that was crossed they they started re-printing entire posts. They stepped even further over it when they hotlinked images.

They do provide a link back to my site with each article, but that’s a completely empty gesture since, again, they publish the entire content of each post. Why would someone link through?

I’ve never charged for Gadgetopia content, and I’ve always been adamant about putting the entire post in the RSS feed. Given that, can I really complain here? I essentially give content away anyway and make it as easy as possible to read it without advertising, so should I be offended when someone starts putting ads around it?

About three weeks ago, an upgrade to the latest version of Movable Type killed our comment spam filtering.

I finally had an hour to track the problem down, and it turns out the upgrade cleared the WordPress API key that MT-Akismet needs to function. We’ve restored the key, and comment spam filtering is back in great shape.

During the time Akismet was offline, I was deleting close to 1,000 comment spams a day and our server was getting killed by all the rebuilds — the home page and RSS feed were being rebuilt about once every three minutes.

Thanks for your patience, everyone. I hate spammers.

Update: Looking through the stats since we got spam filtering back online, I’m finding that Gadgetopia filters a spam comment every 42 seconds.

I just Googled for my company name, Blend Interactive. As expected, we’re number one for the term, but number two is a company out of Portland called Lucid Blend Interactive.

That gave us a good laugh around here. Because if you’re looking for a company called “Blend Interactive,” just remember that we’re the friggin’ crazy ones. For lucidity, go to those guys out in Oregon.

A few weeks ago, we had a prospect who wanted to know what we knew about content management. In response to this, I finally decided to put together a list of the best posts on this site in an effort to show someone that we tend to think about content management. A lot.

It was supposed to be just about content management, but it ended up being a list of Gadgetopia’s Greatest Hits, really. It’s a list of all the long, theoretical posts I’ve made over the years about programming Web apps in general, and about content management specifically.

At the risk of sounding like an arrogant tool, there are some real gems in there. I hope you enjoy it. So, here’s the list.

Feedster: We just made the Feedster Top 250, it appears. Number 242 to be exact. And, according to the linked page, we’re a “2 Time Winner” of…something. I hope it was a good thing. And there’s a big “i” next to our name. I bet that stands for “intelligent.”

Gadgetopia is four today. We kicked things off on August 12, 2002 with this post about The Gutenberg Project. (Check out that URL.)

Thanks to everyone for hanging around all these years.

Wiki: Posted here three years ago today. How quaint.

I’ve recently become involved with a Wiki project. It’s still under wraps but I have to say that I’m awfully smitten with the whole Wiki theory.

A lot has been said since then.

The project, incidentally, was the Movable Type Wiki, which subsequently got vandalized and removed. Too bad because I wrote some really good stuff for it. Does someone have an archive of this thing? I’d love to get my text back out of it.

I have deleted Joe’s post, but the image above will forever remind us both of how much we suck. The posts are identical down to the attributation, the category, the quote, the posting of the score, etc.

Joe’s post was first, but mine stays because I got the first comment, and moving comments is no fun.

Joe, for the record, got a score of 40.

As near as I can tell, this comment pointing out my crappy spelling was comment #10,000. And I’m anal-retentive about deleting spam, so that number is awfully pure.