Disqus - Friends of glebleu

Re: 6 Reasons You Should Be Using Disqus’ Commenting System

Pierre Henri Clouin — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 19:22:46 -0000

Just started experimenting with Disqus. Your post simply nails down all the nice features in Disqus.

From a reader's and commenter's perspective, it provides an awesome central repository and it's a very smart positioning. However, I am still unclear about whether blogs benefit from Disqus' exposure in terms of traffic.

Re: Financial services paying the most for prospective customers’ attention

Pierre Henri Clouin — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 19:47:08 -0000

Ads from financial services has long been the lifeblood of the Internet and the mortgage crisis has taken quite a stab at Yahoo!'s and others CPM ad revenue and performance (see this post on SAI for instance).

To put things in perspective though, the lifetime value of a customer in financial services is much higher (in absolute terms) than that of an e-commerce retailer.

It'd be interesting to trend these CPC prices over the period of time. My bet right now is that debt-related keywords will go down in value (since lenders are in no hurry to lend money) while savings accounts and cd-related keywords will go up. Cash-strapped banks and thrifts, like IndyMac, are going after any opportunities to build up their cash reserves and lure unsuspecting customers looking for a high deposit rate!

Another interesting analysis would be to look at a typical banking activity portfolio to see which seems more cost effective between a conglomerate, a niche player or the long tail from a customer acquisition standpoint.

Update: interesting post on Valleywag about LowerMyBills financial woes in the wake of the credit crisis.

Re: Sexy Widget: Disqus Vs. Typepad

Pierre Henri Clouin — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 20:06:16 -0000

It seems that Disqus is now working on your blog.

In any case, the integration with Wordpress is much easier and smoother than with Typepad, which echoes the sentiment in this post and comments. It is one more reason to make the switch to Wordpress (at least for me).

Re: I’m Reinstalling Disqus - Two Months After Turning Disqus Off

Pierre Henri Clouin — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 20:17:16 -0000

Your concerns with SEO and traffic benefit are well-grounded. However, I expect some upside from Disqus beyond reader involvement, especially if they start offering additional content discovery right from their site.

Re: Hello world! (from Disqus)

Pierre Henri Clouin — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 20:21:45 -0000

Welcome to Disqus. I am also test driving it this week.

I have to say that the Wordpress integration is much smoother and quicker than with Typepad. It will be one more reason for me to switch my Typepad blogs to Wordpress.

As for the SEO and traffic concerns, I believe that increased user engagement will deliver some upside.

Re: A bank’s payment strategy in 3 words: Convenience, Convenience, Convenience

Pierre Henri Clouin — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 00:22:34 -0000

Convenience is certainly key to end-user adoption in retail payments - and in this regard, there is an endless supply of niches to cater to. However, long term success in payments hinges on risk-management, which can be extremely costly to achieve. PayPal is a great (albeit successful) example of that. This is where I see SEPA play a key role, by fostering an overall upgrade of payment backbones and factories that will support the types of innovations you mention.

Re: A bank’s payment strategy in 3 words: Convenience, Convenience, Convenience

Pierre Henri Clouin — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 00:45:21 -0000

Here's another interesting addition to online payment options - Amazon Payments - and to Amazon's Web Services offering). The Checkout by Amazon opens up Amazon's 1-Click to other merchants. The most interesting one is Amazon Flexible Payment Services, which strikes me as an interesting step towards much richer payment APIs and services.

Re: Outsourcing gets easier with new features on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

Pierre Henri Clouin — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 16:32:02 -0000

AMZN's updates to Mechanical Turk are definitely a step in the right direction in terms of the average user's experience. Overall, this release brings Mechanical Turk to a level similar to that of Google AdWords: anybody can use it, but experienced users get a much higher return from it, because they know or have learned how to take advantage of the service efficiencies/inefficiencies. Services like Dolores Labs add most value in configuring a job's parameter to get the result or data set you're looking for.

Re: Google to start new venture capital division — likely for telecom

Pierre Henri Clouin — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 11:12:33 -0000

A corporate VC arm is indeed a sign of maturity for Google. It might also help fund and reward internal disruptive/innovative projects and keep key talent at Google.

Re: A VC: Corporate Venture Capital

Pierre Henri Clouin — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 11:30:22 -0000

The primary motives for a corporate VC arm are attracting talent and innovation - as mentioned by many of the comments here. It begs to ask if it is a sign of slowing internal innovation and lower attractiveness for Google (outside of search). Even Google start up acquisition seem to have not delivered on par with expectations.

Re: Delicious 2.0: Who bookmarks any more?

Pierre Henri Clouin — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 19:50:37 -0000

I find bookmarking with delicious still pretty efficient to share links and track things. I am curious though why they didn't include synch'up with Twitter in this release.

It seems like a lot of people are sharing links on twitter which seems subpar to sharing them on delicious.

Re: Here’s Delicious 2.0 — what on Earth took them so long?

Pierre Henri Clouin — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 19:55:21 -0000

A lot of people share links on twitter nowadays. I am surprised the delicious release doesn't provide an easy-to-use interface to synch it up with twitter and other micro-blogging services.

I would have loved to see finer privacy settings, like the rooms on FriendFeed. These additions would go a long way into turning delicious into a nice, shareable online repository.

Re: Twitter tells me NASA has found water on Mars!

Pierre Henri Clouin — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 19:59:16 -0000

NASA is definitely at the smarter end of the Twitterspace. Very cool.

Re: There’s a method behind StumbleUpon’s madness

Pierre Henri Clouin — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 20:22:04 -0000

Excellent write up about StumbleUpon's back-end.

While SU is a great service for content and website discovery, I am surprised that the prospective roadmap does not include an integration with eBay to browse/discover products and auctions.

Re: Can Novamente’s virtual dogs make a Nintendog look dumb?

Pierre Henri Clouin — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 18:17:46 -0000

This initiative by Novamente is fascinating. Smart digital pets look like a tremendous opportunity in virtual worlds and/or the Internet, especially to provide enhance users' social experience, from finding "interesting" friends to adding serendipity in the mix.

Re: iPhone Barcode reader now integrated with Safari/Dialer/Mail

Pierre Henri Clouin — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 19:36:25 -0000

The barcode reader on the iPhone and the integration with phone calls and internet searches open up a slew of very exciting opportunities. Any idea when Apple plans to upgrade the camera on the iPhone to allow product bar codes decoding?

Re: Poll results for user acquisition: Viral, SEO, word-of-mouth, or other?

Pierre Henri Clouin — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 20:17:00 -0000

Very interesting results, post and comments on user acquisition strategy.

I wonder if a time element might be at play here: people might have understood "where do you put most of your efforts?" as "what user acquisition activity do you spend the most time at?" Since WOM and blogger relation is more time-intensive than SEO, that might explain its greater prevalence.

Along the same lines, it seems to me that WOM and blogger relation provides greater instant gratification than SEO, while SEO efforts take a while to pay off, which might help make it more "popular".

Re: Banking-related panel proposals for 2009 SXSW Interactive Festival

Pierre Henri Clouin — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 17:45:49 -0000

Interesting. I had never thought of SXSW as a place for innovation in banking and financial services.

The proposed session on Mobile Payment seems the most relevant to the SXSW audience and the most interesting - although the mobile experience in developed countries is widely different from that of developing countries.

The proposed session on the future of money seems to come straight out of the libertarian base of Ron Paul's supporters. SXSW being in Austin, I guess it is easily accessible by horse riding.

The proposed session about fixing the sub-prime mess seems very bold but stops short of giving the kind of details that would help tell whether it would indeed be interesting or a perfect session for a nap.

Anyhow, if you go to SXSW, don't spend too much time at the conference (remember this year's epic fail during Zuck's keynote?). The real thing takes place at parties.

Re: The first 6 steps to homegrowing basic startup analytics

Pierre Henri Clouin — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 12:47:48 -0000

Very interesting roadmap to building a robust web analytics capability.

Regarding step 6 about data overload, have you looked into CEP (complex event processing) to filter out the noise and process relevant data in real time? It is also useful not only for reporting but also to take advantage of a real time feedback loop.

Re: StumbleUpon drops the plug-in top and lets the web in

Pierre Henri Clouin — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 01:58:22 -0000

Kudos to the SU team for this new release.

Interestingly enough, this new release of StumbleUpon is still very media-focused and hasn't improved product discovery on ecommerce sites like eBay. In that light, the eBay divestment rumor is not that much surprising

Re: The seamy side of “citizen journalism”

Pierre Henri Clouin — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 17:55:15 -0000

The issue of content/quality control has been plaguing user-generated content sites and it will continue to hold back monetization for a while and until there is a valid/somewhat sureproof software solution to address it.

Re: This year’s IPO market weakest since 1977, and M&As are in the gutter

Pierre Henri Clouin — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 17:57:49 -0000

If 2008 looks pretty bad in terms of exits, 2009 will be even worse. OTOH, buy low and sell high remains the way forward for VCs and investors in general. Just look at what Buffet did in the last week...

Re: louisgray.com: Top Resources to Help Stay Informed In a Crazy World

Pierre Henri Clouin — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 22:24:08 -0000

Some economists have been right about the financial meltdown for quite some time now, including Nouriel Roubini (www.rgemonitor.com) and Brad Setser (http://blogs.cfr.org/setser). It's well worth reading, if you can bear with the technicalities.

Re: louisgray.com: Semantic Gifts Mines Social Profiles for the Perfect Present

Pierre Henri Clouin — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 17:14:30 -0000

Semantic Gifts is a very elegant idea. I like the very simple UI and request page. I wasn't entirely convinced by some of the results I saw. The service would gain at harvesting some of the wish/gift list services' data to improve recommendations, such as Giftag or Amazon's wish lists. Additional thoughts on our blog: http://is.gd/9ic4

Re: Music discovery services chart new paths for gift recommendations

Pierre Henri Clouin — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 12:40:30 -0000

Thanks for checking in. As you gather more data about people's tastes, it would also be terrific - as a user - to know how close my tastes are to those of the "human" who made a particular recommendation. Good luck!