Small Business Directory Inadvertently Opens Door for Competition

LOS ANGELES, CA - Like most everyone else throwing their two cents into the discussion over the 2012 edition of Merchant Circle versus the community we'd all grown to know and love, I'd like to personally take this opportunity to state on record my opposition to MerchantCircle's 2012 overhaul of the site design and functionality.

Merchants who contribute content should be rewarded for their efforts, and before January of 2012 they were. Now, our blog posts aren't even featured on our company homepage, nor are our products, photos or coupons. The fact that MC has shifted focus away from those creating content and towards those paying for placement is a move that will undoubtedly upset a number of business owners in addition to myself, opening the proverbial door of opportunity for competitors to move in on the space the old MC had occupied.

Merchant Circle's 2012 overhaul has angered users, opening the door for competitors to move in.

Instead of the 2011 profiles, which largely featured a merchant's contributions on his or her own small business' homepage on the site, those pages now have more ads to competitors' pages and websites, with only reviews displayed beneath the company bio on company homepages. The category links that once appeared on my Merchant Circle company homepage are now gone, as is the Google +1 button (although it remains on some of the pages that haven't yet adopted the new design).

Many formerly free features now cost far more than fair market value based on pricing for similar services at those few companies who do charge for them.

Rather than labor for the benefit of companies with the resources to pay to be prominently featured on my Merchant Circle company homepage that doesn't even link to my recent blog posts, photos, coupons or deals, I will instead most likely be spending more time on similar sites --- alternatives to Merchant Circle --- preferably sites that won't use bait-and-switch tactics to trick users to generate loads of free content, only to see the commercial benefit of said content be taken away from them.

One such site is called StoreBoard. At StoreBoard, you have a company profile, such as the one I have already created for Egan Medical. Like Merchant Circle, companies get their own blog, and can add coupons, list products in the marketplace, post images, classifieds and even links to their company's respective site-within-a-site.

The company blogs are superior to those at MC as the option to add photographs to posts actually functions properly, meaning the photo actually appears, and all text and HTML show beneath the photo also appears on the page for each respective post. As most users of Merchant Circle who've tried to add photos to blog posts without completely coding the entire page from scratch, the photos usually don't appear, and all text/HTML appearing beneath the photo does not appear either. I once lost more than an hour's work because I forgot to independently save a copy of my MC blog post on my own computer, and lost it when I attempted to include a photo in the post, only to find that all photos and everything appearing beneath them just gets deleted on MC blogs. StoreBoard blogs also give the user superior formatting options compared to those offered by MC.

Here is an example post by Egan Medical Equipment about a new line of products (maternity supports, to be specific) which now are available for purchase through the company's online store: Egan Medical Unveils New Line of Maternity Supports.

Obviously, the site is newer and not as powerful, so the benefit of your activity there won't have the immediate and meaningful impact being featured prominently at Merchant Circle once had.


In fact, each company gets its own links page, and as long as the links don't violate the company's terms of service, users can pretty much post anything they think their customers will appreciate, be it links to products, articles, news stories or whatever else might be useful.

Like Merchant Circle, all that is displayed on a given company's homepage is their bio and contact info (including website link). However, I haven't seen any ads for competitors either while logged in or out, so if they exist they're minimal and out-of-the-way, and you won't see your hard work serve to benefit a larger competitor with a bigger advertising budget.

While we're on the topic of new competitors to the Small Business Online Directory business, one not-so-new player is making a new and significant push to add features that might lure users away from competitors such as MC. Well known, established directory site Manta has added a number of features that will definitely appeal to merchants, and which are superior to the comparable features offered by MC.
Take for example this product page, which is more like a general category page about maternity supports (basically an orthopedic support for women during pregnancy) than a singular product page. The maternity supports page was recently created for a small business profile at Manta. Observe the large photo of the product, the ability to list either a singular price for a specific item or a price range for a class or group of items. Also, observe the length of the product description, which far outpaces the amount of space given by MC for product pages, and even then there were no links to the actual product page on the merchant's website. Manta has all that and more. While I'm no profit, it would seem a logical conclusion that Manta may be soon offering merchants the opportunity to blog directly from their Manta profile, which would get Manta up-to-par in terms of everyone else in the business with regard to the amount and extent of features available to merchants willing to spend their time creating content for the site for free in exchange for a small but sometimes meaningful bit of a promotional opportunity and benefit.

Unless and until Manta and StoreBoard "pull a MerchantCircle" and revokes the most appealing features of its site for the benefit of a handful of each industry's largest and richest players, I will likely be spending as much if not more time developing Egan Medical's presence within the StoreBoard community as I will continue to spend here on Merchant Circle.

I'll also stop paying for a certain Merchant Circle paid upgrade if said upgrade (they know to which one I am referring) fails to reappear on my company profile within the next 7 days.

Anyway, I hope someone at Merchant Circle is eventually made aware of all the displeasure among business owners and their respective employees about the recent overhaul of Merchant Circle's design and functionality, and I sincerely hope the big MC can get it together and make real improvements rather than changes that prey upon small business owners as much as they help them.

The #1 Drawback to Working with Internet Technology

I recently came across a fantastic post on a blog called Get Girls Not Game entitled: "The 7 Deadly Sins of Approaching a Woman That Will Turn Her Off Instantly."

Well, according to this list of the seven deadly sins, sin #2 is the one that keeps me from reaching paradise. It reads:

2. Not Understanding How To Tactfully Move Things Forward

Now I’m going to blow you away with a little insider dating secret… A woman is expecting you to move an interaction forward… and actually will get turned off if you fail to do so. Let me say this again: If you don’t move an interaction toward intimacy and get physical with her, women will actually LOSE their attraction to you.
I know, it might be hard to believe. But for example, if you’re talking to a girl for more than a couple minutes, she’s probably already thinking, “Okay, when is going to ask for my number?” or even, “Okay, so when is he going to kiss me?” And if you don’t do it—or fail to do it smoothly—then she’ll actually “cool off” and start thinking of ways to dismiss you: “I think we’re better off just being friends…”
And this goes for ALL aspects of women and dating… Confidently approaching a woman, going for the number, asking her out, kissing her, getting sexual… everything. If you hesitate or don’t know what to do in each situation, you will end up losing EVERYTHING. And you know it.
It is crucial that you understand how to tactfully move from one step to the next with a woman… from the approach, all the way to the bedroom.

In my younger years I never had to do anything. ANYTHING. They (countless gorgeous twenty-somethings) would initiate the conversation, chat me up and move things forward until I had rounded the bases and tipped my cap for the fans.

Well, one day it all just stopped. I remember what day it was and what activity it was that started my unfortunate reversal of fortune. In my mid-20's I started selling stuff on Ebay to help pay for my rent while I was finishing up with college. It turned into a career in web development, trading premium aftermarket domain names, social media marketing, SEO and so forth. In other words, for all intents and purposes I became a geek.

I'm still the same guy all the ladies were fawning over in high school and college. I'm still just as fit as I was when I was the star player on my college rugby team (and multiple sports teams in high school). It matters not. I have an uphill battle to fight.

Yes, the same guy who exerted zero effort in landing a babe that years later moved to Los Angeles to become an actress and model and at one point dated Shia Labeouf has to work for every base hit these days.

My personality hasn't really changed either. They (mid-20's single women - my target demographic... I'm almost 30 fwiw) seem to be programmed to be averse to guys who spend a lot of time around computers. Even successful guys whose careers involve lots of computer and in particular internet work.

For all you younger fellows that have yet to make up your mind about what you'd like to do for a living, if you decide upon internet work, make sure you sew your wild oats before embarking on your career, and if you have any desire to be married, you may want to find the lucky lady first as well. The alternative is to lie about what you do.

In any case, it's certainly something to consider as one of the major drawbacks of an otherwise exciting, mentally stimulating and very enjoyable line of work.

Author's Note: The other drawbacks include having to work insane hours, having to constantly learn new technologies - even after you've reached an age where you don't want to learn anymore, and bidding a permanent farewell to the feeling of being well-rested.

Vegan Blogger Misleads Readers About Vitamin D

The ease of publishing on the web has granted a new, powerful voice to millions of people around the world who were previously restricted to communicating amongst those within speaking distance.

As with any technological breakthrough, most people will use the technology for good or at the very least benign purposes. However, as with any technology, blog publishing has its share of individuals who use it for, shall we say, less than benign purposes.

This brings me to Ginny Messina, some crackpot vegan blogger who likes to write about health and nutrition-related topics. She no doubt enjoys the platform and the subject matter, however she is woefully lacking in credibility and credentials, a fact that became painfully obvious during a recent post on her blog (not named here due to my policy of not linking to agents of misinformation).

In the post, Messina was blabbing about fat-soluble hormones. Vitamin D is considered to be a fat-soluble hormone as well as a vitamin.

As most readers here are aware, I am something of an expert on the subject of vitamin D, and there may be no one more qualified to speak about the subject than my mother Pam (whose abbreviations are too many to list here).

One of Messina's readers cited a paragraph from the Vitamin D3 Blog in the comments section of her post about fat-soluble hormones. In an attempt to dismissively undermine what she perceived to be a blogger in competition with herself, she flat-out lied to the reader in an effort to contrast the post from the Vitamin D3 Blog --- a blog whose authors are fully qualified to discuss matters such as the one I'm about to get into.

Ginny Messina told her reader that no significant difference between vitamin D2 and D3 exists. This is flat-out incorrect, and could not be any further from the truth. She then went on to insult the authors of the post being cited by the reader in suggesting they were "confused" about the subject.

Well, I happen to know for a fact that said authors are far more qualified to be speaking on matters such as vitamin D2 vs. D3 than some vegan crackpot with no particular educational or clinical qualifications. Messina is dead-wrong in her assertions about vitamin D3, and for that she is being heretoforth called out.

Vitamin D3 is indeed a more bioavailable and otherwise superior form of vitamin D than D2. This is true in spite of whatever uninformed crackpot bloggers like Ginny Messina have to say about it.

Ginny, I suggest you start to read up on the topics you blog about before you around spouting off a bunch of misinformation, lies and dismissive rhetoric that directly contradicts the scientific findings of every single study that has every been conducted on the topic. You're out of your element, and you would be doing your readers a service by ceasing to blog about matters which you know nothing about.

Domain Name PanaxGinseng.net Sells

I am pleased to announce that PanaxGinseng.net has been purchased in a private sale that is being brokered by Sedo. The domain fetched $775 before commission.

While I personally feel that it might be worth up to $3,000, I agreed to accept the offer for a variety of reasons. These include the fact that my domain portfolio has become a little too top-heavy, the fact that I had no immediate plans to develop the domain, as well as the fact that the overhead for maintaining such a large portfolio is becoming prohibitively burdensome in this tough economy.

In the coming weeks and months, I plan to begin aggressively marketing about 200 of the names in my portfolio in hopes of trimming down on the number of domains I hold that I don't plan to develop in the near future. If you're looking to add inventory, or if I just happen to have a domain name you want, now would be a good time to submit an offer on it.

Full Story: Panax Ginseng Domain Name Has Sold

Mixx Refugees Taking Up Shelter at the Mixxingbowl, Old Dogg

The Mixxingbowl (mixxingbowl.com) is a social news, photo and video sharing site and community that is relatively new and comprised of many of Mixx's former movers-and-shakers. It started as a user-owned and supported forum to compliment the original Mixx.com. When Mixx was acquired by UberMedia, slightly more than half of the users from Mixx who more-or-less determined what content would appear on the Mixx.com front-page, category front-pages, popular page, and such have sought shelter at the Bowl.

Mixx.com was an extremely large and powerful social news, photo and video sharing community.  The site was founded in 2007 by former USA Today chief strategist and later Yahoo News GM Chris McGill's company Recommended Reading, Inc. Mixx burst on to the scene at a time when Digg had been enforcing both its written and unwritten rules with an extremely heavy hand. Users were being banned left-and-right for reasons unbeknownst to many of them, often for a first-offense (if TOU was an issue). A couple of the more established "power Diggers" got the axe as well. This turned out to be an extremely bad decision for a number of reasons. First and foremost, one of those banned top-100 Diggers named Greg Davies (cGt2099) happened upon Mixx shortly after receiving word that his appeal of the permaban had been denied.

Davies blogged about Mixx, and encouraged other banned Diggers to take shelter at this brand-new social media start-up that wanted them as members of its fledgling community and pledged not to take them for granted (provided they abide by the site's TOU and not spam the place to death). Word quickly spread that if you were banned from Digg, you could join the community at Mixx and not be judged for being exiled from the niche's only true major player. In fact, banned Diggers instead found a sympathetic ear (or a few hundred) at Mixx. Digg had never anticipated all of its banned users joining together and founding their own (penal) colony. Did I mention Davies is a native of Australia?

The other thing Digg never anticipated was the media coverage Mixx would receive in the weeks and months after its inception.

Here is a partial list of the top news stories about Mixx from the site's first 24 months or so as a live community:

- Stealthy Startup Mixx Launches Into Private Beta - TechCrunch
- Digg Refugees May Be Heading To Mixx - TechCrunch - My comment from almost 4 years ago
- Of Digg "Refugees" and Mixx - History shows us that Mark Evans, Tony Hung and author Mathew Ingram were very wrong about this one.
- Active Diggers Mixxing it Up
- Community quality and network leadership trump numbers: Digg loses contributors to Mixx
- Digg users flock to Mixx
- Why I Dig Mixx (and Nixed Digg)
- Mixx: Will it become the new Digg?
- CNN.com Adds Mixx To Its Mix Of Bookmarking Buttons
- Mashable On Mixx: 30+ of Our Most Popular Stories
- Look Out Digg: Mixx Public Beta Coming on Tuesday
- LA Times Invests in Social News Site Mixx
- MIXX TEAMS UP WITH USA TODAY, REUTERS.COM, WEATHER CHANNEL AND LEADING ONLINE PUBLISHERS TO DELIVER PERSONALIZED NEWS, IMAGES AND VIDEO
- The CNN.com Effect: Mixx More Than Doubles Visitors in May To Nearly One Million
- Looking back at Mixx during 2009
- In Memorial of Violet Planet - A Day in the Life - Beatles Video
- Mixxing 102: How to become a SuperMixxer
- Mixx to Digg: We Break News Faster

Mixx eventually ballooned to the point of boasting several tens of millions of unique registered user accounts.

Over the years since its inception the site has had about 450-500 users who wielded substantially more influence than your average Mixx unknown.  These were the ones whose avatars (and links to their profile pages) rotated in-and-out of the ten spots on "Top Mixxers" section of the Mixx Classic homepage.  When the sale occurred and Mixx announced that it would be switching to a new system and that all records, data, pages, content, accounts and everything else associated with the Mixx we knew would be permanently lost in the switch, slightly more than half of those who were active at Mixx during its final months took refuge at the Mixxingbowl.

Others sought shelter at Amplify and Old Dogg (both right-leaning) and still others at ZoomIt.ca (Canadians).  Most of Mixx's left-wing is at the bowl, along with a token few from the right side of the aisle.  Many from both sides I would not consider activists, and most of those I would classify as such most are good, decent people with whom I may disagree but also with whom I have had many an interesting, polite and civil conversation.  It is unfortunate that I cannot make the same statement about everyone that has taken shelter at the bowl post-Mixx.

One of the common themes about where Mixxers took refuge is that most if not all of the other "household name" sites are nowhere on the radar of the displaced community.  From its first days, Mixxers from all backgrounds and from all beliefs shared one thing in common: an extremely bitter taste in their collective mouths for Digg.  Most are simply too sophisticated to find much of an appeal in Reddit or its community.  Newsvine could have made a play but to my knowledge has not sheltered any Mixx refugees.

If anyone reading this is a Mixx refugee or knows a Mixx refugee in need of shelter, please contact me via the comments at the bottom of the post and I will be happy to help them find a new home.