Matt Mazur

There are a lot of parallels between writing well, speaking well, and good web design.

Take the following, for instance, from Dale Carnegie’s the Quick and Effective Way to Effective Speaking:

Some years ago I wrote a series of articles for the American Magazine, and I had the opportunity of talking with John Siddall, who was then in charge of the Interesting People Department.

“People are selfish,” he said. “They are interested chiefly in themselves. They are not very much concerned about whether the government should own the railroads; but they do want to know how to get ahead, how to draw more salary, how to keep healthy. If I were editor of this magazine,” he went on, “I would tell them how to take care of their teeth, how to take baths, how to keep cool in summer, how to get a position, how to handle employees, how to buy homes, how to remember, how to avoid grammatical errors, and so on. People are always interested in human interest stories, so I would have some rich man tell how he made a million in real estate. I would get prominent bankers and presidents of various corporations to tell the stories of how they battled their ways up from the ranks to power and wealth.

Shortly after that, Siddall was made editor. The magazine then had a small circulation. Siddall did just what he said he would do. The response? It was overwhelming. The circulation figures climbed up to two hundred thousand, three, four, half a million.  Here was something the public wanted. Soon a million people a month were buying it, then a million and a half, finally two million. It did not stop there, but continued to grow for many years. Siddall appealed to the self interests of his readers.

Want to make something that people want? Make something that appeals to their self interests.

Latest layout:

Things to notice:

• Clicking a domain now displays the approximate number of Google search results for that term. You can’t, however, sort by it unless you sign up for an account, which brings me to the next point…
• Paid accounts are back, but with a twist. Originally accounts enabled people to see more domain names than casual visitors. I did away with that about two weeks ago so that I could make the domains available to everybody. I realized that there are a few features that heavy users might find useful, which is who these accounts are for. Those features are currently: 1) The ability to sort by the number of Google results, 2) Track your favorites, 3) See the domains scheduled for the next release
• Quotes were moved to the top of the page and they change every 30 seconds. Doing this will result in more people seeing them (and getting them curious about the site???), will let me display more quotes (since they update I can have dozens if I wanted) and it frees up some space on the left column
• I tweaked the algorithm that calculates the shades of green, resulting in slightly brighter colors
• No more hovering over domains–back to clicking

Theoretically there should be a correlation between the shades of green and the quality of the domains, but how do you get people to click on the good domains? Until today the only incentive people had was to see how many other people clicked on it, but that was already reflected in the color. You also would be able to double check that the domain was still available, but, most of the time that’s going to be true.

Adding the number of search results should encourage people to click around. Hopefully, visitors will be curious about how many search results domains have so they’ll click to find out. Since people will click on the ones that seem interesting, those should be the ones that stand out over time.

I’ll be the first to admit that the number of Google search results is not a great predictor of quality. For example, when you google ” hackerer “ 333,000,000 results are returned. Seems fantastic until you realize that those are the number of results for “hacker” and not “hackerer”.  Google auto-corrects the query and returns the new phrase’s results. I considered checking for this, but it’s is tricky.

Consider “ejellyfish”. Google also auto-corrects that, but there are also some legitimate results for eJellyfish. How do you distinguish? In the end I just said screw it, I’ll return whatever it displays. Maybe that was a mistake, hard to say.

There’s another obvious problem. “psycholog” will return hits for pages that contain the word “psychology”. I tried to mitigate that by including spaces around the phrases when I googled them, but, that didn’t help ina lot of cases.

Regardless, I’m happy with the new featuer. I’m sure there are clever ways to filter the results to find great domains. Maybe the domains that have between 5K and 7K results would generally make great domain names. I’ll let ambitious visitors figure that out.

I’m very happy with the way the site looks. Over the next few days I’m going to completely automate the entire process from searching for available domains to googling to posting on Domain Pigeon. Currently each of those processes is automated but their not tied together. For example, I still have to manually go into Domain Pigeon’s admin area and add new domains.

I want to get it to the point where I can leave for say, three weeks, and assuming no power outages or anything like that, Domain Pigeon still gets updated while I’m gone.

omain Pigeon got some unique publicity today with a mention in the WebHostingShow, an audio show about various IT topics.

Below are my transcribed notes from about five minutes into it:

Are you searching for an available domain name, domain name provider, and more of a search tool I would say, Domain Pigeon.com will list all available domain names that they have listed so far, which you can turn around and use on your own website, if you purchase it through them.

The service is really unique and different though. Now once you visit their website you’ll be able to put your mouse over one of the domain names they have listed for additional information. The color of each domain name listed–there are hundreds of domain names to choose from– is colored coded based on availability and popularity.

Over the 12,000 domain names they have listed to pick from, with 1,000 more added each and every day and should be enough to browse through and see which ones are popular and which ones aren’t popular and which ones you may want to pick up.

Now if you sign up for a Domain Pigeon account you can effortless keep track of all the domain names you are interested in.

For anybody that likes to collect interesting domain names that you may want to use at a future date and time, Domain Pigeon.com is one resource worth checking out.

Awesome. Thank you sir.

I spent a lot of time last month improving Domain Pigeon. That’ll continue this month, but I’m also going to shoot for a better balance than I did last month. By the end of the month (last week) I so focused on the site’s minor aesthetic details that I was losing sight of what I am really trying to get out of the experience: startup prep.

With that in mind, I’m going to try to do things a bit differently this month. For one, I plan to read a lot more. I’m going to try to make it through at least the following three books:

• Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics
• On Writing Well
• Quick and Effective Guide to Public Speaking

The last two are an attempt to improve my communication skills, which could use some work.

I have a few things planned for Domain Pigeon, but the big thing I want to focus on is marketing the site. That’ll include getting more involved in domain name forums, courting bloggers, and maybe, just maybe, a YouTube video or two. That’s a whole new territory for me and I’m not sure how to go about it.  It will definitely be a good experience.

Two big blog items on the todo list:

• Lessons Learned so far from Domain Pigeon
• An article about an online Tetris bot I made in high school

Chances are not everything will go according to this plan, but hey, its a direction.

From The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking by Dale Carnegie:

When Julius Caesar sailed over the channel from Gaul and landed with his legions in what is now England, what did he do to insure the success of his army?  A very clever thing: he halted his soldiers on the chalk cliffs of Dover; and, looking down over the waves two hundred feet below, they saw red tongues of fire consume every ship in which they had crossed.  In the enemy’s country, with the last link with the Continent gone, the last means of retreat burned, there was but one thing left for them to do: to advance, to conquer. That is precisely what they did.

From a speech by Francisco in Atlas Shrugged via HackerNews:

To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss–the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery–that you must offer them values, not wounds–that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men’s stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade–with reason, not force, as their final arbiter–it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability–and the degree of a man’s productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money.

Personally, I liked Hank Rearden the best :). I really which I had time to reread the book. The audiobook appears to be 52 hours long… maybe not a bad idea.