Technology the new engine of central Canada
The article came out yesterday, and has some pretty interesting commentary and stats. (Not just saying that cuz it features us.)
Coming on the heels of some recent articles on where real economic recovery and growth will come from (e.g. Bailouts Don’t Create Jobs: Startups Do), it’s nice to feel like a part of the positive stories out there. (Even if I wasn’t here for the picture, and Ilya’s not actually skinny.) 
Onward and upward!
Forgot one “where in the world” item for us — next weekend, February 21st and 22nd, Ilya, Carol, and Melle will be at PodCamp Toronto. Be sure to say hello!
From 1:15-1:45pm on Saturday, Ilya will be presenting: Leveraging Social Media, Case Study: one post and 250,000 visitors later”.
Mark Evans issued a blog post yesterday titled Pay for a Service? How Radical in which he predicts tough times ahead for startups offering free services and whose business models are premised on advertising. He makes the point and provides examples where actually charging for a valuable, useful service isn’t such a radical idea.
As someone who subscribes to several paid-for services herself, and who enjoys earning a dollar, I couldn’t agree more.
Taking Mark’s idea a little further, what the dot.com bust revealed to us about the legitimacy of crazy valuations, the current credit crisis has revealed to us about basic business common sense – companies need to make money to survive. Period.
Only a few short months ago it was commonplace to hear snickering when a senior person in the company was asked about the “business model”. Who had one? Who needed one? seemed to be the stock answer.
As inevitably happens though, when hubris combines with artificial economics to push simple, fundamental business principles aside, they always come roaring back with a vengeance to the “surprise” of many. Like thousands of others, my bet is that a lot of those companies are hitting a new (old) reality and many will get swallowed up or won’t survive. It’s the business circle of life.
The great news at AideRSS is that we’ve got the best of both worlds. While we’ve had the luxury of building a free service and engaging the interest of an awesome user base that has given us excellent response and feedback, we’ve also had our eye keenly trained on potential revenue models (and no, not advertising).
We’re locked and loaded, and totally excited about what we plan to launch this year. No worries — the feed management system currently enjoyed by our fan base will always be free. Our new services will be different but related, and we hope will provide the kind of value and usefulness that will mean existing and new users won’t hesitate to sign up on a paid-for basis.
Our goal is to be around for many more years, both because we have an amazing service offering, and because we are financially sustainable. Stay tuned…
PostRank helps find out…
Dave Forde has embarked on a project to determine, by various means, who Canada’s leading ladies are in social media.
Vote: Who Is Canada’s Most Influential Women In Social Media?
One of Dave’s goals is to shine the spotlight into the corners of the internets a bit, and see who some of the more unsung heroes of social media are and what they do. Kudos!
Criteria include the engagement scores for the women’s blogs, community voting, and rankings based on community involvement — attending and organizing events, providing education, etc.
And yes, I’m on the list, but I didn’t nominate myself, and I didn’t do the analysis we’re providing for Dave. That was run by Trevor, one of our co-ops (who is, naturally, unflappable and incorruptible).
May the best woman win!
The aforementioned problems with the widget have now been fixed, so the “Powered by PostRank” graphic should be appearing again, and the links from PostRank scores are working as well.
However, for those who’ve gone looking for the widget to add it to their sites, it is not currently available. (Widgets already installed still work.) The reason for this is because the website update included a bunch of changes and improvements to how we do analysis, but including a full widget update at the same time would have required too great an increase in project scope.
So for now the widget still uses the old analysis, and widget PostRank scores don’t quite match website PostRank scores.
What’re we planning on doing about it? Glad you asked. We will be re-launching the widget. Currently ETA I’ve been given is at least a couple of weeks. We’ll be updating the analysis, and have been discussing various “refresh” features to add to it as well.
So this is a good time to get your requests in for features and functionality you’d like to see in the widget. We want it to be as useful and engaging as possible, plus we like to reward contributors with schwag.
Stay tuned! (When we re-launch the widget, we will, of course, announce it with great fanfare.)
