Our friends in Boston have launched the public beta of their new startup, TicketStumbler, this week. Anyone who loves to see live sporting events will find this site useful. As an aggregator for the lucrative secondary ticket market, TicketStumbler allows users to search all of the ticket listings on the various third-party ticket sites in one place.
TicketStumbler has a really nice look and interface with cool slider widgets and an easy to navigate listing of the tickets for each event. Their search runs on natural language and they have geolocation features as well to show you upcoming events near your location. I don’t know how many tickets or events they’re currently storing but it has to be a pretty large figure; over 1 million tickets at least.
Right now, the site only lists tickets for the current seasonal sports in the United States: NFL, MLB, NCAA Football and the NHL. I’d assume the NBA is coming soon once we get closer to the start of the season.
For all of us in northern Ohio, on the edge of our seats for the upcoming football season, TicketStumbler has a great Cleveland Browns section with seats to all of the games this year.
I must have incredibly high standards or something because this was another week where there just wasn’t much in the way of articles or posts that stood out to me.
37signals has become something of a polarizing company these days. A lot of people love them and a lot of people don’t. I’m personally on the fence I guess although none of their products or opinions really have any effect on my everyday productivity of philosophy. I appreciate that they feel very strongly about their methods and products. It would be nice if more people took the same stance sometimes.
I’m officially sour on traffic from StumbleUpon, digg, reddit, etc. now that I’ve been running this blog for awhile and seen what those services can do for me. The answer is that they can’t do much. There’s a good point in the post at Push Standards about banner advertising that I agree with 100%. I share his thoughts on guest blogging also as a matter of fact.
Daniel Jalkut, of Red Sweater Software, gave a presentation on Application Acquisition at the C4 Conference that is definitely worth a watch. It runs a little over an hour and is kind of slow at the beginning. Stick it out to get a look at the thought process of an independent software developer trying to expand his product base.
Mark Wielgus, at 45n5.com, posted another one of his Ze Frank style videos about the dirty world of “make money online”. The eBay product he highlights is pretty incredible; not for its worth but for its scamminess. Holy hell, Internet Marketing can be a disgusting thing.
This post about StumpleUpon at Problogger, actually written by Skellie, is a really deep look at what it takes to get one of your posts some attention from StumpleUpon users. I’ve had some totally random posts on this blog catch fire on SU before though that didn’t follow any of these rules/suggestions.
WP-Premiums is a gallery site showcasing customizations of WordPress Premium Themes. I wanted to drop this site a plug today in light of my ongoing premium WordPress theme giveaway. In addition to the gallery, they have a nice blog with news and updates on the Premium Theme scene.
There haven’t been a lot of articles/posts lately that have really caught my interest. I read some pieces on the botched Microsoft buyout of Yahoo! that were good but I’ll spare you any links to those. I have my own thoughts on the matter that I can sum up with briefly: Yahoo totally blew it.
Moving on to the links:
Lee Falin is one of those independent Mac developers I’m always so interested in. Well, he’s actually looking to become a former independent Mac developer because he’s selling his company and his software. His post is a really nice look into the thought process of selling off your business.
This is a nice look at various online backup solutions available to everyone by James Duncan Davidson over at the Inside Lightroom blog. James focuses on the bandwidth and cost factors for a large photo library but I think his findings apply to anyone looking for a large scale backup solution.
This is a rather innocent post where Adii helps promote a new WordPress theme built to look like Facebook. Normally that’s not really worth mentioning but the comments on this post are intense. Someone chastises the theme’s author for stealing intellectual property (which is an interesting argument) but their approach is a bit harsh.
Welcome to another exciting edition of Wednesday Links:
Anyone who has spent any time at one of the million webmaster forums on the web has seen people promoting programs that will deliver “thousands of unique visitors” to your site for low, low prices. They’re obvious scams but Jon Leger took the time to go out and prove it. The moral of the story is that the only paid traffic that is worth it is PPC, but I think in our hearts we all knew that to begin with.
Shawn Blanc’s latest review of a piece of Mac software is an in-depth look at the blog editing application MarsEdit. This review is massive, like his other looks at Mac apps, so if you’re on the fence about purchasing a copy of MarsEdit (like I am) then check out Shawn’s breakdown.
Article marketing is one of those link building and traffic strategies that I always seem to be too lazy to put effort into. I’m going to try and get over the hump and get into it more so this affiliate marketing article over at Affiliate Confession should be a nice starting point for me.
I think Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, is a pretty interesting character so I found this article at InfoWorld to be a good read. He’s always good for a great quote like this:
“Banner ads are often kind of dumb, and they slow the site down. I’m not interested,” he said.
