Update 8pm: Site appears up, loads slower than anything and is missing lots of images. See screenshot at the bottom of this post.

Last week we reported that Recipezaar was acquired by Scripps Networks for ~$25 million. The site claims 2.3 million pageviews and thousands of paying premium members in June 2007.

Early this morning I started to see a large increase in traffic from Google using the keyword "Recipezaar." Upon checking www.recipezaar.com, I am redirected to a Register.com landing/parked page. The domain status page shows a DNS change today to Register.com DNS servers.

Now the "where is the site" comments have started to appear on our initial acquisition post. Paying premium users appear very pissed off and rightly so. A couple comments stand out:

"Neat beginning – as a paid "member" of the recipezaar "community", I'm not liking this bobble at all. There have been issues with the site – growing pains – all in all a great place to go. Now the big change. Can't even access the site. How's about an email to paid "members" outlining the changes? Hmmmm…hope this doesn't bode of things to come…"

"What the heck is going on????????????? Where is recipezaar and more importantly where are MY recipes.Recipes created and photographed by me and saved to my private cookbooks. This is not a good start at all for recipezaar who posted information about the sale on their site and assured us that little was going to change. At the very least they could have informed us the loyal customers that the site was going to be down for a while."

So I ask? Where oh where did Recipezaar go? I have an email into the company for more details and if you have any details, send it in!

As of 8pm NYC time, this is what I see:

Darren Stuart has launched a new Facebook app which brings the latest Web tech news from ten sources together. The sources include:

• Inside Facebook
• TechCrunch
• GigaOm
• CenterNetworks
• Scobleizer
• Mashable
• Read/WriteWeb
• blognation
• Webware
• Valleywag

While not a replacement for Original Signal or Popurls, if you are an avid Facebook'r, then you should add this app to your account.

Sample screenshot:

ON24 Inc., a media marketing provider, published a report last week about webcasts and specifically the B2B industry. The report looks at webcasts under 60 minutes in length.

Mediapost has a good report summary which includes:

The report shows that registration and attendance is cyclical depending on the time of year or week:

• Forty-seven percent of all registrations occur in the 10 days before a scheduled webcast, with 10.41% registering on the day of the webcast
• The months of December, June and August registered the highest registrant-to-attendee conversion percentages of 64.71%, 58.43% and 57.14% respectively
• Most registrations occurred earlier in the week – Monday (23%), Tuesday (21%), Wednesday (19%) – with the fewest percentage over the weekend

In my 12+ years running online promotions and email campaigns, I have found that Tuesday works best for sweepstakes and Thursday works best for coupon offers. On CN, I try to think about which stories work best on which days. Outside of news, every story can be scheduled based on what I believe the reader response will be.  

The conclusions of the report include:

• There is a cyclical trend of when publishers schedule and deliver webcasts, with registration and attendee levels seeming to rise when there are a lower number of webcasts scheduled
• Archiving a live webcast contributes 15.34% of all registrations, indicating that archiving extends the ROI of the live webcast
• Forty-seven percent of all registrations occurred in the 10 days before a webcast  while most of these registrations occurred earlier in the week (Monday-Wednesday) versus later in the week and weekend

While the findings are based on B2B but I think sites (and webcasters, livecasters and podcasters) such as Justin.tv and Ustream might benefit from this information. I am sure Ustream will provide archives at some point for some of their shows.

Dave Winer has started something this morning that a variety of blogs have commented on. Dave believes that we may see Google "prefer" Google Reader for blogs that use their FeedBurner service. He notes:

"… now someone at Google "owns" Feedburner and all their feeds. And they could, if they wanted to, change the feeds to another format, overnight, without asking anyone. Reader software might have trouble working with it. They would say "Oh but the new feeds work better with Google Reader, and that's the one most people use." And by the way, more and more that's true these days. But what about other feed suppliers? Do they have to change to work with Google Reader? They will say no, but there may turn out to be practical reasons why they must."

Philipp at Google Blogoscoped takes it a step further and shows all of the ways "Google prefers Google".  Well worth a read about Google's use of their tools and how they push you from one Google tool to another Google tool. For example, search on Orkut for video and get links for Google Video and YouTube or how Gmail prefers Google Spreadsheets.

I am not sold on Dave's argument because RSS is not a technology that Google owns or created. It's an "open" product. I can see Google pushing links to it's own services within your feed from FeedBurner. My selfish side is not going to be excited if FeedBurner drops its ad network for AdWords as I will be pissed off to lose the very high CPMs that FeedBurner has managed to command.

We already know that Google controls the data of the Internet. While Jimmy was able to remove Google, for the other 99.999999999% of the Internet community, Google controls every bit and byte. And don't ever forget it. Of course, now they are going to control offline data as well with their cameras and new aerial acquisition. Oh yea, and phone data with GrandCentral.

The question here is simple: Is Google wrong for giving preferential treatment to its own services. As much as I want to say Yes, I must say No. Why shouldn't they try to keep you in their network? It makes perfect business sense.

If you don't like it, then join Jimmy in the potential revolution coming in the near short-term.

TechCrunch's Mike Arrington has a column this evening about SimplyHired and their apparent traffic explosion as defined by the charts on Compete and Alexa. He notes:

Here’s what the source of the discrepancy might be: We have heard that Simply Hired may have started buying a very large number of “pop-under” advertisements from WhenU.

Apparently comscore filters this type of traffic while Compete and Alexa might not. I will say that my dealings with both Alexa and Compete have left me with a void. I will be posting about my experiences with Compete regarding CN this week.

There might be another answer. Unfortunately I can't assure that this is the answer, but it could provide some additional reasoning and perhaps an add-on effect to Mike's thought of popunder traffic. Earlier this year, SimplyHired launched a blogger feature called "Job-a-matic" whereby bloggers can add job listings to their site. Perhaps this feature has picked up steam and somehow the way it's coded is adding traffic to the SimplyHired tally? Again, this is just speculation on my part.

I have met the executives from SimplyHired and chatted with the Indeed CEO. Both companies are innovating in a space that desperately needs innovation.

Oh yea, and I thought the page view was dead :)

So the hot news this morning is Google's acquisition of ImageAmerica, a company that builds high resolution cameras for the collection of aerial imagery. So if you didn't like photos of the front of your house or car or you standing in front of a porn shop, just wait.

Arnold from Search Engine Journal notes, "Google Earth and Maps will soon be rolling out this high-res aerial imagery in the days to come. Google is hoping to strenghten its dominance on web satellite imagery and image mapping technology. ImageAmerica is expected to enhance the depth and quality of Google Earth and Maps imagery."

I remember when the "party" area where I lived a few years ago considered installing cameras to monitor the streets outside the bars. The community was completely against it with privacy concerns being the number one factor. It will be interesting to see what type of backlash Google will see in the future as they continue their attempt to control every piece of data in the world. By data I don't mean bits and bytes on a computer but everything we do. I remember a movie (can't remember the name) where a camera followed behind the man as he moved and kept a full history. We are almost there folks.

My top concern with these types of invasive tools is how our enemies will use them to our detriment.

Clicky is one of the analytics tools used on CenterNetworks. I love the Spy feature which allows you to watch your traffic live. Today they launched a new dashboard which is basically the home page for your stats and displays a variety of reports at a glance. The app is very well done from both a usability and content standpoint. I asked Founder Sean Hammons to participate in an interview so we can all learn about his tool and his tips for your startup. Check out the transcript below. Also check out our previous Clicky coverage.

Allen: Can you provide a brief background about yourself?

Sean: I’ve had a high interest in computers since I was young (currently 29), and have taught myself most of what I know. I don’t have any formal training or a degree in my field. I graduated from Oregon State with a Bachelor’s in Psychology of all topics. I started fooling around with making web pages in 1999, and have been employed in this field for about three and a half years now.

Allen: What is Clicky and where did the idea come from?

Sean: Clicky is designed for small to medium sized web sites, with a strong focus on usability and data presentation. It started as an internal project at my last job. We wanted a tool that showed us what individual users were doing on our web site in a clean and easy fashion, and there was absolutely nothing that was both cheap and good. We liked the results a lot, and decided to make it into a public product. That was about 9 months ago.

Allen: How does the service work?

Sean: People sign up and are given two lines of HTML to add to their web site. One line of javascript sends us lots of juicy details about everything happening on your web site. The second line is a backup image based tracking system, so we can still track users who have javascript disabled, although we can’t get quite as much data out of these people. Then people can view their data on our site, which is updated in near real time.

Allen: What makes Clicky special?

Sean: Our focus on usability and data presentation is key. Most of the data available from our service is also available from many other services. But it’s either confusing or poorly done. Our interface is very clean and easy to navigate, and the data is presented in a way that makes sense. We also have some really cool features like Spy (a live view of people using your web site), an API, custom data tracking, and outbound link tracking (which I’ve found extremely useful).

Allen: What’s the team like at Clicky?

Sean: Well, there’s just two of us, and we live in different cities, and we work out of our homes. So we don’t see each other too often, but we do talk by email or phone just about every day. I am the programmer and my partner handles business stuff and other non-techie details.

Allen: Who is using Clicky? Bloggers, corporate sites, etc?

Sean: All types of sites. Not sure if any major corps are using it, but there are plenty of business sites and other non-blog sites using Clicky. About half our sites are blogs though, which is one of our our target markets.

Allen: Who are your competitors?

Sean: There’s about a billion analyzers out there, but the only ones I consider as serious competition are Google Analytics (it’s free and everyone loves Google), and Mint (the only analyzer that’s ever made me say "wow, that’s cool").

Allen: Sell me on using Clicky instead of Google Analytics.

Sean: I’m perfectly fine with people preferring GA over Clicky, as Clicky isn’t for everyone. It really depends on your web site, but the people who like it swear by it. If you have a relatively high traffic site, and are only interested in trends, then GA is a great product, no doubt. We don’t offer nearly as much trend data or cross-segmentation of data as they do, but we offer a great interface, a lot of detail on individual users, and have a ton of features that GA does not offer – real time data, an API, stats via RSS, Spy, custom data tracking, tag clouds, outbound link tracking, download tracking, non-javascript support, feedburner RSS statistic integration … the list goes on. So, it depends on what you’re looking for.

Allen: Do you have a monetization plan? If so, can you share some details? Are you funded?

Sean: Yes, we make money off premium subscriptions, ads, and licensing. We’re completely self funded at this point.

Allen: Can you share some details about your marketing plan?

Sean: We have done exactly zero marketing. We have spread purely by word of mouth.

Allen: What’s coming in the next 3-6 months for Clicky?

Sean: We just released a fully customizable Dashboard that’s a lot of fun to use and offers some great trend data. The technology behind it will be spreading to the rest of the site within a few weeks. We also want to offer a number of widgets for our users to put on their web sites. We have a contest going on right now with over $600 of prizes going out to the people who can create the coolest widgets using our API, so we’re hoping this will be a good start for that. Beyond that, I’m always making improvement to the backend code and database, and tweaking the interface here and there. We also have a top secret feature that will be coming in a month or so, that I can’t talk about right now. We’re really excited about it though.

Allen: What’s been your biggest lesson learned since you started Clicky?

Sean: We’ve had a lot of people approach us about potential investments, or partnerships, or helping us out in some regard. Unfortunately, these people tend to be greedy, flaky, or both. So, be wary. If you are interested in help or money, consider initiating the relationship yourself.

Allen: Now that the pageview has been declared dead, where do you see analytics moving over the next year?

Sean: Not sure. Trend analysis is a pretty hot topic right now, and we plan to offer a lot more of it when our infrastructure can handle analyzing all of that data in fun and interesting ways. This is where GA really shines. Unfortunately, we don’t have billions of dollars in the bank like Google does, so we don’t have ten thousand servers running this thing.

Allen: How important is analytics to a Web site or blog?

Sean: I would say that if you’re not using analytics on your site, you’re insane. It’s extremely important and useful to know how people are using your site, and how they’re finding it.

Allen: What advice do you have for those thinking about starting a web application?

Sean: We entered a very saturated market, which includes a competitor (Google) that most people run home to mommy about. But – if your idea is good, or your product has unique features that other similar ones don’t, you can succeed! We are making enough money for both of us to live off of, and then some. If you want to make money, have a monetization plan other than Adsense. Adsense is crap unless your site is content oriented, and web 2.0 "service" sites do not have the content to produce good ads. Consider running your own ad service (like we do), or use something like text-link-ads.com. "Freemium" service is also a good way to go (free service with limitations, pay service for full feature set). It’s what we do, and it works well.

Allen: Which RSS feeds are you reading these days?

Sean: I prefer actually visiting web sites for content. Using aggregators for content is a sweet idea, but just too much information for me to digest. Daily, I read Slashdot, Engadget, JoyStiq, del.icio.us/popular, and TechCrunch. I also read Avinash Kaushik’s blog (it’s all about analytics). However, I do use RSS for one thing, and that’s to keep myself up to date on our competitors without too much effort by subscribing to their blog feeds ;)