Guy Kawasaki Archive

Truemors is a place to share rumors that you hear. We reviewed the service when it launched nearly two years. Trumeors was started by very popular web personality Guy Kawasaki and was sold to NowPublic for an undisclosed sum. When the service launched, Guy was quick to note that he spent "only" $12k to produce the service. Mathew Ingram called the spend a "waste".

Today, via a tipster, we learned that the Truemors site hasn’t been updated in nearly a month.  The last story about "giant breasts" was made public on the 27th of February. The other content categories also haven’t been updated in nearly a month. The phone number to submit tips still is active as of the time of this post. Guy is on the board of NowPublic and just wondering why he would let the site go inactive? Interestingly enough, Truemors is represented for advertising by Federated Media.

Guy will be at SXSW next week – I hope to get a video interview with him to ask him about Truemors, his popurls copycat AllTop along with what he’s focused on these days. In case you are unfamiliar with AllTop, it’s a directory of rss feeds.

Back in April we wrote about Flock partnering with Alltop to create a green version of the social media browser that includes Alltop as the default start page. Today SEO blogger Neil Patel has some stats on what type of rankings Alltop has in Google in the year after launch. It’s pretty damn impressive – especially considering that there’s no content on the site – just links.

For example, search for moms in Google and Alltop ranks 1st. How many sites (including NY’s own CafeMom) wouldn’t die for that ranking? Other notable rankings include:

• oddities: 2
• egos: 4
• lifehacks: 5
• celebrities: 6
• dads: 7
• venture capital: 7
• teen news: 10
• humor: 11
• career: 11
• fashion: 13
• mac news: 13
• small business: 25
• world news: 28
• seo: 28
• politics: 29
• autos: 29
• food: 31

Check out the entire list on Pronet where Neil also looks at why Alltop ranks so well. We are listed on the social media page and I’d say we see about 5-6 visitors a week from the listing. I am guessing that categories like celebrities and egos do much better and drive more traffic.

I guess we could start a discussion around whether Alltop should be sharing whatever revenue they earn with the content publishers, you know the ones who make the content that appear on Alltop. Looks like master SEO Calacanis has some competition now!

Marketing guru and Web-celeb. Guy Kawasaki has recently added another accolade to his growing list of Alltop superlatives, browser homepage.

In honor of Earth Day, Flock recently launched a special edition of their popular browser with an unprecedented promise, to donate 10% of revenue generated from the niche browser’s searches to charity; and after winning an award for community at SXSW, the charity will be selected by none other than the Flock community itself.

So what does this have to do with Alltop? Well, rather than trying to aggregate "Green" content on their own, the folks at Flock made a smart move and brokered a deal with Guy to use Green.Alltop.com as the special edition’s homepage.

In the end, Flock increases distribution and continues to improve their rep., Alltop.com gets turnkey traffic, and some lucky charity will hopefully get a bunch of money. Sounds like a good Earth Day to me.

You can download the Eco-Edition of Flock here and if you feel like extending your browsing good even further, add the Effortless Good extension. In addition to your searches generating money for charity, any time you shop at Amazon, a portion of your purchase will split among 4 non-profits.

With several years of startup experience already behind him, Rick Kenney is a senior Mass Comm. student and Marketing Intern with The Participatory Culture Foundation, the people behind Miro.

Editor’s note: Flock is a current CN sponsor.