My blog has moved to blog.roasm.com!

Homestead is working to support php scripts on our hosted sites; it’s not ready for primetime yet, but I’ve jumped over!

I’m excited because this means someday soon, we’ll be able to leverage the wealth of scripts out there to let our users create even more functional and exciting pages.

Check out the new location of the blog to see all my new ramblings…

It’s coming tonight!  I can’t wait!

Homestead has been buzzing (OK, maybe I’m exaggerating) about the Homestead Talent Show the past few weeks. I’ve gone around and harrassed a lot of people into doing something, anything silly on stage.  And tonight, the world will finally see that glorious, mind-boggling talents of otherwise humble Homestead employees.

It’s really open to anyone (all 1 of you who might read this blog but don’t already work at Homestead), so come on by:

Cubberley Community Theatre
4000 Middlefield Road
Palo Alto, CA 94303
7:00 pm

Don’t be late…

Videos will be posted to YouTube sometime in the next few days.

My blog has moved! Find this post there.

There’s some buzz today about the ineffectiveness of Facebook flyer ads.

I wanted to chime in because Homestead has had some experience with it as well, and we found the similar issues, but it’s not all bad news.

We ran recruiting campaigns during the height of recruiting season to local colleges here (Stanford, Berkeley, Santa Clara), schools where a lot of our employees come from.  To keep things fresh, we ran different pictures to see which would capture the most clicks and resumes.  And to save money (of course), we bought the ads using alumni accounts from each of the schools (getting the rate of 10,000 impressions for $5).  And we did the most targeting that Facebook allows; we set the ads to be run to students (as opposed to “Everyone”, assuming that alum have jobs already).

We didn’t spend much on the test ($315 for 630,000 impressions), but that should be enough for a decent test. And the results weren’t great:

Our best return was from Stanford, where we got a whopping 207 clicks from 270,000 impressions, or 0.077%.  That’s almost twice as much as Valleywag is seeing, but it’s still not great.  Do the math, and you get a CPC of $0.65.

A CPC of $0.65 is really not that bad, in the grand scheme of things. There are a few things to keep in mind.

• If you’re not a member of the school/community your advertising on, the price shoots up four-fold to $10/5,000 impressions, meaning your CPC would be a miserable $2.60.
• Use a decent picture at the top of your Flyer, something that will stand out.  If you take a look at the Flyer board for your network, a lot of the Flyers are just text, or have bland images.

So we’ve been recruiting pretty aggressively here at Homestead in every department; of course, I’m most involved in the engineering positions. We’ve tried tons of things, and we continue to experiment.  We recently tried HiddenNetwork.com.

HiddenNetwork.com allows you to submit a job listing that they will show on their network of tech/developer blogs.  It costs $299 to show your listing “tens of thousands of times” (they claim it’s $500 retail but they’re running an indefinite promotion).

Unfortunately, I have to report that it didn’t work at all for us.  We submitted our recruiting ad 5 weeks ago, paid our $299, and so far we’ve received all of 2 resumes, neither of which came close to meeting our needs. And when you go through literally many hundreds of resumes to hire a single engineer, two resumes for $300 is pretty much a total failure.

Maybe the ads weren’t appealing enough, but we’ve had more success with similar copy with other channels of recruiting ads. I think that blog recruiting just isn’t targetted enough; eventhough these blogs are being read by geeks, it’s not targetted enough to geeks looking for work to be worth it for smaller companies like ours.  If we were willing to spend more money for just “brand marketing” for recruiting, it would make more sense.

Disappointingly, for a site that caters to high tech recruiters and high tech blog publishers, it’s surprisingly low tech. As an employer, there are shockingly few resources on the site: there’s no way to see our ads on the blogs themselves, no reporting of where and when my ads appeared, no reporting of click-thru, no reporting of forms filled, no reporting whatsoever.  It makes you wonder if they’re not reporting anything because they know that click-thru is so low.

Even more disappointing was this bizarre footnote to our experiment. I recently tried to log in to the employer portal but had forgotten my password. Amazingly, there was no “Forgot password” functionality to automatically retrieve my password (Strange…).  I had to call their number where a support rep (or someone) told me they didn’t build “Forgot password” functionality because they were waiting to see if anyone wanted it (Huh?).  He told me I was the first person to request my password (What?!).  Then, he asked for my email address, and told me my password with no security questions or authentication (Now, it’s just surreal!).

It goes without saying that we won’t be going back to HiddenNetwork. I really hope they figure it out. But right now, I just want our money back…

Heard a great feature on NPR on the way to work this morning. A reporter ran nasty keyboard (we all have one) through the dishwasher, and despite warnings from Microsoft and Logitech, the keyboard works.

I gotta try this.  I’ll post my results if I get around to it.

So cute, so funny, so horribly misspelled.

Gordon’s LolCat Buildr is taking off, even with a link from the Houston Chronicle!

(Secret: I bought the domain name for my sister, Khanh, who makes wedding cakes as a side job.  Hence, K’s Cakes.  Who knew that Gordon would make it famous, with a little help, for something like this!)

The coverage is everywhere and the demos are fantastic.  The technology is not the most important thing here; it’s actually been out a while and in use (I’ve been drooling over it for a while).

The important thing today is that Microsoft is taking it, productizing it, and moving their marketing muscle behind it.  MS has always said they want to move into the home but the only real success they’ve had is getting users to buy desktops for the home.  Their other products, like Media Center, haven’t been successful.  No one wanted to buy a $1000 set top box and no one wanted to set it up.  MS (or one of their partners) should have just sold a preconfigured appliance (like a Tivo).

The amazing thing MS has done is turned this “Wow”-inducing technology into a $5,000-$10,000 product. That price point is well within the range necessary for early adoption at businesses (as is their plan) and seems like it will be well within the range for early home adoption a few years after.

Surface’s biggest challenge for getting into the mass-market home is also it’s biggest advantage. There is no analogue to this appliance/device/gadget/piece of furniture.  Is it a better computer?  Not exactly.  Is it a better coffee table?  Yes, but not what people expect in a coffee table and much more expensive.  Consumers understood how a plasma/LCD TV for $2000 was a better TV.  People understood how a $400 Tivo was a better VCR/Cable box (though that took a little while for people to get).  It’s going to take a good while for consumers to understand why they should plop down $2000 (if they can get it to that price) after they get past the “Wow” factor.

Then again, there’s no competitor. Users didn’t want to buy/set up a Media Center PC because Tivo was better, easier, cheaper at what people wanted to use it for.  There’s no comparison here, so MS has some time to develop the killer apps for the consumer.

Whatever they come up with, I want one.

An interesting article on “Google Hell”, or their Supplemental Index.  The Supplemental Index is referred to in the SEO/SEM presentation that I caught some of at the Web 2.0 Expo.

I left the Web 2.0 UI workshop and jumped into the last hour of the SEO/SEM workshop.  I probably should have been in the SEO/SEM the entire time instead.  I figured I knew much of what I needed to know about the SEO/SEM space, but the guys up there (from Range Online Media and Web Guerilla) seemed to have some good tips and good experience.

The most interesting thing they had to say (in that last hour I saw them) was that most sites/companies are far too afraid of pissing off the search engines and so they follow the web master guidelines too closely.  They said that we should just push the limits; specifically we should just cloak.  Yeah, just get over it and serve specific pages to bots (as identified by user agents).  They go so far as to serve specific pages to bots as identified by IP address.  Interesting.  I’m ready to give it a shot…

Update: Here are some other tips that come from my notes:

• Best/Worst kept secret: Yahoo Search Submit Pro.  Use it.  It’s gray tactics that you can actually use, and it works!
• A lot of the on-page tactics are ones you’ve all heard before:
  • Title tags
  • Meta tags
  • H1 tags
  • Get rid of query strings
  • Get quality links
• And finally, check out the SEO presentation.  Definitely some interesting stuff.

Just taking a break from all the Web 2.0 Expo posts, here’s something that I saw this morning that’s a real head-scratcher:

Spider-man: The Musical