ProductWiki Blog

Thanks FreshBooks!

2007-06-25T19:19:00.000-07:00

In my last blog post I did a roundup of the people I met at the Mesh conference. At the end I talked about Sunir Shah from FreshBooks and how they might profile me. Well here's the result!

Very cool if I do say so myself.

Seriously though, the FreshBooks guys are great. They're a huge part of the Toronto web community and put a lot of resources into things like DemoCamp. They were also one of the big sponsors of Mesh.

I haven't had an opportunity to use their service just yet, but the buzz is strong, and they've done so much for the community you have to check it out. I know if I'm in a position to use or provide freelance services I'll be going through FreshBooks.

Thanks again Sunir. Great job. And check out the rest of the series. Today Sunir is profiling my friends from JobLoft.com, another great Canadian start-up.

2 days at Mesh, a roundup

2007-06-01T08:14:00.000-07:00

Over the past 2 days I was at the Mesh, Canada's Web Conference, in Toronto. Overall it was a great time and a lot better than I was expecting. To be perfectly honest I didn't pay too much attention to the sessions, other than the keynote talk by craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster. It was great and you could tell that they've got an awesome thing going on there. Some tech specs since I'm a nerd: they're serving 7 billion page views a month on 200 servers. And over the past 12 years they've never had a programmer leave. That is just crazy.

The best part of the conference was meeting various people in the community and putting faces to the sites that I'm familiar with.

Robleh Jama (Sneaker Play) - cool and smart guy that just graduated Uni similar to myself. They're getting great traction and attention so it was cool to talk to him about their accomplishments.

Alex de Bold (ChickAdvisor) - I joked with him a bit accusing him of stealing the "love it" idea :P

Scott Brooks (ConceptShare) - I've known Scott for a while now, and he's a great guy and Concept Share is doing fantastic, which is amazing for a web company out of Sudbury. If they keep it up maybe Sudbury really will be the next valley HAH!

Sean Wise (Wise Words) - one of the people behind Dragon's Den which I friggin LOVE so it was very cool meeting him. Sean also just released a new book Wise Words, and is a columnist for the Globe and Mail.

Saroop Bharwani (Ogrant) - another person I've met with before, but we talked for a while at Mesh. These guys haven't launched yet, but they're doing something pretty cool and I'm rooting for them. I'm not 100% convinced of the idea, but Saroop and his partner impressed me with their intelligence and business savvy so I'm sure they'll figure it all out.

Anthony Carbone (MadWhips) - another guy I know well so it was good to see him again and chat it up.

Simon Pulsifer (QuillSoft) - the King of Wikipedia, this guy has 96,000 edits to Wikipedia which makes him the most active contributor in the world, so it was very cool to meet him. We talked for a while and he gave some of this thoughts on ProductWiki which were quite helpful.

Sunir Shah (FreshBooks) - one of the first people I met that is heavily into the wiki world it was great seeing him again. Sunir now works for FreshBooks and they were interviewing some of the startups to profile them on their blog. He interviewed me, so hopefully we show up!

Now, after 2 days of web and tech and startup talk I'm officially burnt out. I don't want to hear people talk about VCs, or bootstrapping or anything like that for a little while. Time to get back to products!

Toronto DemoCamp13

2007-04-10T10:00:00.000-07:00

After attending my first DemoCamp (number 12) and seeing the other very technologically knowledgeable attendees, I knew that this would be a great venue to talk about ProductWiki. Just a little bit of background, DemoCamp is an informal get together of tech enthusiasts, designers, etc where certain people get to present something that brings value to the audience.

I contacted David Crow, one of the organizers, to see if I could present ProductWiki at the next meetup (numero 13), and we were selected to present, woo! Now that presenters are given a earnest 5 minutes of face time, we're all required to write a blog post answering the 6 main questions that the community wants to know. Well here they are!

Have you attended a previous DemoCamp?
Yes, DemoCamp12

Who are you? Previous experience, what makes you qualified for us to listen to, etc.
I'm cofounder and CTO of ProductWiki. We've been working on this for 2 years now and received attention from a variety of media outlets including popular bloggers such as Mark Evans. And the fact that I'm good looking helps.

What does your product do?
ProductWiki is attempting to create a comprehensive resource for high quality product information. Using the power of the community, and volunteer contributions we want ProductWiki to house FREE product information: FREE from bias, FREE from baseless marketing speak, FREE to use by anybody for anything, FREE from the noise of clutter and spam, FREE from editorial red tape so that it always improves and stays relevant.

What hard problem, interesting insight, or cool feature will you be demonstrating?
The project of creating a high quality, comprehensive resource for product information is an incredibly daunting task. Information-wise: what is a product? What is high quality information? How do you have the benefits of many bits of information without being overwhelmed by the noise?

An example of an innovation that came out of answering this question is the collaborative review system, where many people can come together and review a product individually while creating one authoritative review. This is an example of what I like to call Accordion Information.

What are you hoping to get out of presenting?
Feedback and advice on how to communicate our message and techniques on how to identify the right people that can become a core part of the project. Also (and I know this is sales pitchy), if ONE person is able to see our vision and how it'll effect the world, and becomes a contributor, then it'll be worth it.

What does the community gain by hearing you present?
What is Accordion Information and what are its benefits relative to other kinds of information systems (especially the user generated kind).

Learn from our experiences in growing a community and that it's all about the core people.

Get people to appreciate the problem of low quality product information, and the possibilities that come about when high quality information is FREELY available.

2 months in the trenches

2007-03-29T10:52:00.000-07:00

If you haven't been to ProductWiki in the past little while then go there www.productwiki.com. Now! Check it out! It's great! We just released a new update on Monday that introduces a bunch of new features. For the full details check out the notes on the site. In this post I'm going to run through some of the major changes and talk about why we did them.

Before getting into the details, here's a sample of some of the buzz that's been generating.

Download Squad - a very positive assessment of the site that appreciates the unbiased and comprehensive nature of the information

Maple Leaf 2.0 - an indepth interview with Erik, discussing the history of our site and the new features.

Mashable

Emily Chang's eHub

The Collaborative Review system is something we're super excited about, and it looks like it's already a success. Community members of the site probably already know that there was no formal review system with stars and all of that. There's the tapping system and you can always write reviews in the comments, discussions or as an article, but nothing like Epinions or Amazon's reviews. This is actually very deliberate on our part, we did have one of those systems working before we launched in 2005. But even back then we knew there were problems and so didn't include it as part of the site.

Though we didn't have an advanced review system we never stopped thinking about product reviews and how to do them properly. In fact I even wrote a pretty lengthy article examining the problem with video game reviews. Looking at expert reviews I saw that a lot of them contained the same information, a big hunk of text devoted towards describing the product, with some superfluous information thrown in, and the useful opinions at the end. User reviews, the good ones, followed the same model. The short user reviews are useful but you have to read a lot of them to build up a comprehensive picture of the product. Lastly, the most important parts of the reviews are the ending pros and cons where people say what benefits the product brings to their life, and the cons which are the aspects of the product that should be improved. What ends up happening is you read a ton of reviews and start building a list inside of your head.

Eureka!

Let's just do this FOR people explicitly. This helps the person writing the review, and the person reading the review. When you're writing the review you don't have to reinvent the wheel and come up with points that already exist, if someone has already added that pro or con, then just agree with them! Or disagree if you experienced something different. And for researchers now you have the convenience of reading one review while getting the confidence and coverage that many people's perspectives can bring. And if you still want to see how an individual feels we need to have that as well since it's still useful for a lot of people. Combine the best of both worlds.

It all sounded nice in theory, but now that we've launched and seen people use the system, it looks like the reality is following what we thought would happen. Which is great! Because as anyone in software development knows, the way you THINK people will use a service is often different than how they ACTUALLY do.

The second major new feature we added is OpenID support. When we first learned about OpenID it was kind of confusing, I mean what the heck does a "decentralized, distributed identity system" mean anyway? But after wading through the technical mumbo jumbo it turns out to be a pretty simple concept. All it is, is that you have a login account with one website which gives you a name, and then you use that name on other websites that support OpenID and that's it.

Simple right?

Heck, after dealing with some poor technical issues and documentation, supporting OpenID on our end wasn't that big of a deal either. The biggest annoyance was the lack of a proper testing server that we could experiment against, instead it was 'try this'... nothing happens 'try something else'... nothing happens. Which can have a dramatic impact on development times! Overall we're extremely happy with OpenID. I was skeptical going into it, but after getting it working and using it internally I started to appreciate how easy it all worked. So far it's been a success. Quite a few of the new sign-ups are OpenID people. And considering the OpenID folk are usually the ones that like to try out new technologies, I say welcome!

We've also incorporated some other features into the site that should improve the overall experience. A couple included some functionality that the community has requested including being able to filter your user list by product category, and deleting your own comments.

It's been a long and busy road so we'll chill out on the hardcore coding for a while and focus on community building. We hope you enjoy everything we've worked on, and as always if there are any questions, suggestions or concerns let us know!

An important note: we're looking for some moderators, so if you're interested shoot me, Erik or Amanie an e-mail and we'll start that process.

The Internet went down yesterday, and nobody noticed

2007-03-12T11:01:00.000-07:00

I was surprised to find that no one could access ProductWiki for about an hour yesterday at 1pm (EST/DST). I did some research and found that GoDaddy (our registrar) was having "technical difficulties". It turns out that a whole whack of websites were inaccessible for a short period yesterday. It seems likely that this was connected to the new DST time shift that had happened the night before. GoDaddy said they were ready, but it seems not.

A few things that I thought were noteworthy about the event:

a huge portion of the Internet was down yesterday because of a single point of failure
a ton of people submitted the story to digg, and, surprisingly, it DIDN'T make it to the front page
GoDaddy covered it up very well; they only once, on one page, mentioned they were "having technical difficulties" without any information as to why, or when they would be coming back up
No mention of it on Bob Parson's blog
This event made DST 2007 more significant than Y2K (which is kinda pathetic)

How does this happen? How can, in the "new media", a company like GoDaddy get away with a blunder like this without any viral bashing? No YouTube videos. Very few blog posts. No caustic commentary on digg. Nothing.

I think this event, or non-event, might trigger a shift towards websites using other name registrars (I know I'm considering switching). It wasn't that significant in terms of downtime, but GoDaddy's response, or lack of response, is telling.

UPDATE: It wasn't related to DST after all. It looks like a good ole' DDoS was the culprit.

FLIRTing with the community

2007-03-05T11:28:00.000-08:00

I found a great blog post by Sami Viitamäki recounting the outline of his Master's thesis on the topic of customer collaboration.

In an earlier post, I dismiss the value of crowdsourcing. What I really was dismissing was the form of crowdsourcing that doesn't take what Sami is talking about. A major tenent of the FLIRT model that he's outlined is the idea of concentric rings of ever increasing membership, but with less involvement. He defines them as:

Creators: those users who create original content
Critics: those who criticize, and evangelize the work of the creators
Crowds: confirm the work of the creators and critics through simple interaction (voting, comments) making the information accessible to the community at large
Community (not in the diagram): everyone else

In trying to foster a community and grappling with the challenges of a collaborative website, I found this model to ring true. As I look around the web space and see a ton of UGC websites trying to make a buck off by leveraging the work of the crowd, I realize that without considering the true nature of collaboration, most will fail....

You know you're a web developer when...

2007-03-01T13:06:00.001-08:00

you can tell the difference between Arial and Helvetica
your right-click in Firefox brings up a menu longer than (and wider) than your dual monitor setup
1px of margin can make or break your day
you see colour in hex (it's not light grey, it's #BBBBBB!)
corollary: you can tell the difference between this and this
you check Alexa (or alexaholic) more than your bank balance
Red Bull and Full Throttle are two of your basic food groups
it drives you crazy that Myspace, craigslist, and plenty of fish are so successful in spite of their ugliness
IE6 is like your creepy uncle; you don't like him, you don't want him around, but you still have to deal with him
Google is simultaneously the most loved and most hated entity in your Universe
corollary: you say "Google" more often than any other word in the English language
you want to get bought by Yahoo! before Google edges you out of your market
you know your users by IP address
you no longer think TechCrunch is relevant, but would kill to have Arrington write about you
ditto for digg
you register for every Web 2.0 site and use them for an average of 8 minutes
you judge people by their site's pagerank (or number of comments)
if someone brings up the topic of PHP/.NET/Ruby they better get comfortable, because they're not going anywhere for awhile
you run a hot, up-and-coming startup, but your parents have no idea what you're doing; they tell everyone you work "on computers"
you create a blog post entitled "You know you're a web developer when..." instead of working on your hot, up-and-coming startup.

The Wisdom of Crowds? Nay!

2007-02-26T11:50:00.000-08:00

It's the wisdom of a few exceptional people. I think I need to delve into the mathematics of user-generated content (UGC)...

There is a buzz about the "wisdom of crowds", everyone seems to cite Wikipedia and digg as examples of crowd of people collaborating to produce high quality sources of information. The fact of the matter is that most of the content on sites relying UGC is created by a small minority. Jimbo Wales has said on many occasions (including in this month's Business 2.0 magazine) that 50% of Wikipedia was written by a 1000 people. This is in direct opposition to the commonly held belief that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia written by millions of people, each adding a small snippet or factoid of information. digg also has similar statistics. Very similar, in fact. seomoz.org pointed out that 56% of digg's front page was contributed by the top 100 diggers.

Let's dig deeper into the numbers of these two prime examples of websites that depend on UGC. Based on some rough alexa analysis, and commonly accepted figures, Wikipedia gets in the range of 10 million unique visitors per day, while digg gets in the range of 1 million. Either way, the approximate ratio is that Wikipedia has 10X the traffic of digg. This is the exact same ratio as with the core contributors. Does your site's readership directly relate to the number of core contributors?

Website	readership	contributors	% of content	readers / contributor
wikipedia.org	10,000,000	1,000	50%	10,000
digg	1,000,000	100	50%	10,000

If instead of focusing on the size of your crowd, you focus on your core contributors, the content of these users can support 10,000 (mostly non-contributing) readers. How does this happen? I believe that it's the exceptional intelligence and wisdom of the passionate that is able support strong readerships. (Not the mediocre intelligence, and wisdom of crowds)

How does the trend of crowdsourcing fit in to this model? Well, crowdsourcing involves paying (often very small amounts of money) for the content produced by crowds of people. This model does not likely lead to exceptional content by passionate people, but rather acceptable content by people motivated largely by money. This type of content, I believe, does not support the readership ratios seen in Wikipedia and digg, and you can verify this by visiting some sites that are known to crowdsource (without mentioning any names).

I put it out to you, that instead of budgetting for crowdsourcing, your money would be better spent catering to your 1% of passionate users. How do you that? This blog is a good start....

An open letter to digg.

2007-02-04T10:19:00.000-08:00

Let me share with you a recent e-mail I sent to digg's abuse deparment.

"To my dismay, I've found that my account is no longer valid on digg.

http://digg.com/users/ekkalvia

I'm a loyal digg user, and also a founding member of productwiki.com. I do submit stories from our own website, but I am also on the lookout for other stories and have submitted non-productwiki links (with success) to digg on multiple occasions.

My submission that got me banned was a story that I submitted from ProductWiki that was written by one of our community members:

http://digg.com/television/G_I_Joe_the_original_war_on_terror

I have no idea why digg feels they have grounds to ban my account. This particular story was well-written, appeals to many of the digg demographic, contained no ads, was dugg by several prominent members of your own community, and I didn't employ any gaming techniques in getting this story promoted. I am baffled as to why digg has taken such drastic measures.

I feel digg lacks transparency, and this is one of the reasons that you have been under such scrutiny for being rigged and/or broken. I understand that this is a private site, and you have the right to accept or reject anyone you choose, and I respect that.

I have written an article in the past, that I think no longer applies:

http://www.productwiki.com/digg_com/article/why_digg_still_rocks_small_is_big.html

I would like for my account to be reinstated, but it is likely that the damage is already been done, and I have come to terms with that reality.

I guess I am left with a fundamental question. I am an honest, thoughtful, and prominent member of the Internet community, and if I am not welcome on digg, who is?

Erik Kalviainen
Co-founder, ProductWiki"

I don't expect a response, but I was left feeling helpless and frustrated, and this e-mail helped bring catharsis.

UPDATE:
After a further email exchange, my digg account has been unbanned.

The best gift guides on the net

2006-12-05T13:13:00.000-08:00

ProductWiki is great, and we do have the friendliest people around, but there are some other good websites out there as well. The holidays are crazy, you don't always know what that special someone wants, and you can spend hours looking for that favourite gift. Fortunately, here on ProductWiki and around the web there are lot of resources for finding that perfect gift. However, there are so many guides on the Internet that they're starting to become a little useless. Here are a few guides that stand out and offer up some great suggestions. In no particular order.

Overall guides

Core77's 77 Design Gifts Under $77
For the design centric individual. All of these gifts are for someone that uses design tools or someone who appreciates clever and unique design.

TreeHugger's Holiday Gift Guide
TreeHugger is a fantastic environmental website for how to live in a sustainable way. Their gift guides revolve around products that promote the green in all of us.

Make Magazine Open Source Gift Guide
Make Magazine is a Do-It-Yourself magazine with lots of great tips and guides on projects to improve your life. Their Open Source gift guides focuses on tools and items useful for the hardcore DIY person that'll be useful in a variety of cool projects.

Gadget-focused gift guides

Cool Hunting Gift Guide 2006

Gizmodo Gift Guide 06

Engadget Holiday Gift Guide for Him | For Her

Federated Media Holiday Gadget Guide

Games for Halloween

2006-10-25T20:18:00.000-07:00

Halloween is here next week and in anticipation I've put together the ultimate list for scary games. For extra effect play these by yourself with the lights off, even the oldies will be sure to cause some jumps.

1. Alone in the Dark

The series that started it all, Alone in the Dark is the first survival horror game released for the PC in 1994. You probably won't be frightened by the pixelated monsters if you can even get the game to run, but Alone in the Dark is a piece of gaming history. If you can't stomach the outdated graphics then you can pickup any one of the multitude of sequels that have been released over the past 10 years, with a new next-gen version slated to be released next year, for next Halloween.

2. Resident Evil

Be the master of unlocking. The original Resident Evil brought B-style horror movies to consoles and marked itself as the greatest source for cheesy live-action FMV quotes. Capcom has ensured that the Resident Evil series maintains a high level of quality making every game in the series worthy of a play through. Resident Evil 4, the most recent game, is hailed as one of the greatest games of all time, even if it moves away from the traditional survival-horror genre into more action based gaming. I still recommend playing through the original. Experience the zombie decapitation, the dogs, the licker just like millions did 10 years ago. Again, if you can't take the outdated graphics, or don't have a working Playstation you can pickup Resident Evil: Remake on the Gamecube which has updated graphics and a bunch of new content.

3. System Shock 2

A cult classic through and through. System Shock drips with atmosphere and defines creepy as you make your way through the game struggling to survive. Played from the first-person, but no first-person shooter, you have to immerse yourself in the world, upgrading yourself and working through mind-bending puzzles. Put your headphones on and play one of the greatest games ever.

4. Silent Hill

Why would someone make a town over Hell? I have no idea, but it makes for some amazing experiences. Every Silent Hill game can stand on its own with each one having a unique cast of fully developed characters, with the common theme of the damned city of Silent Hill. Silent HIll 2 is regarded as one of the best in the series featuring an extremely well developed and mature plot that will stay with you for a long time to come. These games aren't about action. Silent Hill is about emotion, and putting everyday people in some very messed up situations as they deal with their own inner demons.

5. Fatal Frame

The Fatal Frame series isn't nearly as popular or well-known as the rest of the games mentioned here, but it's definitely among the creepiest. Fatal Frame forgoes the usual tradition of fighting ethereal spirits with everday weapons like shotguns and rocket launchers and forces the characters to use a different kind of weapon: a camera. Scary huh? I think this is one of the first games to use the phrase Based on a true story so that's gotta be worth something. Plus, in Fatal Frame you're actually the one playing the creepy little girl instead of being terrorized by her.

6. Condemned

Released for the Xbox 360, Condemned is the sleeper hit that puts CSI in the world of Saw. Play the role of a detective out to catch a serial killer that beats the tar out of a lot of bums. The next-gen visuals and audio make this an especially immersive experience with great voice acting and cutscenes to carry the story along. Hand-to-Hand fighting is brutal as you use the nearest available lead pipe to bash crazed bum's heads in. It's not all hobo-beating as you do regular detective activities such as investigating murder scenes looking for evidence. If you're on the fence about this one, just download the demo as it gives a very good idea on what to expect.

7. Dead Rising

Sometimes you don't want to be scared. Sometimes you just want to dismember, decapitate, destroy and demolish and plow through thousands of undead corpses. Enter Dead Rising. Choose from hundreds of everyday household items like bowling balls and katanas to kill as many zombies as possible. And I think you're supposed to help people and figure out where all the zombies are coming from as well. But the best part is killing them. All of them.

Major HTML/CSS cleanup, and style tweaks

2006-10-17T09:14:00.000-07:00

We released a major update to ProductWiki last night just before midnight, but you may not have noticed that much of a change. That's because the bulk of what was done was under the hood. We underwent a complete HTML and CSS stylesheet overhaul. The end result is much cleaner code, and on average, pages that are about half the size (in bytes, not screen real estate of course).

Boring? As an HTML/CSS geek, I don't think so.

While for the average person, who by now has probably already stopped reading, this may not at all seem relevant, it does mean the site responds significantly quicker, and allows us to iterate new layouts and UI improvements much quicker.

If you're a web developer looking for some good resources on some of the more recent developments in HTML and CSS, take a look at this primer for about how to use DIVs instead of TABLEs for layout, and for more in depth research take a look at the Web Developer's Handbook.

5 Ways to Game on the Cheap

2006-10-03T13:28:00.000-07:00

$60 game prices, $600 consoles, and a whole smattering of overpriced accessories. Gaming is not a cheap hobby. However, with some planning, and a little change in behaviour, you can spend a lot of your time playing games without breaking your wallet.

The most cost effective way to play games is to focus on at most a few titles at once, spend a lot of time playing them, and finish them to completion. This way you play and enjoy the games you own without having them collect dust over years. Once you get out of a collector mindset the following steps are easy, and will save you a lot of money.

1. Rent don't Buy

The average playtime for single player non-RPG games is in the 10-20 hour mark. This is short enough to beat the game within a 1-week rental period. And yes, rentals are way more expensive now than when we were kids, but you have to remember that renting is still a lot cheaper than buying. Rentals are also a great way to introduce new multiplayer games to your friends.

If you rent a game and it becomes one of your favourites there's nothing from stopping you from buying it. This is especially true with online rental services such Gamefly and Gameznflix. Online rentals are really great because you're not under any time obligations, so even if you pick up a game like Oblivion that'll take you 2 months to complete, you're making effective use of your subscription. But remember: the more games you play within a month the better use you're making out of the service.

Sometimes the online rental services don't satisfy your instant gratification because you live too far away from a distribution centre, but you can still get a similar service at your local Blockbuster. Ever since Blockbuster introduced their No Late Fees policy you can treat their rentals as being a month long.

This site has a list of the best online rental game services.

Here is a list for Canada.

2. Buy, but Sell Too

Maybe you don't want to rent for whatever reason, I personally don't like doing it. However, buying games can just be another more freeform way of renting if you sell your games after you're done with them. The key to selling successfully is two-fold

Don't sell to stores like EB and Gamespot unless they're running a trade-in promotion
Don't wait too long so that the game becomes worthless

If you're selling games you need to know how the trade-in market works. Just like most things in life, the longer your hold onto a game the more its value depreciates. There are some exceptions like rare titles that increase in value, but it's difficult to know which game will follow this trend, so there's no point in banking on it.

The depreciation on games usually isn't linear either, but instead follows large jumps, the key is to sell of the game before its value jumps down. There are a few events that occur to make a game jump down in trade-in price

sequel is released
official price is lowered
sudden influx of trade-ins, which usually happens when the game becomes part of a bundle
3 months have passed since the game released (for unpopular games)
6 months have passed since the game released (for popular games)

If you buy a Splinter Cell or Tony Hawk game that has yearly versions, don't wait for the next version to come out before selling your copy. If you've had the game over 6 months so it's already experienced a price drop, at least get rid of it within the next few months so it doesn't experience another jump down.

3. Buy Used

Ebay, Amazon are both great sources for cheap and used games. If you're part of a forum, especially a gaming one, there are often buy-and-sell discussions or even whole discussion areas, take active part in these and you'll get some great deals.

There's no point in selling a game to Gamespot for $35 and then having someone buy that game for $65. You could have sold that game directly to the person for $50 and you'd both be better off.

One of the stigmas against buying used games is that a lot of time the games aren't kept in good condition, there's scratches on the disc, weird sticky parts on the manual and the case is all marked up. I'd like to take this moment to implore to my fellow gamers to take better care of your games. If we all treated our games well, then we'd all feel a lot more confident in buying used games. Japanese gamers are famous for the immaculate condition they keep their games, and often times you can't tell the difference between a new and used title. It should be the same here in North America.

4. Video Game Deals!

There are tons of deals happening all the time, whether online or in retail stores. The best sites to stay on top of game deals are CheapAssGamer, FatWallet, and in Canada RedFlagDeals. Fat Wallet and Red Flag Deals both have a lot more deals than just video games and are fantastic sites to check on regularly. Cheap Ass Gamer deals mainly with video games and are usually the first source for any kind of deal.

Other than those websites there are a few permament deals with certain retailers. Fry's Electronics, which only exists in California, often sells brand new 360 games for $45 instead of $60 on the day the game releases. If you don't have a Fry's very close to you, you can always price match at a Circuit City or Best Buy. Best Buy also has gamer gift cards, these are gift certificate cards for gamers with the benefit that any game item purchased with the card over $20 gets $5 off. Well, that just means instant $5 on any game item, just put the money on the card first, and then buy the game or accessory with the card to get $5. For $20 things like Greatest Hits titles, it can be quite a significant amount of savings.

Another lesser well known fact is that sometimes games can be had for cheaper when imported. This is definitely true with Xbox 360 and importing from asia. It works like this:

Pick up an Asian or Japanese 360
Buy Asian versions of games from Play-Asia for $40.

Both of these things can be purchased at Play Asia. The best part about this is that most asian versions of 360 games are in English, and you can play American games anyway.

5. Just be Patient

If you can get over the excitement of owning a game when it first comes out, then the longer you wait, the cheaper the game becomes. Right now you can pickup a PS2, Gamecube or Xbox and spend the next 5 years playing a ton of great games for ridiculously cheap. Not only are the games cheaper, but you have the benefit of picking the best games of the past generation. Istead of paying $150 for each individual Devil May Cry game, on October 24th you can pick up DMC1, DMC2 and DMC3:SE for $30.

Of course you don't have to take it to this extreme, as you can see that most 360 launch titles have undergone price drops, and Microsoft is introducing the 360 version of Platinum Hits where the games will retail for $30. Ridge Racer 6 (which is one of my favourite racing games ever) can now be bought for $20!

Solving the Pasta Problem?

2006-09-27T07:30:00.000-07:00

I've been seeing this 19.95-as-seen-on-tv-style ad on TV for the Pasta Express a lot lately and it's really been bothering me. This product claims to make cooking pasta easier and better than before. I seriously have to doubt this claim. Basically, you pour boiling water in the tube filled with pasta, and, presto! (actually many minutes later if you know anything about thermodynamics) you have crappy, soggy pasta.

Why do products like this keep popping up? And why always for $19.95?

So, I asked Seth Godin for his opinion. From his blog post:

So, how does it sell?

It sells because the point of the commercial isn't to sell you something that will help you make better pasta. The point of the commercial is to sell you something that you will enjoy buying.
More and more, we buy stuff where the buying is the point, not the stuff.

Good answer.

Calling all inventors, designers, manufacturers, and distributors

2006-09-21T09:20:00.000-07:00

We love new, cool products (especially inventions) here at ProductWiki. If you fall into one of the categories listed in the title of this post, then you may be interested in using ProductWiki as a marketing tool.

While, I admit, that we didn't create ProductWiki specifically for inventors, designer, manufacturers, or distributors, we've seen in the last few months that this group can benefit from our site by promoting their business.

Take a look at thesimpleleaf profile. This community member specializes in tea related products and sells them online under their own brand. thesimpleleaf has been using ProductWiki to promote many of their products, and we couldn't be happier.

Today, Dutch designer j.p.meulendijks signed up and added one of their products, with plans on adding more.

We have decided to embrace this serendipitous situation by focusing on the small/start-up/up-and-coming product companies. If you are trying to get your product(s) notice, then look no further than ProductWiki.

Stay tuned for more....

Undiscovered Xbox Gems

2006-09-13T13:50:00.000-07:00

The next-generation is about to hit in full swing this holiday season and the old timers are starting to get phased out. Now's the perfect time play those quality titles many people missed the first time through. The best part is that most of these games can be purchased for very cheap. For this article I chose to focus on the Xbox library because it's the one I'm most familiar with. I also want to show that Xbox is far more than Halo, first person shooters, sports and racing games, and actually has quite a diverse lineup.

Breakdown

Another crazy action game, but this time from Namco. You actually play from the First-Person perspective here, but it can't really be classified as a first-person shooter, it's really unlike anything I've played before or since. The closest comparison I can make is to The Chronicles of Riddick because they both have first-person hand-to-hand combat. In Breakdown the hand-to-hand combat is far more important as there are a ton of movies and it serves the main way you battle enemies. What makes this game really special is the incredible story and setting that takes place within the game. You'll find yourself looking at wild scenes that are worthy of a blockbuster science-fiction movie, and a story to match. The other great part of Breakdown is the sense of power you get in the game, at the beginning you start off as a normal guy with a dinky gun, but over the course of the game you end up becoming this crazy jacked up guy that can do crazy stunts like super jumps and force waves. Enemies that scared the hell out of you at the beginning you take on 6 at a time at the end. It's not all a bed of roses though as there are some major design problems with this game. The levels can get very repetitive and picking up weapons, especially later on in the game becomes a real chore. Still, despite all of these issues I highly recommend playing the game, working through the frustrations and making it to the end, it's totally worth it. Trailer.

GunValkyrie

A crazy action game from Sega that was released early on in the Xbox's life. This title is hardcore, and has the control scheme to match. Many people faulted the game for its difficult controls, but when you master the system you find that the controls are setup in the best way possible to allow for complicated maneuvers. The learning curve is steep, and at the beginning you'll be spending most of your time on the ground, but when you get good, really good, you'll be able to go through entire levels without touching the ground once. It's extremely satisfying to take out hordes of alien scum while doing crazy boost tricks and using your grappling hook. Level designs and graphics are fantastic following a distinct steampunk style that gives the game as a whole a lot of character. The final boss in the game is also one of the craziest I've ever seen as it's some demon-baby with wings, which I think is supposed to be the girl's father. Whatever, like a Tony Jaa movie the story doesn't really matter, it's all about the action.

Kingdom Under Fire: The Crusaders & Kingdom Under Fire: Heroes

The Kingdom Under Fire series can be pretty intimidating simply because of the sheer number of things you can do. Off the battlefield you level up your heroes, decide what units you want, level those up, buy and sell equipment and learn new magic. On the battlefield you take control of dozens of squads have to know what's going on across the entire area, choose the right troops and then position them properly for the most effectiveness, and then cast magic and take control of your hero and hack-and-slash your enemies. It's all a bit much at the beginning, but when you go through the training and get better accustomed to it all it's impressive as to how easy the designers have made it to control everything that's going on. The best part in the whole game is when two opposing units get close to each other they start running faster and everybody starts yelling and it's like a scene right out of Braveheart. There's not another game out that's like this, and it's very fun to boot. This video gives a better idea. The game can be pretty difficult though, for some levels I had to use a FAQ, but when you know what to do for a level in terms of what troops to use and how to use them you can usually get through them pretty easily. Surprisingly enough the story is pretty good as well as you go through the different campaigns and see the war from multiple viewpoints, so there is no real good and bad side, everybody has their own agendas.

Otogi: Myth of the Demons & Otogi 2: Immortal Warriors

Created by one of my favourite developers From Software and published by Sega, Otogi is not your traditional hack and slash. Gorgeous graphics, beautiful music and gameplay that can only be described as elegant. Dashing through the air, launching demons 50 feet smashing into a destructible house, and launching dazzling magic attacks. The game is difficult at the beginning as your magic is constantly being drained, replenished by killing demons, but as you level up and gain better weapons and items the magic draining becomes a non-issue. Being able to replay the same level over and over makes sure that you can level up your character as much as needed while you destroy every single solid structure to discover hidden secrets. The second game follows the same formula as the first but introduces 5 new playable characters each with their own weapons, attacks and skills. I found it very relaxing just being able to go through the levels destroying everything in my path with such grace and flow. Check out a great video here.

Panzer Dragoon Orta

A worthy installment in this obscure Sega franchise. My favourite part of this game is just how gorgeous everything is. All Panzer Dragoon titles have a similar style to one another, and the Xbox has let Sega flesh it out more than ever before. Every single level is totally different with completely new and beautiful landscapes to appreciate, and totally different enemies to battle. The enemies themselves are more than just targets as they all move with a flowing grace that makes you almost feel guilty for taking them down. Surrounding all of these magnificent visuals is an incredible soundtrack that creates the perfect mood for everything going on in the game. Presentation aside the game itself is almost flawless with perfectly tight controls, a deep and satisfying shooting system, and a lot of content as there are many side-quests and extra mini-missions. I can't recommend this game enough and will remain a permanent fixture in my collection. The game can be purchased for dirt cheap right now so do yourselves a huge favour and pick it up. Check out the Tokyo Game Show trailer here.

Phantom Crash

This game would have been perfect for Xbox Live, and it would have been one of the first online mech games ever. But it wasn't. Still, it's a fantastic game out of Korean developer Genki that is fast paced and hectic and should appeal especially to mech fans. Like any self respecting mech game there is a ton of customization and a whole load of different kinds of short, medium, and long range weapons. One of the coolest aspects of the game revolves around every mech having the ability to cloak itself, this makes for some intense matches as you hide from your enemies, or try to find them. One of the complaints that have been said about this game are the small number of arenas, which number less than 5. However, I found each arena was very well designed and fit well with a variety of play styles that always kept the action new and fresh. Non-gameplay related what I really enjoyed about the title was how they used the licensed music to promote new and upcoming korean artists. These artists are probably all old news by now, but it's cool being able to read some information about the artists, see the album cover art and hear their songs, especially before the widespread use of custom soundtracks. It's a quirky mech game that doesn't take itself very seriously, so if you want some fun robot action it's a great title to play around with, and it does have splitscreen multiplayer so it would be great with your friends.

Phantom Dust

This game from Microsoft Game Studios Japan really came out of nowhere, but as soon as it was released I knew I had to have it. It's extremely difficult to explain how this game plays. Check out the Japanese trailer (here) to get an idea of how it looks. Post apocalyptic world, crazy powers, an imaginative and unique storyline, this game is really special. It's a one-of-a-kind experience that shouldn't be missed.

Voodoo Vince

A cute platformer from Microsoft Game Studios. This game has a very unique style and atmosphere revolving around the already unique style of New Orleans. You play as Vince the voodoo doll and that's where the twist on the traditional platformer formula comes in as the way to kill enemies and bosses is to inflict harm on Vince himself. Every new way that Vince harms himself is funnier than the previous and figuring out what to do for the bosses can be quite intricate. Great gameplay and a charming character that you'll end up caring for by the end, it's a shame that Voodoo Vince didn't get the spotlight he deserved.

Why digg (still) rocks: small is big

2006-09-11T09:34:00.000-07:00

There has been a lot of controversy on digg lately initiated by a comment by Kevin Rose that led to a top contributor to say goodbye. Many other top users have rallied around P9 (the top contributor) and have supported him by removing their avatars in protest.

While this may seem like it shakes the foundation of digg, I believe that it does the opposite. A blog post by seomoz.org demonstrates that the top 100 diggers submit 56% of the front page content on digg.com. In light of this stat, I believe the current protest will do nothing but give the average digger a better chance at getting promoted. This touches on why digg is successful in the first place. It provides a channel for the average person who has found or written great content to get noticed.

Submitting your own stories (digg me!)

While sometimes frowned upon by the digg community, submitting your own blog post or link to digg can be very rewarding. Because of the democratic nature of digg, self-promotion should be fully embraced. It gives an opportunity to new blogs and websites to get some deserved attention. As long as there is no gaming of the system, the quality of the content will determine its fate, independent of who submitted it and why.

I've submitted several ProductWiki articles (two written by me, and one by Omar) to digg with the hope of getting some attention and three have been promoted to the homepage (this, this, and this). A lot of time went in to each of these articles, and because they were well-written, in-depth, and timely, they were promoted.

The digg effect bump

Many webmasters and bloggers are very well aware of the digg effect. There is an initial rush of traffic that comes with a front-page promotion followed by a rather rapid decay. However, an insightful article from seomoz's blog demonstrates that all is not lost through a concept coined the linkbait bump.

Basically, the idea is that while the traffic behaves a lot like a spike, there is still an opportunity to retain some small portion of the people who make up the spike. These retained users effectively bump your readership to a higher plateau. If you can repeat the digg effect over and over again, you can ratchet up your traffc level and the size of your community.

This may seem like a technique that games digg, however, the only way this technique works is to a) have great content, b) get dugg through a democratic process, c) retain users because you have a great site. If you believe that this constitutes gaming, then you are missing the point.

Leveling the playing field

digg allows the small guy to compete the big guys (slate.com, cnn.com, nytimes.com) on equal footing. I think the most famous example of a small startup site getting a lot of noteriety because of digg is TechCrunch. In the last year, there have been 130 TC posts promoted to the front page. This a significant catalyst in their success. (Personally, this is how I found them about 6 months ago).

Instead of waiting on the big search engines to crawl, index, and promote your content, you can get instant results from great content using the social phenomenom that is digg.

If David were a blogger battling the Internet Goliath, then digg would be his sling.

It's getting shilly.

2006-09-06T09:28:00.000-07:00

Can you spot a shill? Do you know what a shill is?

A shill is an associate of a person selling goods or services who pretends no association to the seller and assumes the air of an enthusiastic customer.

I found an interesting debate in a post on TechCrunch last night inquiring whether or not certain commenters were employees of the company that they were discussing. I admit, it's tough to know for certain but their are some tell-tale signs:

Overly enthusiastic - The shill will say things like "I love this product, I can't wait to tell all of my friends" without any believable supporting arguments.

First-time contributor - An enthusiastic post by a first time contributor is much more likely a shill than that of a long term community member. Duh...

It just doesn't sound right - If a person is legitimately supporting a product or service the language and the tone they use is likely much more genuine and sounds like natural speech.

If you are reading an overly positive review from a first time poster and you find yourself thinking "Who says that??", you may have spotted a shill.

Marketing to existing users...

2006-08-31T06:55:00.000-07:00

...rather than potential ones

I thought I would pass along an interesting blog post that I saw on Seth Godin's blog this morning. It got me thinking.

They make an astute point about marketing. Why do manufacturers put so much more marketing into the brochure rather than the manual? If you diverted some of your advertising cash to making a better manual you stand a chance at creating customer evangelists.

So how does this relate to ProductWiki? Well, I think we're a little guilty of writing black and white brochures. How do we get people excited about our website and its technology? We're working on it...

Tying everything together

2006-08-25T09:21:00.000-07:00

It's been a pretty busy week and a half here. We've had 2 stories featured on digg (Omar's and mine), and, now, have released two UI updates to the site.

We are really proud of our latest changes, because (1) we feel they signficantly improve the look of our pages, (2) feature the best part of our site: the people, and (3) start tying everything together nicely.

I'll dissect some of the highlights (and, yes, I realize that I love the yellow paintbrush tool)......

The Product Page

We started last week by updating our product pages and what I want you to take a look at are the following sections:

1. The Quadrus

This little doohicky is an important piece of the puzzle. It allows people to to share their opinion on a product with a simple click, or "tap" as we affectionately call it. A tap can be love it, want it, have it or anything like "cool" or "doohicky". In a lot of ways, this is similar to a digg, but instead of one option (digg), you have many.

2. The People

As you tap stuff, you will appear in the list of people that tapped this product. Now, when somebody else visits this product, they will quickly receive some feedback about what other (actual) people are saying.

This brings me to our second update....

The User (People) Page

The user page is designed to be your hub for you activity on ProductWiki. Take a look at my user page for example:

1. About me

You can use this section to do whatever you like. It's based on a rich text editor so you can put pictures, links, colors, or whatever else you like in this section.

2. Latest Taps

The last 10 things that you've tapped will show up here, so people can get an idea of what you're in to right now. If you click on the image you can go check out each product and even tap it too if you like.

3. Comments

Send a message to a person. Say anything.

4. Stats

Everybody loves stats. Take a look at when a user joined, what their personal website is, how many contributions they've made, and how many views they have on their profile.

5. Tag Cloud

All those products that you are tapping need to be organized somehow. Use the tag cloud to remember what you love, what you want, or even what you are thinking about as a gift idea.

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Our latest initiatives are addressing of our core mission at ProductWiki. Get people to help and share with others about consumer products. Let's give the power back to the consumer.

One blog post, many conversations

2006-08-19T08:21:00.000-07:00

Our previous post about not settling for Google AdSense has created quite a stir, and inspired a lot of conversation about AdSense and Internet advertising in general. It's great to see how sharing a few numbers can create a flurry of activity.

Also, partly because of our findings, but mostly to improve user experience, we have released a new layout on our product pages.

Don't settle for Google AdSense

2006-08-09T07:44:00.000-07:00

There has been a lot of talk lately about the performance of Google AdSense as a viable source of revenue for bloggers and publishers alike. Recently, a post on TechCrunch inspired a debate about the potential performance of Google AdSense on the MySpace behemoth as Fox and Google have struck a billion dollar deal. While I believe that AdSense is a great source of potential revenue, it is by no means perfect and, in my opinion, needs to be updated to meet the demands of its users.

We are in an interesting position at ProductWiki as we generate our revenue from two different sources of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising: Google AdSense and Shopping.com Merchant Listings. These ads show up on all of our product pages (never at the same time) and each type of ad gets approximately a 50% share of our page views across a broad spectrum of products.

I've compiled data contrasting the performance of Shopping.com and Google AdSense on ProductWiki taken from a one week period at the end of last month.

	Shopping.com	AdSense
Clickthrough rate (%)	29%	6.5%
Revenue per click ($/click)	$0.21	$0.19
eCPM ($/1000 impressions)	$59	$13

Taking a look at the most significant of these figures (eCPM), Shopping.com outperforms AdSense by a factor of 4.6!

Here’s a brief explanation of how the ads work on ProductWiki.

Google AdSense

AdSense is very simple to implement. When a product page is requested by a user, simultaneously a request is made to Google Ad Services to deliver a banner ad containing two links from their ad database. The database is populated by advertisers. Google has already analyzed the product page and attempts to deliver the most relevant ads. We have neither control on how the ads are formatted (with the exception of some minor font and colour tweaking), nor which ads are chosen.

Creative Zen Vision:M with AdSense

You would expect to see very relevant results since the theme of our site is consumer products, but it’s often not the case. In the above example, we see an ad for “creative products” and for a Zen Vision case, not exactly what we were going for.

Shopping.com Merchant Listings

Wherever possible we display links to online merchants who sell the product in question. This is handled by our software interacting with a Shopping.com XML Web Service that pulls a specific set of ads for each of our products. Unlike AdSense, we are able to control both what ads are displayed and how they look.

Toshiba Gigabeat MEG-F40 with Shopping.com

Why do Shopping.com Ads do so much better?

1. Relevancy, relevancy, relevancy
By far the most significant reason for such a huge gap in performance is relevancy. In our previous AdSense example, the user is presented with two vaguely relevant ads that have only little to do with the Creative Zen Vision:M. Whereas, in our Shopping.com example with the Toshiba Gigabeat, you see links to three reputable merchants who sell the exact mp3 player you’re looking at.

2. Style
Our integration with Shopping.com allows us to style the ads in almost any way we choose, and thus we are able to maintain a consistent theme throughout the page. As far as AdSense is concerned, since we have very little say in how they are displayed, we struggle in creating a consistent theme.

3. The “ignore” factor
AdSense is omnipresent on the Web and, like a boring TV ad, people are getting better at tuning them out. (Take a look at this post by Seth Godin). That portion of our page might as well be invisible.

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Google does have something that Shopping.com does not – breadth. Their database of ads is much more extensive than anything Shopping.com has to offer beyond products; they have ads for blogs, publishers, services, etc.

So how do you get the best of both worlds: the relevancy and style of Shopping.com ads coupled with the breadth of Google AdSense? Simple. Google needs to allow publishers to control what ads are displayed and how they are styled. Another possible improvement is to allow advertisers to classify their ads across broad categories (product, service, blog, etc.) and then publishers could exclusively select ads from those categories.

In the meantime, don’t merely be satisfied with Google Adsense without exploring other alternatives. While our situation is specific to consumer products, I believe there is likely something out there that will be more prosperous for the theme of your website.

Update: Eric Giguere has written an excellent piece on his blog providing detailed suggestions on what we can do to improve our AdSense performance. We plan to implement these changes and examine how much of an effect they have on revenue.

digg it!

On The Record

2006-08-05T08:37:00.000-07:00

Our local newspaper The Record has an excellent article about us and the website. We even made it to the front page of the business section with a snazzy picture and everything! Special mention must be given to Meghan Waters who conducted an extremely professional and well researched interview, and has subsequently written a fantastic piece. Check it out! (cached copy because of restricted access)

Alma Mater Love

2006-08-02T09:58:00.000-07:00

ProductWiki is featured in the latest issue of Imprint, the newspaper of the University of Waterloo. The interview by Steve Preisman was great, and the article is even better! Check it out here.

Comments are cool.

2006-07-17T15:34:00.000-07:00

We're excited to have just released yet another update to ProductWiki. Now, you can add comments to any of the products listed on the site. While you could always start discussions, comments lower the barrier to entry for collaborating, or even socializing in general.

Hey! Comments weren't there yesterday!

The ProductWiki team has already fallen in love with this feature, and we kinda feel like they should've been there all along, but it's never too late.

If you are browsing around ProductWiki and something compels you to say something (anything at all), leave a comment. It's fun!