Eric Giguere (the author of a couple Adsense books that I haven't read yet), has a post up on his Make Easy Money With Google And Adsense blog entitled "The 3 Kinds Of Successful Adsense Sites".In summary, the three types he lists are:The Experience Site - a site that describes your personal experience with something.The Clarification Site - a site to better explain a topic.The Compilation Site - a site that organizes information and links to relevant websites.ProductCritic is definitely the third type of site that Eric lists. To quote his post,"The best compilation sites have lots of links to other sites. They're not afraid of external linking, and they're all the more useful because of it. It may seem counterproductive because each link out is one more chance of losing the visitor (and hence any potential ad clicks) but it’s the links that make the site valuable to the visitor in the first place and that draw in the traffic."I can't believe how well Eric describes our philosoph
ProductCritic's Cell Phone Reviews now lists 18 reviews for the Apple iPhone. I think we have the most extensive list of reviews you will find anywhere.Currently, the iPhone has a ProductCritic score of 87 which puts it tied for best rated phone on the site along with the Sony Ericsson K800i and the Sony Ericsson W810i.
We've just posted all the current Apple iPhone reviews up on our main consumer electronics review site. At this time, not surprisingly (given the hype surrounding the iPhone), it is the highest rated phone on ProductCritic (just barely edging out the Sony Ericsson K800i).Most of the reviews are from the main stream press (like USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and CNET). Over the next few weeks, I'd expect the real in-depth reviews from the more tech-centric sites.
Lightspeed Venture Partners has a blog posting up about the different types of Internet users.In creating ProductCritic, we didn't actually think in terms of this but given that I put myself in the "Time Poor" camp and the whole reason to create the site was to help others like me, it's not a wonder that "search engines" and "comparison shopping engines" are two examples that are directly linked to why we built ProductCritic.Our goal is not only to minimize the time that you spend researching products before you buy them, our goal is also to minimize the time you spend on ProductCritic! I know that doesn't sound like such a smart thing to wish for the visitors to your site when you're creating a startup. It actually sounds completely counter-intuitive.As I've stated in previous posts, the usefulness of ProductCritic is tied directly to how much time we can save people when they research products. That includes spending time on the site itself. Our belief is that if ProductCritic s
This is part two of Startup Lessons from ProductCritic. Part One can be found here.Deciding on the operating system that will host your application has a huge ripple down effect on the rest of your system. There is effectively two options you can choose. Windows or not-Windows which is effectively Linux but not always.Choosing Windows will almost certainly lead to IIS, SQLServer, and C#/VB.NET and choosing Linux will almost certainly lead to Apache, MySQL/PostgreSQL, Perl/PHP/Python/Ruby. Yes, you can run ASP.NET under Mono and you can run Ruby on Rails under Windows but doing so I find is an uphill battle. If there is anything that I have learned is that working in the preferred environment makes life a lot easier.The preferred environment means using the software in the same environment that it was built in. If you work in QA this is a bad idea because little bugs will go unnoticed but as a user it makes things far easier.Luckily, both OS's have platforms for their preferred en
We thought it would be interesting to share some of the technical decisions we made with creating ProductCritic. In this first of a series we talk about the hardware running the site.ProductCritic runs on its own VPS (Virtual Private Server) supplied by SliceHost. A VPS allows a single machine to emulate multiple machines. What this allows is a service provider like SliceHost to own a high end server and then slice it down into any number of smaller less powerful servers and then rent those out to customers.It's a really great because you get your own rock solid piece of (virtual) hardware running in a secure data center with fast network connections at a very reasonable cost. Since you own the entire slice you can install anything you want on it. You also don't have to worry about anybody else wrecking the server when they install something because only you have access to it. Since the service provider is running very little software itself not much every changes on the server
