> finding food joints

Perhaps it's expertise is based on the sheer number of requests in that niche.  It learns by doing.  I doubt it's a coincidence that the first emergence of Facebook places into the geo-serps was also restaurant recommendations. 

>think

Speaking as a member, I think it's great.   It feels like the first days (and nights) in the Islington lobby ---all we need is a thick blue haze of cigarette smoke and a $10,000 bar tab.

Speaking as a forum developer, meh, it has a pulse.  Rupert nailed it. So far, it's a reunion.

>newbies

This thread is as good as any.

Remember when you saw your first real rugby match --you know, the one with blood smears and broken bones?  Your reaction likely was WTF and not "Oh, man, I really want to do that."  You guys/gals can do site reviews and assure them that they need a good title tag and lots of links with kw anchor tags if you want but I'm pointing them to better resources like seobook or wmw. The players we want will be back, drawn to the game.

The Islington level is easy. We're passing through that now.  The next big test is the Barconference (Irvine) level.  Plain and simple, I made the wrong choice of direction there and we ended up in Boston.  Unfortunately, Travoli witnessed the whole thing at Irvine so I can't blame it on Rumbas.

A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. --attributed to Mark Twain

>craigslist

Same here and, overall, it's worked out decently but you are going to have assume an active editor-in-charge role. Even so,  you are going to be panning for gold and only one of five is going to produce something you can use. So I reduced my payout to .005 per word and at that price I can afford to cull or perhaps remix.  I've also found 3 superpro writers via Craigslist --they are pricey .05/word but their work has been incredible.  I've generally used their works as centerpiece articles though at somewhat secondary positions in the network pyramid.

By far the best quality writers were name-brand print magazine freelancers. I bought 2nd rights to their print articles.  Some required some tweaking (usually to make them evergreen) but these are my root articles. Their job is to provide legitimacy.

I also have a "Write For Us" page linked from the footer.  It has brought in a few directly. It's also very handy for quickly regimenting any writer, no matter where I found him.  One writer that came in directly had been trained by Demand Media.  The quality was slightly above the CL average but -damn- the volume and speed he could produce was almost disconcerting.

OK, guys, sorry but it looks like we're going to have to move the forum again.

I don't know what happened to it, db. I don't see any mention of it among the mods, but I can't find it either.

Hotpot = Yelp killer = local recommendation engine powered by you and your friends.

http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/11/discover-yours-local-recommendations.html

>who the

Be patient, Julie will check in, I'm sure.

Yellow Pages Assoc. president says they are working on a site, yellowpagesoptout.com, that would allow people in any municipality to opt-out.

*cough*

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/taking-off-with-ita.html

> I'm not advocating for or against referers for any reason.  I just don't feel like it's worth great efforts to suppress them 100%.

The only reason FOR, imo, is that we'll reduce the work for mods and general noise by culling before it happens.  The quality level of those members riding in on a ref just generally sucks. They'll stay long enough to defend/promote their topic then be gone.

The only reasons AGAINST, imo, are that it adds another level of complexity to forum development and it'll be yet another something that we'll have to migrate to ver 2.

>Though at some point soon we'll reach spending more time talking about it than it would take to do it.

Yes, but it's good debate practice.

>Open or Closed, somewhere in the middle is "awkward".

Agreed. But we need some sort of honey pot out there. Most of what we'll get will be flies, true, but hopefully not all.

Speaking just for myself, I'm OK with it as it is but given a choice I'd rather shut down referrers as much as possible.  Experience says we're not going to pull in a significant number of high quality long-term contributors with referrers. I'd like to stay primarily word-of-mouth. (Kill the bots, too, but that's another topic.)

Virtual assistant.  Rec'd generally good reviews in the tech journals I read.  Currently free.  Iphone only, probably forever that way since Apple bought the developer.

http://siri.com/

With the Firefox and Chrome extensions, Jangro says we're showing referrers anyway.  Given the browsing proficiency and renowned laziness of the membership, you have to figure we're leaving a mark maybe 15-20% of the time.  My question is whether redirection scripts would disable the extensions?

the taxman did pretty well, too.