MappingTheWeb //

Wow.

What can I say? This is an exciting time for the blog and myself.

After holding my breath for a few weeks, 9Rules began announcing new entrants a few days ago. But today was the day I was waiting for. MappingTheWeb officially joins the 9Rules network. I’m very stoked and I look forward to contributing to the network.

Time to celebrate. Raise your glass.

(I will send updates as I get more info from 9Rules.)

On February 23rd and 24th, Vancouver will be the host of Northern Voice 2007. This Canadian blogging conference first began in 2005 and has blossomed ever since. Big names who have attended in the past include Robert Scoble, Dave Sifry, and Tim Bray. The event will take place at the University of British Columbia. The registration fee is a meager $30 for one day, or $50 for both. Prices at the door are $40 and $60 respectively, so register online if you want to save a couple bucks. The event was sold out last year, so door registration wasn’t even available. So sign up soon to ensure your spot. T-shirts will also be available for purchase for $20.

I’ll post more info as it becomes available. See ya there…

In order for me to have closer communications with readers, I have added an embedded chat box in the right-hand column (just scroll down a bit and you will see it). In addition, it will also allows readers to interact and chat about new web trends, technologies, start-ups, or perhaps an MTW article.

The embedded chat widget is provided by InCircles, a cool new web app company. I highly suggest checking them out and embedding a chat box wherever you feel a stimulating chat may erupt.

I am going to leave the chat box on the site as long as it is being put to use and people are engaging in conversations. Expect to see me online often enough. Type me a message and I’ll do my best to reply.

Just type in your name followed by the “Enter” key and start chatting.

Talk to you all soon, literally.

MappingTheWeb has officially broken through the 10,000 page view total for the month of November as of Monday.

After steady, consistent growth since launching in late September, the blog has since surged in terms of traffic after been ’stumbled upon’ several times. For those of you unaware of this term, there is a toolbar produced by a company called StumbleUpon, which allows you to rate sites with a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Essentially however, the application can potentially drive huge volumes of traffic to websites (which i was lucky enough to receive). Here is more on StumbleUpon from Wikipedia.

In addition, the RSS subscriber base and Alexa rank are also moving in the right direction.

Apparently people read this blog? Dunno why. Weird.

Time to party and celebrate? Not yet. Maybe when I get 1% of the traffic TechCrunch gets…

No, this isn’t a flashback to grade 2 recess. It’s a new business strategy that has become more and more popular.

The idea is this: why build an existing user base from scratch when you can leverage a pre-existing one? Seems rather straight-forward, but many companies fail to take advantage of this.

Given that there are already many social networks and established online communities, why not milk these for all they’re worth? Several hundreds, if not thousands, of business models have been built off eBay, Amazon, MySpace, Craigslist, Yahoo, Google, and so on. Though these diverse tier 1 players may not provide a really well targeted, segmented group, you may want to look at some of the tier 2 or 3 players, which may still garner millions of users and heavy traffic.

A large part of YouTube’s success can be attributed to MySpace. The embeddable video player provided branded exposure and access to a new distribution channel for the video start-up.

As a general rule, widgets are a great way to take advantage of an existing user base and provide viral distribution. And in this case, the network may come in the form of a blog’s readership.

Though this is simply one strategy a start-up may choose to follow, it is definitely one that all should at least consider.