Posts filed under “Judy’s Book”
LinkedIn Q&A Rocks
I was trying to get some information on using a Cingular Blackberry in India and I decided to post a question in LinkedIn’s Q&A section (login required). Within 24 hours, I got some great responses, information about flight training and a strong sense of appreciation for what LinkedIn is doing at the moment. My best [...]
Couponlooker Search Improvements
On Thursday we released a number of couponlooker search improvements. You can now use quotes around phrases to get an exact match and use the ‘+’ and ‘-’ operators to require or exclude specific terms. In addition, multi-word query performance has been improved as well. Response overall has been very encouraging so far and we’re [...]
Make it easier for people to do the things they care about
One of the important things to keep in mind on a consumer site is that your users will find a way to use your site to do the things they want to do. Rather than restrict them, find outlets in your product that enable them to accomplish those things. Dogster’s Presentation at Community Next is [...]
Great Post on Taking Smaller Bites (via Crashdev)
Chris has just started blogging and he has a great post up on his blog about the importance of taking smaller bites when starting a company. …one big takeaway was a collective resolve to build our next business by “taking smaller bites”, working toward a vision by executing more thoroughly around discrete building blocks of [...]
Building UGC Sites (via Andy Sack's Blog)
Andy has a great series of posts on building user generated content sites based on lessons learned from Judy’s Book. Highly recommended Tip 1 – Focus on a category Tip 2 – Content Quality the new toy story 3 movie
User Generated Content is great. Moderated User Generated Content is Better
One of the real-time lessons we learned at Judy’s Book is that while UGC is great, without vigilant moderation of that content, you’re going to get a lot of noise in the system, which is not great. When we were aggressively seeking reviews, we relied exclusively on the community to flag posts and then reviewed [...]
Valentine's Day Guide (Doing work so your users don't have to…)
Judy’s Book has put together a Valentine’s Day gift guide which includes information on the price of a dozen long stem roses in over 25 cities across the country. It’s pretty fascinating data – the range of prices is amazing from $39.99 (ProFlowers) to $100.00 (LA Botanicals). I’m not a fan of Valentine’s Day, just [...]
Closing the loop
Most affiliate sites are designed to get users to discover the site, find what they are looking for and then click through onto the target merchant site to complete a purchase. Some sites take this a step further and try to close the loop. I was trying to book a flight on Kayak and clicked [...]
Judy's Book Deal Alerts
With last night’s release, as Dave mentioned, there were a bunch of changes to Judy’s Book and I’ll be writing more about those next week as we shake out some of the outstanding issues. One feature that I’d like to mention in the near term is Deal Alerts. In the left nav on every page, [...]
Measure Aggregate Behavior, but also remember to observe individuals
Measuring consumer behavior and watching consumers interact with your site are the best ways to find out what works and what doesn’t. There’s a great post on Signal vs. Noise about some of the things behind Amazon’s success. Two paragraphs that jumped out at me: Use measurement and objective debate to separate the good from [...]