WOW! Since being accepted to present at Demo, the end of January things have gotten crazy! Coding like crazy, UI design, more code… I can understand now why most companies are started by 20 somethings still in school that can live off of cup-o-noodles and have no other worries. Being a husband, father of two, lead designer for all things creative for Blogwerx and Iwerx, as well as doing the business end of things, it isnt easy.
So, look for us when we publicly launch at Demo 07.
We have decided to make life easier. Thanks to Peter Cashmore for the feedback in a very insightfull conversation. Sentinel will, for the pay per month subscriptions have pre-generated DMCA and other notices that can be sent to a sploggers ISP along with a report. This will speed up the process for the user to combat the situation.
Due to liability reasons Sentinel will not automaticly send these out on the first hit. It will still require a “3 strikes your out rule”
All of the pre-canned notices and anything else we come up with that will assist will be drafted by attornies and meet to the ISP and DMCA standards.
I am proud to say that Blogwerxhas been invited to public launch at DEMO www.demo.com at their opening event in the 2007 year.
Over the past few weeks I have been either contacted or been in contact with some of the major players in the blogosphere. Some of the people interested in the future of Sentinel and what it can mean to content plagiarism.
I wanted to thank people such as Robert Scoble, Peter Cashmore Johnathan Bailey and others who have given me feedback and, or encouragement. It helps to know that you are going down the right path from some of the big names out there. I would rather ask questions now then built it and ask them later.
We needed help. Easy enough to say but finding the right people is something totally different. At the start of Iwerx, Blogwerx parent company. Finding the right type of person that wasnt going to go MIA after a few weeks was to say the least, very difficult.
After finding Mark Buckman code guru and now Co-Founder. It has been just the two of us. Well we have brought on Rick Cofrancesco a good long time friend of mine with years of back-end coding. Both him and Mark will be the back-end guys making Sentinel come to life. Then there is another guy, old then all of us so he brings wisdom and creditability to the table as well as the day-to-day operations that will need to be done. Seeing as we are so small right now there isn’t a great deal to do, but having that right person there in the wings is great for when we do need it.
Things have been getting very busy as of late.
Thats about it for now, but then again there are a million smaller parts to all of those. So we’re keeping busy.
Well, that isn’t 100% true but we have applied for a provisional patent. We have 1 year until we have to file for the real patent.
We have been working on a solution called Sentinel. In short Sentinel has the ability to monitor a blogs content and pin-point where it has been plagiarized on the web.
Why is it needed? One word SPLOGS or spam blogs. It has become so easy to now publish content on the web such as the one I am using currently from WordPress. The fact that Google has also made it very easy to register for Adwords and a free blog from their free blog host Blogger that a person wanting to setup a splog has no cost to them an it can be done in 10 minutes.
The reason a person sets up a splog or thousands of splogs? Money, plain and simple. The splogger will do just what I described and use an automated script to scrape a blogs content based on keywords. Well, within 24 hours the splogger has a blo with 400 blog posts all related to a specific key word. The unsuspecting user does a search in Google and guess what happens…ahhh now you see the point. A site comes up loaded with key word rich ads. Think about it, if a splogger were to make say $40 per month from one splog. Image what they coul make from say 100 or 500.
There is also a huge issue of click fraud as well. Most advertisers want surfers to buy their products but they want them to get there the right way. Being tricked only upsets the user and thus causes cart abandonment. Yet, they must still pay or the click. See a problem here.
Sentinel was designed with the blogger in mind. There isnt any code that has to be cut and pasted into a blog. Just a simple signup form and thats it. Sentinel allows the blogger to work normaly, yet it will scan and then monitor the web for a bloggers content that had gotten scraped without them knowing.
Thats it in a nutshell.
Well, after a time of no development I happen to find a programmer from all places Craigs List. he has brought in new life to Sentinel and is eager to continue the development that has already started.
Sometimes I think I should have stayed in Silicon Valley, how much easier would it be to get Blogwerx and Sentinel off the ground.
This is a first post of what I feel will be many. Where to start, Blogwerx and its first product Sentinel was the culmination of a lot of years of being in the web business as a designer and developer and looking for the next best thing.
Think of it, MySpace. What if they collected $1 from every user per month. That’s $75M plus per month and they are adding 240K new signups per day. Uhhhh, WOW!
I was told a long time ago by someone who is way older then myself and wiser, “The first one to the well drinks the most” Thats true, and we are all looking to find our own well.
