OzWebMasters

Fairfax screwed up with their slow, clunky, overpriced, overly fancy financial site. And now they have made a mess of their second foray into real estate, PropertyGuru.

To start with, the javascript search button on their home page does not work for me, in either FireFox or IE6.

To make things worse, they have been accused of scraping the listings of rival site realestate.com.au.

And in my mind, the SEO effort at the bottom of the home page is more suited to little sites, not those with the backing of a massive media company

It’s not really a clone of Revver, because Revver lets folk watch videos for free (just like YouTube) but has creates revenue from showing ads. Si-Mi (see me), created by David Geddes, Andrew Kelley, and Simone Govic of Victoria, expects people to pay to watch their videos.

Will it work? It’s going to come down to quality of content. The reason YouTube works is that people will watch any old crap if it is free. And it is viral, people tell their mates “hey there’s a place with free videos”. Asking people to pay is not nearly as viral, and as soon as someone pays for something that they don’t like, they might not come back.

As a platform for 3rd parties to use, to monetize content on their own sites, it might work. At my site I could create a video about searching the web, embed it (like you can with YouTube), and charge people to watch it. That way any unhappiness with the quality will be aimed at me, not Si-Mi. However, they don’t seem to offer this. And it doesn’t seem to be planned either, although they are planning to sell clothes. Hmmmm…

As a destination site, where everything hinges on quality & publicty, I wish them luck!

(BTW, their blog is a bit embarrassing, it still contains default content that I figure they would choose to replace)

Although it has been around for a while (long enough to have been through 4 re-designs), it is still in pre-launch mode, and all ads are free. Online classified ads site, Find It, is the brainchild of local entrepreneur Mark Fletcher, using Web 2.0 technology to create an eBay competitor. The selling point is that any product under $500 will always be listed for free, making it a great mix of classifieds and eBay. He says he has spent $2 million on it so far (I’m thinking he has overpaid his staff/contractors), and expects to spend another $750K before it is launched. Good luck to him, and hopefully he gets a move on before someone steals his idea and launches quicker…

Recently they had a full page ad in a major Melbourne newpaper, asking for something to be done about XXX movies in this country. They way I understand it, porn shops are breaking the law by selling X18+ movies, for these are deemed to be prohibited due to containing “real depictions of actual sexual activity … in a way that it is likely to cause offence to a reasonable adult”. 

Unfortunately normal happy-go-lucky just folk having consensual sex movies are being wrongly classified as X18+. And porn shops are unsure whether they will ever be raided and convicted for it.

Many web innovations have started in the porn industry, and to my mind “nice” porn should be available to adults in a free democracy. Hopefully AdultShop’s campaign will have a good result.

Have you heard of Atlassian, Campaign Monitor or Zookoda? They are all local web companies make waves globally. A summary of 16 such companies is at Rex Chung’s site. Buy local!