Search-Powered Web Apps

I’m proud to share another in a series of guest posts written by Lijit employees. This week we present an installment from Mike, who seemed overly excited about writing and sharing this post.

Hi, I’m Mike Merideth, the Director of IT here at Lijit, and I’m going to talk a little bit about the nuts and bolts of how we do what we do. Over the past year I’ve had the opportunity to design and implement the production network and server infrastructure on which Lijit runs. It’s been a great year of challenges and breakthroughs, but if there’s one key architectural concept that has gotten Lijit to where it is today, it is virtualization. We use Xen for our virtualization technology, which has the advantage of being free Software (both in the “free beer” sense and the “free speech” sense). CentOS 5.1 (a Linux distribution which is based on the market leader RedHat) includes this functionality out of the box, and has performed very well for us.

So why does Lijit use virtualization? There are a number of good reasons:

Flexibility: When you’re launching a new web product, it can be hard to predict what pieces of the application will need more resources than you originally gave them, and which will need less. We’re able to change the amount of memory, the number of CPUs and the amount of disk space a server has quickly, easily and remotely.

Availability: Because we use an iSCSI SAN for most all of our storage, we can move virtual servers between pieces of physical hardware. So if we lose one of our physical servers, we can quickly bring up the virtual servers it hosted somewhere else.

Resource utilization: CPUs today are incredibly fast and powerful; far more so than most applications need. Similarly, RAM has become cheap enough that a server with 16 or even 32 gigabytes of RAM is not particularly unusual, or particularly expensive. Running a simple web server on such a system would be a waste of CPU and memory, and therefore a waste of electricity. If you can run several virtual servers on such a system, however, you can get the maximum return on your investment by making sure you’re fully utilizing all of the CPUs and all of the RAM. Which is all tied to…

Cost savings: Colocation is expensive, and electricity certainly isn’t getting any cheaper. Using virtualization means we can get the absolute greatest value out of the rack space and electricity we’re paying for.

As of right now, we’re running about 200 virtual servers on about 25 physical servers. Just a few years ago we would have needed scores of physical servers consuming thousands and thousands of watts of power to do the work we’re able to do in this relatively modest environment. For a startup that would mean a higher burn rate with a shorter runway, and greater stock dilution for the founding stakeholders because of the amount of capital needed to get the work done. If you’re trying to get a tech startup off the ground, you owe it to yourself to see if you can leverage virtualization in your IT architecture. You’d really be crazy not too.

If you managed to read this post without your eyes glazing over, you may be interested in my new Linux infrastructure blog at http://linfrastructure.blogspot.com. I’m keeping notes on my experiences there, in the hopes that what I’ve learned over the past year can benefit others who find themselves in the same boat.

Photo credit: Leonard John Matthews

Chicago. The Windy City.

I was under the impression that the nickname came from the weather, but according to Wikipedia, it may also come from the fact that politics is a sport in Chicago, and that there are a large number of windbag politicians that reside there.

So, I am going to join the windbags and speak at the TechCocktail CONFERENCE:

May 29, 2008 - 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. CST
Kasbeer Hall - Loyola University
Water Tower Campus
25 E. Pearson Street
Chicago, Illinois 60611

My topic? “SEO Has Grown Up: My Quest to be The #1 Douchebag on Google.”

I plan to discuss how SEO has moved past the standard blocking and tackling of on-page content, clean code and relevant links. Personal or corporate brand has become so interwoven into online reputation, that companies can no longer avoid branding as part of an SEO strategy.

Interesting? I hope so. Interested? Register here.

And, hopefully, I wont be adding to Chicago’s nickname much. (Although how cool would it be to say you saw a douchebag be a total windbag in the Windy City?)

Here it is, the third day of a three day weekend and (perhaps because it is Monday), I have Lijit on the brain. This holiday weekend has been a good one for us, with new publishers such as Chris Pirillo, Duncan Riley and Dave Zatz (who runs a great TiVo blog. Todd, you can thank us later) giving us a whirl.

Side note: For all you aspiring business development people out there, getting someone to try your stuff is the easy part. Making sure they are happy with the product and feature set is the hard part. We like the hard part at Lijit.

We even got mentioned in a couple of blog posts, with a real comprehensive review from Louis Gray himself.

And, in all the flurry of activity, one line of Louis’ post seemed to sit in my brain:

[...] essentially acting like FriendFeed in reverse, not looking for one site to track my activity, but instead a search point to analyze all my activity around the Web.

One of the hottest spaces online right now is the social aggregator space, with companies like FriendFeed, Socialthing, Profilactic and others taking the lion’s share of the buzz.

Friendfeed, who is the clear leader offers a multitude of ways to slice and dice the aggregated social data from yourself and your friends, including a search function that can drill down by service or relationship (friend or yourself).

But still, its like drinking from a firehose.

I get an RSS feed of the ~150 people’s feeds (plus my own) that I monitor. Even with Twitter “hidden,” I still get an average of 500 updates to that RSS feed daily.

Frankly, a firehose of data.

And I love it. I am a consumer of data. Robert Scoble (another Lijit user) is THE example of a person that can drink from a firehose of data and pull out the pieces that are inherently interesting, not only to him, but to others as well.

Which brings us to Louis’ comment.

What if instead of passively looking for information (which is what watching FriendFeed is really doing), I want to know everything that one person (and his trusted sources) has written about a topic? Enter Lijit.

Lijit is a social aggregator like FriendFeed and the rest, we just dont open that data to the end user. Rather, we say, “Know someone you trust? Come to them with a search query, and we will find everything they and their trusted sources have blogged, photographed, videoed, or said about the topic and return only those results to you.”

In essence, what Lijit does is drink from the firehose for you, and return just a glass of your favorite information to you. (Yes, with no backwash.)

Want an example? OK, here we go…

I want to know about Link Baiting. I know Micah (being that I am Micah) was a pretty good SEO back in the day, so I go to LearnToDuck (my favorite blog of course) and using Lijit, do a search for “link baiting.”

Turns out that I havent written much about linkbaiting, only one article which is really not that interesting, so I click on the My Network tab…and what do I find? Gobs of results from people Micah trusts:

And for comparison, here is the same search done in FriendFeed:

At the end of the day, FriendFeed is a wonderful tool that I use daily.  I find it feature full and informative, especially when I want to understand what is going on right now.

But, when I want to see the photos that Robert took on his last trip to Yosemite, or that one YouTube video Chris made a few weeks back, or posts from people that Micah trusts around linkbaiting, Lijit is really the best utility out there.

The punchline? Well, it depends on what you are attempting to do, but my general rule is:

When I want to drink from the social media fire hose RIGHT NOW, FriendFeed is where it is at; and when I want to sip [find relevant data] from the social media fire hose, I find Lijit is the right utility for the job.

And, yes, I cant wait until we launch FriendFeed support (coming soon!) so you can get the best of both worlds…

The following is a guest post by Dave Ferro. He’s a director on our product team, an avid rugby player and blogs about his fly-fishing adventures here.

When I interviewed for the job at Lijit, I was asked if I read any blogs, and if I had my own blog. There were a handful of blogs that I read at the time, a couple centered around fly fishing, a weekly column from a sports writer from the bay area, and a few others from the business community that I would check into periodically. As far as writing a blog was concerned, I didn’t figure I had the time, nor would I have assumed that anyone would ever read it. I was told that writing my own blog was going to be a condition of employment; the logic being that to work for a company that provides utility for blog publishers, I should first walk a mile in their shoes. That made sense. Upon receiving the job offer, I went about creating my own blog.

As with many undertakings where one walks in blind, I learned things that I never would have thought of before. The first thing that I learned is that people who you don’t even know will read your blog from places as far away as India, Hong Kong, and Santiago. Even domestic locations like San Antonio and Topeka, where I have never been, and will likely never go.

The second thing I learned about blogging is that there is a veritable plethora of gadgets, widgets, feeds, and other utilities that a publisher can add to his site…the best of which being the Lijit Search Wijit. There are also about a hundred ad networks who will give you a little snippet of code that will place an ad on your site.

Sifting through these ad networks is somewhat of a daunting task. Each of these networks has more or less the same message, “Put our line of code in your site, and we’ll pay you. Not only that, but our black box is the best black box, so we will pay you more than anyone else will.” It all sounded good, so I applied to a few of the bigger names and even a couple of really obscure ones that sound like they are run out of someone’s garden shed.

My site was accepted immediately by one of the household names, and the ones whose websites would have looked lame in 1997. Strangely, my site was rejected by a few upper and middle tier networks, via an impersonal email. Others said that my site was under consideration, and that they would get back to me when they decided that they wanted to work with my site. I love open ended exchanges like this.

I found that once you are accepted by an ad network, you have entered a one-sided partnership. Good luck getting a real answer to a real question. Good luck figuring out why you made 25 cents per click on Tuesday and then 15 cents per click on Wednesday. Some will allow you to block any domains of advertisers that you don’t want to appear on your site, where others leave you with the option of displaying the ads they send you.

At the end of the day, it is your blog, and you have the opportunity to change anything you want. It seems that there is a lot of trial and error you will go through in order to find out what works best for you.

I’ve been at Lijit a few months now, and everything is starting to make more sense. Every product and messaging conversation we have revolves around what we can do to make it easier for publishers, and what we can do to create a better experience for our publishers and their readers. As a product guy, I get to work on features and products that provide utility and real value for our publisher partners. Walking through the trials and tribulations that publishers everywhere will face has given me a better perspective on how to do that.

Jay is one of those Lijit publishers that has been with us from the beginning. With each new blog he starts, he installs our search application and continues to amuse us with his variety of antics. Besides his personal blog, Jay also writes about Denver’s finest dive bars on The BarDiver and about the worst that Netflix has to offer on Flix Flops. (Our own Derek Greentree helps Jay with the movie reviews occasionally.)

Jay was kind enough to answer a few questions and shed some light on his motivation for blogging. Enjoy getting to know Jay, better known to his Twitter posse as Skabber.

How long have you been blogging and what got you started?

I just looked back and found a post from October 24th, 2002. Before then I had a “personal web page” but I don’t think it was considered a blog. I started to blog because I got this new phone called a Sidekick that could send email and attach pictures. I thought it would be fun to write a script that would catch emails sent from the phone and post them to the web.

What is the greatest thing you’ve gotten from blogging?

Meeting people who have read my posts. It’s rare, but on a few occasions I have met someone and had them say, “Oh, I know you. I’ve read your post about…” It’s always shocking when I find out that there are really people out there who have read my posts.

What’s your favorite post ever?

This is really hard to answer. Aren’t posts like your children and you’re not supposed to play favorites?

I just finished a post about my experience building a fixed gear bicycle out of an old 10 speed. It was fun to be working on a tangible thing and be able to write about it. Most of my blog posts are about programming or software, so this was a new experience for me.

And since we’re not playing favorites, can I choose another? This was a post I wrote about an idea I had for the Django web framework. It got a great response and in less than a month was officially part of the project.

You’ve established an entire site devoted to Denver’s dive bars and the people who frequent them. What’s your favorite dive bar?

OK, so maybe we are playing favorites. This question is one of the reasons I created BarDiver.com. I wanted people to be able to let others know about their favorite bars and discover new ones. My favorite bar is The Whiskey Bar, a great corner bar 2 blocks from where I live. They have lots of whiskey, friendly bartenders, a relaxed atmosphere and a great location (for me). You can see the other bars I visited here.

How has Lijit helped you as a blog publisher?

I love the Lijit search wijit. It is so much better than using the default search feature that comes with most blogging platforms. It allows people to not only search for posts on one blog but through all of the content I have posted on all the other social sites that I use. Plus, as someone who has written my own blog software in the past, it saves me the trouble of coding the search feature. Another favorite of mine is the Re-Search feature. It’s so cool that people can come to my blog from a Google search and see a list of other posts relevant to what they searched.

We appreciate Jay’s support and the fact that he is our first drinking widget. Perhaps, after seeing pictures of Jay, you’re thinking that he seems awfully familiar. Well, if you’ve ever flipped through a SkyMall on a flight, then chances are you have seen Jay before. He is none other than the famous Slanket model extraordinaire. So, if you’ve ever been tempted to purchase a hands-free blanket while at 35,000 feet, remember to thank Jay for making it look so good.

Over the past month or so, we have been working with several companies to better integrate their content into our results.

We recently improved the integration of Flickr and YouTube and have continued down this path, by adding six additional content sources.

Initally, most of the integrations make it easier for us to index that content, but over the next few months, we hope to bring some interesting innovations to the results themselves (see this post for a sneak peak.)

So what are the content sources? Glad you asked (in alphabetically order, and in their own words):

Disqus - “Disqus, pronounced discuss, is a service for blog comments. Disqus enables bloggers to make the conversations on their blogs more interactive and manageable. Our distributed comment system connects readers across blog communities, while empowering publishers in promoting their content.”

Intense Debate - “Intense debate is a comment replacement service for blogs. Intense Debate increases the interactivity of blog comments driving more reader engagement. In addition, Intense Debate tracks your comments, and the comments of your friends, across all blogs helping publishers be discovered.”

Mixx - “At Mixx, all of the content is user-generated, which means that we don’t have an editor who decides what you should find interesting. We figure that you can find that same-old same-old pretty much anywhere else. So instead, we make it easy for you to submit stories, photos, videos—whatever you find interesting, informative, different or fun. You can also see—and vote on—the stuff that other Mixxers submit.”

Tumblr - “To make a simple analogy: If blogs are journals, tumblelogs are scrapbooks. You can also look at tumblelogs as slightly more structured blogs that make it easier, faster, and more fun to post and share stuff you find or create.” (Note: If you have a custom domain for your tumblr, enter it as a blog or URL. We are still working through some minor things.)

Viddler - “A fresh, creative web application that allows you to upload, enhance, and share digital video easily and quickly inside your web browser.”

Vimeo - “Simply put, Vimeo is the home for videos you make. You can use Vimeo to upload and share videos with anyone, watch great videos, meet new people, and explore Vimeo the way you want to.”

So, there you have it. Six new content sources. We are planning on continuing to add new sources every month or so.

Have a source you would like us to add? Please leave a comment, and we will start the process.

Part of startup life is that a different part of the company gets the focus at different times. For a few months Dan has had the Monkey riding around on his back while we scale the Lijit infrastructure to deliver the service everybody is signing up for (faster then we imagined). Last week we released our new software platform on our new hardware (200 servers) in our new data center (12 racks) and everything is running Sweeeeet!

Just this morning the monkey left Dan’s office, grabbed a banana in the kitchen and started sending emails from Micah’s desk. He seems to be trying to “help” Micah fill up all that infrastructure with even more publishers !

I’ve already mentioned the awesome tech community that we are a part of here in the Front Range. At a Blogger Meetup last year in Denver, I met Rob McNealy, the man behind Startup Story Radio.

Last week, Rob stopped by the Lijit office to interview Todd Vernon, our CEO and master storyteller. The podcast interview makes for an interesting listen. I love hearing Todd tell the Lijit story, especially when he does so with a head cold. Check it out to hear Todd’s side of things and his predictions for the future of our company.

(Hint: Things are looking good….)

Zach is officially known as a “Systems Architect” around the office, but unofficially known as the guy who makes sure that Mike doesn’t go crazy. Our CEO, Todd Vernon, wooed Zach for a while before he was able to talk him into jumping aboard. Rumor has it that the sweet office in downtown Boulder sealed the deal for him. There is much to learn about Zach and the following questions are only the beginning of our lesson…

• What is your Lijit contribution?

I come to Lijit with about 13 years of practical systems, network and security experience across environments large and small. I hope to make a positive impact especially in the production network, as Lijit has significant performance and security demands there. I also want to help make the production and office systems more manageable, so that over time people find it easier to get their jobs done, and developers and IT folk wake up to fewer surprises in the data center.

• What is your least favorite word and why?

Performant, because it transforms a real verb into a fake adjective in order to shorten the three syllable phrase “performs well” into a three syllable word that makes one sound like an EMC salesperson, and EMC sales people give me the willies.

• What sound or noise do you love and why?

I have a new drum set, and the kick drum sounds like a howitzer. I love that.

• What profession, other than your own, would you like to attempt and why?

Cosmology. If you’re a cosmologist, you can never fully understand your own profession, but nobody could reasonably expect you to anyway, so it’s OK. I just read an article asserting that in the future, the universe will be expanding so rapidly that light from its farthest recesses will never be able to reach observers on Earth, and Earthicans may perceive our by then bloated galaxy as the extent of the universe. So the job should only get easier with time.

• Something you’re guilty of…

I introduced my father to Gran Turismo 4 for the PS2, knowing that he would become addicted to it, potentially destabilizing his job and family life. It worked, and I smile inside every time I think about it. For so many years he mocked me for spending my allowance on video games. Who’s laughing now?

Like a few others, Zach started his blog when he was hired here. He says he wants to have a place to test the Lijit widget (likely story!) but he hasn’t actually posted anything yet. Perhaps when he sees all the traffic I’m pushing his way, he’ll be inspired to write something. I mean, since he’s already demonstrated his wit with the above answers, there are really no acceptable excuses. Zach, thanks for playing along; we can’t wait to see more from you!

At Lijit, we are constantly developing and testing new features for the product, the search results and the re-search box.

Recently, we have begun to explore the concept of including Flickr thumbnails within the search results themselves. Pretty cool idea, right?

What we cant come to a final decision on is exactly where the thumbnails should be placed. So, we are asking our users for feedback.

Here are the choices:

Here are the thumbnails on the LEFT (click the picture to expand):

Here are the thumbnails on the RIGHT (click the picture to expand):

And, here is a quick poll to help us figure this out. The cool thing about this quiz, is you can cut and paste it onto your blog, and share it with your friends. Check it out and thanks for the help!