Wow!

With the first blog post on May 6′th, its been almost an entire month of educating people on the finer points of business, technology, and finance. capitalAI has made some significant headway in this regard. In the month of May, we had 825 absolute unique visitors, over 1,000 visits and 3,094 page views!

While quantity does not equal quality, we posted 62 times. More importantly, we received 60 comments and 22 blog reactions, commenting or linking to some of our posts.

For the avid readers that started from the beginning (or the ones that clicked on the link to my first post above), you’ll notice that the blog started with the topic of personal finance and then morphed into one about business strategy. Let’s just say that this is for the better. I’ve said before that the personal finance industry treats its readers like first graders and I had no intention of doing so. Discussions around business and the ideas and strategy that it takes to become successful tend to excite me a bit more (with personal finance peppered in here and there), and I’ll need that to keep this thing going. Additionally, this blog is still here to tell YOU how to achieve better returns.

Here’s to another great month, where the quantity of posts will likely decrease, but the quality will rise… to the top!

Ever wonder what you get when you cross a comedian, a video, and an audience. A helluva time! Take a look at FunnyorDie. It’s a site founded by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay to promote funny videos (merely 7 weeks ago). It has already received venture backing from Sequoia Capital and its most popular video has been viewed over 31mm times.

Funny Business can be Big Business. Sure, it doesn’t have much revenues now, but as people start flocking to it (to be a star), it’s going to become big and it’s going to become profitable (other than bandwidth, there’s not much cost in running a site like that).

The site is really using Will Ferrell’s power and connections in the industry to cut a niche site out of the YouTube’s of the world. When Mashable comments on it, you know that it’s of interest in the smaller tech community. However, when the NYTimes decides to throw its opinion in, it usually means that it has reached mass market.

Here’s a word of advice to Will and Adam: add some sort of embed code to the video… I know that you had it and took it down… 100 people will read this post and maybe 5 will click through to see the video. If it was in the post, 45 additional people would have seen it. Multiply that by ten thousand blogs and it makes a difference!

There’s a lot going on these days. It’s almost as if the silent dam of Memorial Day has broken and the rush of water has deafened us with its mighty roar. I should have been a poet. Here it goes:

1. Last.fm is bought by CBS for $280mm. A pretty successful site and one that was able to integrate community really nicely into the delivery of music. This comes after CBS acquired Wallstrip for a paltry $5mm. Looks like CBS is trying to move into the digital space, rapidly. Gee, I wonder what it’s worried about.

2. eBay pounces and acquires StumbleUpon for $75mm. I’ve used the service and I didn’t find it very useful, unless I REALLY wanted to waste some time or really didn’t have anything to write about. I found that it always sent me to a page that was created in 1997. For those of you who don’t know, 1997 pages are NOT aesthetically pleasing. If you’re wondering why eBay made this acquisition, keep on wondering. It looks like another corporate diversification move (possibly to bring in some community talent). This is a hiccup.

3. Who cares if the Chinese stock market plunged by 6.5%. We saw similiar action in February and we rebounded, the housing market continues its slow burn, and the economy is lumbering forward. Let’s set a record! The S&P 500 jumped and reached a new record high yesterday. Shhh… don’t tell anybody that if you adjust the index for inflation, we’re still in negative territory. Or that if you look at the Nasdaq, you’ll still sit in front of your computer screen and cry yourself to sleep. I could have, I should have… Yes, I know.

4. Microsoft Surface Computer: Microsoft releases a really cool addition to its maturing technological lineup. Check out the attached video. This conjures memories of the scenes in Minority Report where Tom Cruise does the widescreen criss-cross and acts as the judge, jury, and executioner (or prison guard). Microsoft plans on selling the surface computer to enterprises at first. It will bring down the cost of the machine, develop additional apps, and then sell it you and I. Smart move.

That’s it for now, folks!

and find more pennies… many more pennies…

The tried and true strategy is usually the one that’s not going to make you any money. Even if it does, it won’t make you the big bucks. After all, there are likely many other competitors trying to do the same thing.

So what do you do?

You take your current business strategy and flip it upside down. As I mentioned before, John Chow has taken this advice and performed one of the greatest linkbaits of all time. In the process, he is now the number one ranking Google search result for the search phrase “make money online.”

Nice.

Now, he’s taken this business strategy one step further and is offering a free e-book about the process of making money online. You can get that e-book over here. So you ask, where does he make his money? Very simple. He figures that this e-book will be wildly successful because it’s free and that many users will click on his affiliate links inside the e-book. This will turn into some solid, hard cash. He certainly has flipped the typical blog business strategy upside down.

Maybe one day, I’ll rank number one for the search phrase “business strategy.” Sure it may take a while, but that’s all part of the… business strategy.

Here’s John in action:

The political arena is an interesting beast. Usually, it’s full of infighting, backbiting, hearsay, and intrigue. However, there are times where business should take a page from the politicos and employ some of their strategies. Of course, you never know when the next viral video ala “Hillary 1984″ will ever be successful, but you need to give it a whirl.

Here’s the “Hillary 1984″ video:

Here’s an interesting video from It’s Like Spiders. Nick has taken this advice to heart… After all, everyone wants to be famous.

Then there’s Coke, the company who personifies smart marketing. They just get it. Watch below (while you’ll have to speak Spanish, you should get the message)…

Question 1:

Interestingly enough, I get some traffic from Google every single day. My most popular referring term turns out to be: personal finance lesson plan project. I think this is an interesting choice of words and I continue to wonder why this is my single most important traffic driver. I’ve written about tons of other stuff and still don’t understand why the personal finance lesson garnered from Spider-Man 3 has turned into a project plan. Any ideas? I figure my post about Spider-Man and Shrek’s personal finance lesson is next on the list…

Question 2:

Why is it that we all flock to a specific source (let’s call it TechCrunch in this case) even though we know that the news was broken by an earlier report. For instance, I read about LaLa’s music release last week in Business 2.0. Yet, merely a few moments ago, I linked to Techcrunch when commenting on LaLa’s choice of business strategy. Maybe it’s because I went to the Business 2.0 site and couldn’t find what they wrote in their magazine. Talk about a good web strategy.

Question 3:

Why do we have money? Evidently, it’s there so it can be one factor in the NYTimes Class selector. It seems that we don’t have enough tools telling us how to run our lives. Let’s input a few more variables and find out that we stand in the Bottom Fifth percentile. Ok, the Top Fifth, but who’s counting…!

LaLa, a music swapping service via CD, has announced that it will allow users to listen to music in the hopes that they’re going to buy a CD. If they’re listening to free music do you think they’re really going to buy a costly CD? Still, I see this as an interesting move. LaLa has found itself a successful niche in the powerful music business and is trying to find a way to exploit this. It took additional funding (in the range of $9mm) to execute this piece of its strategy. Could be a quick burn.

Meanwhile, this guy has an interesting startup idea that he based on a LaLa epiphany. He’s being added to my RSS! I have the distinct feeling that a service telling you where to save money has been tried many times before. Maybe he should check out my latest list of 20 Great Business Ideas. While this idea may save you some money, it sounds like shopping.com (just more difficult) I liked this post of his as well. It looks like MySpace is now on the defensive; Facebook has attacked.

Overall, I’d have to say that LaLa has proved to be pretty successful in its niche. I look forward to seeing how its winner-takes-all strategy pans out…

I’ve already commented on the rampant spread of celebrity throughout the blogosphere, and on the fact that technology, politics, and celebrity are by far the most popular topics.

I was searching through Technorati’s popular news section and noticed something interesting. While technology takes the prize as the most popular subject, the vast majority of news articles linked to on the popular section relate to politics (the war in particular).

Why?

It could be that politics is playing a bigger role in today’s news then it did a few months ago, but I doubt it. The real reason seems to be that the blogosphere is actually the one making the news in the realm of technology and celebrity, so there’s no real need to link to outside news sources. When it comes to politics, that’s still the foray of the old-line establishment like the NYTimes and Washington Post.

We can thank the tech geeks and national voyeurism for successes in those fronts. When it comes to politics though, it looks like The Huffington Post liberalism parade is just not cutting it. Now don’t get me wrong… Ariana Huffington is not the only one to blame.

Why does Technorati only include links to outside news sources when it comes to sourcing popularity? Technorati IS A BLOG AGGREGATOR. It should aggregate the links to particular posts and incorporate them into these results!

More on Technorati’s confusing site upgrade another time… I’d rank it slightly worse than the new Google Analytics, after all there’s one person that likes it…