The fundamentals they followed were not that dissimilar to the ones I’ve used over time, getting wpmu.org (and the .com and .net), not to mention wpplugins.com and a few other choice bits of internet real estate.

Namely:

• Believe that you can actually get a great domain
• Then persevere, for as long as it takes, don’t give up
• Don’t insult the owner too, especially not with a low ball offer
• And be sure to do a TM search, to make sure you can use it

So, on that front, and as per the title of this post, I figured I’d share with you how we picked up (and what value we’ve got from) two pretty nice (and important!) domain names over the last few months.

Edublogs.com

I have wanted edublogs.com, and been trying to buy it, for literally the last 7 years.

I’ve probably made an offer every year (it’s been on Sedo for at least the last 4), and only ever had one response, which then disappeared when I refused to make an offer (and rather asked them to set a price).

So, earlier this year, I significantly upped my offer, from the few grand that I’d been initially offering, to 12.5k. At which point they decide to talk,

Needless to say, there was a bunch of back and forth, but we agreed on, eventually, a price of $20,800 (including v significant sedo fees, nice work if you can get it!), and it’s now all set up and working beautifully for us, for example, larryferlazzo.edublogs.com works just as well as larryferlazzo.edublogs.org.

And, was it worth it?

Absolutely. Hell. Yes.

From the minute we set it up we saw an instant boost in our overall site traffic of over 6,000 visits / day! It’s massively increased general usability of the site (folk often just type in the .com) and I reckon it’s added a heap of value to the company too.

So, basically, persistence works, and making a realistic offer (the guy knew I was the edublogs chap, and really wanted it) really helps too.

WPMUDEV.com

I tell you, never start a business with just .orgs… it’s gonna cost you down the line ;)

Given the more tech-savvy DEV user, I always assumed that the .com wasn’t that important, and so though I wanted it, I never really persisted… especially as my initial inquiry was met with a price of $50,000, ouch!

And even more so when I heard from the Sedo broker I hired to negotiate for me that it had somehow gone up to $100,000 in the following two years.

So, I decided instead, to play a bit of hardball.

I guess as I felt we didn’t *really* need it I could try my hand and see what came out, and I also had another little weapon, we own the TM for ‘WPMU DEV’.

So, I put in an ‘absolutely final’ offer of $5k, which got him talking again, and, with various sticking to my guns, and saying that I was prepared to go after it on TM grounds if I couldn’t buy it (I don’t actually know if I could or not, it was kinda a guess) picked it up, in the end, for $8,500 (inc sedo fees)… not bad down from 100k.

And, was it worth it?

To be honest I don’t know yet with this one.

Fundamentally I think it’s a valuable thing to have for the company as a whole, and it’s an important ‘defensive’ position.

But the TM did kinda cover that on its own, and who knows, maybe I could have got it through that process for less.

And traffic wise, I’m not sure if it’s actually had any real benefit – although we did pick up a bunch of links that had been incorrectly made using .com, so maybe Goog will love us a little more.

So, there you go, a tale of two domains, I hope which may be of use to someone out there, and which I’m sure you’ll have your own opinions of in terms of value and all that…

And as far as other ones go, too, I have a few in mind, but we’ll have to see how that pans out ;)

James Farmer on Google+

The Eddies are the highest accolade that an education blogger can achieve. They’re like the Oscars, only better, because no one has to actually meet anyone and they are all done virtually. And we’re the type of people who like to do things from behind screens, right?

The Eddies are run by our sister, Edublogs, one of the most successful WordPress Multisite installs on the planet.

From the website:

The Edublog Awards is a community based incentive started in 2004 in response to community concerns relating to how schools, districts and educational institutions were blocking access of learner and teacher blog sites for educational purposes.  The purpose of the Edublog awards is promote and demonstrate the educational values of these social media.  The best aspects include that it creates a fabulous resource for educators to use for ideas on how social media is used in different contexts, with a range of different learners while creating an invaluable resource of the best-of-the-best on the web!

Anyone in the world can get involved with the Eddie, by nominating their favourite education blogger. Here’s how:

• Write a post with your nominations for each category on your own blog
• Sent the link with your nominations using this form

Here are the categories:

• Best individual blog
• Best individual tweeter
• Best group blog
• Best new blog
• Best class blog
• Best student blog
• Best ed tech / resource sharing blog
• Most influential blog post
• Best twitter hashtag
• Best teacher blog
• Best librarian / library blog
• Best School Administrator blog
• Best free web tool
• Best educational use of audio / video / visual / podcast
• Best educational wiki
• Best open PD / unconference / webinar series
• Best educational use of a social network
• Lifetime achievement

Know an awesome education blogger or tweeter? Give them some recognition by nominating them for an eddie!

As part of the Edublogs team (a sister company to WPMU.org), it is easy to be blown away at the shear number of students that are writing about difficult world issues and sharing in great detail new things that they are learning in school.

Over the past few years, educator Sue Wyatt has graciously volunteered her time to organize a free global Student Blogging Challenge that has evolved into arguably the largest collaborative education experience across the globe.

Thousands of students from every corner of the world have participated in unique challenges that teach students blogging and writing skills such as commenting, internet safety, widgets, creative commons use, and much more.

If you know of any educator that might be interested in getting their students involved, be sure to pass them this link – registration is now open and the first challenge will start next week! We’re also always looking for volunteer mentors, preferably with a background in education, to leave comments on student blogs and provide feedback throughout the challenge.

Though Edublogs provides support  and a home for the challenge, we welcome bloggers from all platforms – including WordPress.com, Blogger, and many more.

Be sure to visit the student list and checkout some of these amazing blogs – students love comments and having their blogs read by others!

We’ve actually been using Piwik with Edublogs for some time as a large scale custom multisite implementation. Piwik provides stats for users on Edublogs.org as well as all 200+ of our Campus sites. We host a separate Piwik install on a VPS and utilize a custom plugin very similar to WP-Piwik that tracks and displays stats for supporter sites in Edublogs. This gives each blog it’s own distinct stats. Our users really appreciate having stats at their fingertips without having to sign up for a third party service or configure any settings.

Interview with Matthieu Aubry, Founder and Lead Developer of Piwik:

Recently I had the opportunity to interview Matthieu Aubry, the founder of Piwik, who now works with a large team to make open source analytics possible for hundreds of thousands of users. Here’s what he had to say about the project:

What inspired you to create Piwik?
We created Piwik in 2007, because there was not at the time modern open source web analytics software, and there was a big need for it. With the rise of Google Analytics, many users were looking at using a quality web analytics software yet reluctant to give away their sensitive web analytics data to the search giant. Most other analytics tools at the time were very costly. Piwik was created to fill in this huge gap and allow webmaters/business owners to keep control of their data on their own servers while enjoying pretty reports and advanced analytics functionnality.

What are the main advantages of using open source software for analytics?

• Your web data will not be used or looked at by other entities.
• If you are a developer, you can take advantage of the plugin architecture and create custom functionality.
• The software being open source, it is easy to give feedback to the team and even contribute changes.
• Be part of an active community of more than 100k active users.

What key features distinguish Piwik from Google Analytics?

• Open Source, self hosted
• Real time updated reports
• Real time view of visitors on your site
• Clear reports & Easy to use
• Respect of user privacy via IP Anonymization, possibility to add an opt-out feature to your site
• Really cool official Mobile App
• Note that it is possible to export your Google Analytics data to Piwik

How does Piwik perform in heavy load environments?

Piwik works well in high load environments. It scales really well with thousands of websites and we have a few users tracking more than 20,000 sites in Piwik. A few Piwik power users are tracking up to 250,000 pages per day with success (on a dedicated server). The main requirement is database size, which can grow to few dozens or hundreds of megabytes if your websites has more than hundreds of page views per day.

What kinds of things can advanced users do with the Piwik API?

Piwik API has 3 main uses:

1- Tracking data in Piwik: there is an advanced Javascript Tracking API but also a REST API to track any visit, pages, downloads, goal conversions, etc. It is very powerful and lets you track visits from any devices or app.

2- Fetching any reports out of Piwik: the Analytics API lets you download any report generated by Piwik (best keywords, visits per hour) and for each report (for example, for each Referrer keyword) will include many metrics such as: visits, pages, conversions, revenue generated, conversion rate, time on site, etc. You can also specify custom segments via the API, to show the reports only for “visits from Germany AND coming from Search Engine” for example. Check out the Analytics API reference for the documentation.

3- Administrate Piwik: the API also allows you to manage your websites, users, permissions, etc. For example, you can create websites and users automatically from another application (eg. wordpress) very easily. You can also create Goals automatically, setup scheduled Email reports, etc. If you start using Piwik on an existing application, you can use the API to import all your existings websites and users.

The WP-Piwik plugin has been downloaded over 33,000 times. With thousands of WordPress users making use of Piwik, would you say that ensuring compatibility with Open Source CMS’s is a top priority for your team?

Ensuring compatibility & ease of use with all CMS is a top priority for us. We have already more than 30 plugins that make it easy to integrate with CMS, frameworks and programming languages. In fact, we are working to communicate better with them in the future, and also improve the Piwik websites to better advertise the fantastic work they are doing!

What developments and features can Piwik users look forward to in the future?
The roadmap for Piwik 2.0 is our vision for the next major release of Piwik. we are currently working on many exciting things, thanks to the support of our sponsors and Piwik professional services:

- Precise geo location will be integrated in Piwik core (currently there is a plugin for GeoIP) and we are going to add few features in it
- the World Map will show Regions & Cities stats for all countries. This is a unique development since Piwik team member works on building the only Open Source map with such advanced
- Visits & actions displayed in real time view (ie. automatically refreshed) in the Mobile App so you can track your Live visits on the go!
- Advanced Ecommerce tracking & Reporting: lets you track products, orders and cart abandonment. This will be the first time that such powerful Ecommerce features are available in an open source solution
- Performance improvements for high traffic websites, in particular, allow easy clustering of the Tracking servers and remove dependancy to the database for tracking (requests will be queued and then loaded in the DB at regular interval)
- and more…

Conclusion:
In a day and age where privacy is rapidly losing value, any option that allows you to own your own data simply makes sense. If you’re wanting to get out from under the watchful eye of Google and jump on board with a solid open source solution, then Piwik should be at the top of your list for consideration.

Sarah Gooding on Google+

You’ve been hearing a lot of buzz about the “freemium” business model lately. It’s a strategy that has made Edublogs, the world’s most popular educational blogging service, a wildly successful business.

Essentially, this is how Freemium works in the marketplace:

…a business model that works by offering a basic product or service free of charge (such as software, web services or other) while charging a premium for advanced features, functionality, or related products and services.

We’re excited to let you know that Edublogs is featured as a case study in a new book called The Mind Share Market: The Power of an Alternative Currency. If you’re interested in making money with the freemium business model, then this is one book you’ll want to add to your library. It demonstrates the success of free products as potent advertisements that will gain you business. You may have noticed that this business model is extremely popular with Web 2.0 and open source companies, many of which are probably already your favorites for one simple reason: they give products away for free.

The Mind Share Market: The Power of an Alternative Currency is available in paperback or via an instant download for your Kindle. Get your hands on a copy to learn the valuable marketing secrets that will give you a philosophical and practical foundation for operating a successful business based on offering free products.

If you’re inspired by the success of Edublogs and want to create your own startup, WPMU DEV has all the tools that you need to start generating sales and profits through this powerful business model.

Edublogs is actually powered by WordPress Multisite. WPMU DEV offers a host of plugins that help you to make money through premium upgrades on your site. These are the very same plugins utilized by Edublogs. They enable you to start gaining more customers through word of mouth, referrals and organic searches when you set up your WordPress site to offer some of your products for free. Find out more by heading over to WPMU DEV today.

Sarah Gooding on Google+

One of my favorites is the Edublogs Forum Theme for bbPress. If you’re like me, and find bbPress a pain to style, grab this clean theme and transform your forums into a place users will enjoy.

The Edublogs Forums bbPress Theme even comes with a built-in options panel for easily setting your fonts, link colors, background image and color. Download the theme for free today. While you’re at it, check out the full list of free themes and plugins from WPMU DEV.

Sarah Gooding on Google+

Once sploggers find a network that’s vulnerable they’ll make themselves at home and return daily because it’s familar territory. They will often have a series of networks that they return to in order to earn income. Sploggers take it personally when you spam their splogs because you’re affecting their income. This causes them to be extraordinarily persistent.

Anti-Splog is the ultimate plugin and service to stop and kill splogs.

We’ve had a year to witness the phenomenal success of Anti-Splog in combating destructive splogs. Want some proof? Here’s a visualization, created by the talented Tammie Lister.

Download a print-quality PDF.

Let’s break it down even further: There are over 711,000+ blogs on Edublogs.org with hundreds of new blogs being created daily. Every day anti-splog constantly montiors and checks every blog each day for splogging activity.. The average number of blogs automatically marked as spam per day by Anti-Splog is around 450-500. After a manual check of all splogs marked as spam over the past two days, only one legitimate blog was wrongly marked as spam.

This means Anti-Splog is achieving 98.75% accuracy. The API is currently trained with 73,661 spam posts and 29,253 ham (real) posts, and it only keeps getting smarter and more intuitive every day.

The Scope of the Problem

Blogging platforms face two battles with spamming activity:

1. Sploggers – people who create blogs to promote products, services or websites
2. Spam commenters – people who write comments on blogs to promote products, services or websites

Common types of things they promote are the high-end fashion and jewelery brands, pharmaceutical products, diet products, and sexual services.

Both are major issues to blogging platforms and most people aren’t aware of how bad they are until they’ve run their own network and faced the challenges of battling them.

Negative Effects of Spammers and Sploggers

1. They have a high nuisance factor
2. Use valuable resources like disk space and band width
3. Have serious implications to the reputation of your network
4. Cost time and money to constantly battle

Each splogger is capable of creating hundreds of blogs per day and globally there are hundreds of thousands of sploggers. They create splogs because companies pay them to be sploggers. If you don’t have anti-splog protection in place, your resources and reputation are at risk.

Don’t let your network become food for splogs. Get yourself hooked up to the Anti-Splog service today and save yourself loads of time and grief.

Sarah Gooding on Google+

Follow Sue on Twitter (@suewaters) and stay up to date with the latest from the conference using the #iste10 hashtag.

Interested in using WordPress as a Learning Management System (LMS)?

WordPress as a Learning Management System – Move Over, Blackboard

Check out our interview with Kyle Jones, a Knowledge and Learning Services Librarian, who has been successfully using WordPress Multisite and BuddyPress together to add a new social aspect to online course management. This interview provides an in-depth look at the advantages of using an open source LMS.

WPMU Dev Premium Themes for WordPress and Education

WordPress is revolutionizing the way educators approach course management. Not every theme is suitable to support LMS features. WPMU Dev Premium has created several full-featured themes with learning management in mind. Check out a few favorites of other educators:

BP Social

View Theme

BP Scholar

View Theme

The Edublogs Homepage Theme

View Theme

If you have any questions about using WordPress Multisite in education or want to get more information about Edublogs and WPMU DEV Premium products, get in touch with Sue Waters at ISTE or via Twitter.

Sarah Gooding on Google+

Anti-Splog Plugin: Detect, Prevent, Moderate, and Destroy

This plugin is at the moment the most sure-fire way to keep your site free of splogs. Its unparalleled success with Edublogs is already well-proven with more than 20,000 splogs killed in a matter of two months. It targets bots as well as human sploggers with amazing accuracy and is constantly learning and adapting, based on data it collects from thousands of blogs. Anti-Splog will not disappoint as so many other plugins do. The huge advantage of this plugin is that it will work right away without wasting hours of your time. You will not need to try multiple plugins and .htaccess hacks in combination to try to stumble upon the right formula for killing splogs. It simply works. Check out more of the details on the Anti-Splog plugin and start saving yourself time today.

Super Captcha: Custom Bot Verification

Originally written for WPMU, the Super Captcha plugin now works with BuddyPress and WordPress single user as well. Its protection capabilities cannot rival the Anti-Splog plugin but it may provide your site with some temporary relief and with the right combination of techniques, you may find yourself splog-free for a season. If you don’t mind captchas this may be a solution for you. Anti-bot verification is placed automagically on the login page, and the registration pages. You can control when and where the captchas are displayed, as well as dictate your own custom word list that is easier to read. Failed logins are shown in your dashboard so that you can spam the accounts as soon as they attempt. One reason I chose to include this plugin among the newest remedies for splogs is because it was recently updated within the last month and is robust enough to work with social networking variations of WordPress as well as simple single user installations.

4 Steps to Stop Sploggers: A Fatal Concoction

An article over at BP-Tricks.com, written by stwc, outlines a combination of anti-splog methods that may prove to be successful for your installation when working in combination together.

There are four basic steps to his comprehensive solution:

• Change the text on the http://yourbuddypresssite.com/register page.
• Remove the “powered by” text in footer.php of your child theme.
• Change the register slug in wp-config.php
• Add a functions.php file in your custom childtheme to redirect signups for all blogs on your WordPress MU install to the Buddypress register page.

Check out the full article for more detailed instructions. Though this hasn’t worked for everyone, it may be something that will work for you.

If you want to share any additional anti-splog remedies that you’ve found to be extremely useful so far this year, let us know in the comments or contact us on Twitter: @wpmuorg

Sarah Gooding on Google+

Spammed Blog Review Form

While developing and testing our new Anti-Splog plugin on Edublogs we have been making a lot of sploggers very unhappy. A nifty feature of the Anti-Splog plugin is that when you mark a blog as spam instead of that boring white warning screen showing when you visit the splog you get a pretty, branded notification with a review screen.

Just in case you accidentally spam a valid blog, the user gets one chance to ask for you the admin to review the blog. It sends an email notification with a link that will take you to Anti-Splog where you can see their latest posts and get an instant preview of the entire blog without having to unspam it.

When we first created this form, the spammers had the audacity to actually spam us more through the review form, so we threw a reCAPTCHA on it which has stopped that. Though what it hasn’t stopped is comments from some angry (and dumb) spammers, with very comical results! We thought you might enjoy a few laughs along with us.

Let’s start with the angry ones:

Save Your Important Documents With ClaimProof.com (http://claimproof.edublogs.org).

Its Not a spam its just a educational blog which tells about how to make secure your online data.
what the crap u had done..
i need my blog back

Forex lessons from one trader (http://learn2forex.edublogs.org)

why you consider http://learn2forex.edublogs.org/ as spam? I post releases and forex market daily information. Where is spam here? I believe this decision was made in error

Male Enhancements (http://adavis1102.edublogs.org)

mrbloggy's Latest Post

I’m adavis1102 im here to promote my bussiness oportunity to advertized my product. for our friendly user of this site ! my posting product is not spam besides all my product posting here is good and not a spam!

The Hotest Websites (http://mrbloggy.edublogs.org)

This blog is not SPAM!!!! It is my blog where I store the press releases I writer for my clients. Please enable!! or I will have to sue you for lose of earning and data.

EVO Battery (http://mybattery.edublogs.org)

It’s my blog. I have it a long time. And the url I like very much, I will no longer write the best articles, pls give it back!

And my favorite:
Links of london’s world (http://lovelinks.edublogs.org)

You are a spam!

The stupid and just plain pitiful:

(weightlossroutines.edublogs.org)

this is not a spam, i’m just posting about a weight loss program!

(laptopbatteryreplacement.edublogs.org)

I just want to introduce some battery buying informations

MoreMuscleGrowth.com – Muscle Supplements & Build Muscle Workout Diet (http://maskulado.edublogs.org)

This article is not spam. I am a journalist who writes about different topics, specific health and body building. Please return my article.

Wholesale Clothing | Clothes | Apparel (http://wholesaleclothingdepot.edublogs.org)

this is not a spam. i’m only promoting my new site, but i’m not spamming.. thank you very much..

Soul music the innovation (http://soulmusic.edublogs.org)

This is not a spam, this is a landing page created for xxxxxxxxxxx.com, please enable it so we can make the changes.

Laser Modules Review (http://lasermodulereview.edublogs.org)

hi, I just want to share some useful information about laser modules with some friends.

Aren’t these the very definition of spam?

welcome to my space (http://viviennesale.edublogs.org)

only some ads link,no spam and no one read my blog

Seo Services (http://herrybrown.edublogs.org)

this is not a spam blog we try to getting traffic on my site with your site. so please permit us to publish more blogs on your site. thanks

Male Enhancements (http://adavis1102.edublogs.org)

im adavis1102. im here to promote my bussiness oportunity to advertized my product for our friendly user of this site ! my posting product is not spam besides all my product posting here is good and not a spam thank you!

Absolutely priceless! This is in order of receiving from another splogger but with several blogs, all have exactly the same posts on mp4 converters:
Attempt #1 – http://xoxxbkq.edublogs.org – give me the reason please!
Attempt #2 – http://eypyicu.edublogs.org – I’M SORRY.But it’s not my fault.
Attempt #3 – http://rfmzxor.edublogs.org – OH ,dear! what happened?

And the saddest one of all:

blog qiao qiao kan xia (http://eolo1112.edublogs.org).

Ah…I’m a employee, it’s my job. I just do what I want to do like you. In my opinion, every person has his survival to make money ways, my job is send post, i like the job, the post most articles are written by the professionals, maybe in the past, i post some spam post, but i realised it and changed. Blogs opens to people are just let people write. Hope you give me the chance. God bless you.

Conclusion

We hope you had a laugh along with us! Are you ready to make some sploggers mad yourself? You can read about the features of Anti-Splog here, and download the plugin here.