We just lean differently up here - federalist instead of sovereigntist. Take a look at this political cartoon that was in Le Devoir during the reference re secession of Quebec - http://jpzeni.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=64
Everything seemed to be flowing logically until I got to this statement "No traditional marketer would have figured this out" (referring to integrating a Craigslist post into Airbnb). To that statement my question is why couldn't a traditional marketer imagine that functionality? They probably wouldn't have been able to create the actual implementation themselves but that would be a job for an engineer regardless of who came up with the idea. If the marketer happened to be an engineer great, if not, it seems like something that would just be delegated to a technical member of the team.
From what I understand Airbnb did a fair bit of spamming to craigslist prior to the very slick layout you see there so the idea of marketing via craigslist was already baked into their strategy regardless of it's implementation.
The last paragraph made me laugh because it reminded me of when Google started to discount the power of link directories years ago. All the cutting edge SEOs just moved to new techniques and the exact same thing will happen again. It's a cat/mouse game and the people who continue to win are the ones who continue to innovate new ways of gaming the system.
The guys who were really successful were the ones who were doing forum and comment spamming before someone decided to write a program that allowed absolutely anyone to do it. You can be sure none of them are lamenting Google Panda ... they'd moved on to new techniques long ago. Stuff like this is just one very basic example - http://www.buzzfeed.com/awesomer/the-truth-about-infographic....
From my experience it all depends on the size of the site. If you have less than 200 pages on your site I'd recomment that you try and stick to no more than domain.com/folder/page whenever possible.
But, one other thing I would strongly recommend is to never create extra or redundant folders unless they really add a lot of value to your site usability. And, never, ever, create empty folders ... it seems like a no-brainer but it happens a lot more frequently then you might think with people using them to force a specific heirarchy on their site or for the sake of stuffing keywords into their URLs or just because they think the final URL looks 'nicer' that way.
Last thought on why flat is normally better, homepages are likely to accumulate more links than any other page on your site and often more links than the rest of the site combined. So the closer an interior page is to the homepage the more benefit it will derive from the inbound links pointing to the homepage.
That is not a good analogy. The reason knowck-off luxury purses get confiscated is because they are using the luxury brands' marks. The fashion industry is actually the perfect example of not being able to sue for 'look and feel'. There are very few trendsetting concepts or designs in fashion and 99% percent of the products sold are knock offs of some other product. The fact that you can't sue to protect a design is why there is tons of innovation and creativity in fashion.
I love Canada, I love Toronto and I love entrepreneurship. I run a small startup in Toronto and I must admit that comparing Toronto to Silicon Valley is a joke. Toronto isn't even the best place in Canada to work on a startup and maybe not in the top 3.
It's nice that the community is tight knit and there is some good talent here but what is missing is really some of the most important stuff: 1. VC and Angel Money, 2. Connections and 3. A deep pool of startup oriented hackers
I'm going to have to completely disagree with you. A very basic SEO strategy might get you ranked for your basic brand related search terms but if you are in a niche with any real level of competition that is all you'll get. If you have a deep understanding of SEO and the ability to implement complex SEO strategies you hold the key to significantly improving the quantity and quality of your traffic. Moving from position 5 to position 1 is likely to increase your traffic for that term 5-10x.
I've been in the mood for just that type of can't put down read. But after googling for 'book reviews', 'top books' and 'books you can't put down', etc and other similar queries I just got a bunch bestseller lists and spammy adsense sites. Weird
While I certainly understand why PG and others feel this way; I think this title gives a good frame of reference to the story ... especially given the persistence that these guys needed in the face of being rejected for funding. As a fellow Canadian entrepreneur I gotta give these guys 2 big thumbs up! Way to go.