As we continue to introduce to our new vBulletin 4.0 Publishing Suite, we would like to share our broader vision and answer some questions about where we are headed.

First, our vision. We believe that both content and community are king. Launched in 2000, vBulletin has grown to become the leading and most powerful forum management software in the world, with considerably more than 100,000 copies sold. If you combined the traffic of all vBulletin sites, they would easily rank in top ten largest sites globally—roughly same the size as Wikipedia in terms of unique visitors.

We take pride in the success of our customers as they build some of the leading websites in the world.

But we feel this is only a start. To bring vBulletin to the next level, we are investing heavily. Over the last year, we have doubled the number of developers working on the product—and they are a very talented group. You should expect a much faster pace of development—and more exciting new features.

To focus our efforts, we continue to do research with vBulletin community owners and webmasters. We find that many of the most successful sites want to become more significant content publishers. This is because many communities that started as simple discussion forums have grown into powerful databases of knowledge and content— true leaders in their areas of expertise.

These site owners tell us they want simple, but powerful tools to manage articles, blogs, and all manner of content—all in one publishing platform. The new vBulletin does this elegantly. And by fully integrating with our forums, we believe that our new Suite uniquely captures the power of community and content in a single platform.

This doesn’t mean that we have slowed investments in forum functionality. To the contrary, we continue to invest heavily in the core forum platform and the new product includes some important new features. In our research, vBulletin site owners tell us that in addition to content management, they want tools to help with such activities as: advertising monetization, SEO, site analytics, and mobile.

While we have made some changes in vB 3.8 and vB 4.0 along these lines, many of those changes are ahead for the vB 4.0 series. In subsequent posts from our staff you will learn more specifics about our vision in these areas, in addition to our plans about more content management features, and more enhancements to forum and blog functionality.

You may have noticed that we’ve priced vB 4 products to strongly encourage adoption of the Suite by offering a much larger discount on the Suite. This is very intentional. We now view vBulletin Publishing Suite as our core product. As we add new functionality, it will continue to be fully integrated with the Suite.

You may have also noticed that we’ve finished migration of vBulletin development from the U.K. to California. We have deep respect for the wonderful heritage of vBulletin.
The primary reason for the move was the availability of pools of technical talent and proximity to the resources of our parent company.

We are occasionally asked about the role of Internet Brands as the parent of vBulletin. For instance, how important is vBulletin to Internet Brands? The answer is: very important. Internet Brands is the largest operator of vBulletin sites in the world. We deeply care about the software and will continue to invest heavily in its development. Internet Brands brings far more resources to the ongoing development of vBulletin.

We are also asked: how do we view certain vBulletin sites that compete with Internet Brands sites? The answer is: we manage vBulletin for its own success and we view those sites as valued customers. vBulletin thrives as its own community continues to grow. Internet Brands websites must compete on their own and receive no “special treatment”. Even where we compete, we are all in this together. It’s a big world.

In closing, we are extremely confident about vBulletin’s continued growth and success. We are grateful for your wonderful support. And we have enormous excitement about the road ahead for us all.

You can read it all here: vBulletin Vision

After watching all my favorite TV shows I head over to Google Trends on it’s next update or two and check out what people are searching for. It never fails that something mentioned in the TV episode is on there. If it was a big part of the show, such as Sheldon’s hilarious emotional display (for those that don’t know Sheldon’s character… he doesn’t do emotion) the top 10 is usually home to some kind of search term related to it.

House M.D. is another good example of this and probably better as 95% of the population is usually going to have no idea what that long name disease is and the curious, well they just need to know things! It’s even more funny to see how the majority attempted to spell them (though I have noticed that Google Suggest has helped improved these since being made default on Google’s homepage).

With that said, if you are a science geek and haven’t seen The Big Bang Theory… I suggest you check it out!

I’m going to do my best to keep up with this blog and make it worth your time to visit. I’m going to see about ditching this theme since a ton of sites use it and get something custom. I also want to add a photo gallery to it as facebook sucks for large photos and I also want my pictures to be with my blog.

Well, it’s 5:30AM. Time for breakfast… then bed…. yep.

DailyPaul.com is a favorite stop for me but lately I’ve been put off reading the comments on that site. People make outrageous claims and are down right rude. It really puts me off and is a terrible reflection of the candidate that you claim to support. The recount issue is a hot topic over there right now and the comments are filled with conspiracy theories and rude comments toward individuals involved in counting the ballots in New Hampshire. In their minds a conspiracy exists whenever Ron Paul doesn’t do as well as expected. Here is the thread if you want to take a look: New Hampshire Recount. You can also check out a blog post on the official Ron Paul site asking people to be professional: Remember: Voters Judge Dr. Paul by Your Actions.

Please consider what your actions say for Ron Paul. Let’s stop giving people even more reason to not vote for a candidate that is working for some of the most drastic changes to come to this country since the days following World War II. Change doesn’t happen over night. Stop doing things to make it even harder to achieve.

I had a friend point out that Aaron made a new post using my site as an example of sites that were being overly aggressive with ad placement and it was killing them in the process. I’m going to have to disagree with him to an extent. Having those ads under my navigation has not prevented me from landing on Digg.com, Autoblog.com and Jalopnik to name a few. In the past week I have been covered 2 times by Autoblog on news items I have written. If you have good content that people want to link to then the majority won’t care about two ads above the fold. As each year passes people are upgrading their monitors to support higher resolutions which will allow them to view more of the page without scrolling. I use 1920×1200 and have no problem seeing the content on my site (Example). While I understand there is still a large amount of people on 1024×768 and even 800×600 the trend is not moving towards more people using these resolutions.

Here is a screen shot of my current Google referrals for a day:

and my uniques for the month:

This month is my best month since I started the site in 2003 for revenue and traffic.

I don’t have any problem with him using my site in his video. It’s his opinion and he is generally right with the assumption that over zealous ads can kill sites. If you have the content to back up the ads then the impact the ads will have on your traffic are minimal. That’s at least what my experience has found running my web sites.

• 24
• Lost
• The Office
• The Unit
• Heroes
• Big Bang Theory
• Jericho
• Weeds
• Californication
• Dexter
• The Dead Zone
• Family Guy
• South Park

That about sums it up. I’m pretty much addicted to all of those. Thank God for DVR.