The news aggregating site at Topix.net has a new complementary domain at Topix.com, and a renewed focus on the local audience that CEO Rich Skrenta thinks can be a difference maker for the site. Oh, and just call them Topix. Skrentablog in discussing the site, and why it had to change:
We took a hard look at ourselves at Topix last year. We had built up a strong local audience on the site, but a lot of it was SEO, and while users were clearly getting some value out of our product, we hadn't made something that people really cared about. As cool a technical trick as our aggregated geolocalized news pages were, they actually pretty much sucked.Making Topix into something people cared more about wasn't going to be a quick trip to Clonesville to pick up a copy of Digg or MySpace, according to Skrenta. "I don't believe that you can win by making a clone of something else," he wrote. Part of that change meant a $1 million domain change. As of now, Topix.com gets the love, while the long-running, familiar Topix.net will eventually slide into being a redirected URL, but not until the search engines pick up the dot com domain in a satisfactory manner. Skrenta may not be SEO's biggest fan, but he seems to recognize its importance. The official word at the
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