One of the joys of bootstrapping a startup is spending your savings. When those are gone you set to sell your personal possessions which answers the question “Where does all the nice stuff on eBay come from?”

Luckily for me I’ve always been obsessed with good stuff. Most of what I buy I can sell down the line for more than I paid for it. The extravagance of the purchase becomes better value the more time passes. Recently I’ve been working on a podcast. As I want to involve a number of people, and get decent quality, I’m going to need some equipment and that’s led me to scanning the shelves for salable stuff.

Seth Godin’s been a hero of mine since I met him in the late 90’s when he came to my company to discuss his then-current book, “Permission Marketing”. I got a free copy and, after reading it in a single sitting, found myself buying every book Seth’s published since.

I bought a copy of Seth’s “Free Prize Inside” when it was published in 2004. Actually I bought two. One to read and another, in a limited edition cereal box, which has travelled with me from the US, to Latvia, London and now Los Angeles. Faced with the expense of my podcasting equipment, I decided to list it on eBay and thought it would be nice to tell Seth why and how he’s inspired me. As the patron saint of guerilla marketing I was sure he’d get it.

You can imagine how happy I was when he wrote back, minutes after I emailed him, telling me he’d placed a bid himself and, that if he won, I could keep it.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that someone as generous with their ideas is as nice as this but I’m still a little awed. If you want to save him from spending money on his own book, you can place a bid on it yourself here.

The funniest, saddest, most obvious, part of this ad for SinglesNet is the line:

“*photos may not be actual members”

Excuse me while I pick my jaw off the floor.

Sandra Tsing Loh (who’s recently divorced) is arguing in The Atlantic that marriage is passe for everyone – not just Republican Governors.

Like Jonah Lehrer, whose blog I picked this story up on, I’m too recently married to comment on this objectively. He however notes that Loh quotes Helen Fisher, the anthropologist paid by Match.com to provide a “scientific” basis for Chemisty.com, their premium dating site. Lehrer points out:

“While Fisher has done some interesting work on romantic attachment in the past, it’s worth pointing out that there’s exactly zero evidence that people have “dominant” or “operative” neurotransmitter system, or that being exposed to oxytocin in the womb makes us touchy-feely.”

In layman’s terms Fisher’s theories , which divide people into four broad types, are “neurobabble”. So don’t worry, whatever NPR commentators try to tell you, marriage hasn’t been made obsolete by science just yet.

I’ve written about the extremely dodgy “science” used to justify the matchmaking abilities of big subscription dating sites before. Now the University of Arkansas have officially labeled matching algorithms as junk science.

Psychology professor Jeffrey Lohr and two psychology graduates, Aimee King and Deena Austin-Oden, analyzed several leading dating Web sites and found that promotional claims were more self-serving opinion than legitimate psychological science.

…

Even when the dating services cite scientific evidence, consumers don’t always get all the facts. In an eHarmony comparison, the researchers found that the site neglected to reveal that they compared their couples, who were married only an average of six months (the “honeymoon period”), to couples in the control group who were married an average of two years. The researchers said that opinions expressed during the honeymoon period should not be compared to the opinions of couples after the honeymoon is over.

…

Many Web sites make claims that they cannot substantiate. For instance, Match.com claims that they are responsible for “twice as many marriages as any other site in the world.” The site measures success according to the number of marriages. However, Match.com does not use divorce to measure failure and thus cannot offer scientific research to support the usefulness of their claim.

It’s the dating industry’s dirty secret. People choose partners based on “…proximity, physical attractiveness and attitudinal similarity, a sense of rapport and similarities or self-disclosure.” Every time people from different backgrounds meet they fall in love. Look at all the families formed in Veitnam of people on opposite sides of a war. Similarity is over-rated and yet that’s all most sites measure.

Proximity is something no website can affect, attractiveness is in the eye of the beholder, rapport is hard to build, and easy to lose, over email; and self disclosure is actively discouraged by sites which make photos and real names optional.

If only there was an open, honest, face-to-face, dating site that let people choose their dates based on attraction rapport and honesty…? That would be awesome.

According to the AFP, marriage is a trend that’s sweeping Japan. They highlight matchmaking parties in which there are three guys for every gal, and talk about the connection between “marriage hunting”, “birth hunting” and cooking lessons.

No, I don’t see the connection either.

The lede seems to be that in Japan, as elsewhere, birth-rates are dropping and young people have to work harder to find a mate. The parties are a product of the companies that are rushing to address the needs of thirty something’s who feel they’ve missed the boat.

I’ve read that Japanese people are hesitant to be anything but anonymous online. I wonder if that doesn’t make it hard for dating sites to really get a foothold.

People on dating sites often complain about getting fewer responses than they’d like. There is a solution, it appears to be bribery.

A surprisingly un-hideous woman in Utah decided she’d up her chances of a lifelong commitment by tying her betrothal to a 17 year old Jeep modified for off-roading. As a car lover, my first thought is that the Jeep was a gift, because I’d never have sold my 1994 300ZX TT if someone hadn’t stolen it from outside my house in the middle of the night… what was I saying?

Anyway, turns out she’s a genius. She’s currently got 300 proposals from men prepared to marry her essentially sight-unseen – blinded by the 8,000lb winch and rear locker on offer.

Who knew eBay Motors was a dating site?

As we prepare Vooji for launch, we’re learning a lot about what pops into people’s heads when you say the words “video dating” and for many, Comcast’s ‘Dating on Demand’ appears to be the answer.

I’d never seen this TV/Web dating hybrid as I:

1. Don’t have a TV
2. Am not in a Comcast region
3. Try not to hurt my brain with stuff like this

In the interests of research and greater understanding I went to YouTube to view a few of their profiles (as their website is so broken it’s literally unusable). There I found a litany of horror some of which is too funny not to share.

Don’t blame me – it’s all on TV.

Mr. Wonderful
Likes: Blondes, food, hair gel
Dislikes: Introspection, eye contact, baggy T-Shirts

Ms. Diagnosed
Likes: Strength, obedience, kink
Dislikes: Her first husband, drugs, sucking

Ms. FedEx
Likes: Cheating, big hands, the FedEx man
Dislikes: Societal norms, stability, reason

Ms. Freebie
Likes: Nine Inch Nails, free stuff, food
Dislikes: Work, laid back people, blue-collar crime

Mr. Wild-Crazy
Likes: Honesty, Sex and the City, shoes
Dislikes: Constantly losing, anime, weird stuff

Vooji will be nothing like this. I promise.

The problem with phone-dating systems is that they appeal most to people with faces for radio. Hence the need for ads which suggest 10’s want to spend their evenings talking to truckers on long-haul trips to Minnesota.

The guys on most phone-dating systems pay per-minute fees a Nigerian 419 artist would decry as dishonest and overpriced, which makes the gorgeous, lonely, dateless woman fantasy a necessary part of their business model. Even when it means hiring Evangeline Lily as the totally implausible face of single womanhood.

A thousand fanboys already have this clip loaded into their iPhones for discreet playback whenever they feel lonely. If you haven’t seen it yet, enjoy and try to remember – this is just a cruel lie from start to finish.

There are two things that deserve to be reconsidered at Drive By Dating – an Australian automotive dating site.

1. In much of the world, being involved in a drive-by is a bad thing
2. Their logo reminds me of something I can’t quite put my finger on…

UPDATE: This could be very, very clever marketing indeed. Those Aussies…

If you’ve written mail to my vooji.com email address and had it bounce back sorry. As of right now, that address is working and I’d still love to hear from you. Technology is hard sometimes…