Summer vacation has been very good to me this year. Fishing on Cape Cod, an unexpected trip to Nantucket and a few days in the Adirondacks has put my head in a good place and I’m recharged and ready to get back to work. I didn’t bring laptop with me, just checked email on my iPhone every few days, talk about liberating.

Here’s a few photos I took at Blue Mountain in the Adirondacks last week.

A few news items of interest. comScore Media Metrix Ranks Plentyoffish.com #1 Dating Site in North America And U.K. By Total Visits. I have a problem with this statistic, as it shows total visits, not unique visitors, but then again it’s a press release and it’s the middle of summer.

I would be much more interested in the news if they triangulated the data with Compete, Quantast and Hitwise and talked about unique visitors instead of monthly visitors.

Love this quote, “We introduce singles to other singles based on their actual search behavior on the site.” That is the most interesting piece of information in the entire release and it’s buried below all the stuff about Adsense and ASP.net which nobody cares about.

I’ll report back on my conversation with comScore, which is going to explain how they measure dating industry traffic and statistics.

TechCrunch was a bit behind the times announcing the First DNA-Based Dating Service: GenePartner. They read my comment about Scientific Match and edited the original post.

Online Personals Watch interviewed Fernando Ardenghi about his new startup, LifeProject.

This is why I think he’s going to have a difficult time getting the site off the ground:

LPM is the codename of an innovative and high precision quantitative method that compares similarity between quantized patterns, like:

The pattern 6.7.6.8.9.6.7.7.8.7.2.5.8.7.3.4 is 74,79865772% similar to the pattern 5.7.4.8.7.4.5.6.4.6.8.9.6.8.4.4

The pattern 6.7.6.8.9.6.7.7.8.7.2.5.8.7.3.4 is 92,55033557% similar to the pattern 7.7.6.8.8.7.6.5.8.7.4.5.7.7.3.4

The pattern 6.7.5.8.8.6.7.7.8.7.4.5.8.7.3.4 is 88,38926174% similar to the pattern 5.6.4.7.7.5.6.6.7.6.3.4.7.6.2.3

The pattern 6.7.5.8.8.6.7.7.8.7.4.5.8.7.3.4 is 87,58389262% similar to the pattern 7.8.6.9.9.7.8.8.9.8.5.6.9.8.4.5

LPM takes into account the score and the trend to score of any pattern.

In the above example, it used the results of the 16PF5 test, but it can use the results of other test, like the 30 subdomains of the “NEO PI-R” Big5.

The $300 subscription fee is way out of line, people won’t pay that much more for better matches without seeing proof first. And what’s with the $30,000,000 in first-year revenue? Time for a reality check.

I came across this signup form for the beta version of a mobile-based website. Instead of username and password they ask for your phone number. I’m on the fence about how I feel about this (less inbox clutter vs. privacy issues) but it’s a lot better than dating sites which ask you to fill out a whole form just to be alerted when the beta of the site goes live. All they need is an email address.

Dating4Disabled is a dating site for disabled singles out of Israel. Nice site but the ads for Loveaccess featuring a buxom vixen who is obviously not disabled were kind of strange. Over 10k visitors monthly and the forums seem pretty active. Here’s more.

According to a recent survey conducted by Harris Interactive, adults worldwide go online for several reasons: 23 percent of respondents say they go online for dating, 50 percent use social networking sites and 72 percent play games.

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I am heading off to Nantucket for a few days, back on Friday. Working an hour or two a day and responding to high-priority email. I’ve had some very interesting conversations with executives at Match, eHarmony and several startups in the US and China in the past week. Lot’s to talk about when I get back. In the meantime, send in your story ideas, leave a few comments, and please click the ads.

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For the next six days I’ll be with family at a lodge in the woods at an undisclosed location. No computer, no blog and limited cell coverage. As normal, all contact should go through the Contact form and I’ll reply as soon as I can.

The next few weeks are going to be incredibly busy. A trip to the lake in New Hampshire for some water skiing and wakeboarding, then I move my home and office across town next to the Bunker Hill Monument and the weekend after it’s time to head to New Jersey for my 20th high school reunion. Of course I continue to work with existing clients and look forward to starting several new projects in August.

If you have bookmarked the blog in your browser, now would be a good time to sign up to the RSS feed or via email. You’ll be alerted each time I post and avoid having to come back to the blog when there is nothing new. The archives and search feature are worth checking out in the meantime.  The Subscribe link at the top of the page will present you with RSS and email subscription options.

Have a great week/end.

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