What kind of blithering idiot really thinks that an illicit fortune in Nigeria will actually be transferred to their bank account, or that some compound will make their sex organs or mammary glands larger, or that something offered in an unsolicited email might actually be a good idea?
Yet these blithering idiots must exist, otherwise spammers wouldn’t bother.
On the other side of the fence, what kind of jerk spends their time, creativity, and energy coming up with novel ways to bombard people with junk solicitations for stuff they don’t want (or are outright scams)?
Yet some jerks spend their time this way, or our inboxes wouldn’t be full of the stuff.
And my final rhetorical query: why all the indignation about spam? It is arguably easier to deal with email spam than junk snail mail (you just hit the delete key instead of having to cart it to the recycle bin) and less intrusive than telemarketing (the call inevitably comes just as dinner is on the table, or you are putting the kids to bed, and then you feel bad for being rude to a real human being).
Since email spam has recently bitten me, I now at least understand the pain that spam can cause (almost as bad as psoriasis) . Here’s my sad but true story of spam bites man.
First, we’ve set our business and personal email up for a long time to be forwarded by our web host (IX Webhosting) to our local ISP (Comcast). We then use Comcast’s POP and SMTP servers to pick up and send email.
Comcast’s spam filters have historically done a pretty good job of shielding us from the worst of spam. It’s true than my email address is published all over the place on websites, and that I’m listed as registry contact for various sites, so my email address was spammed frequently.
But Comcast shielded us from the worst of it, and my email client, Thunderbird, had junk mail screening tools that did the rest. Whatever got through I hit delete, and didn’t worry about it too much. (Although I did wonder: if I can tell from a glance at the sender and subject that an email is spam, why can’t an automated system?)
Those were the days!
The first sign of trouble was the report from a couple of friends and business associates that their email to me was bouncing with some kind of message from Comcast about spam. I pretty much assumed that the problem was with the senders, and that somehow they (or their ISPs) were associated with notorious spammers. Oh foolish pride! I should have realized that the problem was me (well, me and the whole spam email situation).
It was a dark and stormy night when our email stopped altogether. I don’t mean that the quantity slowed down or that we lost connectivity. I mean that we stopped getting our email. Our inboxes were empty.
Comcast technical support said sure your email works, and sent me an email to prove it. IX Webhosting said sure your email forwarding works, and had me forward an email to a new address to prove it.
I may not have been the brightest bulb on this issue, but it didn’t take me too long to figure out that Comcast had blocked all email from our domain as spam.
It turned out that they weren’t going to unblock it, either.
What to do? It seemed like the simplest solution was to use the email services for our domain provided by IX Webhosting, rather than forwarding the email to Comcast. I changed our server-side settings, and our email clients, and the email starting flowing again. And flowing. And flowing. Simply incredible quantities of spam, hundreds of spam emails in a single hour.
Perhaps Comcast’s blocking my email made some sense, after all.
What to do? It was time consuming and stressful to go through all the spam, and something had to give. Taking a new email address really didn’t seem desirable.
I did a Google search and decided to try a third-party email sanitizing service offered by an outfit called SpamStopHere.com. StamStopHere auto-generated a new set of MX records, which I was supposed to get IX Webhosting to implement. (I think this meant that I was asking IX to give over our email to this other outfit.)
IX Webhosting refused to comply, and SpamStopHere said, “We are adding IX Webhosting to the list of web hosts we cannot work with.”
Great.
IX Webhosting said that they had their own server-side filtering, and showed me how to write a custom filter in Thunderbird that recognized the spam header their filtering system added. (This, however, didn’t do Phyllis’s Outlook Express client any good, as it doesn’t have a mechanism for recognizing custom headers.)
IX Webhosting also had me implement a client-side open source program, SpamPal.
These tweaks were no doubt well intentioned, but they didn’t really touch my spam problem. One morning I spent an hour cleaning up my spam. (Well, it was complicated by a virus payload and Norton Antivirus. The AV software made me click OK to deleting each and every infected file, and OK again after the file had been deleted).
After a bit more research, I signed up for another service, Spam Arrest. You give Spam Arrest access to your email in-box, and it automatically downloads your email. Your email client connects to the Spam Arrest servers via a secure connection.
Spam Arrest has quite a few features, but mostly it works by maintaining blocked and unblocked (authorized) sender lists. A good starting place for the authorized sender list is your address book, which you can upload from any email client.
If you haven’t authorized the sender, Spam Arrest sends them a challenge-response email. The sender must click a link to authenticate the email, something most spammers can’t do.
The service costs $6.00 per month, with a free trial and various discounts. So far, I am really pleased with it. It’s great to open my email in-box and to see only a handful of emails, all of which are real. I also enjoy opening my webmail page on the Spam Arrest site and seeing all those hundreds of spam emails sitting forever lost in cyberspace (they are erased once a week by default). The goal of an intense week of my life was to elude spam, and I think I’ve succeeded!
]]>MovableType is the software that powers this blog. I upgraded not because I wanted some new bells and whistles (I tend to be pretty conservative about that kind of thing) but rather because I had to: security flaws in the old version had allowed some spammers to hijack the email notification system. Yuck! Why do people spend their time trying to hack systems? What a waste of time.
MovableType has moved in the enterprise direction, leaving your average solo webmaster to the wondrous delights of open source WordPress. So MovableType is now positioned as software to manage enterprise blogs---although they'll still let you download it for free for "personal" use.
As enterprise upgrades go, this one went pretty smoothly. I was careful to make backups of my server-side database, and to follow directions carefully. But, of course, the whole thing didn't work when I restarted it. And you get what you pay for: the free download personal version comes without support.
A little research showed that the problem was that I'd put my MovableType "static" directory within my web server's CGI bin directory, used to execute scripts, which is where my MovableType itself lived. Moving the MT static stuff out of there, and correctly pointing to it in the configuration files solved my problem.
I'm reasonably happy with the upgraded version, and I'm glad to have plugged my security problem. Personally, I still prefer WordPress, but I can see whay an enterprise running multiple blogs with multiple authors and a variety of editorial roles would want to manage them with MovableType.
More generally, I wonder about software getting more complex as it matures. Is it because there are more bells and whistles ("features") in successive versions? This process seems sort like the opposite of entropy, and yet related to entropy at the same time because of the chaos it throws into the lives of IT people who must cope with it.
]]>That said, SEO has come of age, along with its slightly more respectable relative, CPC-or Cost Per Click-advertising via Google AdWords (or elsewhere).
Any business, no matter its size, needs to include an Internet marketing and advertising component as part of its business plan. For some businesses, this Internet marketing effort is the only advertising that is necessary. A key component of this marketing plan is crafting an effective SEO strategy.
In crafting your effective SEO strategy, it is necessary to walk a narrow line. Over aggressive tricks-sometimes called Blackhat SEO-do not work in the long run, except for scamsters. On the other hand, it is right and just to put one's best foot forward, and get as a high a natural search ranking as possible.
Contextually, SEO needs to be regarded as a component of online marketing and advertising. It's perfectly reasonable to allocate a percentage of resources to SEO at the same time as a CPC budget is formulated.
While there are some responsible and reputable SEO consultants, the field has not entirely emerged from an era of gaudy patent-medicine *get rich quick* hucksterism.
In response, my electronic book Search Engine Optimization: Building Traffic and Making Money is available as downloadable PDF from O'Reilly, the publisher. It's not about getting rich quick, and is focused on concise nuts and bolts issues. You can take this PDF to the boardroom and understand the technology issues underlying SEO (it won't replace your marketing consultant). If you are a do-it-yourself webmaster, my PDF should tell you everything you need to become a SEO whiz from a technical perspective.
But like many things software that seem like a good idea when you start, this proved to be much more of a job than I had imagined.
Wake-Up Call
I was Googling myself, and my recent book, Google Advertising Tools: Cashing in with AdSense, AdWords, and the Google APIs. Many writers spend far too much time Googling themselves and their books!
During this fun way to idle away extra hours (ha! ha!), I came across an SEO blog entry that discussed Wired?s interview with me about making money from AdSense blogging. The author of the blog entry was somewhat snide about this blog and Photoblog 2.0: "A startling realization came onto me as a saw the design of each [of Harold's] blog[s]. Sometimes crude, unsemetrical [sic], and painful to the eyes is what I can describe it."
Here's the part that got me into gear. One comment suggested that "someone should tell him [Harold] that old Kubrick theme [the default WordPress design] is a favorite of blog spammers. I almost click away from any blog using that theme when I see it, just as a kneejerk reaction."
A response suggested that I made my blogs ugly on purpose as part of my insidious get-rich-quick scheme so that viewers would click any link (preferably an AdSense link to make me revenue) just to get quickly off my ugly sites: "This is probably a reason for his [Harold's] monitary [sic] success since users tend to click away (in disgust perhaps) as soon as possible and the next thing they click on is a Google Ad. So maybe ugly does work as part of a marketing plan."
I Am Flattered, but...
Guys, I am flattered to get all this attention, and it certainly helps the search engine status of my blogs, but to a considerable extent my critics miss the point. While they are right to pick up on the idea that a successful blog exists as part of a larger idea or plan, it is crucial to realize that search engines do not care about beautiful design.
They don't care in the slightest.
The only thing that matters to a search engine is content.
My
The art and craft of SEO is partially about taking relevant content and tweaking it so that search engines can most easily digest and index it. This process does not care about the appearance of the content. SEO is not concerned with making that content *look good* to humans.
Compromise
Search engines may be unconcerned with the appearance of the content they index, but search engines do care about traffic. Visually attractive sites are attractive to humans, get links, and move up in their PageRank. So design does, too, matter. The compromise is to create sites that look great, with the design supporting their content-and where the information architecture is straightforward enough to work for SEO purposes as well.
Kubrick
Kubrick is the theme, sometimes called a skin, that is the default for WordPress, the open source blogging software. Kubrick is famous, and was designed by Michael Heilemann.
The WordPress theme, such as Kubrick, controls how pages in a blog managed by WordPress look, and also how they fit together with one another.
Remember, one of the critics of my Photoblog I mentioned earlier deplored my use of Kubrick.
I like Kubrick. I realize that it has become a cliche, but I still think it is a great design.
I chose Kubrick at the time that I got WordPress installed because I liked it, because I thought it didn't interfere visually with my photos, and because it was the default out-of-the-box, so I didn't have to do anything. When you spend your time chasing three little kids, writing books, taking pictures, and consulting, you don't have too much time left over to worry about design themes.
One of the things I like best about Kubrick is buried inside the code modules that Heilemann supplied to WordPress. Like the dysfunctional computer HAL in Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey, commented out sections of obscure code, buried in places like the footer template, start saying things like "Dave, what are you doing here", "Dave, I wouldn't do that," and then quoting the lyrics from Daisy, Daisy.
A sense of humor, these open source coders and designers have, yes they does, my precious!
New Skin
Over the past year, I've become pretty serious about my photographs. Well, maybe "serious" is not the right word since I have so much fun with photography. But you know what I mean. I mean that I think my photoblog and photos deserve a frame that will not let someone dismiss them simply because it is the default.
New skin time! Time for makeover Berkeley Hills weblog 94707! (That's my zipcode, by the way.)
The first place I started was to look at existing open source themes for WordPress. There are lots of these, here?s a list of themes on the WordPress Codex.
Some of these pre-built skins are wonderful. Some are garish. But none of them seemed to fit the bill of working well with my photographs.
I realized I'd have to build something for myself.
There are really two parts to a WordPress theme. One is to control the look-and-feel of the blog. The other controls the information architecture: how blog entries, the navigation panel, the blog home page, and so on, are organized.
I realized that I wanted to keep the existing information architecture, which works fine. All I wanted to change was the way things looked.
If you read the comments within Kubrick, this is simply a matter of creating four graphic files, the most important of which is the header graphic, and changing a few style settings.
So I decided to modify Kubrick, rather than creating my own theme. In hindsight, I believe this was a mistake. When I do it again, I will create my own theme, not modify an existing theme.
One thing I should say here is that WordPress is great software. As far as I am concerned, one part of its greatness is that it is entirely written in PHP, with source code available and present. The PHP uses styles to generate the HTML that is displayed. You can change anything about WordPress and its code you'd like under open source licensing.
Pixel by Pixel
Changing the positioning of the graphic elements using their styles took hours of pixel-by-pixel labor. Every time I fixed one element that was off by a couple of pixels, something else broke.
Style Sheet Angst
Style sheets are great. They modularize HTML, and separate form from content. But WordPress is a very complex system, with some styles set in the style sheet, some set in the header module, and the display impacted by code in perhaps twenty different modules.
I spent a great deal of time playing CSS detective and wondering what I had to change to move this dingus to there.
Sometimes I think they should have stuck with tables to organize HTML.
Which Browser Are You On?
Finally, and I do mean finally, I had the new appearance working. Or so I thought. Moving from Internet Explorer on Windows to Firefox, I found that the whole thing was bollixed up. Worse, I found it had a slightly different fit of graphical elements on Mac Explorer, Mac Firefox, and Mac Safari.
I had to add conditional code that checked for the browser that was opening the blog, and picked a different set of styles for each.
By the time I got this all working it was midnight.
If there is anyone running Linux, or one of the browsers I haven't mentioned, would they please drop me a line to let me know if there are any problems?
Voila
Here's the makeover:
Photoblog 2.0 Home page
Sample Blog Entry
Catgeory page
Was it worth it? These things usually seem like they are after you've done them, but not while you are in the thick of the agony. Ah, there it is again: the agony and the ecstasy!
Is It My Turn Yet?
Q: I am the Googleplex Blog. I am running on an old MovableType install that Harold never upgraded because it was one of the last free versions before MT went commercial. My design is functional, but not particularly inspired, and Harold hasn't changed it in years! Is it my turn yet? When are you moving me to WordPress? When are you getting me a nice new skin?
A: Not tonight, Josephine.
]]>In the SEO arena, gaudy patent-medicine *get rich quick* hucksterism meets successful marketing techniques (and people who do make a great deal of money), and both meet the nuts and bolts of a technology framework.
Like a beautiful spy with limpid eyes and unknowable depths, or an iceberg with 95% of its mass hidden beneath the surface of an arctic ocean, SEO can appear wondrous, mysterious, and baffling.
Less poetically, the core of SEO is the art and science of promoting web pages so they are high in natural search engine rankings. (A natural search engine result is one that is not paid for, as opposed to paid advertising links that also appear on search-results pages.)
Extended SEO has come to mean the whole field of marketing in relationship to web properties-so it is not unusual these days to have an SEO expert propose paid advertising via Google AdWords or another program as an adjunct to core SEO techniques.
I?m pleased that my book Google Advertising Tools: Cashing in with AdSense, AdWords, and the Google APIs has been doing well (it?s shown up on Amazon?s list of computer bestsellers in the last few weeks).
My book is about the landscape of making money on the web: how to create content that will make money, how to monetize that content with Google's AdSense program, how affiliate programs work, how to effectively use Google's AdWords program to promote traffic, and how to program custom applications related to Google's advertising programs.
In other words, this is a practical book aimed at helping you make money, but it is primarily about effectively using technology. There are two chapters in the book (out of 16 chapters) that discuss SEO issues from a nuts and bolts perspective.
So I was pleased when O?Reilly (the publisher of my book) asked me to write a short electronic book specifically about SEO. You can download Search Engine Optimization: Building Traffic and Making Money as a PDF.
Like Google Advertising Tools: Cashing in with AdSense, AdWords, and the Google APIs, my SEO PDF is not get-rich-quick hype, and is focused on concise nuts and bolts issues. It doesn't really tackle marketing techniques at a strategic level (which I am looking forward to doing soon).
Now there's a new game in town: flickrwhacking.
A successful flickrwhack finds a flickr tag that uniquely identifies one Flickr photo.
To back up for a moment, when a Flickr member posts a photo that can mark their image with tags that describe the contents. These tags are a useful way to find photos on Flickr (one's own, or photos relating to the subject of a tag). Flickr tags have come to play an important role in the folksonomic categorization of the web because they provide a high-volume approach to correlating subject-matter with visuals.
Some Flickr tags can be pretty idiosyncratic, hence the game of flickrwhacking.
I tagged a somewhat unusual photo of mine of a holly flower with the tag By Golly. It turns out that By Golly is a flickrwhack, and was added to the Flickr flickrwhack thread.
Flickrwhacking is part of a general Flickr trend of making a game out of everything. Another example: one group is devoted to each member finding their least interesting photo on Flickr. Of course, as with googlewhacking, the moment a photo is labeled as uninteresting-which is an automated Flickr ranking system for photos-it becomes more interesting.
Googlewhacking! Flickrwhacking! The web! Ain't life grand?
]]>Of course, I've seen the AdSense ads for eBay when I enter a search term such as antiques or Nikon D200. In fact, almost any search term query at all that might possibly be something one might buy brings up (among other AdSense search ads) an ad linking to eBay mentioning the item.
The eBay ads via Google cover so many terms that they sometimes overreach. I'll bet you didn't know you could buy thoughts on eBay. A Google search for thoughts returns this eBay ad:
Thoughts
Whatever you're looking for
you can get it on eBay.
www.eBay.com
Well, I gosh darn sure hope I can't buy what I'm thinking of right now on eBay (and, no, I won't tell youit's private!).
In another example of overreaching in ad placement, a search for the term cliff returns (along with search results) this ad:
Cliff
Looking for Cliff?
Find exactly what you want today.
www.eBay.com
Now, I know you can find most things on eBay, but I haven't seen that many cliff auctions lately. Maybe I'm missing something. What I also seem to have been missing, at least according to the WSJ article, is the extent of money eBay pays Googleaccording to the Journal, eBay won't give out numbers, but a big chunk of its $400 Million annual online ad budget goes to Googleand the extent to which Google's traffic is vital to eBay. (On a personal note, when I want an eBay auction, I go straight to eBay. I can't remember having clicked through to eBay from a Google AdSense search ad.)
When eBay started placing these huge ad buys with Google starting in 2001, eBay did not regard Google as a competitive threat, just the vendor with the best search engine technology. In fact, eBay probably felt that as the customer spending the money they had the upper hand in the eBay-Google relationship. (A side note here: isn't it amazing how Google has been able to take advantage of the behemoth internet players to gain its current position, first honing its search engine technology at Yahoo's expense and then gaining literally billions of dollars of easy revenue from eBay since 2001?)
As Google's tentacles began to stretch wider, eBay came to consider whether Google was, in fact, a threatand to wonder whether eBay's now deep dependence on traffic from Google constituted a giant vulnerability.
Certainly, Google wants to be the leading online entry point for online commerce, although it has a ways to go to achieve this ambition. Google Base, a free online classified service, is at least indirect competition to eBayand direct competition to Craigslist, part-owned by eBay. Google is also developing an online payment service to compete with eBay's PayPal, although the Google service has yet to manifest itself in a serious way, and PayPal's ubiquity will be hard to rival.
eBay's response to all this is marked by internal confusion. At a summit meeting of eBay executives that met in the summer of 2005, role-playing was used to assess the threat. A "green team" thought from eBay's perspective and concluded that there was no threat and that business-as-usual should continue. In contrast, a "red team" thought from Google's perspective, and concluded that Google was planning a move into eBay's primary turf.
Clearly, eBay insiders are divided. As the Journal puts it, "Indecision within eBay will probably delay any conclusion." In the meantime, eBay is holding discussions with Google rivals Microsoft and Yahoo. Also, eBay's new WantItNow site is a shot across the bow of Google as online ecommerce entry point.
Often, I just want to buy something and not deal with the hassle of an online auction. In the past, I could have browsed through eBay looking for a Buy It Now button on the thing I wanted. But this was cumbersome. So usually I just put the item into Google or Yahoo (but mostly Google), and found someone to sell it to me. WantItNow features only items that are immediately available. It is an attempt to counteract this dangerousto eBaytrend of using Google to find items available for immediate purchase.
It's not clear what will happen in the great eBay-Google-Microsoft-Yahoo games. These games will be great fun to watch, and are significant for the future of the web. The outcome will no doubt be studied in business schools of the future. For the meantime, the only thing that's really clear is that eBay does risk becoming marginalized by Google. In this scenario, eBay becomes simply another backend product supplier, and Google controls the gateway. Most likely, eBay continues to be viable (after all, why should Google choke such a good source of revenue?), but the brilliant future belongs to Google.
]]>It is kind of cool knowing I'm talking to a computer, because I can rant, rave, and curse all I like without having to feel remorse at exhibiting inappropriate behavior before a mere human cog in the machine. (Instead, I'm exhibiting it to a machine cog in the machine, who will probably remember me detrimentally the next time I try to do a really tricky bit of programming!)
Somehow all my upset never results in the computer at the other end transferring me to a "customer service" representative. Which is, I suppose, the point of the whole thing.
Voice-response customer service lines were brought to mind by a message flashing on my DirectTV last night advertising that the DirectTV phone lines had "improved" by going down this path. (It's another, minor pet peeve of mine that DirectTV sees fit to signal some stupid message to me by flashing a light in my bedroom on the TV-satellite controller box. What nerve!)
This trend of automating customer service using software that "understands" what you say is probably good for companies in this business like Nuance. But pretty obviously it's not good for consumers. If you've ever been frustrated trying to get through one of these systems, you'll know what I mean. I'm all for self-service help mechanisms where appropriate, but this is the forte of the internet, not a telephone that I've picked up.
So what gives? In his glib bestseller The World Is Flat, Thomas Friedman tells us (as if we didn't know) that outsourcing is here to stay. (Where tomorrow's lowest-cost outsource provider will be located is another question.)
Friedman, however, doesn't really pinpoint one of the main thrusts of outsourcing: many companies have come to believe that customer service is a cost center and a drain on their bottom lines. The less their customer service costs, and the more shabby their customer service, the better. These businesses are now marching to the tune of Wall Street's quarterly expectations, and do not realize that in the long term people do remember how they've been treated.
You can see an example of this disturbing trend in a voice-response customer service that places another obstacle in the way of getting through to a human being. It all reminds me of a Saturday Night Live skit I happened to see recently. David Spade and Helen Hunt play flight attendants saying "Buh-Bye" to passengers leaving an airplane. No matter what the passenger wantsfor example, information about a connecting flightthe response is always "Buh-Bye." It's hard to convey how funny this gets (I know it sounds like real life, and not particularly funny, but you have to see Spade and Hunt in action) with lines like, "I said Buh-Bye and your mouth is still flapping!"
Finally, when the rude flight attendants have dismissed the last passengers, Spade picks up the intercom and calls for a protective escort to get out of the terminal.
Spade playsfor laughsa flight attendant so rude he'll need an armed body guard to protect him from his customers. So will all these companies that have relegated customer service to impenetrable automated systems and the back of beyond.
]]>Google Mars provides elevation maps (showing altitude in relief), satellite photos created using a mosaic of visible light images, and views created with a mosaic of infrared photography. As with Google Earth, you can zoom in and out and navigate across the various views.
Other features are almost too numerous to list. You can browse links that list the regions of Mars, show you where spacecraft have landed, or that are the subject of stories about Mars. As an example of a story, here's the so-called face of the man on Mars. Unfortunately, "story" means a scientific account about a feature, not the wonderful Edgar Rice Burroughs Mars fantasies beloved in my youth, nor even Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy describing a terra-formed planet.
Using any of the three view modes, you can search the surface of Mars for mountains, canyons, dunes, plains, ridges, and craters. For example, here's the elevation map of the Burroughs crater, named after my hero, pulp fantasy writer Edgar R. He got a crater named after him that is a whopping 78 miles across. Where's Tarzan, or John Carter of Mars, when you need them?
All this is very cool. Very cool indeed. If you have too much time on your hands, go check it out right away.
Putting together these images, which are credited to NASA, the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), and Arizona State University was undoubtedlyas the About Google Mars page statesa great deal of fun, as well as real work.
But Google Mars inevitably raises the question, what is the point? I'm thinking that Google wants to lock-in its first-mover advantage for local search ads prior to the colonization of the red planet.
]]>What does a Honda Element and a platypus have in common?
Julian is now reading omnivorously, kind of like a platypus, whose food (not reading) diet consists of platypus insect larvae, snails, yabbies, worms, tadpoles and other fauna and shellfish.
Platypi also occasionally eat small frogs, small fish and fish eggs. Yes, "platypi" is a valid plural of platypus, along with "platypuses." A "yabby" is a kind of Australian crayfish.
To get back to my story, like any newly literate second grader, Julian has to read the advertising gambit about the Honda Element and the Platypus over and over again to us.
Julian also notices that the billboard says that if we tune to a certain AM radio frequency (AM 1660 I think) we will get the answer to the Element-Platypus conundrum.
So we dutifully tune our rather powerful car radio to AM 1660 and get nothing, nada, zippo. No signal at the specified frequency.
Julian, who likes order in life even though he knows it often doesn't exist, is upset. We are bemused: how like old-school Madison Avenue to buy an expensive ad placement that doesn't deliver to prospects. What's the point of the billboard if the "call to action" is a dud? How can this possibly compete with the efficiency to advertisers and ease of process of CPC advertising?
"Don't worry," I say to Julian, "I'll Google it and find out how an Element is like a platypus."
Interestingly, when I do Google Honda Element platypus, I don't find what I'm looking for at the top of the natural search results. Instead, I get a bunch of advertising trade rags boasting about how clever an ad campaign the Honda Element and platypus routine is.
Maybe it is a clever campaign if you make your living from brick-and-mortar ad commissions, or if your goal in life is to have your buddies in the ad business think you are swell. But if the goal is to both target a market and to deliver a message, then the Honda Element platypus ads should be on the endangered species list.
According to the Madison Ave accounts of the ads, the radio station is supposed to broadcast a cocktail party conversation between the Honda and the platypus.
But none of these articles tell me the actual content of the cocktail banter. To find out, I needed to visit the Element and Friends site Honda set up.
Fortunately, a CPC ad displayed by Google along side my search results directs me to the right site.
The campaign may not have been such a good idea period as a way to stop the sinking Honda Element sales from further deteriorating. But if it was to exist at all, it should have been online, and highly targeted using CPCwhere a call to action can readily be pursued.
It may be a little anticlimactic, but after all this you'd probably like to know what the car and the animal do have in common.
Both the Element and the platypus are "hodgepodges": the car is "part van, part suv, part surf wagon," while the beast has the "bill of a duck and the tail of a beaver."
I can think of a few other commonalties myself: both have numbers that are on the decline, and both are peculiar looking to the point of ugliness. Well, maybe not to the parents of platypi.
]]>Several readers have pointed out that Wikis are just as useful-if not more so-in private contexts as they are as general sources like the excellent Wikipedia.
Many companies and institutions-from entire enterprises to small workgroups-have replaced complex Knowledge Management Systems with wikis. Wikis can also be used to help share knowledge across organizations. For example, a publisher I work with has organized a wiki to benefit all the contributors to a specific series of books that share the same resources, vocabulary, and ideas.
What are the advantages, and what are the dangers, with private wikis?
Very much on the plus side: Private wikis can cut through bureaucracy, and make it easier for people to share information.
On the downside, with a wiki you may not know who has contributed what, and with what degree of authority?leading to possible confusion and delay. This is essentially the same problem as with public wikis, and can be mitigated in the same fashion that Wikipedia has used: openness about issues and process, and clarity about roles, reviews, and responsibility. Still, a reasonably sane corporate denizen would be wise not to accept private wiki information as gospel without understanding its source-and where the source fits into the institutional zeitgeist.
A related private wiki issue is ease of use. If knowledge workers find it difficult or time consuming to use a wiki, they won't-and it will lose utility as a knowledge management system. This implies that institutions may find it worthwhile to go with licensed wiki software such as Socialtext, or to use a consultancy specializing in wiki knowledge management systems, rather than going it alone with open source wiki infrastructure.
More important than choice of software or software implementer, any institution establishing a private wiki should establish an initial team tasked with clearing potholes out of the way and training users. Otherwise, the private wiki will likely only see marginal use-and the goal of creating less hierarchical knowledge management will fail.
]]>The jeremiads of bloggers rise to the heavens but provide some useful insights.
Profiles on MySpace are the kind of superficial self portraits you'd expect of teens on the make?but can also show wonderful creativity and expressiveness.
Photographs posted to Flickr can be insipid not-quite-in-focus family album affairs-but also can rival or surpass the work of the best professional digital photographers.
Closer to the core of the web, open source software initiatives like Linux and Apache and others hosted by SourceForge provide the technical know-how that keeps the engines turning (and prevents private enterprise from consuming the commune).
Communal forums like LinuxWorld, SlashDot and WebMasterWorld provide the discussion and descriptive glosses that make it possible for all the moving parts of the web's technology to work together.
Taxonomies like the Open Directory Project (ODP) provide structure to search engines like Google and Yahoo. (The ODP is not really communal, but it is noncommercial, provides its data to everyone, and works because of the efforts of volunteer editors.)
Wikis are communal by definition. Commune-based wikis, particularly the Wikipedia, provide information repositories that are unmatched in scope (and in the number of contributors) while avoiding any kind of hierarchical information verification.
Everything, however, is not perfect in this paradise of communes. The major problems with information communes are that they are easy to manipulate or corrupt, and that it is hard to evaluate the reliability of the information contained in communal repositories.
These are not new accusations to hurl at demotic levelers of information barriers. No doubt the priests who could write elegant Latin said much the same kinds of things when Gutenberg produced his first printing press. But they are troubling all the same.
It is easy to manipulate ODP listings and Wikipedia articles to improve natural search engine rankings, and these are standard techniques in the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) toolbox. When the stakes become large enough, anything is corruptible, and there have been serious claims that ODP listings are paid for with bribes (because they can be used to enhance a website's status in search engines such as Google).
More interesting philosophically is the accuracy of information found in communal repositories. A recent Op-Ed piece in the New York Times poses this question, asking how does the accuracy of the Wikipedia compare with the accuracy of the information found in a vetted publication such as the Encyclopedia Britannica?
The answer, of course, is that comparative accuracy depends on many variables.
Before I discuss some of these variables, I need to point out that the wise consumer regards all received information with some skepticism, suspecting that the inherent bias of the purveyor may well color what is presented even if the bias is not intentional. (Here's some more information about how to evaluate the credibility of web pages.)
It's true that the situation is probably more extreme on the web than off it, but information bias is a universal. Even casual researchers need to understand some of the techniques used to evaluate the veracity of information found on and off the web: context, consistency, professionalism of presentation, plausibility, the reputation of the information provider, the verification process (if any), and the apparent motivation of the information provider.
In my opinion, there are manifest instances of information bias in the Big Red Barn and Dr. Seuss-and techniques for evaluating the veracity of information should be taught starting in first grade. Seriously. And it has some bearing on the situation, and is not entirely trivial, that I found the Wikipedia article about Dr. Seuss the best, most objective, and least commercial site to provide a link for more information about this children's book author (above).
Leaving first grade behind, would you rather read an article about elementary physics prepared by 1,000 anonymous members of the hive on Wikipedia, or one written by Albert Einstein for the Encyclopedia Britannica, and scrupulously edited by professionals?
This is kind of an apples and oranges comparison. I sure have more respect for Einstein's intellect than even for, well, a googol of anonymous intellects that have contributed to the hive. Einstein obviously will know his elementary physics, and furthermore will have insights to impart about how to think about physics.
On the other hand, the 1,000 hive contributors will get elementary physics right, too. By the time these folk have been back and forth over each other's work, the finished article is likely to be as accurate as something subject to the most rigorous professional review. There isn't likely to be much bias left after 1,000 people have been over it. There may not be much flavor either.
This highlights an important point: articles in the Wikipedia that cover a topic of fairly wide general interest are likely to be thorough and unbiased. But more narrowly-focused topics are often written by one or two people with an ax to grind, may be biased, and may contain faulty information (or even outright fabrications).
The more technical and arcane you get, the more likely it is that there are only a handful of people who really understand the topic. This line of thinking implies that communal-process information mechanisms like the Wikipedia are less likely to produce good information on cutting-edge scholarly and scientific topics?and more likely to be good sources of information for topics at the general college level (and below).
Going back to Einstein, Einstein is not going to get his facts wrong, and will probably have an interesting viewpoint about physics (even elementary physics). But that self-same "interesting viewpoint" can also be called "bias." In fact, it's common for the very best scientists and researchers to be extremely opinionated in their areas of expertise (and a gosh darn good thing too!).
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, asserts that this issue is not about comparing the accuracy of information derived from a communal process with the accuracy of information from a lone distinguished, professional contributor. Rather, Wales opines, it's about the conflict between two vetting systems. The communal wiki process, according to Wales, involves unending scrutiny whereas a professional review process like that of the Encyclopedia Britannica is flimsy: in the future "people will say, 'This was written by one person? Then looked at by only two or three other people? How can I trust that process?'"
To its great credit, the Wikipedia has been open about problems with accuracy, methodology, fraud, and group process. In fact, these things are discussed ad nauseum as part of the Wikipedia (see the Wikipedia Community Portal for details).
Wales is right that from a philosophic viewpoint that the stakes are high, and that the process of individual signed contribution is on a collision path with anonymous communal information gathering. He's wrong to assume that the commune is always right.
[Thanks to Martin Davis and Phyllis Davis for reviewing this piece; the opinions and flaws, of course, are mine, all mine.]
]]>My picture of most "companies, institutions, and human beings"-and this is very transparent with my kids-is that an angel sits on one shoulder and a devil on the other. Sometimes the angel wins, and sometimes the devil wins.
Google cooperates with the Chinese government to censor Internet access in China. Chalk up one to the devil. On this story, you may laugh or cry when you read about Bill Gates taking the unusual step of praising the competition and Google's censorship in China as preventing more censorship overall. George Orwell, where are you when we need you?
Google resists turning over search records to the U.S. government when its competitors roll over and play dead-and don't give a fig for the privacy of their customers. This time it's three cheers for the Google angel!
On the good side of the ledger, I am very, very impressed with Google's technology prowess and business acumen. Besides personally using Google's search all the time, as the author of two books about using Google's technology, I am professionally grateful to the company. (The books are Google Advertising Tools and Building Research Tools with Google.)
However, I've been bemused for a long time about the free pass Google has got from the technology community (and media) for behavior that would have been critiqued soundly in any other company. (See, for example, my Do no evil? from August 2005.)
Any big business that enjoins on its Investor Relations pages "don't be evil" is riding for a fall. By the way, Google's famous-or infamous-"don't be evil" motto ties in nicely with my devil and angel Google analogy. Both "don't be evil" as a world view and the devil-angel dichotomy are representative of a black-and-white Manichean outlook. Google's more recent Corporate Philosophy statement has hedged "don't be evil" a bit by replacing the notorious too-good-to-be-true aphorism with the declaration that you can make money without doing evil.
Now the Google worm has begun to turn, and the company that could do no wrong can do little right in some quarters. For example, check out Danny Sullivan's 25 Things I Hate About Google on SearchEngineWatch. Danny also loves Google, so I think he buys into the dichotomous Manichean Google worm world view, too.
]]>As you likely know, the results you see when you do a Google search are divided into "natural" links-the supposedly objective links the search engine comes up with in response to your query-and "sponsored" links, which are paid advertisements.
Sponsored links (does an ad by any other name smell fairer?) are clearly labeled as such (in very small type) and appear both above and to the right of the natural search results.
Google makes its very nice living on these sponsored links, a/k/a ads. These ads are placed using the Google AdWords mechanism. (Besides appearing in search results, Google's ads also show up on websites that have enrolled in the Google AdSense program.)
Anyone with a valid credit card can place an AdWords ad-although, of course, Google makes more money from its large advertisers than from its "two-buck chucks."
When you place an ad via AdWords, the system automatically checks the ad text for violations of the Google rules (click here for the lawyerly text of the terms and conditions).
The automated check includes an attempt to weed out copyrighted or trademarked terms.
If your ad is rejected by the software, you can request an exception-but don't expect a response with anything other than a boilerplate reiteration of the rejection.
Google is particularly strict about reserving the term "google". Oddly enough, "AdSense" and "AdWords" are both fair game. Well, perhaps not oddly because Google makes mucho dinaros off selling ads against these terms.
Case in point: a recent attempt by the publisher of my new book Google Advertising Tools to place an AdWords ad using the book's title.
I think this is pretty clearly a legitimate usage of "Google". (The book's copyright page does include the standard notice that Google is a trademark of Google Technology, Inc.)
The ad was rejected, and the reasoned request for an exemption signed by a marketing manager at the publisher was also rejected in boilerplate, reiterative fashion.
Of course, Google has every right to protect its valuable name. However, Google exercises great power over our virtual lives. Sometimes in arbitrary and capricious ways.
It continues to trouble me that this absolute power can be exercised without any effective appellate mechanism.
]]>According to a recent front page New York Times article, real estate transactions in which buyers have never seen the property have become increasingly common on the Internet, particularly on eBay.
It should come as no surprise that a great many of these sales are fraudulent. Any buyer of a house or land who does not at least view the property prior to buying it is an idiot (it is hard to put it any more kindly). That there are buyers foolish enough to proceed in this fashion is, in fact, a symptom of an overheated market in real estate (even with the slight cooling down in the housing market this year, things are still a bit frothy).
That said, these cases of outright fraud raise issues similar to the Craigslist lawsuit. eBay, and others, simply cannot go on abdicating responsibility for online transactions consummated on their sites. Ultimately, there will be a backlash.
If you stick to rummage sale items, it's reasonable to assume the same level of responsibility that you would find at a yard sale: once you walk away with your purchase there is no recourse.
But real estate is not a dusty tchotchke from your parent's attic. High ticket items lead to real damage, and to legal recourse.
Furthermore, most jurisdictions provide fairly thorough legal protections for buyers in real estate transactions in the off-line world. Both from a moral and a legal viewpoint, eBay will have to find a way to incorporate these protections into its workflow when real estate is involvedor surrender this potential portion of the online transactions market to the fraudsters.
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