Slashdot Mirror

The problem isn't with the technology (newsletters vs. blogs) but with the way the technology's being used. Newsletter creators learned long ago that it made much more sense to send out tightly-focused newsletters, something that many bloggers have yet to learn. Those bloggers cast too wide a net and turn off some of their readers.

One way to just get the things that interest you from a less-focused blog is to use category feeds if the blogging software supports it. This relies, of course, on the blogger properly and consistently categorizing his or her posts, but it can definitely narrow things down.

It makes sense when you consider the source of Slashdot's news:

http://news.google.com/news?q=google

Eric
Reality vs. Fantasy: a juxtaposition

On a related note, Google is allowing AdSense publishers to click ads since click fraud isn't such a big deal.

Eric
How to find the BlackBerry OS version

Maybe when it comes to electronics, yes, but I'm not sure about some of their delicacies...

Eric
AvantGo for RSS

I think they're really trying to free up more vertical space for search results. Why? Because the search results have been getting crowded out by other things at the top (not just sponsored links, but links to local searches, maps, etc.) and bottom of the screen. Moving the categories to the side, making the Google logo smaller (it's now 135 by 50 instead of 150 by 55) and reducing the amount of whitespace at the margins all let them squeeze more into the vertical space.

They may also be able to play with showing ads in the left column, which is an ad hotspot, though I don't know if they'll go that far.

One must jump the shark to find the length of its tail.

Eric
My AdSense blog

Yeah, it's kind of funny that they went with such an architecture to begin with, it's so un-Unix like.

Eric
Real-life applications for PageRank

Actually, RIM's main data center is already located in Waterloo, Ontario. RIM has already argued that US patent law didn't apply because of this, but that didn't get them anywhere with the judges.

Eric
Sign up for my free AdSense newsletter

2. Spell things correctly.

Actually, one valid SEO strategy is to specifically target misspellings. Not everyone using a search engine knows how to spell, and you can take advantage of that.

Eric
The Invisible Fence Guide

Yes and no. Unlike blogs, podcasts are mostly one-way, none of the commenting, tagging and cross-linking that characterizes blogging. Podcasting is another form of content syndication. And yes, the technology is so simple now (I use a Yamaha UW500, a USB audio/midi recorder) that anyone with a computer can record themselves doing all kinds of things and slap it out on the Internet for anyone to see. (A hint to save you some bandwidth: if what you're doing is distributable via a Creative Commons license, you can have the Internet Archive host it for you.)

Recording is easy. The tricky part is figuring out how to best build your feed. Besides the standard RSS tags, look at the iTunes extensions.

Eric
Just put out my first (long!) podcast

What Amazon is doing, of course, is protecting a vast amount of intellectual property that it has amassed over the years in the form of consumer reviews. While Amazon does not own the copyright to those reviews, they do have extensive rights to them as set out in the Amazon Conditions of Use:

If you do post content or submit material, and unless we indicate otherwise, you grant Amazon.com and its affiliates a nonexclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable right to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, and display such content throughout the world in any media. You grant Amazon.com and its affiliates and sublicensees the right to use the name that you submit in connection with such content, if they choose. You represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content that you post; that the content is accurate; that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person or entity; and that you will indemnify Amazon.com or its affiliates for all claims resulting from content you supply. Amazon.com has the right but not the obligation to monitor and edit or remove any activity or content. Amazon.com takes no responsibility and assumes no liability for any content posted by you or any third party.

This data that it has managed to collect is an important selling tool, especially for book authors. Why? Because potential book buyers often look at the Amazon reviews to get more details about what a book is really about, even if they don't end up buying it on Amazon (but it gives Amazon more opportunities to push products on those eyeballs). Sure, us authors will fuss over the star ratings (of course you want a 5-star rating, who wouldn't!) but the reality is that the negative ratings can also sell books -- if they're constructive. Those reviews get shared with Amazon partners through the Amazon Web Services, so they just don't end up on the Amazon.com site (though I do find it odd that the reviews aren't shared between the different English-locale Amazon sites). All this data just helps them become the e-commerce portal of choice.

So trying to protect the gathering and processing of this information -- visitor-supplied metadata -- is completely understandable from their point of view. They'd be fools not to do so, especially with the ease with which these kinds of patents seem to be granted.

Eric
Read my Invisible Fence story

AdWords = Google's advertising program (started as text-only pay-per-click ads on Google' search results pages)

AdSense = program that lets webmasters/bloggers rent space on their pages to Google to display ads drawn from the AdWords program, in return they get a percentage of the ad revenue made by Google from the ads shown on their pages

Promoting Firefox with the Google Toolbar promotes the use of Google, which (over the long run) leads to higher revenues as more people see the ads (both on the search results pages and on other sites via AdSense).

In some ways this is a reaction to competing programs like Yahoo!'s new ad program and also to Chitika's eMiniMalls program. There's no doubt that these programs will benefit some AdSense publishers, but they'll certainly benefit Google itself the most. Even if they have to pay.

Eric
Read my AdSense blog

I think they need to think carefully about the ratio between free and paid content. Not knowing what publication this is, it's hard to be specific, but I believe that only the truly authoritative sites can get away with putting most of their content behind a subscription wall. Let's face it, with so much stuff available for free today on the Internet from reputable sources, you have to provide something unique, some extra value-add that makes it worthwhile to subscribe to your content.

The local newspaper in our area, The Record, went to a pure-subscriber model a couple of years ago. You can't get anything for free on their website except for some very basic stuff (weather, community events) and classified ads. Contrast that to The Globe and Mail, which offers much of its daily content for free. Guess which one I look to for online information?

What's worrisome for the subscription-only plays is that it's a serious barrier to entry to attracting a younger readership. Young people don't seem to read offline newspapers much any more. Placing your content behind a firewall means that can't read you online. Which will probably bite you in the long term.

various organizations and cartels have monopolized all the popular distribution and advertising venues in a given territory

That makes it sound like a big conspiracy theory, but I don't think it's that. Yes, there are different rights (publisher, performance, etc.) with different organizations collecting them, but I'm not sure it's any more complex than selling anything in a different country.

But how would he explain the existence of Thunderbird?

Eric
Read one of the best AdSense blogs around (runs on blojsom)

Nvu (note spelling) is indeed a great program. It's an open source project that supports Linux, Win32 and Mac OS X. You can use it in a WYSIWYG mode or you can edit the source of the page directly. Besides being free, it also includes support for editing CSS styles (including external style sheets), a must for building sites today. Plus you can get extensions that add neat new features. Definitely worth a look.

Eric
Invisible Fence Guide (CSS to make it fancy is still coming...)

but here it is just because it has "Apple" in the title

Unlike every Linux story.

Hey, we take our maple syrup seriously, see Table 2 in Ticketable Offences Under the Farm Products Grades and Sales Act.

Most people don't realize how little authors make on their books. For a non-fiction, you're usually talking 10% of the net (wholesale) cover price. (For fiction, it's usually a smaller percentage of the cover price, which generally works out to about the same.) So for an average $40 tech book, the author might be getting 10% of $24, i.e. a couple bucks per book. If you only sell 5,000 books total (very common) then you can see that the numbers don't amount to much.

This is why more and more authors are starting to publish their books electronically as e-books, often becoming their own publishers. It's very similar to the way that musicians are exploring electronic distribution avenues for their work. But it's still an immature, emerging distribution model for both kinds of artists.

Like I've said before in my AdSense blog, it's not that hard to make some money using AdSense and blogs, i.e. enough to pay for your Internet costs plus a small profit. Making real money takes time and effort, and don't let anyone else tell you otherwise.

Like I've said before in my AdSense blog, it's not that hard to make some money using AdSense and blogs, i.e. enough to pay for your Internet costs plus a small profit. Making real money takes time and effort, and don't let anyone else tell you otherwise.

The chance it will work is around 50%

I'm not sure anymore, are we talking about face transplants or John Travolta's recent movie work?

how much can AdSense really earn you?

I get asked that a lot (well, I guess it's no surprise, since my book is titled "Make Easy Money with Google") but there are no firm statistics anywhere. All I have to go on is gut feel, really, but I suspect that most sites are earning between $50 to $250 a month. Some sites go way beyond that, earning several hundred or even several thousand dollars per month. And some, especially the new ones, will earn less. However, it's easy enough to make enough income to pay back your hosting costs, which is the first step.

There's no real secret to this stuff. In the end, the secret "AdSense formula for making money" comes down to this:

earnings = number of clicks * average price per click

You can derive almost everything from this formula, as I described in the article The AdSense Formula.

Generally speaking, the sites making a lot of money from AdSense get (no surprise) a lot of traffic. That's the hardest part -- getting the traffic, especially the right traffic.

Click fraud is a big problem and legitimate sites are running into it more and more often. Recently someone was targeting pay-per-click related ads on my sites (a lot of my content is related to that topic) and causing my earnings to skyrocket. But it was obviously illegitimate income. What you do is report your suspicions to Google and let them figure it out. I've always done this and kept on good terms with them.

Let's face it, no one forced you to sign up with Google's AdSense program. If you can't abide by the rules that they impose, you always have the option of finding another ad program to suit your needs.

I'm not really sure why this is news. They should for sure exclude registrations that haven't passed their grace period when reporting activations... that's just common sense. A company can't fully book the revenue it receives if there's a return period. Same reasoning applies here.

my guess is that Google will ban sites not having any content /other/ than their ads

That's already the case -- you can't normally display AdSense ads on a site if the site doesn't have any content. If Google notices this or if someone reports it, they'll ask you to take off the ads or lose your AdSense account.

That said, Google and other third parties do offer domain parking facilities that explicitly allow you to show ads. But you have to explicitly sign up for that kind of program.

I don't know how any of this would be considered "illegitimate" use of domain names, though. It's the price you pay with an open market.

So, that is why you opted for the short non .com domain eh?

That was a bit of a struggle, actually. I couldn't find a good, short .com domain so I compromised on the title of the book. But then I had the problem that the URLs printed in the book would look horrible, so I also went and registered a short .com domain consisting of the first letters in each title word to get memwg.com as a shorthand for MakeEasyMoneyWithGoogle.com. The shorthand form makes no sense unless you know the title of the book, but it made for reasonable URLs on the printed page.

I definitely recommend finding a .com domain first before using one of the other domains, though, unless your stuff is country-specific and you'll get a boost from having a country-code TLD. And, practically speaking, the .com domains tend be much cheaper than the country-code ones. If you're registering multiple domains, this can be important. It's just that finding an available domain .com related to your topic can be so incredibly hard.

...reliable and secure outsourcing of [...] Exchange server

Lotus Notes^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H

If you can't be bothered to figure out for yourself which books you "ought" to read to get a good grasp of western literature, are you going to read the books some people at Amazon think you "ought" to read if they just end up on your shelves?

No, no, we already have Slashdot for that...

There's always a tug-of-war happening in tech companies with respect to innovation. It seems to me that the best companies have people that take a long-term view, looking ahead at what's coming down the pipe, instead of the short-term quarter-by-quarter view. This can be hard in a public company, yes, and it's a difficult balance to achieve.

That said, I don't think everyone likes skunk works projects. The important thing is that people enjoy what they do, whatever it is. A good QA person, for example, is one who derives satisfaction from finding and squashing bugs and ultimately making things better for the customer. Different strokes for different folks. A company like Google will tend to attract the creative I-gotta-think-about-things types because that's what they want. But it doesn't meant that every company has to work that way. Indeed, I doubt every company could work that way.

And don't forget the customer satisfaction angle. I suspect that what really turns the crank of people at Google is that they can come up with projects that will eventually be used by thousands, potentially millions, of people worldwide. They're thinking like customers, and in fact they are customers themselves... and Google's audience is so large in general that I suspect it means that there will always be a group of customers who can identify and enjoy a given skunk works project. And then the audience gets bigger... it's a bit self-perpetuating.

Yeah, how do I get one of those for my new book? Though this is really the wrong audience for it...

And you get free shipping if you buy $1,000,000.00 or more!

But just think of the commissions you'd earn from the affiliate program! Where do I sign up?

Socks. Buy only one colour of sock. Black, white, whatever as long as they are all the same.

Stay away from white, then, otherwise when you accidentally wash some of your socks with your blue jeans you'll have to start pairing them up again, which would defeat the purpose...

Technically you can do this in Unix today with named pipes, which the Windows world sadly lacks

Hmm... funny, I was using named pipes in my Windows NT 3.5 days, and as far as I know they're still there. Don't remember if they're exposed at the CLI level, though.

This was a front page story in today's Globe and Mail: New vaccines target Ebola, Marburg. Still at least five years away from testing... but if I had Ebola I think I'd be ready to sign up for early clinical trials!

Interesting how the vaccine may end up saving African apes as well...

You can't yet. Follow the links in this blog entry for more information.

I agree, don't drown them in buzzwords. That said, it's not entirely clear to me what is meant by 'complex website'. Are you limiting yourself to web applications on dynamic sites? Are you concerned mainly with the presentation aspects of those web apps? Do you cover navigational and other non-app issues? Do you deal with the complexities of the configuration and management of the web sites (DMZ, load balancing, etc.)? Do you talk about application servers? Non-database back ends? Covering all these aspects in three months would be a challenge if you expect them to do any programming at all.

As someone who's written books with actual URLs on the printed page, I can understand his desire to have some way to update stale links without having to track down and change every copy. Automatically redirecting is not a big deal -- this is how TinyURL and other similar (and useful) services work. Most of the printed links in my new book (see below) are done in this way to keep them from breaking when the destination site changes things around and they don't bother to redirect incoming links to the correct location.

There is a difference between "redirecting" and "hijacking". Redirection by itself is not hijacking.

but you can't forecast the results

But that's true about most marketing initiatives. What makes them nervous is that the posters aren't having their material vetted (like press releases and so on) through the usual corporate processes.

rather than formulating a marketing driven non-word for their new product

And yet, if you read articles like Strength of Trademarks you'll see that those "non-word" (aka "fanciful) trademarks are the strongest to protect. So there's a reason for formulating them.

Of course, the challenge with the fanciful names is linking them to the product/service.

Indeed, see JavaScript is Not Java.

As others have already pointed out, Google makes the lion share of its money from ads, though they do sell their search technology itself via things like their search appliances, partnering with companies like Amazon, etc.

I think, though, that one of the keys to Google's success has been its ability to create simple, automated processes wrapped around its technology. Want to promote your stuff? A few screens to fill out and $50 lets you start an AdWords campaign. Want to make money? Cut-and-paste AdSense code onto your website to start displaying relevant ads automatically. Want to integrate search? Use the Google APIs to query Google's main index. Got products to sell? Submit a product feed to get listed in Froogle. Want to index specialized documents? Write a plugin for the Google Desktop tool. And so on... They seem to go to great lengths to make things simpler to do. That's the key part of their culture that has made them successful. IMHO.

someone's junk is another's treasure

Which is really why eBay exists and is so profitable!

Most likely. I asked my wife to try it out as an alternative to PowerPoint, but it didn't work well for her because she had to keep saving things in PP format (because OO isn't on the computers she uses for presentations) and was especially freaked the first few times when OO complained that if she converted things to PP format then she might lose stuff.

If you can work in an OO-only environment, it's probably OK, but the OO-PP interoperability was not good. Some of the slides it made (and she started editing presentations made with PP originally) weren't showing up in PP. Ah well...

Yep, generally it's the lawsuit-related keywords that have high pay-per-click values. That's because Google uses a bidding system for the placement of text ads -- the more you bid, the more chances that your ad will be displayed more often. (There's a feedback system in there to weed out the non-paying ads, even if they have high bids.) So of course there are many lawyers willing to bid highly for certain keywords in an attempt to find clients looking to sue someone. It's a numbers game, they only need to find a few clients and win their cases to make it worthwhile. This happened with Vioxx, for example, although that's died down now.

Other high-paying keywords/phrases: domain name, consolidate loans, credit repair, web hosting, free online poker... etc. etc.