Thanks for the personal attack. Really appreciated it.
You do not make websites better by guessing what the user wants. Your own slashdot website probably has someone who looks at what people do, looks at how many people comment and generally advises on which are the most popular links. This helps them work out which stories are interesting to you and not a load of garbage. It also helps them work out what tags submissions should be grouped together based on the likelihood of users to read certain types of submissions.
Using cookise for advertising is completely different. You're using your cookies to make sure that either the money you spend gives you the biggest return (ROI). You're thinking about this the wrong way around though. You're thinking from your perspective as an advertiser (or someone who works for one). I, as a user, want to be able to click on ads of things I want to buy. Your job, as an advertiser of things I want to buy is to give me those ads at the right time and in the right place. You can't make someone buy something they don't want to. You can make it a lot easier for them so they don't get psised off and go to your competitor.
Not that this is the purpose of cookies - but how do you differentiate between real people and robots/spiders?
More importantly how do you tell, from your server logs, how many of your users who arrived from a certain referring source stayed on the site? Do you know what they did afterwards? Do you know if they then went and performed the function your site is aimed at? Do you know if they came back at a future date to do it? Can you do any of these things without cookies?
And no, you can't do any of these things with IP address+Useragent lookup - it's far too inaccurate.
Knowing where a user came from and what they searched for is a bad way of trying to optimise your site. I can name hundreds of situations where someone was proud that they'd generated a huge volume of visits (or page views if you weren't using cookies) of users that then left straight away because it wasn't what they were looking for.
Usability testing is very useful. Not using to usability testing to try and increase revenue is the death of any business.
Personal data almost always isn't stored on cookies. You give your personal data to a company. They probably don't even link that data up with what you do on the website via cookies. If that company then sells that information on to someone else or uses it for reasons that aren't ethical, that isn't down to cookies. That is down to the company being crap.
I've seen examples where third parties require cookies to analyze the usage patterns of users on client sites but I don't require logs to understand usage trends on sites where I have easy access to log files. In fact, I think usability testing would reveal more than analysis of usage data.
So how are you going to do this usability testing? Are you going to assume that everyone arrives at the home page and then navigates through your site? This is 2009, wake up to the real world. Most sites have 60%+ visits coming from Google in the middle of the site, to do any usability testing they need to know where they arrived to focus that usability. To get this information you need to have cookies. If you don't, you'll end up with a really nice home page, pointing to your good bits of content and you'll ignore most of your user base.
This is the attitude that makes Murdoch think he can get away with putting all his content behind pay walls. It'll fail. If all EU content has to follow the new cookies rule, it will fail too and the only option you'll have in an EU country is to access non-EU content.
In the UK, fortunately you have a nice little website that tells you all about how to take ideas you have and turn them into money.
Fortunately, they also have a section on protecting your intellectual property that tells you how to do that as well (in terms of patenting, NDAs, Trademarks and Design right). I'm sure the processes aren't quite as straightforward as they look like they are here, but you get the point.
On a personal note - the question of whether to patent is a difficult one. In the internet era it would seem easier to exploit the innovation yourself before anyone else can come up with a similar, but slightly different idea that they then make a shed load of money out of.
Let's not get overwashed with this - water is just one thing that we need for life. Other things are just as equally important. Not least a stable temperature that is condusive to growth. Things like the moon can be ruled out becasue of the large differences in temperature due to the lack of atmposphere. As the poster above says, with the new ion rockets that are available, we should be looking for deeper space planets that are more likely to be able to host life because of their constant temperature (where water is actually water and not ice or steam or whichever other state it can be in).
Wow - that is important then. I wondered how the publishing companies were going to make people pay for their content if they hid it behind a barrier. Micropayments don't work if everyone has to do them seperately on every single site and every single time you want to pay for content - you need a one click payment system. Google can provide that, because they are large and they are trusted. Moreover this gets around the issue that Publishers had that users won't be able to find their content - they'll still give Google access to it for indexing, you'll just have to pay to view it. I wonder how much Yahoo! and Microsoft are pooing their pants right now.
I recently tried to install an old discworld noir that I had from ages ago but hadn't completed. It wouldn't work, I can't make it work and now I want to play it more than anything in the world. Damn the company that made it going bust. Remake it. Please won't someone remake it.
I was trying to persuade the missus (yes really) that WoW was just really an extension of the rogue and Angband games I used to play but with the ability to play real time instead of turn based and actually play with/against real people.
She looked at me blankly and claimed that she didn't know what Rogue and Angband were. When I showed her, she laughed and claimed that it was completely different because of the graphics.
I maintain the similarities are there - certainly with the stats and so forth. But obviously it is a bit more advanced. As you'd expect in twenty years.
It's probably not what Google wants to hear, but more visits and ad views doesn't necessarilly help most newspaper sites as they won't sell out their ad inventory anyway. What the newspapers need to do is focus on building up a bigger core audience (through building authorative links to informative, well written articles) who are more likely to interact with the site and add value based on however the newspaper sees its business model.
The real trouble is that they don't really have detailed business models at the moment apart from putting ads on the pages. However if you don't sell all your ads, then more page views does not equal more money.
"But don't forget, there is also a whole spectrum of physics to be investigated at the LHC which the Tevatron can never do."
In other words if Tevatron discovers it first, then LHC can get on with finding more useful stuff rather than trying to prove god exists/doesn't exist because of one particle (yes I know that this particle doesn't prove that god exists or doesn't exist).
... if you can't hack an existing domain to redirect traffic, why don't you easily buy a misspelling and play off people who can't spell the domain properly?
And then sell it back to the initial company for a huge profit.
To be fair, Yahoo will have to cope with all those people outside the US (yeah, I know - we don't count) who are looking for detailed analysis of the result that they just can't get on TV.
I don't know why you'd be checking Yahoo! news though. Surely you'd opt for one of the news organisations that has a history of journalism (eg BBC or Reuters).
Or you could put yourself in their position whereby Iraqi planes are bombing the munition dumps of America that are trying to blow up your capital and government. Iraqi tanks driving through your streets to pick up the Americans that are trying to kill you and the Iraqi soldiers shooting at the Americans who are trying to blow up your store and your family.
Seriously - think of the situation without the US troops there. There'd be chaos. There'd be terrorist attacks every five minutes. The Iraqis who are rich and well armed from the Hussain days would take over straight away and the whole situation will be the same as before but with a different leader. I don't think you can drive in there, take out the government and then drive out again without sorting out some sort of succession planning.
The real question should be how on earth are they spending $10b a month (or whatever it is) and still haven't managed to get a proper Iraqi government and police force. What are they doing over there? The question isn't when they should pull out, but how they set up a government so that they don't need to be there.
Given I've had to charge the battery twice a day on occasions and if you attach to a computer for itunes then that counts as a recharge, you can see how this would run out quicker than a normal battery.
Then again, you replace your phone every 18 months, why would you want a new battery when you're going to get rid of it soon?
Surely the main trouble with putting it on the moon is that the sun and Earth's gravitational pull would cause lots of minor defects throughout the day/month/year depending on its position to each of them.
Unless the moon doesn't have an eliptical orbit (wikipedia suggests that probably isn't true though - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon).
"spair time"? Seriously, who edited or approved an article with that in the summary, not to mention the punctuation?
Ok, I may not be able to spell, but there is nothing wrong with my punctuation. Unless you are suggesting I have an overuse of commas. But then you've done the same in your comment and I am sure pots and kettles wouldn't come to mind.
Slashdot Mirror
Google Analytics users a first party cookie.
Thanks for the personal attack. Really appreciated it.
You do not make websites better by guessing what the user wants. Your own slashdot website probably has someone who looks at what people do, looks at how many people comment and generally advises on which are the most popular links. This helps them work out which stories are interesting to you and not a load of garbage. It also helps them work out what tags submissions should be grouped together based on the likelihood of users to read certain types of submissions.
Using cookise for advertising is completely different. You're using your cookies to make sure that either the money you spend gives you the biggest return (ROI). You're thinking about this the wrong way around though. You're thinking from your perspective as an advertiser (or someone who works for one). I, as a user, want to be able to click on ads of things I want to buy. Your job, as an advertiser of things I want to buy is to give me those ads at the right time and in the right place. You can't make someone buy something they don't want to. You can make it a lot easier for them so they don't get psised off and go to your competitor.
Not that this is the purpose of cookies - but how do you differentiate between real people and robots/spiders?
More importantly how do you tell, from your server logs, how many of your users who arrived from a certain referring source stayed on the site? Do you know what they did afterwards? Do you know if they then went and performed the function your site is aimed at? Do you know if they came back at a future date to do it? Can you do any of these things without cookies?
And no, you can't do any of these things with IP address+Useragent lookup - it's far too inaccurate.
Knowing where a user came from and what they searched for is a bad way of trying to optimise your site. I can name hundreds of situations where someone was proud that they'd generated a huge volume of visits (or page views if you weren't using cookies) of users that then left straight away because it wasn't what they were looking for.
Usability testing is very useful. Not using to usability testing to try and increase revenue is the death of any business.
Personal data almost always isn't stored on cookies. You give your personal data to a company. They probably don't even link that data up with what you do on the website via cookies. If that company then sells that information on to someone else or uses it for reasons that aren't ethical, that isn't down to cookies. That is down to the company being crap.
I've seen examples where third parties require cookies to analyze the usage patterns of users on client sites but I don't require logs to understand usage trends on sites where I have easy access to log files. In fact, I think usability testing would reveal more than analysis of usage data.
So how are you going to do this usability testing? Are you going to assume that everyone arrives at the home page and then navigates through your site? This is 2009, wake up to the real world. Most sites have 60%+ visits coming from Google in the middle of the site, to do any usability testing they need to know where they arrived to focus that usability. To get this information you need to have cookies. If you don't, you'll end up with a really nice home page, pointing to your good bits of content and you'll ignore most of your user base. This is the attitude that makes Murdoch think he can get away with putting all his content behind pay walls. It'll fail. If all EU content has to follow the new cookies rule, it will fail too and the only option you'll have in an EU country is to access non-EU content.
In the UK, fortunately you have a nice little website that tells you all about how to take ideas you have and turn them into money.
Fortunately, they also have a section on protecting your intellectual property that tells you how to do that as well (in terms of patenting, NDAs, Trademarks and Design right). I'm sure the processes aren't quite as straightforward as they look like they are here, but you get the point.
On a personal note - the question of whether to patent is a difficult one. In the internet era it would seem easier to exploit the innovation yourself before anyone else can come up with a similar, but slightly different idea that they then make a shed load of money out of.
Disclaimer: I work for BusinessLink
Let's not get overwashed with this - water is just one thing that we need for life. Other things are just as equally important. Not least a stable temperature that is condusive to growth. Things like the moon can be ruled out becasue of the large differences in temperature due to the lack of atmposphere. As the poster above says, with the new ion rockets that are available, we should be looking for deeper space planets that are more likely to be able to host life because of their constant temperature (where water is actually water and not ice or steam or whichever other state it can be in).
Wow - that is important then. I wondered how the publishing companies were going to make people pay for their content if they hid it behind a barrier. Micropayments don't work if everyone has to do them seperately on every single site and every single time you want to pay for content - you need a one click payment system. Google can provide that, because they are large and they are trusted. Moreover this gets around the issue that Publishers had that users won't be able to find their content - they'll still give Google access to it for indexing, you'll just have to pay to view it. I wonder how much Yahoo! and Microsoft are pooing their pants right now.
I recently tried to install an old discworld noir that I had from ages ago but hadn't completed. It wouldn't work, I can't make it work and now I want to play it more than anything in the world. Damn the company that made it going bust. Remake it. Please won't someone remake it.
... get turned into a Kestrel? Is this the earliest example of dumbing down?
I was trying to persuade the missus (yes really) that WoW was just really an extension of the rogue and Angband games I used to play but with the ability to play real time instead of turn based and actually play with/against real people.
She looked at me blankly and claimed that she didn't know what Rogue and Angband were. When I showed her, she laughed and claimed that it was completely different because of the graphics.
I maintain the similarities are there - certainly with the stats and so forth. But obviously it is a bit more advanced. As you'd expect in twenty years.
I for one welcome our new @ symbol overlords.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2009/apr/06/google-wallstreetjournal "Most newspapers would prefer a fraction of their current traffic in exchange for a core set of engaged, frequent, transacting users."
I'd argue that the 'would' should be a 'should'.
It's probably not what Google wants to hear, but more visits and ad views doesn't necessarilly help most newspaper sites as they won't sell out their ad inventory anyway. What the newspapers need to do is focus on building up a bigger core audience (through building authorative links to informative, well written articles) who are more likely to interact with the site and add value based on however the newspaper sees its business model. The real trouble is that they don't really have detailed business models at the moment apart from putting ads on the pages. However if you don't sell all your ads, then more page views does not equal more money.
"But don't forget, there is also a whole spectrum of physics to be investigated at the LHC which the Tevatron can never do."
In other words if Tevatron discovers it first, then LHC can get on with finding more useful stuff rather than trying to prove god exists/doesn't exist because of one particle (yes I know that this particle doesn't prove that god exists or doesn't exist).
It must die.
Until it Google (/Yahoo!/MSN/AN-Other-Search-Engine's spider) starts being able to index it (and 'pages' withing it). Which will never happen.
So we'll have to stick with the standard ASCII pages, so that people who search for the thing in Google will be able to find it.
... if you can't hack an existing domain to redirect traffic, why don't you easily buy a misspelling and play off people who can't spell the domain properly? And then sell it back to the initial company for a huge profit.
To be fair, Yahoo will have to cope with all those people outside the US (yeah, I know - we don't count) who are looking for detailed analysis of the result that they just can't get on TV.
I don't know why you'd be checking Yahoo! news though. Surely you'd opt for one of the news organisations that has a history of journalism (eg BBC or Reuters).
Maybe it is just me.
Or you could put yourself in their position whereby Iraqi planes are bombing the munition dumps of America that are trying to blow up your capital and government. Iraqi tanks driving through your streets to pick up the Americans that are trying to kill you and the Iraqi soldiers shooting at the Americans who are trying to blow up your store and your family.
Seriously - think of the situation without the US troops there. There'd be chaos. There'd be terrorist attacks every five minutes. The Iraqis who are rich and well armed from the Hussain days would take over straight away and the whole situation will be the same as before but with a different leader. I don't think you can drive in there, take out the government and then drive out again without sorting out some sort of succession planning.
The real question should be how on earth are they spending $10b a month (or whatever it is) and still haven't managed to get a proper Iraqi government and police force. What are they doing over there? The question isn't when they should pull out, but how they set up a government so that they don't need to be there.
Maybe his job is important, given all these studies showing that we are more at risk than ever. eg The recent report from the Georgia Tech Information Security Centre saying that all our security is way behind what the hackers use.
Apparently after 400 recharges the battery is down to 80% of its life (I don't know how they've tested this). http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=327614
Given I've had to charge the battery twice a day on occasions and if you attach to a computer for itunes then that counts as a recharge, you can see how this would run out quicker than a normal battery.
Then again, you replace your phone every 18 months, why would you want a new battery when you're going to get rid of it soon?
Surely the main trouble with putting it on the moon is that the sun and Earth's gravitational pull would cause lots of minor defects throughout the day/month/year depending on its position to each of them.
Unless the moon doesn't have an eliptical orbit (wikipedia suggests that probably isn't true though - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon).
It is so that people with too puny a mind to understand the subject can comment on the spelling rather than the subject matter.
Ok, he didn't mention javascript files as well, but I am sure that was just a mild oversight.
and none of them were downloading the CSS or image files that they should have been.
So they don't load anything that could possibly install a virus on your computer when doing these checks?
Sounds to me like this is a bit of really useless functionality that will just eat up your bandwidth.
Thanks AVG. You've just confirmed to me that all antivirus software is pants.
Fair point - I'll take it as some sort of backhanded compliment.
"spair time"? Seriously, who edited or approved an article with that in the summary, not to mention the punctuation?
Ok, I may not be able to spell, but there is nothing wrong with my punctuation. Unless you are suggesting I have an overuse of commas. But then you've done the same in your comment and I am sure pots and kettles wouldn't come to mind.