Comments Off on The Filter Bubble

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Sixteen years ago, I received a call from someone who worked for a large computer manufacturer, which was planning to add an online direct-sales program.  The caller was creating a business plan for this new division of the company, and wanted to hire me to design an affiliate program.

My first question was, “What about channel conflict?”

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I wanted to attend an event today, where Stephen Dunn will speak and read poetry. It’s in Sacramento, nearly a two-hour drive each way, and I decided not to go.

But all weekend, I’ve been thinking about poetry and how I came to love poetry. And so I’ll write about it. Read more »

Comments Off on AdWords’ Dot-TK Plague & the End of Automatic Placements (2013)

All year, I’ve been doing battle with a never-ending series of aggressive fraudsters who use AdSense ads across many dot-tk (.tk) domains which each generate small numbers of cheap fraudulent clicks, siphoning money from any campaign which has Automatic Placements enabled.

Why does it work? It works because Google AdWords refuses to enable exclusion of placements (web sites) based on Top Level Domain (TLD). Read more »

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The “Rack Unit” is a standard measurement for server height; one rack unit (U) is 1.75 inches. Read more »

Comments Off on Google Gets Creepier – pre-filled subscribe box in search ad

This just seems creepy and wrong: Google (AdWords) allows advertisers to create Search ads which pre-fill forms with Google Account data. In this example, my email was pre-filled next to a “subscribe” button which doesn’t say what I’d be subscribing to — alongside a completely meaningless “Privacy” link which doesn’t disclose how the email address would be used. Read more »

Comments Off on Google’s AdWords ‘Interest’ Targeting

I’ve long wondered how Google evaluates a person’s “interests” in order to display advertising that’s not displayed “in context.”

I think Google’s algorithms need tweaking, because Google has an unreasonably long memory regarding my “interests.” Read more »

Comments Off on WordPress 3.7 Adds Automatic Updates: A Great Idea, But …

WordPress has just released version 3.7 of its blogging platform, and many folks will be pleased and relieved that they’ve added automatic updates to the software.  I certainly was happy about it, but … Read more »

Comments Off on In Praise of GTmetrix.com

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While reading Internet Retailer’s December 2012 profile of its chosen “Top 100” ecommerce web sites (http://www.internetretailer.com/2012/11/30/going-extra-mile), I was confused by its “Speed” ratings for the sites. Each web site was evaluated based on its page-load time, and 33 of the 100 sites were rated “unacceptable.”

The idea that many web sites succeed despite slow load times isn’t a surprise. What confused me was the scale used by Internet Retailer in assigning its speed ratings: Read more »