Mark your calendars because tomorrow Google is planning on breaking their text-only advertising model (on a limited test release, anyway) and begin allowing advertisers to buy animated banners advertising. The interesting part of the story is that this will be on CPM instead of CPC, thus meaning it will be based on banner impressions, not clickthrus. I wonder how this will equate to Adsense users? Hmm …

Credit to FranciscoIV from Blog-a-rama (blogrolled) for bringing this story to my attention and by writing this I am most certainly inviting a hailstorm of casino-related spam. Oh well, I can’t resist.

Online casino, Golden Palace, seemingly will advertise anywhere including the backs of child actor has-beens turned boxers (Celebrity Boxing), but they aren’t stopping there to get their name out. Now according to PC Magazine’s Lance Ulanoff, they have moved onto naming a species of monkey. Yes, you read that right, they bought the name to a type of monkey!

Online hucksterism has officially reached its nadir: GoldenPalace.com has paid a wildlife park $650,000 for the right to name a new species of foot-tall monkeys. This is no joke. The poor, furry creature will henceforth be known as “The GoldenPalace.com Monkey.”

I’m all for creative advertising and marketing, but this is totally absurd on a number of levels. Beyond the workers being forced to use this ridiculous name as part of their job the rest of the human race are not going to refer to this monkey with its purchased name. At best it will be shortened to something like GP monkey, or the “The GP.” Therefore, whatever life that 650 grand gets is going to be coming from articles like the one in PC Mag and this one and whomever else manages to make fun of the pathetic tale.

Can’t you just hear the barker? Step right up, get yer Monkey whore! Here, here!

An almost workable advertising idea if only people would use the name, but they won’t. This will have slightly more lifespan than the sweat melting ink on those Celebrity boxers backs.

Ridiculed, yes. Effective? Don’t think so. I don’t know who I feel more sorry for, the worker who has to introduce the GP Monkey, the people who blew their hard-earned money at an online casino, or this new species of monkey.

I wonder if next we’ll be hearing about the goldenshower.com Monkey?

Phreakers (phone), Phishers, and now Pharmers?! Who can keep up with all the names being assigned to evil technology deeds?

The ploy is called pharming — a play on “phishing,” another type of Internet fraud — and it involves highly skilled hackers who secretly redirect users’ computers from financial sites to the scammers’ fake ones, where they steal passwords and other personal information. Even the Web address looks the same.

The difference is the user doesn’t have to do anything except be en route to the bank site and the pharmer’s malicious code planted on the user’s infected machine does all the dirty work of redirecting. Anti-pharming software is in the works, the article says.

Ever get the feeling that at least some of this activity is motivated by creating a product can be sold to protect against it? Talk about vicious circles, I have another name for this type activity and it starts with an F (and no, it doesn’t really rhyme with that word). Hmm …

It’s a good time to look more carefully at local websites and the possible advertising revenue that could be generated from them as well as advertising on local websites for your business (if applicable).

Local online spending growth will be 46 percent higher in 2005 than 2004’s $2.7 billion. That sum represents a 28 percent increase over 2003 spend. Some 2,177 local media properties were analyzed as part of the report.

We bought the domain name for the town where our offline business is domiciled many years ago. Our plan, though terribly executed so far, has been to use the profit generated (zero to date) and give that money back to the community for things like more books for the school, hanging up the Christmas decorations, etc. Seems like it is time to take another look at this missed opportunity of ours …

Yes, they have Atom and Blogger, but Google doesn’t yet have what many feel is a glaring omission: RSS. Now, according to one of the former Blogger.com brainchilds, Evan Williams, Gmail has something called Web Clips coming which will allow reading RSS feeds through Gmail. And it has ads too.

Richard MacManus from Read/Write Web writes:

If I was to guess, I’d say they want to harness RSS. Most of their huge take of advertising revenue comes to them via webpages - their own pages, plus external webpages that use Google Adsense. So Google wants to ensure that revenue doesn’t get siphoned off if they make content available via RSS.

The one thing Google has to be extremely careful about is inviting more click fraud. This, I think, is what they’ve been spending a lot of time experimenting with before jumping on the RSS train. Once they sort these technical details out, I think that we’ll see Google help popularize an exciting advertising channel that is still in its infancy: RSS advertising.

Some will call this the beginning of the end when many sites start running Adsense in RSS — and if Google makes this available as an option, this will increase the noise to signal ratio. However, unlike email spam which is a hassle to opt-out in most cases and often unsolicited (harvested emails or otherwise), RSS subscriptions are opt-in and easy to opt-out.

I hope at the same time more support for HTTP authentication in RSS aggregators is also popularized so that publishers can offer readers the ability to receive the content ad free in exchange for a small subscription fee. Some aggregators do offer password protected feeds today, but it’s not a well used or very popular function … yet.

I sign up for new things online every day. Surveys, polls, etc, I’ll take a few of those from time to time. Accordingly, I tried to sign up for Perseus and their new program for creating surveys. I found it kind of fascinating how they go out of their way to identify that their email validation system may not work very good: it will end up in the spam bin (see picture).

So I decided to keep a closer eye on the system and the email did arrive into Gmail and was marked as spam, just as Perseus said it might. I clicked on the validation email and what do I see next?

Hmm, well, that’s not a good sign, but maybe it still worked before the system crashed? I tried logging in and saw this:

I’m sending a link to this post to Perseus along with the validation that wouldn’t work. Maybe they can unsuspend my new account.

Update 4/19/2005: I was finally able to validate my email successfully. I went through the steps and created a: Blog reading survey

The full page ad (FPA) is often misunderstood and abused, but when used properly can actually be appreciated by surfers. FPAs can vividly remind inform readers that, hey, we need to eat in order to continue to serve the content you’re reading right now. However, FPAs can and usually are extremely distracting.

Case in point: the RSS to FPA technique.

Here’s how this works: I read RSS almost exclusively by headlines. It’s like skimming the subject lines of emails. While this system is fallable, it affords me the time to read a large number of sources quickly. I can scan 350+ headline sources throughout the day while working with minimal disruption. So hitting somebody like me with a full page ad the minute I pick the headline out of the thousands I see daily is a huge faux pas.

Instead, readers should be brought to a clean page, something that looks like the entry pages of this blog, if you’d like a real world example. If I’d have read the article in a full aggregator I would not have seen the FPA, so why when I visit the website am I having to view it before seeing the content? Don’t punish RSS subscribers!

Now where would a FPA be effective and actually make sense? As I surf around and read more articles, the site could track my site session activity and intelligently drop in links to related FPAs. In other words, if I come in looking at a story about baseball, and then search for other stories about baseball, why not have FPA results there for me contextually (Adsense surely would) like tickets to local games, baseball merchandise, etc. This way the FPA becomes content.

Yes, the FPA should be labeled, disclosed in the ad itself and/or marked in a special category as advertising so that the reader realizes that they are, in fact, reading advertising. But if it is honest, personal endorsement advertising — an authentic testimonial — it can be extremely effective. If I say: hey, buy a PSP, then I just sound like a PSP pitchman, but if I say: hey, I just bought this PSP, check out all the screenshots, and then I bought this game, check out the screenshots for the game and what can be done and you can buy it from ___ here, well that’s a whole different game (pardon the pun).

Some news site are making the ad content so utterly intrusive that the news is barely readable. This is another reason why I’ve switched almost exclusively to RSS headlines for most news and then “brave the wild” when clicking through. I hope when the RSS ad revolution rolls in that they will make these ads contexual and not go off to some sucky non-content type ads. I greatly prefer content ads over non-content ads. Don’t send me directly to a shopping cart page, send me to a FPA with testimonials, pictures, supporting information … from that type of page send me to the shopping cart.

I support FPA and advertising on websites. Heck, look around here. But there isn’t any of the actual blog content you see here that can’t be consumed in the RSS aggregator of the reader’s choice. Give us readers choices, make it easier for us, and at the same time passively and contexually advertise to us and we will buy from your site. Many will be grateful that you’ve helped them find good deals.

And speaking of good deals — here comes one for webmasters, bloggers, etc who use Google Adsense — there’s only 17 days left from this writing to take advantage of the MakeYouGoHmm April 2005 special reader deal on the Google Adsense Revenue Checker. I’m not just making some lame, I’ve never actually used it before pitch here, I really do like and use this program every day … it’s sitting in my system tray right now, checking my Adsense stats every few minutes. All I have to do to see where we’re at is hover my mouse over the icon. I’m surprised that at last night’s Skype Meetup I didn’t mention this great tool to Stuart, Bill or Charles. Think I might just send them a Skype chat message about it right after posting this.

Also, the author of the program has made three free upgrades to the program since I wrote that eight days ago. He is clearly committed to making this an essential tool for Adsense affiliates.

If this special deal goes over well (it is, so far), then we will probably be offering other frequent special reader deals on software and web services. I’m signing up for and buying stuff online all the time. If I buy something and like it, then I love the idea of being able to pass along a good deal to friends, family, associates and readers. I can’t shut up for long about something that I like. Especially tools like this that give us back time.

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away Bill Gates vowed to eradicate spam within two years and 80% of experts quickly predicted Gate’s prediction was “unrealistic.”

Well, over a year has gone by and in my opinion the Fairy Spam Mother has had little improvement in staying away from our inboxes.

Apparently the folks at Pew Internet have gone and done some sort of study and come up with the conclusion that people are more accepting of spam.

Fifty-three percent of adult e-mail users in the United States now say they trust e-mail less because of spam, down from 62 percent a year ago and about the same as a June 2003 Pew survey. Pew also found that 22 percent of e-mail users say they are spending less time on e-mail because of spam, down from 29 percent last year. In 2003, it was 25 percent.

On the positive side Gmail in particular has improved their spam filtering and it doesn’t totally suck any more. It’s gotten to where we’re not as easily filling up the space provided, especially now that they have increased the storage amount in excess of 2GB (and still growing, BTW). Good job, Gmail team, now how many more years (snicker) before you get out of beta?

Technorati has added a related tag feature. This will suggest related tags tags which could be related. Pictured above is an example of the technology tag which seems to do a pretty decent job. Contextual algorithms can be tricky.

Something I don’t like about these Technorati tags are that there doesn’t seem to be any archives. This means that once the tags roll off the front master tag page (and for active tags, this can happen quickly), there are links to Technorati from your blog but no link from Technorati back. This means the tags become one-way.

As a general practice, we will remove one-way trackbacks made to this blog. One-way being defined as sending a trackback to this blog but not having a link inside the actual post. IMO, this is sort of analogous to someone having a party and the neighbor with a party across the street coming over putting fliers on the door about their party but not doing the same at their party; it seems very one-sided to me, even if the neighbor’s party is bigger and better. Still, there are a few rare exceptions when we do accept one-way trackbacks, so it’s not a completely black or white issue. I guess I’m saying it’s a netiquette issue of sorts to me.

So these one-way tags could provide a benefit to readers when and where they are able to navigate to additional, fresh related content, but it also significantly increases the linkage to Technorati and gives an ugly appearance of spam inside the blog entries themselves, especially when a lot of tags are used on blog entries that don’t contain many words.

I am concerned about how the major search engines will see these tags and I don’t want to do anything that penalizes our sites in the search engines. I wonder if Dave Sifry and Technorati or the Del.icio.us folks have ever contacted the big three SEs (Google, Yahoo, MSN) and asked what their position was on these tags and tagging in general?

And yes, I do realize that Yahoo recently bought Flickr and that Flickr is a major proponent of tagging. However tagging pictures so that they are more descriptive is helpful on a number of levels - especially for accessibility reasons. I’m not entirely cerrtain that blog post tagging carries quite the same benefits for the end user as picture tagging.

Then again, I don’t know. I’m just musing here and would like some reader feedback on this one.

Readers will see that I have been sporadically experimenting with these tags, and also — finally — del.icio.us (grrr to the spelling of that domain). I still like Furl better, but I’m no longer a holdout on using this service.

Not sure how I’ll deal with tagging over the long haul, but I’m very curious how other webmasters feel about the use of these tags and potential pros and cons? This is something I hope we can discuss tomorrow night at the Skype meetup.

tags: tags, technorati

He’s appealing of course, but nine years is a pretty good slap on the wrist for Jeremy Jaynes.

Jeremy Jaynes was convicted in November for using false Internet addresses to send mass e-mail ads through an AOL server in Loudoun. Prosecutors said Jaynes sent more than 10,000 spam e-mails over three days in July 2003 from his Raleigh, N.C., area home, using the Internet to peddle sham products and services such as a “FedEx refund processor.”

It’s spammers like Jayne who have clogged up all our email inboxes for far too long. He should be forced during those nine years to sift through the email boxes finding false positives. Manually. Over and over and over again.