Date Archive: August 2006

What’s the best pricing model for aligning your SEM’s goals with your own goals? The answer seems obvious: revenue-sharing. Unfortunately, the intuitively obvious answer turns out to be wrong.

A quick hack to get WP admin privileges if you have a root password for the relevant server

Sara Holoubek has an interesting piece in today’s DM News SearchBuzz.

Danny Sullivan announced he’s parting ways with Incisive. We look foward to hearing where he ends up, and wish him the best of luck on his next gig.

One great steal-this-usability-idea for retailers from Google WebMasterCentral is the flyweight “rate this tool” survey.

Could an increased interest/awareness of online privacy harm online advertisers by hampering their ability to track? No, I don’t think so.

How much can you trust comScore numbers? For a single month, not all that much.

Ricardo Semler’s message resonates even more today. Trust employees: slash bureaucracy. Trust employees: eliminate management. Trust employees: open up your books. Trust employees: open up your decision making process.

Having grade school aged kids, when I see “back to school” I think of disney lunch boxes, backpacks, notebook paper, and pencils. For a couple of seconds, I was somewhat mystified to see sunglasses, futons, and boxer shorts…

Here’s a modest proposal to search engines and comparison shopping engines: Embrace transparency. Provide itemized click reports to advertisers and their agencies

Claim: BillMeLater creates reciprocal trust from the shopper to the retailer because the retailer is extending credit on the spot. In contrast, PayPal and GoogleCheckout when marketing their wallets to consumers stress the benefits of keeping private information (credit card, email, etc) from the merchant.

The EFF has an interesting post on How To Keep Your Search History Private.

Google announced a means for local businesses to distribute coupons through Google Maps. Being able to show the benefit of an online ad pushing sales into a store is huge — the holy grail of response advertising.

Jeremy Keith’s “Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model” is really decent.

www.howtocreate.co.uk: I like this site.

Steve Kemper’s “Code Name Ginger: The Story Behind Segway and Dean Kamen’s Quest To Invent a New World” details the birth of Dean Kamen’s self-balancing transporter, the Segway.

After reading Tuzhilin’s report, I have a better appreciation of Google’s fraud detection methods. I come away feeling that fraud on the non-Adsense network is likely small, and agree with Tuzhilin that Google is making “reasonable efforts” to fight PPC click fraud.

Rant: Why does viewing a PDF through IE or FireFox cause the browser and often the desktop to come to a grinding halt for several seconds, even on a decent computer?

I had an interview this evening with Benjamin Ling, Product Lead for Google Checkout. A few noteworthy points merited a quick blog entry.

The site provides several screens of simple geometric shapes and asks you click on the page. At the end of the survey, the site shows you where others have clicked by superimposing dots on the image; the density of the dots provide a natural 2D histogram

Google now provides time-of-day cost and click reporting. This is a good thing — more transparency helps advertisers.