Online Ad Spending Is Up - No Kidding?

Is it really any shock to hear that Internet advertising is up again this year?

For the 8th consecutive year, the number of dollars spent on Internet advertising has again gone up. In fact, the amount of money that advertisers spent on Internet related ads was the leading increase with 18.9% more than any other media category increase according to Nielsen. The next closest thing to the Internet was national magazines with only a 7.6% increase.

Newspaper advertising has shown a steady decline year after year and in a post about the impact of the Internet on newspapers I wrote almost a year ago, I asked the question; "will we see the death of a media in our generation?" Again, there was a decline in newsprint ad revenue which equaled over 7.5% which is up from last year's 5% decrease.

The one big surprise for me in 2007 was the increased dollars that are being spent on outdoor advertising. Normally when I hear outdoor I immediately think of traditional billboards. Now there are these fancy new-fangled digital billboards that have the capability of switching out the message very quickly to accommodate sales or whatever may be an immediate and time sensitive call to action. I have noticed that companies are also spending more money on things like vehicle wraps. From city buses to company cars, this too can be considered outdoor advertising.

According to Forrester Research, online spending is expected to hit $204 Billion, this year. Yes I said billion. The 3 big "C's" are going to continue to dominate the online market; clothes, computers and cars. The 3 of those combined will account for over 1/3 of all online sales or $70 billion.

Here's another interesting tid-bit from the recent surveys. Free shipping, a big draw in past is garnering less interest on both the consumer and the retailer levels. With the increase in ad AND consumer spending, we may see free shipping go bye bye for a while. However, I do think that it will surface frequently. After all the .99 cents or 99 dollars on almost all consumer goods has never gone away.

One last fact about demographics and online behavior and then I will leave you to your day.

"The casual shopper goes online to look for the best price, leveraging the transparency of the Internet to save money. However, more affluent customers appreciate the convenience of shopping online and are not necessarily looking for the best deal. Retailers would be wise to recognize there are significant opportunities within both audiences and should market to them accordingly." Via Forrester

Yeah, I still think this Internet thing is a fad. You'll have to pry my CB radio from my cold dead hands.

 

Don't You Just Love Spam?

I have certain customers that love to sign up for "free offers" on the internet with their primary email address. About a week after they sign up for the "once in a lifetime deal", I get a call and listen to the woes of a person afflicted with self imposed "spamalotis." Yes I just made that up. Spamalotis is not really a word, but I bet The Big Bald Blog will index really well for it in a few days. But I digress.

Most of the time, I explain to them that all it takes is for their email address to get on one list, and it's all downhill from there. It seems like common sense but here are some things that you can do to avoid getting spam.

Don't take any "free IQ tests." This one seems to be the inbox killer that most people fall for. If you HAVE TO provide your email address to complete an online transaction or you want to sign up for something, USE AN ALTERNATE EMAIL. Go get yourself a Hotmail, Yahoo, or Gmail and use that email every time you are required to provide an email address. Save your primary email address for professional correspondence.

ITnews reports that a new spam site is found every 3 seconds. "New figures suggest that 92.3 percent of all email sent globally during the first three months of 2008 was spam." Yes you read that right. 92.3% of all the email sent was spam. Wow, what a staggering amount. "The data from the study also indicated that 23,300 new spam-related web pages were created every day during the period, or one about every three seconds."

I have a discussion board on another site and I always thought it was strange that I got a ton of spammy sign-ups from .ru domains. The ITnews report also said that, "...the number of spam messages sent from compromised Russian computers has more than doubled over the past year.

In the first quarter of 2007, Russia was in tenth position in the chart, relaying just three per cent of the world’s spam. Today this figure stands at 7.4 percent."

There are all kinds of free spam killer options out there as well as ones you pay for, but the more you protect your primary email address the better off you will be.

 

How Fast Do You Down?

Most of us know that the internet in the US is much slower than the rest of the world that has what we could call an equal amount of development.

Since the Telcos welched on their bargain to add those 200 billion (said with your pinky finger at the corner of your mouth) tax deferred dollars into the US infrastructure, we are behind most of the countries of similar status.

Here at the office I have a DSL by Qwest, it does OK and I regularly get about 2.5mbps down. This is not as good as the neighboring community who has a muni that offers 3 times that speed for a touch less than what I am paying.

So here's my question. What kind of internet do you have? Speed and ISP?

 

Using Non Domain Based Emails For Business

Here's my opinion. You want to hear it because I know everything, right? Not really, but I do have some strong feelings on this subject. Very similar to my feelings on printing your own business cards on the perforated Avery stock and using an ink jet printer.

IF you have a business, AND you have a website and your own domain, you should NOT be using a Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL or other free email service. I don't care if you have had your email address, mycoolcamaro49@hotmail.com for 15 years, DON'T use it when corresponding professionally with clients. This chips away at your legitimacy. Take an extra 10 minutes and set up an email address through your control panel or have your hosting company do it for you if you don't know how.

All I know is that if you send me an email from sirpimpsalot@aol.com and expect me to buy something from your company, you have already lost my business. (unless of course you are selling pimp hats.)

So tell me what do YOU think on the subject.

 

Hotlink Protection Engaged

You don't know what I am talking about? OK, here is a little background. Bandwidth theft or "hotlinking" is direct linking to a web site's files (images, video, etc.) so it will appear on your own site, eBay auction listing, weblog, forum message post, etc. as if it were your own.

Instead of having src="theimageonmysite.jpg" you have it like this: src="http://www.thisisnotmysite.com/theimage.jpg". This is not good.

There are several reasons that you shouldn't do this.
#1 - Hotlinking uses someone else's bandwidth to serve up the image on your page. This is bad form.
#2 - If all of your images on your site are from other websites it will take longer for your site to load. This too is bad form
#3 - The person you are hot linking to can take down the image or switch it with another image that is named the same thing. For example. This is the image that has been getting leeched on.



I COULD take this image called "sad-puppy-762578.JPG" and replace it with a file that is named the same but is a really naughty image or something that's really disgusting. AND, given the amount of people linking to this, it would take quite a while for everyone using it to realize what happened. However, since I am a nice guy and this would be bad form on MY part, I opted for a different route.

Yesterday I had to turn on my "hotlink protection." This prevents the aforementioned bandwidth theft. It's sad that I had to resort to this. The users over at Jappy.de ruined it for everyone by leeching my bandwidth. I was playing nice until, literally, 100's of people from Jappy.de started hotlinking to images on my blog. I had more hits from Jappy.de/whatevertheprofilewas than I could count.

If you had a link to an image or video hosted on my site and you are a "friend" let me know and I will allow you as a friendly site. I like to play nice, I really do. Do you still love me?

 

No More Domain Tasting

Domain tasting is NO MOE! YES!

I have always wondered why ICANN allowed this "try before you buy" policy in the first place.

What is domain tasting you ask? It is the process of registering (temporarily) a domain to determine it's "financial viability". Basically, you monetize the heck of it to see how well it does. If the domain didn't pass the test, the owner had a 5 day grace period in which he could get a refund. The ones that do good, are retained by the registrant.

Now, you all have seen these "financial viability test sites" pop up in searches. You are searching for your favorite whatever and perhaps you misspell the word or maybe you don't. Either way, included in your results page is a link to a page that has absolutely nothing to do what what you are looking for except that it may have your keyword on there as a link to something else.

Wikipedia states, "In April 2006, out of 35 million registrations, only a little more than 2 million were permanent or actually purchased. By February 2007, the CEO of GoDaddy reported that of 55.1 million domain names registered, 51.5 million were canceled and refunded just before the 5 day grace period expired and only 3.6 million domain names were actually kept."

According to ICANN, this whole process was initially designed to help people out who made a typo in the registration of their domain. Of course, as you can tell from the above numbers, people soon began to exploit this clause of generosity.

DotSauce.com reports that a unanimous vote of 13-0 turned the once flexible rule into a thing of the past.

"The discussion was sparked in response to the scandalous practice of Network Solutions hijacking domain searches in recent weeks. Oddly enough, the industry can be thankful to Net Sol for getting the snowball rolling on the end of domain tasting."

So what does this mean for regular Joe Surfer? Better quality results? I hope so but we will have to wait and see. One thing is for sure, there may be glut of "bad tasting" domain names that will soon come up for sale on the secondary market. And I bet that it will dramatically cut down on the amount of "typo squatting." (FYI - That anchor text is going to www.budwiser.com, an obvious typo.)

 

Hacking For Dummies

This post is being guest blogged by
computer engineer and published
author Steve Clark.

An interview with a pair of well-known security researchers uncovered an extraordinary view of the ecosystem that supports the phishing effort that plagues modern day financial institutions and their customers.

http://www.net-security.org/article.php?id=1110&p=1

"The reality is pre-made, ready-to-deploy, turnkey sites are already created for practically every major organization that you can think of.
All a phisher has to do is purchase the latest kit and deploy, no technical expertise or coding skills are really required. All the phisher typically has to do is place their email address into one line of code and they have a ready to deploy phishing site."

Once the 'turnkey' code has been modified with the correct email address, the whole site is simply uploaded to a compromised host on the internet.

Users receive an email that looks like it comes from a well known company (paypal.com for example) requesting the user to update their account status or whatever. Instead of going to the real website, the link leads them to the compromised website (which looks identical to the real one due to the turnkey phishing software that has become readily available), and are tricked into entering their account info which then gets emailed back to the hacker.

There are other ways to trick people going to the phishing sites that do not even involve sending emails, such as modifying the user's 'host' file located in C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc. This is a fairly easy hack is possible to do through back doors or vulnerabilities in many peer-to-peer file sharing programs (used for sharing mp3's and avi's). Still other methods involve monitoring the user's internet port itself and intercepting and bypassing a user's DNS queries - what's known as a 'man-in-the-middle' type of attack.

The good news is that there are ways to protect yourself. Microsoft has even started adding support for phishing attacks in its latest internet explorer version 7.0.

Microsoft Phishing Filter

It is alarming to me the ease and relative lack of computer skill that is needed to create one of these phishing websites - as well as how hackers are trading around our 'private' information like some kind of commodity.

I guess the bottom line is be careful of where you are going on the internet, it might not be where you think you're going!

Thanks for the information Steve!

 

Why Did I Get Hacked?

I didn't get hacked, I was just posing that as a hypothetical.

Most of you are familiar with the story behind David Airey's domain/site hijacking. To recap, some enterprising individual hacked his way into David's Gmail account through some exploit and proceeded to transfer away his domain and then hold it hostage. Thanks to the intervention of Bob Parsons, CEO of GoDaddy, David was able to get his domain back from the offending party.

With that groundwork laid, what are you to do to protect your domain? Making sure your little piece of the web is safe is something that most of us take for granted. I know I sure do. Even as I sit here and look at this list of things to do, I am realizing that I am doing a few things that you are NOT supposed to be doing.

James Koole over at the TuCows blog has a list of things that you may want to pay attention to.

1. "Use WHOIS Privacy. It can protect you to a certain extent from this kind of theft. If the administrative email address that is listed with the domain name under WHOIS is exposed, then a potential domain thief has two pieces of information he needs – the domain name, and the email address used to manage it. The thief can then gain control of the email address, and then use that email address to gain control of the domain by having passwords emailed to himself. WHOIS Privacy offers some protection because it prevents the domain thief from finding out what the administrative email address is for the domain name.

2. If you can avoid it, don’t use free, web-based email addresses for your administrative contact. In this case, a security flaw in GMail allowed the hacker to gain control of the email account of the domain holder. Likewise, having your entire domain portfolio under a single administrative email account is another mistake. Never mind having one domain name stolen, if a thief gains control of your email account, he could steal your entire portfolio of names.

3. Your domain name is worth more to you than you might think. It may only cost you $10 a year to register the domain, but take a moment to imagine what the cost would be if you had to change domain names tomorrow. It could be as easy as reprinting business cards, or as difficult as re-branding your entire company.

4. Chose your Registrar wisely. Look for a Registrar with a solid Compliance team and a good record within the industry. They’ll have policy and procedures in place to protect you against domain name theft, and in the event your domain is taken from you fraudulently, you stand a better chance of getting it back with a solid registrar. Our CEO, Elliot Noss, has talked about this in the past. You can read his “Ten questions to ask before you pick your domain name Registrar” post for more information on how to make an informed choice."

I guess I have some work to do after reading this. It really doesn't matter what you do or how secure you think you are, there is always someone that is going to find a way into your stuff. But question is, what makes certain people a target? Traffic? Perceived worth? Did they anger someone? Or is it the thrill of randomly picking someone and hacking them just to see if you can do it? AND exactly how many licks DOES it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll brand Tootsie Pop? The world may never know.

 

Google is Expanding in Iowa

Even though my article on Google coming to Iowa didn't get "dugg" I was one of the first to write about it. Everything was confirmed later when I did the follow up post.

Now, some several months later, Google is in the Iowa news again. It turns out that Google was really impressed with the local talent pool that turned out for the interviews and may encourage an immediate expansion.

The Omaha World Herald reports that "Google has purchased almost 1,000 acres of rural land south of the city for a possible second site for its Council Bluffs operations, said Mark Norman of the Council Bluffs Area Chamber of Commerce.

Part of the land is being graded and evaluated for construction, Norman said.

Google is developing other data centers across the country. But none of the announced sites is larger than the Bluffs site. The next largest site appears to be Pryor, Okla., where Google owns 800 acres. The company has 400 to 500 acres in Lenoir, N.C."

Just to give you an idea how big 1000 acres is - A square mile is only 640 acres. City officials say that " It's too soon to know how extensive Google's development will be..." but if Google is has bought up 1000 acres, I am sure they aren't doing it just to have the land. We will have to see. Regardless of the outcome, this is a good thing for Iowa. After all, this is in addition to the press we just got on American Chopper! Anyone see the ethanol powered chopper episodes?

 

Making Money Blogging

Believe it or not some people actually make money online by running a blog. Unfortunately, I am not one of them. However there are all kinds of people that do make money and lots of it. If you're a regular Joe reader of The Big Bald Blog you may not know who John Chow is, but if you are a fellow blogger, the chances are real good that you know the name. John Chow is a member of what some people call the "A List" bloggers. And quite a few of these A List bloggers make big money with their blogs through selling ads, affiliate income, paid reviews among a host of other income generating devices.

Some bloggers even post how much money they are making to substantiate their authority in the blogging niche of "making money online." John Chow, owner of JohnChow.com is one of those people. In a recent post Mr. Chow recounts his revenue received in November as well as the traffic that his blog is receiving.

John started his blog, simply as a personal blog and thought that it might be fun if he tried to make money from it. As it grew and grew, we come to where he is now, another record breaking month in revenue. Here are the numbers courtesy of John Chow's post Blog Income Report - November 2007.

Total income from November was: $27,240.83. This was broken down by category with the bulk of the dollars coming from private ad sale amounting to over $12k. Folks, this is some serious money for operating a blog. Granted this is a full time job by itself to maintain such a highly visited site, but it pays well. John also has other businesses that he owns.

I have seen big money makers like Chow and Shoemoney in the past talk about how much they are making but I always wonder what kind of traffic you need to have to sustain that type of income. Well, he addressed that too.

John reported that he was getting 323,572 page views with over 185 K visitors. He then goes on to break it down and shows that he is making over $80 per 1000 page views. ShoeMoney said that he was getting about 75 thousand uniques per day when he was sent his famous check from Google.



So there you have have it, it's all about traffic. Buy you have to network to get the traffic to come. Once you have the traffic, it's all down hill from there. But wait is it. As this post was sitting in the draft bin, Mr. Chow posted another article about this very thing. He says that "getting traffic is only half the battle and it’s not even the most important half." According to the post, John's income growth is not proportionate to traffic growth. It seems that it is all how you monetize your blog. He does say that "If your blog is new then building traffic is your number one goal."

Initially, the goal of The Big Bald Blog was simply to experiment with SEO and find out what blogging was all about. Thanks to all of YOU we have had the added bonus of traffic that continues to climb. With out YOU, the reader, TBBB would be nothing.

I keep looking for that one thing, the one thing that can really make a difference and possibly generate some income. Something as revolutionary as I discovered on Saturday. This last weekend as I was deer hunting I used what proved to be the finest innovation in hunting since the firearm.

Now I may get in trouble here from the anti-hunting crowd but for those of you who are deer hunters, you have to go and pick up something called the "Butt Out" field dressing tool. It is simply amazing and I wish I had invented it. I got it at Wal-Mart for about $10. You will have to Google it and watch the video as I don't want to post it here. Once you discover what it is, you too will agree that it is truly an innovation.

I know this was a long and rambling post, but again, I want to thank the readers of The Big Bald Blog for stopping by and making this a great adventure!

 

The Impact Of The Internet

Here's a few interesting factoids that I ran across about the Internet and how it impacts us.

• Music Albums are having a tough time going gold or higher (music "stealing")
  


• 2nd week movie attendance is dropping (from pirating I guess)
  


• Jobs are being found online for online jobs


• Declining dollars dedicated to yellow page and newsprint advertising
  

• Consumers are more knowledgeable when it comes to health care related issues
  


• People are meeting people in new and unusual ways that were never possible before
  

• Entertainment is increasingly centered around the computer monitor.
  

OK now seriously, I want to know. How has the Internet impacted you or the ones around you. I remember going to college and there wasn't anything called the Internet or email. I had to stand in line to schedule classes at one computer terminal.

What do you think. How has the Internet negatively or positively affected you?

Have a good weekend everyone. I am off to the woods to play.

 

Google: The Little Troublemaker

Back in June I did a post on how Google helped some bank robbers Crack a safe.

Now it turns out that Google can expose a deadbeat husband when he's trying to keep his lottery winnings from his wife.

The Miami Herald reports that "A woman whose husband has kept about $600,000 in lottery winnings from her says she has a number for him: half."

When Donna Campbell's husband stopped watching TV and disconnected their phone, she figured something was amiss. She finally took action when she received a post card congratulating them on their new house that she knew nothing about. Guess where she turned. Well I guess the headline gives it away. Yep Google. She searched for her husbands name and low and behold, he was in a group of lottery winners and his portion amounted to $600,000. Thanks to her sleuthing on Google, she is now filing suit against her husband to get half, or $300.000.

When confronted with, "Do you have any news you want to share with me" the husband acted ignorant and denied everything. Once the suit is won, Donna plans to file for a divorce.

Ahhhhh the power of Google!

 

Firefox Passes Internet Explorer.

Well at least in MY stats report. For the first time since I have been blogging, the browser that has accessed my website the most is Firefox.

So far this month Firefox users have hit my site 8890 times and IE users have accessed it 7379 times. I wonder what this means. I knew that Firefox was gaining ground with over 400 million downloads but I have never seen my stats reflecting the Fox as #1.



I am curious, what are you seeing on your stats? Let me know.

 

Make Money With Stockade Online Backup

Today is a historic day for The Big Bald Blog. Everyone put your hands together and welcome our very first sponsor; Stockade!

What do they do you ask. Well friends, let me tell you.

Stockade is a company that provides online file storage, data restoration and disaster recovery services. But here's the best part. For those of you interested in making money online, you can do it with Stockade. All you need to do is become a reseller and add this service to what you are already doing and you will earn 30% on all sales. AND you don't have to spend a dime to do it. You heard it right, it doesn't cost you anything. They will set you up with your own branded site, give you all the tools you need and they will do all the marketing for you. Folks, it doesn't get much better than that.

Not only are you making money as a reseller, you are providing some real value to the end users. This can be a revenue stream that supplements your existing services or you can work it full time. Either way you cut it, there are some real benefits of becoming a reseller.

• Provide a valuable service for your customers
• Generate a subscription-based, recurring revenue stream for your business
• No capital outlay for your business to get started
• Customized client software embedded with your reseller ID
• Stockade website and unique url for your new offering
• Easy to sell
• Easy for your customers to deploy
• Great profit margin
• Provided the infrastructure and technical support
  

Every company, big or small, needs to have a off-site electronic file backup plan as part of a bigger disaster recovery program. Too often as a company grows, the need for a data restoration solution is often forgotten. This is where Stockade can help.

• Backups are stored off site in a secure, world-class data center
• Redundant copy stored in a second data center over 500 miles away
• Reduces human error through automation
• Eliminates the frustration associated with handling tapes
• All stored data is encrypted using 256bit AES encryption – only your customer has the passphrase to un-encrypt the data
• Addresses HIPAA, GLBA and Sarbanes Oxley offsite data storage compliance
• Easy restoration of data
• Economical
  

Stockade takes the worry out of backing up critical data. The Stockade solution takes the human element out of the process by automatically sending the compressed and encrypted backup files off site to a secure, world-class data center via the Internet. From there a customer has total control of their files. AND as an added bonus, stockade offers a risk free trial at no charge. Don't like it? Pay nothing. The customer has nothing to loose.

The online backup services provided by Stockade are not only guaranteed to pump up your revenue generation, but it will provide some real value to your customers.

To find out how to become an online backup reseller, click the ad at the right and sign up for more information today.

 

Internet Ad Spending

Once again the reports are out and they are showing BIG numbers. According to the IAB 3rd quarter spendings set a new high at - are you ready for this - $5.2 billion. Some are claiming that the internet is on pace to break $20 billion in revenue by the end of the year. Out of the total spending, paid searches comprise 41% of the revenues.

"The continued robust growth of the industry indicates that marketers increasingly understand and appreciate the benefits of interactive advertising," said Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO of the IAB. "Marketers large and small have come to accept digital media as the fulcrum of any marketing strategy."

With so many people having the internet at their fingertips through mobile devices and ever expanding WIFI locations, you can rest assured that this number will continue to climb until it passes most traditional forms of media.

Has the shift in your advertising budget occurred yet?

 

FIrefox Is Getting Big

Not long ago I wrote an article about Firefox reaching the 400 million download mark. This was an impressive feat and an even more impressive story. Even though it is an open source browser the frisky little fox is making some serious bank. According to an article in The New York Times, Firefox reported $66 million in revenue, 85% of which came from Google.

From Google? Yep, they have a royalty contract with Firefox that has allowed this huge influx of cash. The New York Times is asking if the money and the success could spoil the principles that Mozilla was founded on. Currently the Mozilla corporation has in excess of $74 million in assets and they don't seem to be giving too much away in the form of grants. Other than paying their CEO $500,000 + annually, what are they, a non-profit organization, going to do with all that cash? "When the connection with Google was revealed more than a year ago, the question on popular tech Web sites like Slashdot.org was whether Mozilla was acting as a proxy in Google’s larger war with Microsoft and others." So is Mozilla hording a war chest to launch some kind of big initiative? At the point where Firefox overtakes IE as the preferred browser maybe we will know what is actually in store.

Tim Wu, a law professor from Columbia University says, "“We’re living in a cold war between open and closed systems, and Google is happy to lend support to entities that it sees as allies...”

With Google gaining ground every day in terms of search numbers, stock price and revenue, it will be interesting to see what develops in the Firefox camp over the next 5 years.

Your thoughts?

 

Page Rank - Can We Stop Relying On It Already?

Page rank, page rank, page rank. It is getting tiresome to keep hearing about it. Unfortunately we live under the umbrella of Google and we have to follow their rules. Andy Beard just wrote about an article called Digg Favorites Slapped By Google. It lists several websites that, evidently, got penalized by Google for some reason or another. Paid links missing the "no follow" attribute? Who know what's behind the "best" algo in the world. Most of the sites that Andy lists are very good sites with reliable content. I guess it's a big mystery.

After all the websites penalties have been dished out for whatever reason, the average decrease in page rank was 3 points. That is a pretty big jump for someone with a PR of 6. The least shocking was John Chow getting hit again. He has been on the outs will Google for some time now. I happen to love his blog and I know he has some serious links coming in. I don't think that his traffic will suffer due to his decrease in page rank. Want to know how I know? Uhh, 16,000 RSS subscriber and growing is a good indication.

Obviously, Google still has a page rank of 10 and I have seen a bunch of PR 8 sites and a few with a PR of 9. But I ask you, have you ever seen a PR 10 website other than Google? I don't ever remember seeing one.

Is this an unobtainable number? Are they reconfiguring the web? Is a revolt on the horizon? Conspiracy theorists unite?

Just kidding. Seriously though, has anyone ever seen a PR 10 site. If you have let me know.

 

Google AdSense is Gone

Since I use Firefox, sometimes I don't see what others are seeing in IE. Yesterday it was brought to my attention that an IE user was seeing a "page can not be found" in some of the AdSense locations. So I dusted off my IE and went in and looked. Yep, sure enough, there it was.

I know that Google will only allow 3 ads per page to display. I have 10 posts showing on the home page and since I had the AdSense code in the header above each post, only the first 3 ads would show. Up until now there has been no effect on the other 7 posts that show up on my home page. Evidently something has changed. The second three posts were showing up with the "page can not be found" error in the header.

So I decided to venture out and take a look at some of my other favorite blogs. I went on over to JohnCow's site and it was doing the same thing in IE. Obviously I am not getting a fraction of the traffic that the Cow is but nonetheless, it looks bad. And that, boys and girls, is why I decided to take the AdSense off. If they get it fixed I will put it back up. It's not like I was making any money from having them anyway. With over 36,000 page views in the last three and a half months, I had only made $5.63. I can't even think of anything clever to say that I would buy with that.

 

The Top Secret GPhone

Most of you have heard that Googe's stock has bulldozed it's way past the $600 mark. Obviously this is an effect of the widely anticipated and top secret GPhone that is building momentum.

Adding legitimacy to the whole upward trend of Google's stock, the search giant announced its acquisition of an obscure Finnish start-up, Jaiku, holder of key Short Message Service patents. SMS is text messaging, the technology that enables the exchange of short messages between billions of ordinary cellphones.

Obviously Google is not discussing anything about the GPhone, but USA Today reports; "Trip Chowdhry, analyst at Global Equities Research, says Google also has already begun designing an advanced GPhone model, equipped with a Google browser optimized to display Google services such as Gmail and YouTube.

Aimed at young users, a browser GPhone would probably sell at a fraction of the price of an iPhone, BlackBerry, Palm Treo or Microsoft Windows Mobile smart phone, Chowdhry says. One major hitch: Cellphone carriers are insisting on a cut of ad revenue. "The carriers want money any time the phones are turned on, especially if the call is to Google," Doherty says."

The hardware has already been developed. The only thing Google needs to do now is sign an agreement with a carrier. Once this is done, the phones could hit the market in a matter of weeks. When it happens, it going to happen fast.

It also sounds like it is going to be faster, cheaper and more powerful than the iPhone.

 

Finally - Spammers Get What They Deserve!

The Associated Press reports that, Jeffrey Kilbride, 41, of Venice California, and James Schaffer, also 41, of Paradise Alley, Arizona, were sentenced to 72 months and 63 months in prison, respectively, fined $100,000 and were ordered to pay $77,500 in restitution to AOL. They also were ordered to forfeit over $1.1 million in commissions they made spamming inboxes with pornographic emails.

They sent millions of unsolicited e-mails, prosecutors said. During nine months in 2004, Kilbride, Schaffer and an associate transmitted more than 600,000 spam messages advertising pornographic Web sites, according to court documents. Even after Congress passed the law called the CAN-SPAM act, the 2 perps continued sending email via remote servers in Amsterdam. The authorities were able to track the spam back to the individuals in Phoenix.

To prove that there is no honor in spamming, 3 other individuals that were involved, turned on Kilbride and Schaffer and testified against them in court to in order to avoid prosecution themselves.

YES! I love to hear stories like this. Obviously there is some big money to be made in spam, I have always wondered how much people make spamming and why they do it. Now that those 2 are going to be in a prison cell for quite some time, someone needs to go to the door of their cell every 5 minutes and scream at the top of their lung, "Click here to see the hottest girls on the net."

 

The Shoemoney Show.

Here's a video from Shoemoney's website asking a big question. "Does Yahoo Even Matter Anymore?"



What's your thoughts?

 

Google Is Reading Your Gmail?!

I was perusing Webpronews website this morning and read a article by Doug Caverly called, "Microsoft CEO Says Google Reads Your Mail."

The article says that Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO, accused Google of reading email that is housed in their Gmail system. Why would he make this accusation? Maybe he was playing some dirty pool to promote their Windows Live Hotmail system especially after the fact the that they had just re-done the monetization.

Looking a little deeper the article on Webpronews references a write up on CRN.com by Ed Moltzen. This article says that, "...Google reads customer email as part of a failed bid to drive ad-based revenue. Ballmer isn't the first to fire salvos at Google's Gmail privacy policy. Privacy advocates have been critical over the policy almost since the beginning, but the popularity of the service has skyrocketed nonetheless."

To date, the big G has not come forward to defend themselves against these accusations. Google does publicly admit that they "processes personal information" on their servers but they never come out and explicitly say that they are reading your email. They haven't said that they aren't reading your email either.

So what do you do? Just like any other email system, whether its a free service or a hosted email service, don't send anything that would need to be kept private or secure. I am not real convinced that if you are exchanging recipes via email with a buddy, Google will step up and start spamming you with Pampered Chef and recipe oriented direct emails.

This whole thing is interesting nonetheless.

What say you?