Tuesday, April 06, 2004

Hard disk storage from EMC imitates tape backup. Tape backup is slow and cumbersome. Hard disks are cheap and fast. EMC makes a "disk library" to masquerade as a tape device. [Ars Technica] 11:40:54 PM

NEC develops a radical quick charge battery. NEC's organic radical cathode technology has lead to the development of a quick charge battery. [Ars Technica] 11:39:01 PM

WordTracker Killer: Adwords Clever Wizard. Do you need to identify which are they set of keywords that are most in demand in the online niche you operate in? Need to learn what KEI means? The Wordtracker Killer is here! While there is really quite nothing like the original service from the original, highly acclaimed, WordTracker online service, this efficient and easy to use tool from CleverStats may have a lot of interesting features to offer to the aggressive online marketer and SEO/SEM specialist. AdWords Clever Wizard is a Google AdWords automated analysis tool. Clever Wizard can be used very efectively also as a suggestion and research utility. For each keyphrase input Clever Wizard shows the total number of Google of searches per month, the relative KEI index value, and a number of possible synonyms. A 30-day trial version is available here. [Robin Good's Latest News] 11:16:22 PM

Better Learn Now What A Real Link Looks Like: The New Ad Wave. "Emergence of a new wave of online advertising at a time when Web surfers are finally accustomed to--and armed with the tools to block--the old ones." The new array of solutions and proposed approaches to advertising is both fascinating and scary. Better learn now what a real link looks like before the things are going to change a bit on this front. [Robin Good's Latest News] 11:13:54 PM

Online Advertisers And Publishers Watch Out For Norton Security: Your Newest Enemy. I don't know you, but I was pretty mesmerized when I saw the following just a few hours ago: on a normal Windows PC, running Internet Explorer, I accessed my Kolabora site. On the home page, the top banner, which normally showcases the famous fresco from the Sixteenth Chapel, shows only a small section of the banner image repeated several times horizontally in the banner area. In all other areas of the site the top banner area appears as if completely empty (normally the Directory area sports a banner from our one of our sponsors, Communicast, and the other sections have banners that include some Chinese colors or calligraphy. But also these were not visibile anymore). By paying a bit more attention I also noticed that the Google ads appearing on the right side column were all lacking their titles! I don't know about you, but boy was I surprised for a few minutes. God, I said, what kind of spyware has gotten on this machine? Well, let me make it fast for you. Forward fifteen minutes ahead: I have now uninstalled Norton Internet Security from this friend PC and everything is back to normal. He can see my site, my sponsors and my Google Ads in their full splendor. But how many proper ads, images, and ethical contextual text ads are being handicapped, mutilated or made altogether "invisible" by this "security" tool? If you are an online publisher you better start worrying now. On the other hand, if you are Peter (Norton), please stop this before everyone notices. Thanks. [Robin Good's Latest News] 11:13:21 PM

Context-Based Advertising: Through RSS, Highly Targeted Opt-In Is Just Around The Corner. One-Shot Searching Is Over: Publish And Subscribe Approach To Gain Momentum. This is a must-read essay from one of the few players in this field that shows to see and well understand where we are actually headed. Bob Wyman writes in his blog: ".."online advertising, especially contextual advertising, is evolving rapidly." Because a subscription to a search-based RSS feed implies a "persistent" personal interest in some kind of content, whatever targeted and relevant contextual info promoting products or services in that niche, can only be seen as a valuable and useful addition. "Publish/Subscribe systems, by collecting explicit statements from subscribers about the content they wish to see, are able to deliver targeted content much more effectively and accurately than the existing alternatives can."..."Context based advertising is a major step in the direction of providing advertisers with effective methods of targeting while also reducing the burden of advertising on users. The goal of modern, context-based advertising practice can be summed up as: "Display no ad that the user is not happy to see." While the traditional search services have focused on providing one-shot searches of their historical collections, publish/subscribe services provide the ability to create "persistent" queries or subscriptions to new content as it is posted to the Internet. Those who only have a passing interest in a subject are likely to limit their searches to the traditional search engines, but those who have a persistent, long-term interest in a subject are likely to subscribe to a service (likely an RSS feed) ... so that they can be kept up to date on the latest information that interests them. ...If advertising is provided in the results to persistent searches and if the delivered ads are strictly revelant to the search terms, the effect is almost as though the user had subscribed to the ads themselves! Think of it as "opt-in" for finely targeted advertising! [Robin Good's Latest News] 11:12:12 PM

Get Your Favourite RSS News On Your Front Page: MediaScooper. MediaScooper is a new FREE service that allows you to display any RSS feed on your Web site with maximum ease. You need to simply log into MediaScooper (no registration required) and to select one of the many RSS feeds already listed there or to add manually the URL of your set of preferred RSS newsfeeds. Once done that, you are provided with HTML and Javascript code that can be immediately inserted in your preferred Web page to show news headlines and excerpts from your favourite news sources. [Robin Good's Latest News] 11:09:19 PM

What's Next for Google. kottke links to a great piece about Google's "secret" source of power (you mean, it's not those energy pellets from video games?) from Topix and writes a nice post about Google's future as well. This is particularly well-timed, since Gothamist was posed with the question, "How does Google make money?" this weekend. We managed to answer, "Text ads," but started to wonder what would come next for a company who has become a verb in a way Yahoo! could only dream of. We do think kottke is right, in that we may all be "cursing the Google monopoly" in a few years, but as long as we can dig dirt on our friends, enemies and ourselves by Googling, Gothamist is happy. [Gothamist] 11:06:07 PM

Back to blogging... It's hard to believe I haven't posted to my blog for a couple of weeks.  However, when I looked at the date of my last blog, it happens to be March 22, 2004.  To me, it's a significant date for one reason.  It's the day before one of our client's shared hosting servers was creamed by the Witty Worm, a fast moving destructive worm that kills servers.  8 days after the crash we had retrieved SQL server data after the backup was restored by CIHost.  CIHost was caught flat footed and couldn't keep up with the damage. Tech support was non-existant for days. Only the most persistent could get information on their account status other than what was rarely posted on the support site.  On our end, I had the client's domain propogated to a new server under 24 hours from the time we realized CIHost was flaming out.  Though running, the site wasn't fully operational as we elected to wait until we were sure the data we had available was the latest possible backup version.  Patience was crucial and it paid off.  CIHost simply didn't have a plan for such an attack on so many of their servers. This was a very damaging worm and they did everything they could to mitigate the damage internally, but their communication was just dismal for the first 6 days.  It's good to be able to enjoy things getting back to normal, but I must say CIHost is no longer servicing our client as a primary hosting company. 11:00:09 PM