Yet another Digg-style, social networking site has been released, Blogosphere News as a beta. It’s under the management of Splashpress Media. It’s a good thing it’s in beta, it is still very unpolished. Dead links to the advertise page. And Mermberships (sic) are free. No contact form to reach a webmaster or designer or intern to let them know of problems. And no privacy policy. But it will be nice to have one site to get a lot of info about blogging.

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I first stumbled across Project Wonderful in December 2006. Project Wonderful is a system that allows ads to be bought and sold as an auction, highest bidder gets the ad, and it changes in real time, so you can have an ad on a site in minutes. It started out as a way for publishers of web comics to be able to easily add advertising to their web sites, but any site can take advantage of the system.

I’ve been running some advertising on a couple of my sites (an “adbox”) the past few months, and have also run some advertising (”bids” or “campaigns”) on other sites. I allowed ads to run both here on PlanetMike, and on my Christmas site. Here are my thoughts about the Project Wonderful (PW) ad system.

For all users:

• I wish I could stay logged into the system. The current logout time is something like 30 minutes, which is annoying. Yes, it can be dangerous, but if you aren’t on a trusted computer, you shouldn’t check a preference box to stay logged in. If someone steals my home computer, I have other problems anyways.
• The Project Wonderful web site itself is sluggish at times. Logging in takes 15 to 30 seconds occasionally.

For publishers (sites letting others advertise on them):

• Bids shouldn’t be able to be removed or cancelled by the bidder quickly. What happens is they bid some amount and then figure out that someone else has a much higher limit. So the bid rate goes up to $.40 but two hours later drops back to 2 cents because the incentive for the higher bid has gone away. A bid should have to remain in place for at least 24 hours.
• The web publisher may set a minimum bid. But the ad says “your ad here,” which is a waste. Let the publisher put their own ad there, linking to wherever, at no cost. But still let someone bid more than my minimum to get the ad themselves. Right now I feel that space is wasted while I’m waiting for minimum bids. The example is the banner ad at my Christmas music site. Update (2007-10-31 11am): Ryan from ProjectWonderful pointed out to me that this capability is already in the system. I was simply misreading a certain set of options in the control panel area of the adbox definitions.
• Pages with PW ads load slowly. On my table-based site (ugh, I know, I need to redesign) there is usually a visible delay when the page gets to the PW cell.

For advertisers (putting your ad on other sites):

• The campaign system is wonderful. I ran three campaigns in early October to advertise ChristmasMusic247.com. The first was for only ads of any size that could be bought for a price of zero to two cents. After a week, I changed to two campaigns, one only for button ads (117×30 pixel images), the other for large ads (468×60 or 728×90 images) only. The results were amazing.
  

  Campaign	Bid limit	Total Page Views	Total Click	Total Expense	Cost per 1000 Page Views (CPM)	Cost per Click (CPC)
  2 Cent Campaign October 1 to October 4	$0.02	97,091 (54,703 unique)	353 (343 unique)	$4.05	$0.04 ($0.07 unique)	$0.01 ($0.01 unique)
  Button Campaign October 10 to October 19	$0.01	1,173,830 (586,150 unique)	2,434 (2,167 unique)	$36.18	$0.03 ($0.06 unique)	$0.01 ($0.02 unique)
  Large Ad Campaign October 10 to October 19	$0.06	570,720 (254,377 unique)	1,698 (1,515 unique)	$52.45	$0.09 ($0.21 unique)	$0.03 ($0.03 unique)

  In those three weeks, I received nearly 4,500 clicks, for a cost of just over $100. If I had tried to run a Google Adword campaign, the cost would have been much higher for the keywords I would have had to choose in order to get high placement on pages. I just created a campaign using Adwords, and the Traffic Estimator said my keywords would need to be 20 cents (Christmas music) to 50 cents (Christmas carols), so an equivalent number of clicks would have cost me $900 to $2,250!

• Keep in mind I was competing with other advertizers, so the sites that my ad was on changed daily (hourly!). But if I felt it was very important to be on a specifc site, I could set up a separate bid for that site, with a higher bid limit.
• So as PW gets more popular, and daily bid rates increase, the CPM and CPC will increase. But right now, PW is an incredible bargain.

Overall, the Project Wonderful system works very well. I encourage you to check it out for your next web project. PW is very economical, easy to use, and supports small web-based businesses, but could easily be used on larger sites as well.

Right now PlanetMike.com is made up of several different technologies: WordPress, a lot of shtml pages (server side includes), a few php pages, and lots of photo galleries created with iPhoto and Gallerie. After the recent Google PageRank update, I’m thinking about basically starting over with the entire site. I think I want to move the blog from /journal/ up to the top directory level of the site. The largest section of the site would be my jokes archive. Most (all?) of the jokes have dates on them, so I could move them into my WordPress database. That would give me a ton of blog posts, but overall the site would be much easier to manage.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. I won’t have time to start doing anything until December, so I’m not in a rush.

Wow, my Google PageRank for the PlanetMike.com home page has dropped to 4 from 6, down from 7 a year ago. Speculation elsewhere on the web says that Google is penalizing people for using Text-Link-Ads. Well, if that’s the cause, hmmm, fine I guess. Up until this month, I made much more money from Text-Link-Ads than I ever did from Google Adsense. So could this be case of Google telling people to stay with us, don’t use any other advertising system?

Something interesting I just noticed, it seems that more of my inside pages have increased their page rank. So maybe Google is simply distributing the PageRank from the home page among all of the site’s internal pages?

Other sites discussing this:

• Time To Count Your PageRank Losses
• The best comment ever about Google
• Digg Favorites Slapped By Google

Two of my other sites haven’t changed their PageRank, both are still at 5.

The latest attempt to get into people’s webmail accounts is from a group Shelfari. Apparently set up as a service to help your friends learn about new books to read. They do this by getting you to give them your webmail account’s password so they can look to see if any of your friends are also members of Shelfari. In reality, Shelfari.com sends spam masquerading as you to everyone in your webmail’s Address Book.

See other reports of this behavior at:

• Suffering Shelfari Spam? Opt Out
• Freaking Shelfari
• Major Ranting
• Why Shelfari.com sucks so much!

I have blacklisted email from shelfari.com to my servers, as a complaint I filed there a few days was blatantly ignored and they did it again, emailed one of my addresses another “invite” to join.

Reminder: Never ever ever give your webmail account information to a third party.

I just checked my Akismet spam listing, and see that at some point on October 20th, 2007, Akismet tagged the 20,000th spam comment on my blog. Wow, amazing. And that is after tweaking WordPress to use a unique filename to process comments. Most days I get around 2 to 5 spam comments, although my gut says that the rate is increasing, with mostly spam from humans. See Blocking WordPress Comment Spam from April 2 for details of my tweaks to WordPress’ wp-comments-post system.

Submitted to BP.com:

I just visited the BP gas station nearest my home. Sometime in the past week, they have added TV screens at each pump playing news updates and weather. Ugh! I wont’ be back, despite the convenience of this gas station. There is an Exxon across the road, which is just as convenient; plus at least 4 other gas stations along — Road that are also on my way. If I wanted to watch TV, I would watch TV. I get the weather in my car. Plus I know you are going to start playing commercials for the stuff you sell in the convenience store. Who needs 8 TV sets, all blaring their loud audio, slightly out of sync with each other, so I’m listening to a jumbled mess while I’m trying to pump my gas. I know you won’t remove these TV sets from this station just because of one complaint. but think about the people who won’t take the time to complain. Sorry, but I think the TV sets at the pump is a silly decision. Thanks for your time, Michael

Last month, Verizon screwed up my billing when I tried to change to a less expensive for the same features calling plan. The rep promised me that it would be all fixed and straightened out in my October statement. Guess what? The October statement is still screwed up. They still have me for the Triple Freedom plan. Amazing. I’m guessing that DirecTV gives a kickback to Verizon for every customer that Verizon gives them. I hope it’s worth it to Verizon, becuase now they have a seriously ticked off customer to deal with.

So my options are:

• A cell phone
• Asterisk, a VoIP system on a computer here at home
• Vonage, or some other out-sourced VoIP service

What do you think? I’d love to hear some comments about alternatives to using Verizon.

Well, hopefully it is only a heart attack. It was fine yesterday, went to turn it on this morning. Nothing. I read these pages at Apple.com:

• iMac G5: Troubleshooting when your computer won’t turn on
• iMac G5: Loose power cord could cause power loss
• iMac G5 Repair Extension Program for Video and Power Issues

And hooray (hooray ?!) my serial number is in the range probably covered by the extended repair program. I have an appointment on Monday morning at the local Apple Genius bar. I did call Apple tech support, and got someone on the line. He was as helpful as he could be, he walked me through a couple steps and acknowledged it probably is a hardware problem.

I should have gotten the extended warranty (Applecare) plan, but I forgot about it until after the year had passed after getting the iMac in December 2004. Hopefully, the machine will be able to be repaired for free.

I have often wished I could have a real-time visual indicator of what my web server is doing. I never really got past simply using a tail command piped into a grep command so I could see interesting things. But Erlend Simonsen came up with a very cool program called glTail. It’s a Ruby script that analyzes your log files and shows you what is happening by whom on which web site. I put my 10 most popular web sites into the script, and it runs beautifully. I just looked and I’m already 3 versions behind the times, so I’ve just upgraded.

I did have to install Ruby, and RubyGems onto my Powerbook. And that took a while, but the instructions at MacOnRails.com made it pretty easy, although I didn’t quite understand everything they were saying.

You can read about how Dougal Campbell is using glTail.