neverblog.net

We recently had a situation come up at work where a few of our users who do a lot of work in Banner found that they could no longer launch the app. Instead of the login screen, they were getting a blank window in Internet Explorer. We use Java 1.5.0.12 to run Banner 7, and the VM itself seemed to launch fine, but then nothing happened. The problem only started after we upgraded everyone from Java JRE 1.5.0.11 to 12 last week, so we started by assuming the new version of Java was conflicting with something.

An analysis of common programs yielded Google Desktop as a common thread, so we tried uninstalling that. Immediately, Java worked great and Banner loaded immediately. A Google search for ‘java 1.5.0.12 crashes google desktop’ showed that the problem is not limited to Banner only. In all instances we’ve had of the problem, a quick removal of the Google Desktop (including all settings and indexes) has fixed everything.

As a side note, the irony factor on this one is pretty significant. After all, most of the users who had the Google Desktop had gotten it as a result of the Java Update Scheduler, which had offered them 1.6 (the actual latest version of Java) and had installed (you guessed it) Google Desktop with the Java update as a default option. Several of our users wrote angry comments in the field Google provided with their uninstaller, and I can’t say I blame them. Also, it’s another example of why IT needs to keep tabs on and limit the proliferation of user-installed software.

1.5.0.12, 1.6.3, banner, banner 7, banner crash, google, google desktop, java, java crash, jre

The Motley Fool is reporting that Google is being sued by American Airlines for selling sponsored ads targeted at the keyword ‘American Airlines,’ a trademark of the airline. Here’s an excerpt from the full article, located on Fool.com:

To understand the situation a little better, fire up Google and punch in “American Airlines.” Google’s AdWords program serves up sponsored results along with the organic search-engine results. Online advertising accounts for as much as 99% of Big G’s revenues — it’s clearly a big part of the Google model.

Your mileage may vary, but when I searched this morning for “American Airlines” (in quotes, but it works just as well without them), I saw several third-party ads. The most prominent ad, at the top of the page, is for AMR’s own AA.com website. However, the column on the right features rival airlines and portals that promise discounted airfares.

The ads themselves don’t feature the American Airlines brand. However, the ads wouldn’t be on the page if the sponsors hadn’t bid on the trademarked term. To be sure, I logged into AdWords and saw that I could bid on the term “American Airlines” for as little as $0.04 per click. (Minimum bids vary depending on ad quality, even within the same keywords.)

Is this right? Is this wrong? The only thing for sure is that a lot of money is weighing on the answer.

What will make this one really juicy for the lawyers is that, with most searches on the web being case-insensitive (as far as I can tell–if someone knows differently, please feel free to comment), the trademarked term ‘American Airlines’ and the perfectly reasonable search for ‘american airlines,’ aka airlines offering service in america, are one and the same in a search engine’s mind.

Obviously, the larger issue is whether or not things like ‘Disneyland’ can be bought as a search term when trademarked by a company, but it’s a little more interesting in the case of American, whose decades-old choice of a name designed to build brand recognition might actually confound an already complicated issue even more.

Another interesting point that the article makes is that, if trademarks are ruled off-limits in advertising media like Google, it will also allow the trademark holder to withhold advertising funds from Google for those particular terms, as there would be little reason to advertise for a search term when no competitor could:

It is easy to see that Google could lose a lot of money if it caves in on these cases. If no one else is allowed to bid on “American Airlines” and other AMR trademarks, AMR has no reason to bid on it, either. It is the top organic search-engine result.

Of course, on a more personal level, I will be interested to see how this case is resolved, and what effect, if any, it will have on the blogosphere, many of whom rely heavily on Google AdSenseâ„¢ for their blog’s revenue stream.

adsense, adwords, google, american airlines, american, airlines, lawsuit, trademark, trade mark

There has been quite the buzz recently about Google’s recent move to encourage use of the rel=”nofollow” tag on paid links. Matt Cutts, whose blog offers an insider look at SEO in the Google world, argues that buying links to boost page rank should be prevented, as it constitutes deception of the search engine’s algorithm, and prevents it from serving the most relevant links to searchers.

The Official Google Blog also has an article about the nofollow attribute, which clearly states that incoming links from sites that Google deems have been paid for will not be ‘credited’ towards the target site’s page rank. Now, my point here is not to argue that Google should be allowing comment spam and other obvious and highly exploitable means of link-spamming. However, the fact that Google (and now Yahoo! and MSN Search) have decided to support and enforce the nofollow attribute as the default for paid links means that the three major search engines on the Web, through which most of the people that find information on the Web locate the sites and content they want, have taken the stand that money shouldn’t be able to buy recognition on the Internet, or at least better search results on the Internet.

While this attitude seems quite reasonable, and is garnering a lot of support throughout the blogging community, where spam is an ever-present problem (thank you Akismet, 10,000+ pieces of junk automatically filtered and counting), few seem to be regarding it as the fundamental cultural paradigm shift that it represents. In the ‘real’ world, companies with large amounts of capital can fund massive marketing campaigns, using their clout to eliminate poorer and weaker competitors. It is a simple reality of capitalism that money continues to be used to buy influence in the offline world; in fact, large firms constantly flood the market with print, radio, and TV ads that cost billions per year across the board. Why is it then, that Google and other online search giants have decided that paying to be noticed is deceptive and wrong? Is it a moral stand against a cutthroat practice, or merely another assertion of corporate domination over a particular market by its largest players.

I, for one, will be curious to see how the forces at play in the market affect the decision Google has made on paid links, as sites like ReviewMe and Text-Link-Ads will have to decide whether to conform with Google’s ultimatum, risking the wrath of their advertising clientele, or to leave the nofollow attribute out of their links, thereby risking losing publishers who fear a declining page rank. All in all, I think the decision made by Google to filter search results by non-paid links only is noble, but it ignores the larger reality of our society, which is that money drives people to content all the time.

Take, for example, the recent advent of Gofbot.com, a site operated by McDonald’s as part of a marketing campaign featuring fake newscasts proclaiming Gofbot to be ‘bigger than the Big Mac.’ The point of the campaign, and the fake page counter on Gofbot.com, which always resets to 4 hits, is that nothing is bigger than the Big Mac, a tried and true ‘American classic.’ However, if you look it up, Gofbot has a relatively decent (for a site with NO content) Alexa ranking of 352,306, driven solely by the TV campaign and the buzz it created. The page takes you to McDonald’s website after you’ve seen the mini presentation, and voila! McDonald’s has paid to send you through a link to their site. And they did it by circumventing Google and placing their high-priced advertisement in a market that already accepts that money buys the attention of people in our society.

When you consider that the Web doesn’t live as an entity by itself, and that search engines are but one way that people are driven to websites, it certainly complicates the issue that Google is taking such a clear stand on. I would love to see a world in which advertising dollars don’t make you more relevant for a particular search term, but I’m not sure Google’s moral stand can survive in a world where money already buys the attention of millions of consumers every day.

SEO, google, search, paid links, gofbot.com, mcdonalds, mcdonald’s, msn search, yahoo, advertising, online advertising, nofollow

Google announced today that it will begin offering its new pay-per-action ad service to its higher-traffic publishers (over 500 conversions per month). While it’s great that Google is offering this new service, I’m not exactly sold on how effective it will be for publishers.

Google’s standpoint is that the pay-per-action ad, which only pays the publisher once the person who’s clicked the ad signs up for a service or completes another such task on the advertiser’s site, will cut down on frivolous or downright illegal clicks by people being paid to do so, or bloggers cheating on their own sites. I’m sure this will happen, and I’m sure it will push more companies towards online advertising that have been hitherto reticent to jump into such a murky and unknown market.

On the other hand, as a publisher, I’m not sure I want to be responsible for someone else’s crappy site. For example, if Google puts an ad on a page that links to a site that wants its users to sign up for a free service, but the form is so long and intrusive that less than 1% of the people who click the ad end up signing up, I don’t want that ad on my site anymore. So, the solution could be as simple as the problem, if Google has acknowledged it and is planning to account for it: rank the ads by their overall conversion rate across all publishers. Then, if a particular ad performs terribly no matter what site the users are coming in from, push it down the list, so publishers can display ads for better written sites in their valuable ad space. Of course, right now Google makes its money from those very publishers, so I’m sure the way they display the ads is the same as for the standard AdSense–the more the advertiser pays, the better their position.

google, google adsense, adsense, adwords, google adwords, online advertising, pay per click, pay per action, pay-per-action, pay-per-click, advertising, ad

The following is a compensated review for SoloSEO, a self-managed search engine optimization site.

SoloSEO is a search engine optimization toolkit based on the web, and targeted at DIY webmasters looking to optimize their sites while keeping marketing expenses low. SoloSEO’s sign-up process is easy. They have a 2-week free trial available, and they require minimal information from you (email address, name, etc.) to get started. Once you’ve gotten your username and password, you can proceed into the main dashboard screen, where most of the options you can choose in SoloSEO are available in a nice, easy-to-navigate fashion. The interface actually reminds me a lot of the WordPress admin page, so perhaps that’s why I find it so intuitive.

When you begin, SoloSEO walks you through the initial steps that are required to start tracking and optimizing your site. If you don’t have any analytics set up, SoloSEO recommends you to Google Analytics, but does mention that other options are available. As a side note here, I believe SoloSEO’s strategy of using already-available free web apps that exist on the web is an excellent one for keeping internal costs down, and thereby passing those cost reductions on to the website owners / customers that SoloSEO serves.

After you’ve chosen some sort of analytics software, SoloSEO begins to ask you for information about your site, beginning with the main keywords you would use to describe your site. All the reports generated in SoloSEO, including the ones that are immediately generated once you’ve given the site some keywords, are exportable into TSV or CSV formats. If you’re unsure what keywords accurately define your site, or are worried that you might miss some ‘obvious’ ones, SoloSEO allows you to search sites like Google AdWords, WordTracker, and Overture (or all three at once!) for related keywords. In my case, this resulted in about 25 useful results per search, including things like misspellings or incorrect pluralizations that apparently many people search for on the web.

Once you’ve defined your top keywords, SoloSEO takes you through the process of creating a sitemap for your site. This allows SoloSEO to perform additional functionality, such as checking for dead links of other nastiness that could drive potential customers away from your site. Among the other tasks SoloSEO originally outlines for you are creating additional topics for your site, with sub-topic keywords, and running a report to determine the effectiveness and page ranking of your site against that of your competition. All in all, it’s a very complete package that covers all the basics. I am particularly fond of the aggregator at the bottom of the dashboard which shows you your current ranking in several major indexes, such as Yahoo! and Alexa. This aggregator also lets you select the original link that SoloSEO is using to get your stats, in case you want to view them in the original context.

The price for SoloSEO is $29 a month, which allows you to track and optimize up to 5 domains. Each domain beyond that costs an additional $4 a month. Considering the tools the SoloSEO offers, and the knowledge and guidance that the task-based interface provides, it is an excellent option for fledgling websites trying to make an impact for their companies on the web. While there may be features required by major-market companies that SoloSEO does not provide, it certainly would accomplish everything I could possibly need in terms of tracking search keywords on my blog. My only suggestion is that perhaps a cheaper package for 1 or 2 domains could be offered, since $29 a month is a significant expense for me, considering my hosting is around a 1/3 that price, and I would be much more interested in purchasing a service for my single domain at a rate of around $5-7 dollars a month.

soloseo, search engine optimization, google, keywords, ads

In a move that could be called ‘not not hypocritical,’ Microsoft has stated that Google’s recent acquisition of DoubleClick opens the door to monopoly in the web-based click-thru advertising industry. Microsoft alleges that Google’s purchase would hurt competition, an interesting standpoint for a company that itself tried to purchase DoubleClick.

No doubt, had Yahoo! or Microsoft been the successful high bidder, we’d be hearing nothing about this. In fact, if DoubleClick was such a prize, why didn’t companies like Yahoo! outbid Google to ensure that they’d have that tasty slice of the internet marketing pie? It seems slightly fishy that something so valuable, which was so recently on the open market, could have been so easily taken from under a company like Microsoft’s nose. Perhaps patching Vista has sucked away all of Microsoft’s operating capital?

google buys doubleclick, google, yahoo, microsoft, microsoft antitrust, anti-trust

The Blackberry: Sweet, juicy….Internet.

As PDAs and similar handheld devices continue to advance, it becomes more and more realistic to consider them in one’s site design, in order to reach the widest audience possible. Since I happen to have a Blackberry right now, I’ve been trying various sites in order to see what’s compatible and what fails miserably.

The usual suspects, such as Google and Gmail, performed flawlessly, as expected. The folks over at Google seem to a have a special little spot in their hearts for the mobile user, and their most popular offerings don’t disappoint in this regard.

Once I was sure that I’d maxed out my PDA’s capability to process client-side markup and scripting (you have to manually add JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and XML support, otherwise you’re basically running Internet Explorer 4.0 on a teeny-tiny screen–a browsing experience that would make even the most desperate bsuite-hound run for the nearest Mennonite community), I headed over to this blog.

The front page loaded flawlessly, though it takes quite a while, and the Blackberry’s status bar indicates a laborious process of running scripts and proccessing CSS at what is, relatively, a snail’s pace. What surprised me the most was the appearance of a photo that went with one of the stories, nicely formatted and filling the screen. It’s easy to scroll through and read posts, click on related articles, and do pretty much anything else you’d want.

With the front page test complete, I tried logging in to the admin section. Navigating to /wp-admin yielded a standard userID/password dialog, and within 30 seconds, I was on the admin dashboard, free to click on any tab, change any options I wanted, and even post an article. As far as I can tell, WP works with the Blackberry, or rather, the Blackberry has no problems handling WordPress. It’s a far cry from the cell-phone internet I’m used to.

I plan to continue trying out sites to see where the Blackberry might get stuck. I’ll post if I find anything, and update this entry if I find any more significant sites or webapps that work.

UPDATE: I found a page with a really nice intro to CSS and web development on the Blackberry. Read about it here.

First off, Thumbstacks.com, the new web-based Flash/AJAX presentation software I blogged about recently, is definitely still in the alpha testing phase, and the current lack of features is to be expected in these early stages of deployment. However, I’ve now played around with the software, and there seem to be some distinct pros and cons that I can see so far:
Pros

1. Right-click menus make it easy to insert images from flickr or your computer. Alternatively, right-clicking along the list of slides offers nice standard options for creating new slides, deleting old ones, etc…
2. Pre-made templates offer an instant way to make your presentation look nice, as well as to keep a consistent format throughout.
3. Real-time text editing and image manipulation responded well when tested, with little to no lag, and newly imported images loaded quickly.

Cons

1. Image manipulation lacks several important features, such as the ability to maintain proportion of the image when resizing it (Shift doesn’t work).
2. The templates collection is quite limited, and there is little to no info encouraging others to create and submit templates. Perhaps those in charge plan to add this in in the future.
3. As far as I could tell, there are no options to choose a ’style’ for an individual slide. PowerPoint offers users several different arrangements for the slides, such as text/image side-by-side, all text, and various other combinations. Such flexibility, combined with the existing templates in Thumbstacks, would really make the program sing.

In spite of its current limitations, Thumbstacks definitely shows promise, not least of all because its native format supports collaboration and sharing of work with multiple users, thereby overcoming the main weak point of PowerPoint. Soon it should be possible to demonstrate a product to a client over the web, or hold a meeting with representatives from several different firms, without worrying about whether or not sufficient PowerPoint licenses are in existence to support such an endeavour, or if application compatibility will become an issue. The combination of Flash with an AJAX backup ensures that a majority of visitors will have no issues viewing others’ presentations. All in all, Thumbstacks is showing definite progress. I wouldn’t be all that surprised if it gets bought up by Google before too long, perhaps as a nice addition to the newfangled Google Account.

It’s been well over three weeks since Google first announced that its next-generation calendar app known as CL2 was in the closed-beta phase. According to the company, around 200 individuals were given access to the calendar (the rest of us just get an invalid page error), with strict instructions on how to preserve secrecy. In spite of this, TechCrunch.com indicates that one of the beta testers provided access to Yahoo! While Yahoo! has since notified Google of this, it would be rediculous to assume they did so before carefully analyzing all of the new features.
The advantages offered by the new CL2 should be many and varied. Obviously, the calendar will be highly integrated with Google’s popular Gmail e-mail application, and will utilize the latest in AJAX programming techniques. TechCrunch also has a list of some of the features that Google is intending to include in the public release:

Creating Events

You can create events on your calendar in a number of ways.

Click ‘Create Event.‘ This brings you to the create event page, where you can enter information about your event.

Click on Quick Add (or type the letter Q). Quick Add gives you a text box where you can type all the information about your event in normal English, and we’ll fill out the form for you. We’re pretty excited about this feature, so please let us know how it works for you.

Drag-to-create. If you’re looking at the day where you want to create an event on your calendar, just click and drag your mouse from the desired start time to the end time. Once you’ve selected your time range, you can just choose a title for your new event.

Event Pages

Whenever you create an event, we create a web page which you’ll see when you click on the “more details” link on any event. This web page is only visible to you, unless you’ve invited other people to your event or made the event public, in which case you can use the page to share information about the event with people who are attending or the public at large. Note: you don’t have to be a CL2 user to be able to see event pages, so you can use these pages to share information with anyone involved with the event, regardless of what online tools (if any) they use. (Ever wish your favorite local band would learn how to use HTML and publish their calendar? Once we get your feedback and open CL2 to the world you can help them do just that.)

While it seems that Google’s release of its CL2 software is imminent, it’s probably a good idea to assume that some serious additional testing will have to be accomplished before that can become a reality. Plus, if the introduction of Gmail was any indication, we’re looking at a slow and steady release to the general public based on limited numbers of ‘invitations’ extended to those who already have accounts. This approach seemed to work excellently with Gmail, as the Google team was able to roll out additional addresses by offering users the ability to invite first 6, then 50 users to establish an account. The snowball effect of this type of rollout should not be ignored by future web-based application developers, as it provides a means for quickly expanding a software product’s reach, all while allowing the company to maintain control over just how rapidly the software proliferates. For most of us, though, this means either jumping on the bandwagon early, or getting shut out in the cold until a more widespread release.