Work :: Lavoro ::: June 2005 Archives

Every day I read marketing material from other companies. What never ceases to amaze me is the total lack of content in some of their blurbs. Regardless of what they are trying to sell you, whether it is a service or a tangible product they seem to think that "more is better", ie. if you can say it 10 words then it will probably sound even better in 30 words or more. Shove in a few superlatives for good measure, regardless of whether they actually enrich the content or not. I touched on this "marketing madness" a few months ago. This evening I was reading over a preview of a new site. It was a really frustrating experience for me as I was familiar with their services and would have no qualms about recommending them to people. However if the new site's content had been the deciding factor in choosing them for our own business then we would never have bought anything from them. The other thing that is causing me much amusement at present is some of the IT press releases. I know that we all need to issue press statements and that at times they may not be the most newsworthy, but some of the recent ones I've read have been real gems. One company contradicts their own website in a press release - nothing like consistency, while others manage to spin the most insignificant of events to new levels. I suppose I should congratulate them on one level, but I can't help laughing at the same time. Ah well. It's only business :)

So Google launched site targetting a few days ago. I have both an adwords and an adsense account with Google, or more precisely, the company has one of each and I have an adsense account as well :) From an advertiser's perspective I would have thought that selecting a range of sites would have led to impressions clocking up, but I was obviously wrong. With the standard adwords you are given an indication of where your ad will appear in relation to the amount you bid on the keyword or phrase, whereas with the CPM model you don't seem to have that option. Some kind of "bid X to get Y impressions on somesite.tld" would be helpful. Maybe this kind of functionality is going to be added at a later stage. The flipside to this is adsense. How will earnings be affected by the new payment model? If advertisers were previously paying for clicks does this mean that now publishers will be paid for impressions? There doesn't seem to be any mention of it in the adsense help docs. Am I missing something?

Would people be interested in registering personal IE domains if there was a special subdomain for it eg. name.ie or ainm.ie (or some other semantically logical derivative) ? We get requests for IE domains every single day. In most cases they are from either registered businesses or similar, but we are seeing an increasing demand for personal domains. Unfortunately the IEDR's naming policies do not allow you to register something like micheleneylon.ie unless your business or activity is known by that name. So, for example, a published author can register their name, as can a politician or other public figure, however a private citizen cannot. This does lead to issues, as people look at other cctlds, such as co.uk and see that they can register whatever they want, whereas with .ie not only are they more restricted by the naming schema, and are reduced to registering mjn1.ie or similar if they don't register a business name with the CRO I can understand the IEDR's current rules in most instances, however maybe it is time that they introduced a new "section". Other countries have designated part of the namespace for specific areas, so .ac.uk is reserved for academic institutions and various other "areas" exist within other national registries. To date the Irish namespace has been flat. There is no differenciation between private businesses, government departments, education or personal space. Would a change be of benefit or would it merely cause more problems that it solved? The IEDR is not the organisation it used to be. Earlier this year they reported profits, while they also made a move towards creating some form of "after market" in "secondhand" domains. From a technical perspective there have been some significant changes, although most of them would not be visible to the end user but would be of great interest to companies such as ourselves that register domains on behalf of our clients. Of course one of the obvious arguments against a move like this would be the current size of the cctld. I stress current, as a move like this could help to grow it significantly. However, for that to happen, these domains could not be priced at the existing level, which varies from €40 to over €100, depending on the reseller. If an individual could get their own domain for a price similar to that of a .com it would surely be attractive, however the IEDR may be able to argue against that pricing also. On what grounds you may ask? Well the IEDR is not like .com. It is not a fully automated system. Each and every registration and modification request has to be manually reviewed by the IEDR staff, who work from Monday to Friday. If you want to make a simple DNS change on a Friday evening, for example, you will have to wait until the following Monday morning before it can be enacted. What can be done to address this situation? The obvious answer would be to introduce a greater level of automation. If, for example, a system similar to Nominet's automaton was put in place then requests could be processed almost automatically. Needless to say there would have to be some level of verification, but surely a DNS change does not require a hostmaster's intervention? Surely the onus lies on the reseller or their client to know if they have setup their DNS correctly or not, as it will not be processed until it passes the DNS check in either case.

Google has finally launched site targetting for adwords. In order to enable the site targetting option you need to go into your account settings after logging in and toggle the option. You then have the option of choosing between normal ads and targetted ones when you create a campaign. Unlike with the normal ads you then have to specify a CPM rate. So how do you choose sites? You have two options. You can either specify specific sites that you know are in the network or use keywords and then choose from the sites available that Google considers to be relevant.

We finally moved into our new offices yesterday afternoon. Moving is always traumatic :) I expect we'll bring order to the chaos at some stage over the next couple of days, but I'm not going to hold my breath. On the plus side my new desk is bigger and more comfortable. The telephone system is great, though I still haven't worked out how to use it properly - need to spend some quality time with the manual to rectify that I guess.. ... Now the fun bit ... redoing headed paper, compliment slips, business cards etc... Oh what fun!

Today I discovered that Comodo had launched a "wonderful" new anti-spam product. It's great! It will stop all spam effectively. It will also stop any effective communication via email in the process, but surely that is a small price to pay for keeping your inbox clean? I think not. I tried to send a business email to them today but got this really "helpful" message back from them: Hi, this is XXXX. Your recent email has been delivered to my computer, but because you're not yet in my trusted senders list, it hasn't been placed in my inbox. To get added to my trusted senders list, please reply to this message with my AntiSpam passcode. Here's all you have to do: 1. Press Reply 2. In the body of the reply, type in my AntiSpam Passcode: 3. Press Send. When I receive this reply, I will know that it was really you that sent me the email and not a computerized spammer. I will then be able to read all your mail. This authentication will be done only once. Thank you & have a great day, XXXX Easy? Let's have a look at what I got in my inbox: Note the total lack of an image or code of any kind. What does this mean? Well, basically it means that the idiot is "protecting" his inbox with a defective tool. I don't care if it's a transient bug in their software or whether pigs fly. Due to their stupidity my email has not reached the intended recipient, so if I was trying to place an order ie. spend money with them, then they have lost the transaction. Brilliant, isn't it? I've never been in favour of CR (challenge response) as a method to "fight" spam, as it breaks the entire communication stream. There are plenty of ways that you can block spam and still maintain your business relationships safely. The Comodo method is obviously not one of them. I would love to know what they were thinking when they decided to "protect" their inboxes using it. Maybe they'll learn or maybe they'll lose business as a result of their stupidity.