I just read a post by Don Dodge on the Google Click Fraud data, where he quotes a Google report showing that less than 10% of all clicks are fraud and that less than 0.02% of the frauds get through to the advertiser.
That sounds too good to be true. Let me give you some data to prove my point.
We've been tracking ads-clicks on Sampa sites. Since Google Adsense doesn't report back to us which pages were the most effective, we created a solution that sounds very reasonable (lots of services do that).
Here is the last 3 days of data that we collected:
Feb/28: 60 clicks on Ads
Feb/27: 45 clicks on Ads
Feb/26: 42 clicks on Ads
Now, this is what Google Adsense tells me:
Feb/28: 29 clicks
Feb/27: 28 clicks
Feb/26: 28 clicks
That is anywhere between 40-50% less than what we are measuring. So why is Google eliminating so many of those clicks from our account?
There are some explanations from our side:
Our data is collected in UTC timezone and Google's data is on PST.
The script that we use to measure clicks might indicate a click on the "Ads by Google" or "Announce on this site".
First of all, the timezone shift can't really be responsible for multiple days. If a click was counted today in our system, but yesterday on Google's system everything should even out at the end of the month (or pretty close to it).
The possibility that users are clicking on "Ads by Google" or "Announce on this site" are pretty real, but it is unreasonable to think that 40% of our clicks are on those links.
So, here is Google telling us that only 10% of clicks are fraud, and I'm seeing them removing more than 40% of clicks on our sites. Sounds like a pretty big disconnect to me.
And, yes, there is the possibility that Sampa sites have a larger percentage of click fraud then other sites, but it is hard to see the motive since our users don't make money out of Adsense, and nobody associated with Sampa is allowed to click on any Adsense ad (we are that afraid of Google cutting us off)
Just one final note (for the purists), we do remove multiple clicks from the same IP, because we assume that Google does the same, so the number of logged clicks on our side is much larger, but we do our own "fraud detection" and cut that down by about 50%.
Reading how the Wired reporter Annalee Newitzbought her way into Digg it has become very clear that Digg is done.
My first Digg happened more than a year ago and it was amazing. The crowd was really in control and it was a fair and legit system: users vote for the articles they like the most, and the best bubbles to the top.
Now, "diggers" have grouped into gangs, and "digg" or "bury" stories using obscure agendas, mostly because of monetary rewards.
So, immediatelly I started thinking how can Digg be fixed...
TechMeme uses a different method of defining what is popular and what is not: how many people have linked to that page recently. What if Digg would use a TechMeme-like technology just to validate the votes.
I mean, when my story got "dugg", quite a few blogs linked to it because it was truly interesting (IMHO). If you see a Digg story with 100 votes, but no backlinks it sounds very suspicious.
Another solution is to add a reverse weight to each Digg user based on the number of votes they have. If a user votes just 2 times a day, that is worth more than a user that votes on 20 stories a day. Or, is it? Hummm... Just thinking out loud now.
I've just got my spanking new copy of Office 2007 two days ago. I am thinking about installing it today.
My biggest concerns revolve around Outlook 2007, more specifically, if it will work well with my Exchange 2003 server. I'm sure Microsoft consider this a key scenario and tested it, but you never know. So I went to the web to search for blogs, articles, forums, etc. talking about that case. I didn't find it much, on the specifics of running Outlook 2007 with Exchange 2003, but I found quite a few (angry) customers complaining at how slow Outlook 2007 is.
It concerns me a lot.
Outlook is probably the most used application on my machine. I depend so much on it that it would be sad if it didn't perform well. I certainly can disable indexing and the Business Contact Manager (which some people pointed as the two primary slow down reasons).
The thing with searching for information of this kind on the web is that you find clusters of people that suffered the same problem. Sometimes hundreds or thousands of people. But are those 1% of the customer base or 0.001% of the customer base? It is hard to find people praising Office 2007 or Outlook 2007.
Do you have any good/bad experience with Outlook 2007? Should I install it?
At Sampa we have 4 different versions of the business plan, excluding all the variations on PowerPoint presentations. Why a company need 4 different business plans? That is easy to answer: Because each investor or investment forum have different requirements on length and content.
That is close to absurd, but it is the reality.
We just finished writing our canonical business plan. It has twelve pages, some charts, comprehensive information, yada-yada.
They have this 5-page crazy rule. Why is it crazy? Because from their site "submit...executive summary of the business plan... no longer than 5 pages".
I don't know if you ever send an executive summary to an executive with 5 pages, but if you do that he (or she) will absolutely not read it, shred it and ask you to try again.
In my book, an executive summary always has 1 (one) page only. In extreme cases it can be two pages. But that is it.
Now, the ESIF email to participants asks for the following: "You have until March 6 to submit your final business plan" and "...your plan must be no more than 5 pages...". They remove the "executive summary" part, but the problem now is that a 5-page business plan is short, very short.
If you think a business plan must describe the state of the market, the competition, the opportunity, the company, the product, the customer, the directions and goals, financials, team, marketing plan, and a few other elements, you can see how hard it is to fit everything into 5 pages.
Anyway, I believe the ESIF is not asking for an executive summary, but for a short version of the business plan, which is fine. The problem with the shorter version is that you have to trim information that might be exactly what they were using as a key selection criteria. Of course, the obvious stuff will be there, but the devil is on the details.
Live every ex-Microsoft, I became a huge critic of the company's product, business strategy and attitude in general. But I have to agree that Office 2007 is out of this world.
I haven't played with Vista yet, and have no plans on doing so on the next year. But Office is a productivity suit, and if it could make me more efficient and faster at doing simple tasks it deserves my attention.
Last week I installed Office 2007 and... wow! This is the real 'wow' campaign that Microsoft should be doing. Office 2007 gave me the same feeling when I ran Windows XP the first time. XP was a huge leap from Windows 98. Not only in reliability, but the whole user experience. Office 2007 gives the same impression from previous versions of Office (2003, XP, 2000, etc.).
I don't think Microsoft innovated so much on the Office UI ever.
Enough with the abstract, here is the concrete:
The Ribbon is great. I'm still struggling to find where things are, but that is just a matter of getting used to it. The first thing that I noticed is that I get things done with less clicks.
The entire experience is consistent.
The UI look great. Just something about the soft-blue gradient colors and the orange highlights that work well togheter.
I haven't tried the new PowerPoint yet, but heard nice things about the new presentations.
Outlook works like before. That is pretty much my bar to install it. I like the ClearType. Like the "To-Do Bar".
My only complaint so far is about Outlook. There are two features that I'm desperate to have:
Ability to have two Exchange Mailboxes on the same profile. Ok, that is a very rare user scenario, but I have my professional and my personal Exchange servers. Now I have to keep closing Outlook and opening on a different profile all day long. Very annoying.
Ability to configure the Reminder box "Snooze" options. It has too many options right now and I always need to scroll the listbox. First, the list box should be 10 items high, and have my own timespan. And just in case you are curious, this is what I want: 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 4 hour, 18 hour, 1 day, 4 days, 1 week, 2 weeks.
On the neutral side, but it could be better:
Outlook continues to hang and be slow from time to time. Some emails take a minute to appear (usually if they link to external images)
HTML rendering of Outlook has changed. Some of Sampa's emails look like crap. I'll need to fix that.
Nobody has Office 2007 yet. I just had to re-send a Word document because I mistakenly saved in 2007 format.
I continue to believe that improvements to Outlook is the number one reason Microsoft can maintain its leadership in the office-productivity suit for a long time.
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September, 2007