A Whole Lotta Nothing

Nice hidden Panther feature

According to this you can share image capture devices like scanners and cameras with image capture in Panther. I just tried it myself, and although my iSight doesn't show up as a capture device (which would make it a pretty cool webcam), my mounted compact flash card from my digital camera does. I poked a hole in my firewall and just showed a few friends some photos I just took, but haven't downloaded yet to my mac.

Very cool hidden feature.

Everyone's got priorities

On this Slashdot post about the Microsoft temp that was fired, I noticed what could be the best off-the-wall slashdot comment ever:

...I can walk into a McDonalds (not that I would - I've been boycotting them since they started making pizzas) with a group of friends, order a meal, and start snapping pictures of our little party.

Some people boycott McDonalds for their treatment of workers, mishandling of food, or what they've done to the livestock industry.

Then there are others that just hate pizza so much they'll never set foot in a restaurant ever again.

Onto the to-do list

Postfix Enabler is a quick GUI for turning your mac's local SMTP server on and sending mail from it.

Minor site updates

I tossed the mobile phone photos along the right sidebar of this site and instead am feeding the most recent post to my ten years project, with an excerpt (all my photo taking energy is being used up there, so nothing extra left over for random mophos). I also added a feed from the Creative Commons blog.

As always, this site is an experiment in personal publishing and I may be adding more stuff and taking other stuff away soon, we'll see.

Panther

It seems like every time Apple releases a minor update, the mac lovers from all over exaggerate their upgrades into gifts from god that made their computers faster, their bodies sexier, and their lives richer.

Not being a huge Apple fanboy myself, I just want the thing to work, to come close to the speed of my PC, and to be more stable. It looks like Panther is the first release that lived up to the hype, for me at least. My powerbook seems downright peppy and I haven't seen a swirling beachball since I upgraded. Mail and iChat finally seem stable and Mail isn't going unresponsive when I have more than one window open. I finally see what everyone was raving about with Expose, having a quick keyboard shortcut to get to other windows on a crowded monitor is a lifesaver.

I haven't dived in much deeper than that, but so far I'm very happy with the $130 package.

Storytime with Sedaris

I owe a million thanks to John for getting me tickets to David Sedaris. I've read a book of his a few years ago and read one or two of his articles in Esquire, but earlier this year I got a copy of his book on CD that he read and it was about a million times better than the printed word (which granted, is already pretty funny, but his delivery and timing is everything). It was the first time I've heard him live and I was crying with laughter at several points in the evening. There was a story about a morgue (to be a chapter in his next book), a story about halloween (to be in next week's Esquire), and a story about Santa. He's on a 30 city tour, and I hear he's going to be down in Stanford next week, so catch him if you can.

The Daily Show

Two odd things about The Daily Show:

1. On last night's show, Jon Stewart made an off-the-cuff joke about the first story of the night "which you can read about on my blog." before launching into the full story. The blog joke didn't get too many laughs though (I was thinking to myself do people even know what he's making fun of?).
2. perhaps related, but author and blogger Neal Pollack is going to be on tonight's show

Down and Out in Dartmouth

This overview of Darthmouth College's wireless setup and how people use it sound like something out of a Cory Doctorow future.

Amazon whole book searches

Thanks to Amazon's new search-inside-books feature, you can quickly see all the books that mention "blog" in them. Scroll past the blog books and start digging deeper. There are self-help books, marketing books, programming books, and grammar books mentioning the concept in all sorts of ways. Fascinating stuff.

ALA is up

The new A List Apart is back online. I've missed it since it's been dormant, using it fairly often during the last redesign project (mostly for the CSS lists article).

The new issue features Doug's article on CSS tabs, and it's absolutely terrific. Doug's got an amazing way of coming up with solutions to problems no one else can crack, and his solutions are really clever. I'd say he's one of the few people doing web design that can truly think outside of the box, but that phrase is so cliched as to be meaningless so I won't say it. Anyway, Doug never ceases to amaze me with the things he can come up with.

That all said, there were a few visual aspects of the new ALA site I feel could be improved. The front page feels a bit chaotic to me, with all that blazing red everywhere. Above the fold, I'd guess there are 25 links in four different sizes and different type treatments, but when I first looked at the site all I saw was red links everywhere and it was hard to know where to focus. The layout kind of reminds me of the excellent Nedward blog, which does a great job of visually separating content into "the important stuff on the left and the other stuff on the right" through the use of color in backgrounds and graphics. The other problem I have is the separation between articles on the front page and the archives. Scrolling through this list of CSS stories, it's hard to tell where one ends and another begins. I would guess whitespace would go a long way here. Adding 30-50px above each title would pad the page out and require more scrolling, but each article would be easily found and retreived from the growing lists. An alternative would be subtle separators of some sort, either CSS-enhanced horizontal rules or graphics. And lastly, the article widths feel about half as wide as they used to be. I don't know if they are really narrower or it's a bigger font, but the line-length feels abrupt compared to normal comfortable reading on other sites. I don't want to sound ungrateful, it's an amazing developer and designer resource, but the collaborative nature of the articles naturally brings out the design and developer critic in me.

Congrats on all the work Zeldman, et al. had to do to bring it back from the dead!

Free Culture!

I helped put together the new Creative Commons CD featuring all sorts of great licensed music, and it's all available for download.

Now that the pool of CC-licensed music has grown, we had a great deal of choices and as a result there are all sorts of songs in the mix. I've been listening to these songs for months and it's hard to pick favorites, they've all got some strengths. Don't miss the bonus remixes too, the creativity there was amazing.

The cost of consumer privacy

I recently signed up for phone service, this time with Verizon/GTE, and like my PacBell line in the bay area, they wanted to charge me for not listing my phone number in all their directories. I could argue that consumer privacy isn't a special privilege and that the whole idea is preposterous that I need to pay them not to sell my name, number, and address to anyone that wants it, but PacBell/SBC charged a negligible 26 cents a month. I wonder if such a low charge even recoups the accounting costs, but it seemed like such a ridiculous amount I paid it without protest. Verizon, however, charges five times as much at $1.25 a month. Fifteen bucks a year to maintain my own privacy is no longer a negligible amount.

Years ago, phone companies developed business models where they would sell space in white and yellow pages, and eventually the complete listings to telemarketers and other companies. If I don't want to take part, I have to pay to make up the difference they could be making by selling my info. I can't think of any other business where this is acceptable, but it seems pretty messed up.

Crap. Goodbye Elliot.

Elliot Smith killed himself today. I downloaded a few songs of his back in the Napster heyday and ended up buying a few CDs. I had the opportunity to see him live a few times in SF, but never went.

Crap, I really liked his stuff.

It's a little weird, in a life-imitates-art sort of way, to realize his song was used in a suicide scene (in The Royal Tennenbaums), and now he's gone and done that himself.

The Bl ö g B ö ö kc ä se

This is dangerous (to my bank account): IKEA has finally embraced the web. You can order some stuff online and they have their entire catalog online, either as a painful flash interface, or you can just download the whole thing as a PDF.

After spending weeks browsing through expensive modern furnishing and top o' the line interior design catalogs, I'm impressed at how cheap IKEA remains and how closely they pay tribute/copy classic designs (pdf of a room that looks vaguely Eames-ish or Danish 1950s). I guess it'll always be considered semi-disposable swedish furniture, but many of their pieces are looking lovlier than ever.

That reminds me: I used to joke about "The IKEA rule." If you were moving from one region of the country that had a local IKEA to another that also had a nearby store, you had to destory or give away all your IKEA products, then repurchase at the new location, 'cause all that fiberboard ain't making the trip intact. There was also a point in my life when I longed for IKEA products that used startch-based materials instead of wood. That way, when you wanted to move and get rid of your stuff, you'd simply submerge them in water until they dissolved. No muss, no fuss.

Nerdvana

Thanks to Michael Heilemann's detailed tutorial and some spring cleaning of my desktop files (half an hour ago, there were about 300 files on my desktop, now all organized into directories), my workstation PC looks like this (with windows up, everything minimized -- both ~200kb jpegs), and I'm extremely pleased with the look and improved workflow. I share my desk with a powerbook I customized to behave more like windows, and now I can get both desktops to behave almost exactly the same.

Me gusto del mundo

Every 18 months or so I remember a site called Adventures in Advertising by Tom DelMundo. And like a Skinner Box rat, I check every archive to catch up where I last left off. Here's one of the many good ones.

Go!

Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs Sox Cubs

update: Noooooooo!

second update: fer chrissakes!

It's like the Jetsons. Finally.

The company LG appliances has a couple things that should have been invented and perfected long ago: the combo washer/dryer and the microwave/toaster. Progress!

Carrying on the family tradition of ruining games in a single move

Hey, I didn't know Bill Buckner moved to Chicago and had a son!

Thoughtcrime!

I've been a happy customer of the iTunes Music Store, but in order to let my TiVo stream music through my home theater system, and in order to hear music on my MP3-playing car stereo system, I have to first burn everything I buy to a blank CD, then import them as MP3 files. It's a pain and makes a lot of 10 cent coasters I have no other use for.

It seems like there should be a way, or a hack, out there to burn the AAC songs to a virtual CD blank on the filesystem, then rip the tracks off that. Still tedious, at least it would remove the need to waste physical media converting to a more widely supported music format.

If anyone knows of a way, email me and I'll keep it to myself. It's probably a borderline DMCA violation for me to even think these thoughts, but I bought the music legally and I want to use it in my entertainment devices, not in P2P clients.

update: looks like there is more than one way to skin a cat.

3,649 to go...

I removed the "daily" photo thing that was on this site, because I was being pretty lazy and only updating once a month as of late. But instead of simply stopping that feature, I chose to do something a bit more ambitious.

I like taking photos on a regular basis. I get a chance to practice and improve my technique and I also get the chance to capture memories in a format I can easily archive.

As I've gotten older, I've noticed that time seems to move faster. The rate of change of those around me makes my head spin. Children seem to double in size between the times I see them.

Today I turn 31 years old, and to help me document the next ten years I've started a new site for daily photographs, at: http://tenyearsofmylife.com/.

From 31 to 41 I'm sure there will be a lot of interesting things coming up along the way. I'm going to shoot for one shot per day, but I'm not sure how many will be taken on the same day. I may eek out a dozen photos shot on one day over time, or simply try and pick the best shots from the previous few weeks of photos to showcase. I'll see how it goes.

Back when MTV still played music

I'm buying all three of these DVDs the day they come out. The Gondry clip is unbelievable.

The Cinderella series

Everyone's pulling for Sox vs. Cubs in the World Series, right? I don't even follow baseball that much and I can't wait to watch it if they both win their league series. The only thing that could make it a better match-up would be if somehow the Indians could also be battling for the pennant in some freakish round-robin thing.

On being bought

After seeing ex machina" href="http://snowdeal.org/section/ex_machina/archives/2003_10_01_index.html#106579162010543063">this post (to answer that post directly, I would have been happy with $20 a month, since that's what I hoped for) and this other one about Google ads being the equivalent of a chilling effect bought and paid for, I think both authors are missing a vital point in what I wrote last week.

The bottom line for all this discussion is simple: google ads aren't designed for typical blogs.

Maybe I made the mistake of calling my article "blogging for dollars" since it's not exactly blogging in the classic sense. I don't post about the cheese sandwich I ate earlier, I don't post about politics, and the site isn't a mirror reflection of me. I'm not the least bit worried about Google's terms of service because I'm not blogging my thoughts on advertising systems at the site. It's totally focused on gadget freakdom and not at all a personal site.

People worried about carrying Google ads on their personal site and wondering if they would be silenced over it should worry more about how pointless of an endeavor the ads will be. Unless you're focusing on a specific thing, they're not going to pan out at all. If your blog is about anything and everything, you shouldn't run the ads and you won't have to worry about any terms of service agreements.

The ads only work on focused sites like my pvr blog, news about WiFi, news about gadgets, news about motorcycles, and the latest mac software news. Overall, those sites barely resemble a standard weblog, and don't have much in common aside from the formatting.

So on the subject of advertising money killing the independent free-form nature of blogging, I say it's much ado about nothing.

Weird find

I have no idea why these work, but they do:
http://www.amazon.com/weblog
http://www.amazon.com/bob

Shannon on the new porn/guitar ads

She's a porn star, for crying out loud - she's good with fingers AND can take direction. And seriously - get that girl a pick. Porn stars are also good with props. She can handle a pick.

-- Shannon Campbell

World Cup

Though the US lost, tonight's World Cup game was a great one to watch (photos from my seat: 1, 2, 3). The packed house was on the edge of its seat the entire time, watching as the US team put together play after play attacking the German goal, but coming up short in the end. I knew the game would be a tough one to win for the US after watching Germany rule its previous matches. They controlled the mid-field, won most balls in the air, and had an amazing goalie.

The Canada-Sweden game that followed was also a nail-biter, but Sweden controlled the second half and put a couple in late to get a well-deserved win. I'm looking forward to both the final match (Germany will likely kill Sweden), and the 3rd place game between the US and Canada (I'm hoping for a US win, I think we can pull it out).

It's a bummer the US team lost, but it was a great night of soccer. I'm bummed to hear the WUSA doesn't look like it will be playing in 2004, I would have loved to drive up to Seattle to see Mia Hamm and Abby Wambach play.

Brad Sucks (not in the least)

A couple months ago I picked up the Brad Sucks CD based on Scott's recommendation, before I heard a single note.

It sat around for a few weeks until one day I decided to rip the disc into iTunes and toss it into the random work mix. It spun for a week and it wasn't until I looked for the songs today that I realized what I've been enjoying all week. I have a few John Vanderslice and Folk Implosion albums in my library and I assumed the songs I heard and liked were one of those bands, but it was all Brad. "Making Me Nervous" is my current favorite song on earth. It sounds like the best of Folk Implosion and the rest of the Brad Sucks disc is really good too.

It's well worth the five bucks, and once again I'm amazed at the full sound a record-at-home musician can create. The days of multi-million dollar recording studios and thousands of dollars per hour rental fees are dead. Now it's just a cheap PC, a little equipment, a little software, and some expertise to make music.

Life ain't nuthin' but blogs and money

So I finally wrote up my experiences with Google's Adsense system and my PVRblog. I'm hoping it helps people looking to commercialize weblogs do a better job (also, the first thing I should do is hire an editor, it's a long one).

Blogging for Dollars

In mid-July of this year, the new weblog service Typepad launched, and after a couple months of beta-testing I was hooked on the features. Rather than try and move my highly-customized blog over to the service, I decided starting a new site would be much easier, so I decided my next site would be housed at Typepad. I've long been a fan of TiVo, having owned one for the past three years. Last year I finally started hacking them and found it to be much easier than I thought. I have always followed TiVo news, I'm often writing long emails evangelizing the product to those that ask, and I've wanted to write easier how-tos than the ones I'd read on TiVo hacking. I realized then that a blog focused on the digital recorder space would be perfect for Typepad, and PVRblog was born (actually I originally wanted to call it DVRblog, but accidentally bought pvrblog.com before I realized my mistake, so pvrblog it is). When I started planning and designing the site, I realized that since it was at Typepad, it was going to cost me some money to run it each month. Currently I already have one commercial unix account, a co-located debian server, and a co-located windows server. I wasn't looking forward to another monthly bill, so I looked at my options and realized I could throw Google's Adsense textads into the template and perhaps defray the costs. I designed the site templates with this in mind, making sure there was room for it. My dream with PVRblog was to make five dollars a week, in order to easily cover any hosting costs I've run Adsense textads on Blogroots since Google launched the service, but they weren't very lucrative. I figured it was probably because "blog" wasn't too highly sought after of a keyword, so consequently Blogroots usually make only a couple bucks a week, tops. My dream with PVRblog was to make five dollars a week, in order to easily cover any hosting costs. I've been blogging for four years and paying for it throughout, but if I could write a blog I enjoy doing and have it pay for itself, well, that certainly would be something. I launched PVRblog publicly on July 16th with half a dozen posts, then announced it on my personal blog. In a matter of hours, dozens of other sites linked to it, the site ascended Daypop and Blogdex's lists, and all told the debut was a big success. Late that night I remembered the ads and logged into my Adsense account to see how the day went. I clicked over to reports to see the activity. From approximately 3,000 visits (not too shabby at all), enough people clicked through that I made $40 in the first 24 hours. The first thought that came to mind was this:

Great googly-moogly, holy crap. Crap, crap, crap. What the hell just happened? What did I do? What does this mean for weblogs? Would the world be covered in textads when I tell people about this? Shit!

To say the least, I was a bit freaked out. I was measuring everything in increments of $20, hoping to make my monthly hosting and in one day I had enough to pay for two months of hosting. The next day brought another month of paid hosting, and this continued until a few days later I was a Yahoo pick for new site of the day and it resulted in twice the traffic I'd seen so far and over $100 in click-thrus came in during a 24 hour period. Once again, I freaked out.

Micropayments suck. No, really.

I've been a big fan of Scott McCloud's comic works for years and I have optimistically followed his essays and speeches about someday paying writers and artists online through micropayments. I've been a user of Paypal since May of 2000 and have bought many a CD and shirt from local musicians selling online. I've followed the recent launch of Bitpass and have used it to view McCloud's latest work and buy a pile of MP3s from various bands. I've used all these systems but I realize their limitations: uptake is minimal when compared to most web surfers, and few people probably go through all the trouble to pay anyone for content. after using micropayment systems like Bitpass, and compared to something like Google's Adense, I've come to the conclusion that micropayments indeed suck Clay Shirky recently tore McCloud and Bitpass a new one over this (Scott wrote a response), and after using micropayment systems like Bitpass, and compared to something like Google's Adense, I've come to the conclusion that micropayments indeed suck. There are a whole host of reasons for their suckitude, but the biggest obstacle has to do with user experience. People are lazy. You are lazy. I am very lazy. I don't want to lift a finger to do anything generally, unless it is really worth it. When you're reading stuff online and you're hit with signup forms, registration forms, or worse of all, payment forms, most people close their browser or go somewhere else. It's just how we work. I haven't read the LA Times website since last year when they instituted a draconian registration process that requires your email for their spam cannon. When users are faced with what looks like work when they were expecting to enjoy reading something, you can bet they will leave, be pissed, or both. Now don't get me wrong, I love Scott McCloud's work and I'd gladly pay him a buck a day to produce the high-quality comics he's capable of, but if I was randomly hitting Bitpass "pay me to see the next page" screens in my web wanderings, I wouldn't be wandering for very long. I'd be leaving. And no matter how far micropayment companies take the technology, there is always going to be a cost (no pun intended) involved with paying for content. You'll have to click buttons, log into extra screens, authorize your accounts and the like. Not all of those steps can be automated and the process will continue to be slightly painful for anyone going through with it (the vast majority will not go through with it). With unobstrusive textads like Google's, the experience for users of your site is only slightly changed. They now have to see an ad (depending on how well you integrated it into the site), and a few of them may very well click on the ads. As the site owner, you get money trickling in, everyone and anyone can view your site, and some people will even find better information or bargains on stuff they wanted. Your readership can grow as much as you want, and usually this carries with it higher click-thrus and more money. Compared to micropayments, unobtrusive textads look a million times better for both the author and the reader.

Google's innovations

Google doesn't get much credit for what it has done to revitalize online advertising. Google's textads aren't just a great technology because they are less of a hassle for readers (compared to micropayments or banner/popup/popunder ads), they are also better than any other textads I've ever seen. I built my own system in fall of 2001 for MetaFilter, and while it did mimic the format, it didn't have any of the content-sensitive filtering, nor did it have any performance limits built-in. When I launched MetaFilter's textads, the first ads were terrific. They were often members' blogs or new services other members had launched. People clicked on them like crazy because they were loaded with fun new sites. It was ads by the members, for the members of MetaFilter. This is typical of other services I've launched online — the early adopters are knowledgeable and enthusiastic, so their first contributions are terrific. A few articles were written about MetaFilter and the new ads and soon after several copycat systems sprang up. People talked about a new revolution in unobtrusive advertising on corporate and hobbyist sites. I enabled anyone to advertise on MetaFilter, and although I kept some standards to keep erotica sites and spammer sites out of the system, eventually most people advertising weren't members and didn't know MetaFilter too well. Many placed ads based on the promises the highly positive textad articles talked about. Their ads were often for things that no one was interested in, even though I warned many advertisers before taking their ads and their money. As people realized the majority of ads weren't that great, they started to ignore the textad box on the front page. The click-thru rates fell like a brick, from 5% in the first month down to the typical advertising industry average of 0.5%, and like that, the revolution of textads was over (there are still ads at MetaFilter and a few dozen people use them for some fairly high-quality ads these days). Google did two amazing things to prevent the same activity in their own system. First off, most everyone knows they do content-sensitive filtering on ads. This is vitally important for sites like PVRblog, but at MetaFilter, any ad was randomly placed next to any content. Google goes to great lengths to make sure that any ads you see have something to do with your searches or the content that accompanies them. The second innovation is their performance metrics and lower limits imposed on advertisers. Simply put, if your ad sucks, you will get booted, so the quality system-wide of the ads never goes down. It's brilliantly simple, but if your ad was written poorly or you picked the wrong keywords, the click-thru rates will reflect that, and Google often ends campaigns that don't meet a minimum of criteria. This Darwinian system ensures the strong survive, that ads are highly targeted, well-written, and used by a good percentage of searchers and readers, making the system as a whole work. Simply put, Google not only invented the textad, they perfected it, and thanks to those innovations, Adsense carries those benefits to site owners and readers.

Adsense advantages

I've met with some great success from Adsense, beyond my wildest dreams, but one of my first thoughts was "what does this mean for blogs." When I asked a few friends during my initial freakout phase, even those that had low opinions of blogs in the past saw this as a ray of hope. People creating websites for the fun of it have never really had a way to be compensated directly for maintaining high quality sites. "This is a wonderful thing" they said. "For once, writers can get a break, by finding a way to pay for hosting and maybe even encourage them to write more" was something else I heard. When was the last time you heard someone say they received a check for advertising on their hobby site that could be used to purchase a fully loaded Aeron chair? I think the success of Adsense means a lot for not just blogs, but for any website produced by writers, historians, artists, and fans. One of the first great things about the web was the plethora of amazingly informative sites maintained by passionate individuals in their free time. There's no reason any topic-focused site can't benefit from Adsense. It's my hope in writing this piece to show how this is a potential boon to other website authors. Make no mistake, last month PVRblog made a lot of money from Adsense. When was the last time you heard someone say they received a check for advertising on their hobby site that could be used to purchase a fully loaded Aeron chair? Sounds like something you might have heard in 1998, no? Well it's true today, and I hope a lot more people meet with the same success.

Tips for a successful Adsense site

I know that a lot of the PVRblog's luck with adsense was just that: accidental luck. I had no idea so many people would like the idea of a blog about DVR technology. I didn't know TiVo was such a sought after keyword at Google. I had no idea my previous projects' Google ranking would help my site out when I first linked to the site from my blog. The whole thing was one big happy accident, but I've noticed some trends between what I did and what others have tried. What follows are things I've noticed worked to my advantage. 1. Pick a topic Blogs are about anything and everything and it isn't every day that you find a good blog focused on a topic. In order to have any remote chance of success gaining an interested audience and getting good on-topic ads showing up, pick a narrow topic you are passionate about and run with it. I would guess that I do just as good or better than Gizmodo on textads (Gizmodo certainly covers the same area of PVRblog, just not as in-depth) even though I probably have 1/10th the traffic because my site is more tightly focused. If there's anything in this list that requires a drastic change on the part of website authors, this is it. Focused blogging isn't that popular but I'm convinced it's the only way to have a chance to carve out a niche on the web. If you want to proclaim yourself as an expert on a topic to both an audience and search engines so that people will know you're the one site to go to for information, you'll have to focus. Focus and be as specific as you can. 2. Consider your topic as it relates to the web If what you are aiming for is ad revenue, it helps if your topic is something you can buy products related to it. It also helps if those products can be bought online and people are comfortable with it. One of my favorite topic sites (arguably slightly blog-like) is Kicksology. Professor K knows everything and anything about basketball shoes and about once a week I drop into the site to see what's new in cutting edge shoe design. Often when I see a rave review on a cool looking shoe, I want to know how much it costs and if I can buy them. It's an impulse buying thing, but if you notice Kicksology recently added Google's ads to the site, but they're not super-focused. Ideally, if I was reading about a new shoe, I'd want ads offering the same shoe for purchase right now. I've checked out a few dozen of the reviews, but the new air jordan review is the only one that carries with it targetted ads. Generally speaking, Kicksology is about something not normally ordered or sold online and the ads are often a poor fit for the content (no one's fault really, people just don't buy that many shoes online). TiVos are very close to the web. People buy them online, they look up tips and hacks for them, and resellers have tons of TiVos to move. I didn't really think about it when I started the site, but thanks to the mass availability and customers looking for deals on them, the web's a natural place to shop for a new TiVo. If you're really interested in knowing how well a topic might work out, try going through the process of placing a Google Adwords ad. During the process they'll tell you how much a keyword will cost you, and you can use that to determine if writing a blog about goldfish is going to be more lucrative than the one you could be writing about golden retrievers. 3. Be passionate and write your ass off Don't start a blog just to turn a buck, because it's going to be clear to your audience that you don't really care about the topic if you don't offer much beyond press releases from companies. If you want to have a site that ranks highly at Google, write how-to article after how-to article and offer content no one could find anywhere else. I love this guide to ranking higher in google because it doesn't focus exclusively on HTML tricks or stoop to tips on gaming the system, it simply says: write the most useful website on earth and everyone will link to you, which will make you #1. I started PVRblog because I've been following the space for the past three years and I have dozens of in-depth tutorials I've written and want to write about the subject. I'm enthusiastic about the topic and I look forward to spending a few downtime hours writing articles, conducting interviews, or reviewing books and hardware for the site. 4. Designing for Google and your audience Don't underestimate the power of Google and google-ability of your site. About half of all the traffic to PVRblog is from a Google search. If people are looking for information on how to upgrade a tivo, they might find my articles about it, and alongside every article are four links to upgrade kits at various prices. I wouldn't be surprised if the click-thrus are crazy high on those links, for those users. I do the same thing myself, often looking up reviews on cellphones and following ad links to help find the best prices I can. On the technical side of things, having an accessible, valid XHTML site, with good semantics, good page titles, and good filenames helps Google index your site. Typepad does all these things extremely well right out of the box. After I launched PVRblog, Google indexed the entire site within hours and reindexes it often. The site shows up in the top ten for many common TiVo hacking or TiVo feature searches. Searchers are often looking for info to help a purchase, and are likely to click an ad, so it's worth thinking about them. Nick Denton recently wrote about the design of a weblog may change based on Adsense, and I'd say he's got a lot of good points, but be careful that you don't go too far, forcing people to make extra clicks just so you can stream more ads at them. Your audience will pick up on this eventually and bail. What not to do Of course now that I've given you a few tips, it's important to reiterate what you shouldn't do. Don't just slap ads on your blog and expect to get rich the next day. If every blog about anything on earth is going to carry adsense boxes, their utility is going to go down and people won't be likely to click on them. Don't be disappointed if you're not pulling down big bucks on your topic-focused, well-googled site. It takes time to build an audience and gain links from people that find your content useful. If you follow these guidelines, it's quite possible you'll be able to pay for your own hosting. Eventually, you might make more.

The downsides

Like anything, it's not all roses and Adsense is far from absolutely perfect. It's got two big drawbacks: the approval system and the terms of service. The approval system is evidently run by humans, and they state upfront they won't accept personal sites. I would guess that's likely because most personal sites aren't focused on much of anything besides a specific person, and hence would be hard to advertise to. For even focused sites, some people have had real trouble convincing the Adsense folks to approve them, even when their sites could potentially produce great on-target ads. The decisions are sometimes arbitrary and will likely work against Google if it continues to mistakenly deny legitimate sites. The other big problem is the terms of service for Adsense which have received a lot of scorn recently after a few people were booted from the program without any recourse. Google took it a step farther and beefed up the legalese to even prohibit the discussion of the TOS, which is kinda nuts. Of course, I've benefited greatly from Adsense, and it's probably no surprise that the TOS issues weren't a dealbreaker for me personally. Google's between a rock and a hard place on this issue. If they were more transparent, like they have been with their search results, people would no doubt spend their lives gaming the system. What Google hasn't stated upfront about how pagerank works, people have reverse-engineered to great effort. There are whole sites and thousands of people that dedicate their lives to getting their sites as high as possible in Google, whether or not their site has good information or helps out web surfers. These folks see no problem in making Google less useful for searchers if it means their clients are happy with their rank. Google's spent every day since their launch in a cat-and-mouse race to beat those that seek to game the system. If Adsense were transparent, say if they told you how many clicks were allowed per hour from a page or an IP, you can bet that within a couple hours people would produce adsense link clicking bots and bot farms that carried hundreds of IPs solely to produce fake click-thrus for cash. So it looks like they are trying to keep a lid on this, keep their methods as secret as possible and went as far as to put a gag order on the entire subject. I don't know what's going to work out for them in the end, but I think they could potentially lose a lot of money whether or not they tell everyone how Adsense works exactly. The future will tell us if they made the right move here. Areas for improvement The tools offered for authors using Adsense are pretty paltry. It's a new service and I expect it to change, but it'd be nice if the results were more granular so you could compare which pages produced the highest click-thrus, and tailor your content to that. It'd be nice if you could see a breakdown of each domain/site you were using the ads on. The new custom colors and layouts are great, but it'd be nice if you could track how different sizes/colors were performing to enhance your design. Currently you just see a number for views, a click-thru total, and a dollar value assigned to that.

Conclusions

A long-ago promise of the web was that people could share their expert opinions and thoughts on anything, and others in the world would find them. Search engines have helped the web live up to that promise and it works well today. Google's Adsense goes one further, in that someone writing passionately and expertly on a topic can now also make some money doing it. Nick Denton has been saying niche blogs could turn a profit for a while now, and after my experiences I'd have to say he was right. The opportunity is now there — if you've ever wanted to write a topic-focused blog and wondered if you could get paid for it, Adsense could make it all work for you.

Finally uploaded

I've been fairly quiet here for the past couple months due to a million projects at work, one of which I finally got to finish tonight. We revamped the Creative Commons website, and although it largely looks the same, there are some new sections, a reorganization, and complete recoding from the ground up, using the latest CSS tricks.

The logo is now using this image replacement trick to hide the logo from text browsers. I removed the javascript rollovers and script used in the navigation on every page, and instead replaced it with the CSS rollover technique, which borrowed heavily from the techniques used on the Lee Jeans site. It's a really cool trick, each nav bar item is actually a larger image that shows both states, with CSS to move and hide the parts that don't need to show. As these technologies and tricks are constantly evolving, Simplebits has a great tutorial on doing a three-stage rollover all with CSS (I'll have to copy that and reduce the number of images and lines of CSS further). Before I was doing navigation and subnavigation using nested div elements, but now everything is a nicely organized, unordered list styled with CSS.

The end result are pages that look exactly the same as before, but the code is about 20% tighter (the site was already valid XHTML/CSS before), pages will be easily indexed by search engines, and the content will be more accessible to all. Take a look at the about page, then turn off styles in your browser and view source to see what all the work was for. Now, if I could only get IE 5 on the mac to allow for float:right to work when applied to a form element, I could get rid of the last table in the header, but even with that, the site is valid XHTML, it's simpler to update, and carries both rich semantics and increased accessibility.

But don't just take my HTML programmer word for it, there really is a business case to be made for coding websites like this.

Upcoming.org Events

As I mentioned before, I would eventually automate my upcoming events listing using mt-rssfeed. Thanks to this tutorial, about five minutes after I started tinkering I was done adding it to the sidebar of this site. I love it when stuff just works like that.

Gettin' the Led out

I crapped on School of Rock when I saw the first trailer for it, but lately I've heard one postive review after another. Apparently it could have been the crappy film everyone's seen a thousand times before, but Linklater pulled it out and let Jack Black run with it.

I just got back from seeing it, and although there were one or two cheesy parts that felt like every 80s movie ending I'd ever seen, the rest of the film was pure Tenacious D rocking with Jack Black (sadly, Kyle Gass was nowhere to be found). Basically it was like all of JB's parts from High Fidelity mixed in with a bunch of kids and a cheesy plot, but somehow it all worked and was quite entertaining.

practical jokes powered by wishlist hacking

I was happy to read that Meg got her gift today, and with some forward planning, Mark even got photos of the actual event (I told him I would give him my first born if he'd take photos on the sly). I think the photos capture it well:

1. Oh boy, free amazon stuff!
2. From Matt! With a funny note attached, I wonder what it is...
3. What the hell is this piece of crap? Is this some sort of joke?

Looks like it went off perfectly.

So here's the backstory on the joke. When Meg lived in SF, I heard first-hand all about the wonders of Seabiscuit for years. Eventually when I finally saw a Seabiscuit special, I was totally let down by the hype. I was convinced he was the greatest horse that ever lived, a Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan of racing, but it turns out he won a couple big events but otherwise just made for a good underdog story at a key point in this nation's history. We used to argue about the details of the story, but suffice it to say she loved the Seabiscuit and hated the Admiral.

Anyway, when I saw Meg dissin' the War Admiral the other day, I decided to see if an old Amazon bug was still around, the one that lets you send stuff not on a wishlist to people's wishlist address. Amazon closed up all the holes except one, and I 2nd-day-aired the toy along with a note that said "HA HA! War Admiral RULES!" I really wanted to see the punchline to the joke, when she would get the box from amazon, would think it is Seabiscuit, then realize it's her nemesis. Judging from the photos, I call this joke a rousing success.

Now, a tutorial on how to do it:

How to send something not on someone's wishlist to that someone

I really hope Amazon doesn't close this hole because I actually use it for good, not evil, and not usually for jokes. I often buy someone something extra to go along with their wishlist item, so if they wanted a simpsons figure, I often use this hack to buy them another one that goes with it.

So go to someone's wishlist page, then add something from their list to your cart by hitting the buy button. Then when you are directed to the quasi-checkout/upselling page, you must scroll down all the way to the bottom to the button that says "Continue Shopping" in their list. Now, you have their address stored, and can go hog-wild ordering stuff. Just click anything in the top nav or run a search to get them something else. Add that something else to your cart then proceed to checkout.

On the address page, pick their wishlist address. Next write a gift note on the thing you really want to give them, if you want. Click continue. On the Shipping Options page, there's a list of the goods, with a button that says "change quantities or delete". Click that, and then click the delete button for the thing originally on their wishlist. You should be able to complete checkout, and they'll get something not on their list.

Again, use this for good, not evil. It's a fun little hack and I sincerely hope Amazon lets it stick around, I know friends have enjoyed getting extra gifts they didn't ask for, and Meg even said it was a funny joke.

My precious numb ass

Some exclusive superfan screenings of the LoTR trilogy are being planned. Check out the Dec. 16 screening of both extended films plus the new film as a chaser. What's that, like 12 hours of film in a single sitting?

I can only imagine that with my adult diapers on, I could tell other patrons trying to leave my row for the bathroom: "you shall not pass!"

(thanks lance for the heads-up)