Data centres to off-centre opinion

We’re selling our house at the moment and decided to try the internet agent route rather than a traditional estate agent. Our rationale is they’re a lot cheaper and most people now find properties via sites like Right Move and Zoopla.

Once our property was listed on the various property sites I set up a Facebook ad to see if it would drive much traffic, and in the process realised that Facebook are missing a trick (or more likely they’re working on it but dont have it ready yet); the ability to target ads not only on demographics and geography, but on status updates/wall posts.

Its easy enough to target people over a certain age who live within a certain number of miles of Woking, but what if I could target people who also posted to their wall/updated their status with “house hunting” or “just seen a lovely hose” or “estate agent”? We’d be talking about highly targeted ads that Bing and Google could only dream of. And they’d be more valuable to me as an advertiser, so I’d be willing to pay more.

I’m sure this is on the way…

Voyages of World War One Royal Navy warships are being used to help scientists understand the climate of the past and unearth new historical information, with help from the public. Visitors to the website www.oldweather.org, which launched earlier in October, are being invited to input weather observations of the routes taken by any of 280 Royal Navy ships. Once on the website, volunteers will be asked to transcribe information from the digital copies of historical logbooks, making notes of weather and any interesting events.

If you have a fascination for weather like me, you may find the Weather Winter Wonderland open day at the Weather Stop interesting. In addition to Technical Advice and Demonstrations of products and software, they’ll have mulled wine and mine pies

I’ve found the team invaluable as I slowly built up my weather equipment.

More details to follow on their Facebook page.

As an experiment, I created an add for my new weather site on Google, Microsoft and Facebook. I used an identical add on the three networks but different tagetting;

Microsoft Adcenter

UI is a bit confusing, the targetting is average (couldn’t find Woking, just Wokingham), the scheduling and budget settings are good.

Google Adwords

UI is better Adcenter but still cluttered and a bit confusing. The targetting is pretty good, allowing the user to target geographic location more accurately than MS (i.e. it found Woking). Adwords also gave you an indication of search volume when selecting keywords and also suggested additional keywords and estimated the #searches that used them per month – useful to expand your reach.

Facebook Advertising

UI is very straight forward and I found it clearer than either of the others. Unsurprisingly, the targetting is very very good, after all you share pretty much every bit of demographic info with Facebook. I targetting a 10 mile radius of Woking which Facebook claimed had an estimated reach of 95,440 people.

Cost Comparison (per click)

• MS ~£0.04
• Google ~£0.17
• Facebook ~£0.33

Impressions (two-day week end)

• MS: 40
• Google: 9,062
• Facebook: 99,233

Click Through Rate (CTR)

• MS: 2.5%
• Google: 0.07%
• Facebook: 0.021%

Traffic

Ironically, Yahoo and Ask both sent more traffic to the website than MS/Google or Facebook. Facebook was highest out of the three tested followed by DoubleClick (Google).

Conclusions

This wasnt a scientific test – the targetting was different on Facebook, which probably goes some way to explaining the low CTR as people were shown the ad based on location rather than a desire to find something about weather in Woking. The MS CTR was high, but with only 40 impressions I dont think you can make a fair comparison.

I’ll leave the ads running for a while then compare a longer period with more data.

There is no online schedule for Guilfest this year (at least that I could find), forcing everyone to spend £5 on a programme. To save you the hassle, I’ve listed the stages, acts and times for Sunday below. Enjoy.

Early reports that Google employees were tricked into installing malware which allowed the hackers to steal information have been corroborated by McAfee.

The attackers are alleged to have identified friends of the Google employees via social networks (like Facebook, LinkedIn etc) and then posed as those friends to trick the employees into installing the malware as they believed it was trustworthy. The industry is claiming this is a watershed in the sophistication of attacks, and undoubtedly it is very sophisticated, however it seems to me that its more evolutionary: for years spammers have been sending email which claims to be from someone else, indeed the most sophisticated spammers have obtained address lists from users (either via unpatched machines or more regularly now by tricking them into sharing their username/password for their email [see my post about Threadsy]) and send emails to all their contacts as if it came from that user. The clever (?) thing about this attack is the fact they used social networks specifically to get users to believe an IM was trustworthy.

There is no new lesson here, keep practicing the safe internet usage guidance which hasn’t changed for several years:

• Always install updates for your software (Windows/OS X, IE/Sarafi/Firefox, Flash etc)
• Run AV (AVG or Microsoft Security Essentials are good free versions)
• Enable the firewall
• Dont click on anything which looks suspicious or you’re not expecting, even if its from someone you know – always check the person sent it.

The guys over at downloadsquad.com have a good list of free Windows utilities; here. They include, CD/DVD burners, network synchronisation, file transfer, image editing etc.

They’ve also posted a list of Systems Admin utilities here.

A friend recently complained about how long his computer took to boot each time he switched it on. When I showed him the Sleep and Hibernate modes he immediately changed the default settings so his computer hibernated when he pressed the power button instead of shutting down.

This is exactly what I do with my work laptop, and indeed is what I’ve been doing since 2001. I also use Sleep when I’m only going to be away from my computer a short time (e.g. lunch, or walking to a meeting with my lapotp).

Both sleep and hibernate save the state of the computer so that when you next turn it on (or “resume”), the computer carries on where it left off; no need to start everything from scratch.

Hibernate saves the state to disk then turns the computer off, so it uses no power. Sleep saves the state in RAM which needs some power to work, so a small amount of power is consumed.

These features work irrespective of what Operating System you’re running (Windows XP, Vista, 7, Linux [e.g. Ubuntu] and Apple OSX ). Some boot more quickly than others (OSX vs Vista for example) but none are as fast as resuming from sleep or hibernate.

The only word of warning: reboot the computer once in a while (for me, thats a couple of times/month) to clear out garbage left from crashed programs.

I’m lucky enough to have received an invite to the beta of Threadsy. In their own words: threadsy is the world’s first integrated communications client! it combines your existing email, Facebook, and Twitter accounts into a unique, enjoyable experience.

Earlier this year I wrote a post asking for just such a thing, however now I’ve got it I’m faced with the question of trust. Do I trust Threadsy with my usernames and passwords for Twitter, Facebook, Live Mail etc? How do I know Threadsy is legitimate & secure? The answer is I don’t. I have to make up my own mind based on their privacy policy and reputation. The one thing they have going for them is the fact they were featured on Cnet – a site I do trust. In other words, trust by association, which is just like life: you build trust through recommendation/association and experience.

Error 0×80040154 indicates SelfSSL can’t open the metabase – which is to be expected on IIS 7 or IIS 7.5 by default as the metabase changed significantly from IIS6 to IIS7 (and SelfSSL is an IIS6 resource kit tool).

On IIS7 and IIS7.5, you need to install the IIS 6 Metabase Compatibility role service to be able to use SelfSSL. You don’t need any of the other IIS 6 role services installed.