Data centres to off-centre opinion

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.

Last weekend I added the final sensor to the Davis Vantage Pro 2 weather station on the roof; a UV sensor. The software which reads the data has been updated to read UV value and calculate sunshine hours per day, both of which are automatically reflected in the Weather gadget. I have yet to update live weather page as this is quite a big job; like many things IT related its not as simple as adding a graph to the page – the software I use has been updated and now has an editor, but it will require a bit of work to migrate the existing page to the new version so I’ll save that for another day.

1. Clean, Partiton and Format the USB stick

Run CMD.EXE and type the following command. Note: This set of commands assumes that the USB flash drive is addressed as “disk 1″. Double check that by doing a list of the disks (type “list disk”) before cleaning it).

• diskpart
• select disk 1
• clean
• create partition primary
• select partition 1
• active
• format fs=fat32
• assign
• exit

2. Copy Windows DVD ROM content to the USB Stick

Type the following command to copy the Windows DVD content to the USB stick.

• xcopy d:\*.* /s/e/f e:\

3. Boot your computer from the USB stick & install Windows as normal

I recently got another Xbox but when I tried to stream music from my HomeServer it would throw the following error; “Can’t connect. Make sure you have activated this console on your computer”

The existing Xbox continued to stream without any problems so I knew streaming was working.

Windows HomeServer uses Windows Media Connect (not Windows Media Player) to stream, and whilst no config is exposed inside the WHS console you can still configure it via c:\program files\media connect\wmccfg.exe. I found I had a load of devices (including the 2nd Xbox) listed as denied – Media Connect only supports 10 devices. Removing some of the old devices (PCs which had been rebuilt for example) and changing the new Xbox to Allow fixed the problem.

General Shortcuts 

Taskbar Shortcuts

Windows Explorer

Obviously these are based on the beta build and may (albeit unlikely) be cut/change for the RTM.

With the explosion of blogs and social networking sites over the last few years, its apparent (at least to me) that whoever creates a compelling aggregation service will be onto a winner. Facebook is getting there, you can already integrate it with Twitter, but what about all the other information sources we each use?

I consider aggregation from two perspectives; the publisher (me as an individual and my internet persona) and reader (me seeing everything my freinds & colleagues are up to).

Why do I need a publisher?

• I have several blogs each focused on a particular theme
• I have Facebook, LinkedIn, Windows Live and numerous other online profiles
• I publish photos on my Flickr account, in my Facebook profile and in my Windows Live Photo Gallery
• I scroble music on Last.FM and I have a Zune profile

Few of these are connected, and many now offer competing services. Should I be uploading photos to my Facebook profile, my Flickr account or my Windows Live gallery? For me, the answer is all of them because each offer somthing unique. Flickr is great for “just sharing photos”, Facebook is great for sharing photos relating to some event and Windows Live is just plain easy with the local client (Windows Live Photo Gallery) and I tend to use it for my climbing photos. I want all these connected so anyone can see all my photos, nicely organised irrespective of the service they’re hosted on. The same applies for blogs, tweets etc; it makes it easy for you to see what I’m doing or thinking about. The converse of this is my desire to see everything my friends are up to, in one place. Aka, the reader aspect.

Whoever is able to pull together a social graph/aggregator like this, whilst still allowing the uniqueness of each service to be exposed (i.e. not attempting to replace each service, just provide a launch pad) will be onto a winner. They may even be one of the first to make money from social networking.

After writing this blog entry and searching for a suitable image, I found that Google are ahead of me and already have an API which could help a would-be developer build a social aggregator.

Spotify, the new on-demand music streaming service is an interesting (and in my opinion, innevitable) evolution of internet radio. Its idea is simple, install the client, create an account, type the name of an atrist, enjoy. Unlike Last.FM, you’re not forced to listen to your chosen artist interspersed with others, its U2 all the way (or whoever you chose).

From a technology standpoint, they’ve done nothing clever: iTunes and Zune basically do the same thing, only they deliver you an MP3/WMA/AAC rather than stream. Oh, and you have to pay for tracks you download from iTunes and Zune Marketplace.

What makes Spotify interesting is their business model; either listen to the odd add or pay a monthly subscription for ad-free listening. No doubt most users (me included) will be opting for the ad-funded version, it will be interesting to see how many tracks per ad Spotify settle on to make money. In other words, Spotify is to Music what Google is to search from a business perspective.

Now the clever part; if they’re able to profile their users, they will be able to target us with more relevant ads, which turns into revenue for them. If I were them, I’d be partnering with Microsoft, Google and Yahoo to obtain user profile information. Which leads me to think they’ll be bought pretty soon. It may not be one of those three, I could see a media company picking them up, but rest assured, if they’re able to prove the business model works they’ll be bought, and soon.

Can Last.FM evolve to compete? Will MySpace, iTunes or Zune offer something similar? I don’t know, but I’m sure they’re watching, very closely.

I’ve known about Twittervision for a while; basically it plots twits on a map of the world in near real-time. Its fun to sit and watch for a minute or so, but I can’t help but think it needs some filtering and aggregation to make it truely useful.

For example, a filter/search box allowing you to enter a term would show you the relevant twits relating to that subject from around the world. Watching this for a few minutes (or even better, some ability to record and see a timeline) would show you what different parts of the world thought about the subject.