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.

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.

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.

Whilst I have a LinkedIn profile, I’m not an addict. I’m not the sort of person who upon meeting someone new immediately sends them a LinkedIn invite. This makes expanding my network a long-term process, however I just stumbled on Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn by Guy Kawasaki. Even though most of the ten are relatviely obvious, its well worth a read. I immediately adopted a few of his recommendations.