Sunday, January 28
Hey, have you heard about this new guy, Barack Obama? I know he's kind of been under-the-RADAR, so you might not have read about THE LAST TIME HE BRUSHED HIS TEETH or seen the news footage of THAT TIME HE SET A MAGAZINE DOWN ON THE COUNTER.
Fine, so I'm the last person in America to hear about Obama. I'm often behind on the latest trends, because in 2000 I took a vow that I wouldn't watch national news until Bush was gone. On the other hand, I've kept some shred of my sanity for the last six years, so I feel like it's been a fair trade-off.
So, I guess everyone loves Obama -- he's warm and charismatic and smart and a hell of a speaker. And, frankly, America really needs a leader like him; someone where we can point to him an proudly say, "See that? That handsome, intellectual man? That well-spoken gentleman? The man who seems like he's from another era; a time when politics was reluctantly performed by men who felt it their moral duty to serve our country, not a free pass to act like a tiny dictator and line the pockets of your friends. Well, that man, my friends from around the world, is OUR president. Yes, I know, you're surprised -- frankly, we shocked ourselves on this one."
--
Here's something you may not know, though: there's a fly in the ointment. Barack, it turns out, is black. Yes, his skin has pigment -- LOTS of pigment, my friends. And some people HATE THEM SOME PIGMENT.
Now, I grew up in the deep South. In Savannah, Georgia -- one of the thirteen original colonies, and one of those cities where that was pretty much their biggest moment. It's a place where some hicks
still proudly fly a flag from a war they
lost in order to
keep their slaves. You'd think one or the other of these facts would be enough to discourage anyone from flying such a flag, but, hey. This is the South, with a capital S. "We got different traditions down here! We eat things called 'chitlins' with a straight face!"
Later I moved to Atlanta, Georgia: "Hotlanta," "The ATL"; a city that was one of the first in the country to have a black majority; a city whose mayor was the great Andrew Young (one of MLK's homies). Atlanta's motto was "The city too busy to hate" (I think Savannah's was "The city too fat to get off the porch and do anything about our hate.")
But even in Atlanta, in a lilly-white suburb of Stone Mountain, Georgia (there was only one black kid in my entire grade school), our neighbors to the east, our neighbors who brought us a home-made pie when we moved into our house, like you see in the movies, these neighbors kept a broom-handle in their trunk, which they introduced to us as their "n----- stick".
For protection, see. You know, in case, like, THEY break down the great wall we'd erected to the north and streamed down on us again, as THEY had so many times... Oh, wait, I'm thinking of the mongols in China. The blacks... well, I guess they pretty much just ran the city and ignored the racists hiding in the burbs.
--
So, can we actually elect a black man in America? Sure, cough, I'm not racist at all, and neither are YOU, of course. In fact, it's hard to find someone who's willing to stand up and say, "Dammit, I kind of fear black people, OK?" Yet we assume racists exist. We
know they do -- we saw the police and national "guard" turning displaced black citizens away from white neighborhoods, at gunpoint, after the flooding in New Orleans. We saw the authorities use force to break up groups of blacks who had banded together in the ruins of their city to forage for necessities.
I'm sure each of those policeman, each guardsman, has a story that he'll tell to explain why what he did was perfectly logical. Maybe some of us even believe those stories. But you know, I know, we all KNOW that if that city had been white and middle-class, there would have been a fleet of Army helicopters airlifting every man, woman and child out of that hellhole on the first fucking day. If it had been white and middle-class, it would have been evacuated BEFORE the hurricane by a fleet of Army trucks. If it had been white and middle-class, funding for maintaining the levies would never have been cut in the first place.
--
We Democrats don't want to pick a guy who can't win an election. Lots of people fear Hillary's campaign for this reason -- if a woman cannot be elected in America right now, we Democrats don't want her sucking votes away from a candidate who
could be elected, because at this point I think we can all agree that we'd be better of with a squeaky toy in the Oval Office than we would with another fellow named Bush, or really any other crony of Karl Rove's. At this point
no leadership would be better than the inverse leadership under Bush -- a squeaky toy wouldn't have started a pointless war with a country that posed no threat when we were in the middle of stamping out a real threat in another part of the world, for example, nor would a squeaky toy have spied on its citizens, lied about it, and then tried to make it legal, nor would a squeaky toy have tortured people in our name.
Me, though, I just don't
like Hillary. It's not that I fear her feminist power; I just can't stand her politics. Every time I see her getting behind some bill as a N.Y. senator, it's some crap that's sponsored by the RIAA, or it's some attempt to censor video games or some other family-friendly bullshit. Maybe she's trying to appeal to conservatives, but, damn, that's a stupid strategy. I mean, let's face it, lady, conservatives do NOT like you. They FAMOUSLY don't like you. You are pretty much the flag around which conservatives rally when they want to bond together about something they don't like.
You aren't going to win them over by talking about families and crap, any more than I'm going to suddenly become appealing to lesbians by mentioning how much money I give to Planned Parenthood. (P.S. Your daughter Chelsea is really hot and I'd love to date her.)
--
But back to Barack... as I said, I haven't watched the news, so I've just seen bits and snatches -- headlines about how his was the only moving speech was at the DNC convention, etc. So I went to
his website, and watched his video message to American voters.
Actually, I was at the café the first time I watched it, so I didn't have the sound on. And I realized an interesting thing, just watching him and not hearing any words -- it made me focus on how he was speaking, instead of what he was saying, and it struck me: this man has EXTREMELY large ears. I mean, like,
really big. Like, he should maybe grow his hair out a little more. Or think about tying them down in back somehow. Surgery should not be ruled out.
Also, possibly as importantly, he really believes what he's saying. He either wrote these words he's speaking that I'm not hearing, or he told someone exactly what he wanted to say, because just watching him speak, I believed in him. Whatever he was saying, he thought it was the
truth. And he thought it was
important. Wow. When was the last time a politician told us the truth?
Later, I watched him again with the sound on, and his ears didn't seem so big. Also, his words were eloquent, and his message was good, and it was honest.
--
And it was at this point I decided... to hell with it. This is a good man. We need a good person, right now, very badly. I'm not going to worry about Barack's skin color.
Yes, racism will be a factor. Maybe it will even be the deciding factor. That'd suck.
There have been precious few moments in history where we have an opportunity, each one of us, to define who we are simply by picking a side. There were people in Germany who opposed the Nazi party, and they got to brag about it for the rest of their lives. There were people in France who fought for the underground, and they are still held in esteem to this day. There were people who stood up and marched with MLK, there were people who drove black workers around during the bus boycotts, and their grandchildren still remember them for it.
Sometimes the most important thing in a fight is which side you are on, and not whether that side can win or not. Sometimes we just have to believe that, eventually, good will win out, and we have ask ourselves, "How will my children judge me when I tell them the story of this time?"
When my kids ask me about the first black man who really had a shot for the presidency, will I be forced to dissemble: 'Well, see, kids, at the time, I didn't think he could win, so it seemed expedient for me...'
No.
Mr. Obama, you have my vote, and you'll be getting a fat check from me in a few days. I would have just spent that money on booze and cars anyhow, hopefully you'll do something better with it.
And, hey, if you need someone for your "President's Information Technology Advisory Committee" I will gladly serve. (Mr. Bush used to have such a thing, but he abolished it in 2005,
apparently because they weren't willing to change science to fit his worldview.) Let me know what else I can do, OK?
Labels: politics, stories
Tuesday, January 16
A couple years ago when I'd brag about
Delicious Library (which I
hardly ever do) I'd say, "All this without ever advertising!"
I stopped saying that because we do advertise now, and lying is bad. ("We" in this case is me and the frog in my pocket. I call him "Sir Jumpy.") I thought I'd share the little I've learned about advertising as a smallish software company. (Again, the Sir Jumpy and I incorporated a while ago, for tax reasons.)
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Advertising in magazines: pretty much sucks. Well, it might not suck, but you'll never know. First off, nobody reads magazines any more. Proof: what are you reading right now? Is it a magazine? No. There -- what more do you need? (If a single data point doesn't define a trend, then I guess our entire war on terror was a huge mistake?) Second, even if people did read magazines, you'd never know which ads of yours were effective, since there's no really good feedback mechanism of which I know. Third, magazine ads typically cost big bucks.
Magazine guys have told me, "Hey, advertising isn't to generate sales, it's to generate
exposure!" OMGWTF?! If I wanted exposure I'd move the L.A. and go clubbing every night with Paris Hilton and her growing menagerie of hangers-on and/or venereal diseases. I WANT SALES, DAMMIT! I'm not paying for some squishy "exposure" thing. Give me money. That's what I want.
Also, magazine ads are really hard to compose, so you'll spend a bunch of time and effort trying to make one that looks all professional and shit, but you're a software developer, not a professional ad-making-type-person (hmm, there's probably a better word for that) so, if you'll forgive me for saying so, your ad is probably going to look like shit. And, you're probably going to forget to bring teh funny in your effort to look all professional, so you'll just end up alienating your core market of crazy independent thinkers with your attempts to look all sophistomicated. (Remember this is a community where the most remembered ads are a lady smashing a T.V. and "It sucks less.")
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Advertising on Mac-specific web sites: pretty good for me. My advice for this is the same advice I give for picking stocks: pick the sites that you yourself really like. (As opposed to "you notyourself" -- that guy has no taste.) I advertise on
Crazy Apple Rumors because I think that guy is teh hilarious (that's two -- if I use "teh" one more time it's going to be funny, given the comedy rule of threes) and because it's a tiny site and he basically was willing to sell me the ad space for a hot dog and a cup of coffee.
Now, I don't get complete sell-thru data from C.A.R.S. (see next section), but I *do* get to track referrals from them to my site using the cool tools provided by my web host (in my case, it's called "Urchin"), so I can measure some of the efficacy of this, and I've found that, per dollar, C.A.R.S sends as many people my way as Google's ads. Since C.A.R.S. readers are also clearly Mac fans and have demonstrated their superior intellects by reading such a fine site, my estimation is they are more highly qualified customers than the generic Google referral, so this advertising was worth it to me, even though the total volume of hits I get is, of course, an order of magnitude smaller than with Google.
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Advertising on Google Adwords: good if you are VERY careful. For the two of you who don't know already, Google makes its zetazillion dollars a year by allowing advertisers to bid on placing ads on (a) search results pages, and (b) blogs and the like (called the "content network"). Because Google is made up of a bunch of well-massaged, well-fed, lovable computer wonks (seriously, Google employees are the Kobe Beef of computer programmers), they've designed an incredibly rich set of tools for setting up and monitoring your ads.
The basic idea is that the advertiser (me, in this case) says, "I'll pay up to 10 cents for Google to display my ad on a page that mentions 'Collecting' and 'DVDs'." If I'm among the top six or so bidders for any given page, my ad gets displayed. If my ad never makes it into the top six, or if nobody ever clicks on my ad, Google automatically disables it and tells me I better up my ante.
One of the coolest parts of their system, though, is that they automatically track customers who have used AdWords to get to my site, and I can tell Google if a particular "session" ended with a sale, so, for what I believe is the first time in the history of advertising, I can actually track
exactly which ads, run where, cause customers to
buy my product, not just "eyeball" it or be "exposed" to it or whatever. This is
truly amazing.
There's a bunch of other factors in all this, but that's a rough outline of how it works. So, what's the problem? Well, the first thing scammers started doing was clicking on their competitors' ads; if you sell library software and you see an ad for your competitor, you might think, "Hey, I can just sit here clicking this link all day, and it'll cost him 10 cents every time! MUAH HA HA!" Now, I've set up a limit on AdWords on how much I'm willing to spend per day, but even so, if you false-click enough of my ads, they'll stop showing up for legitimate customers for the rest of the day, so you can essentially do a denial-of-service just by leaning on my ad, in addition to costing me money. CURSE YOU!
Sucks, huh? Well, Google claims they've figured out how to detect this, but of course isn't giving any details. In my experience, this kind of "click-fraud" isn't the primary problem with AdWords, but it's something to think about.
The latest form of fraud I've read about works like this: some unscrupulous site picks a bunch of words that are close to the words you'd use to advertise your product, but not quite (for example, common misspellings). They then bid, say, a penny for those words, since they are so uncommon. People who search for those words are led to a page on their site which contains Google content ads for YOUR site, for which you're paying ten cents a pop. Sure, it's not illegal, but it's kind of a sucky thing to do, in that it ends up getting around Google's automatic suggesting of similar, more successful searches, which would lead people directly to your ad and/or your site without your ad.
I don't know exactly of what kind of shenanigans I was the victim, but a couple months ago (November-December) I discovered that my cost-per-conversion (that's how many dollars I spent on advertising to generate a single sale) went from around $29 per customer to around $75 per customer. Yipes!
Now, even $29 per customer may seem high on a $40 product, but I like to fudge it in my head and think, "Sure, but think of the
exposure!" I mean, there
is a certain value in just having your name repeated, over and over, so I factor that in to how much I value AdWords. Also, there's a value to getting a customer for a 1.0 product
at any price, because once gotten (gotten?) you don't have to advertise to her to get her to upgrade to 2.0.
But $75 per customer? So I'm
losing $35 for each customer I get through AdWords? What am I, Sony?
So I started diving into Urchin, and the first thing I discovered is a VERY VERY high percentage of referrals to our site (ONLY during the months where I started losing money) came from some place called
"www.losmejores-juegos.com/g-common2.googleadd.php". Take a good look at that URL... it just kind of
sounds suspicious, doesn't it? I mean, a whole page just for "googleadd"? Why not just call your page "clickfraud.php"?
I went to that page (now defunct) and it was very much just a referral page full of ads. Hmm.
Then, on AdWords, I discovered that my ads on the "content network" were sucking up all of my ad budget every day, in just a couple hours, so I wouldn't run any ads for the rest of the day, in either the content network or for search pages.
Hmm and hmm, I say.
The smoking gun, however, was that these "content network" ads, while claiming to reach hundreds of thousands of people a week, were generating NO revenue. I mean, literally NONE. None of these "people" who were clicking through these ads (remember the user has to click on an ad for me to have to pay for it) to my site were ever buying my product!
Well, I know from earlier statistics (back before I was getting boned by los dickheads) what ratio of people normally buy Delicious Library after clicking through to our site, and it was WAY more than, say, 0%.
What was the solution? Well, in this case, I did two things: one is, I assumed that losmejores-juegos.com was up to no good, and added them to my AdWords list of sites that are simply not allowed to run my ads any more. Screw you guys, I'm going home.
Second, I discovered that historically, "content network" ads on Google really kind of suck -- they suck down the majority of my ad budget and almost never generate conversions (sales). So, to hell with them -- I lowered my bids on the content network down to almost nothing.
Result? My cost per new customer averaged $13.20 for the first ten days of January, instead of $75. Hooray for Zoidburg! Everything's coming up Millhouse! And other Groeing quotes!
I also wrote Google about all this (twice), but received a stock responses that basically said, "If you decide you don't want your ads on a certain site, just exclude them" and then "We watch for clickfraud in general, we're not going to look into this particular case."
So, to summarize: Google AdWords can be really good, but don't depend on Google to make sure you don't get boned. Concentrate on the search ads, and don't bid high for any ads on the content network right now. Honestly, the content network never really paid off for me even when I wasn't being actively defrauded, and recently it made me not only waste my entire ad budget, but also made me thus miss advertising to legitimate customers on the search side, because my budget was drained.
Sir Jumpy says: Google content network == teh suck.
Labels: business, mac community
Saturday, January 6
Ok, normally I don't participate in rumors, but this one is just too juicy to pass up. According to my source, Steve and co. are working on an "all-new" Keynote that they'll debut at MacWorld 2007. I'm told that there's a special team that's been working feverishly to make sure it's done by MacWorld, and that Steve himself is overseeing the whole effort, as he considers it "his baby."
If my sources are right, this new Keynote will be almost completely rewritten from the one we saw Steve debut just last year. Of course higher performance is expected to be demonstrated in this Keynote, plus the usual new transitions and flashier graphics. Nobody is talking about the biggest changes in this Keynote, but rumors abound of a possible iPhone tie-in, and even the new video iPod may be integrated into this new Keynote.
I asked if this is from the standard Keynote team, and my sources indicated that the core team is involved, but that Steve is pulling in people from "every part" of the company to assist, and to make sure that this Keynote helps show off the broadest range of Apple technologies possible.
In a new twist, when I asked whether this new Keynote would be given a standard version number or referred to by year, my source indicated that this would definitely be called Keynote 2007 -- he seemed surprised by the question, in fact. But then he indicated that he expected ANOTHER new Keynote before the end of the year! Apparently Steve is aiming to have a different Keynote for every major event he goes to this year, and he's told his team to work night and day to make sure there's always something new to show off in each one.
Others close to Steve have apparently tried to convince him that with Apple coming out with so many amazing new products this year, the impressiveness of this new Keynote itself won't matter much in the grander scheme, but Steve is still obsessed with making sure every detail is perfect. Apparently Steve was heard to say, "Look, it's me standing up there on stage, and I'm sure as hell not going to give my customers the same damn Keynote I gave them last year! We need new stuff to show them! This is a company-wide priority!"
Finally, it appears this version will EXCLUSIVELY be available over the web... when asked about it, my source indicated that MacWorld atttendees would get this new Keynote "for free" (actually, he said its price had already been put into the cost of their tickets, which I think is pretty sneaky), but that his feeling was that "only the most extreme Apple geeks would actually, say, go into an Apple Store and want to buy a copy of this Keynote." I can't say I agree! Every Keynote Steve has given us so far has been really great, and I expect this one to be no different.
Labels: humor?
Delicious Monster
