Posted by Bolster on Feb 26, 2010 in
Off-Topic So, I was going to do a complete walkthrough for people interested in using Google Adwords for advertising, and its something I was really looking forward to writing.
I would not normally have cared to do such a thing because I’m cheap, but Google sent me out a £75 voucher in January.
(As Always) there was an issue; Google’s coupons are rendered useless if you have ever accessed Adwords before (longer than 14 days ago).
Not ‘Created a Campaign’, Not ‘Filled in Billing Details’, but if you go to www.google.com/adwords and just ‘TryAdwords now’, 14 days later there is no coupon on the planet that will help you.
So, I recieved this coupon half way through January 2010, which is almost exactly a month after I, naievly, clicked on that ‘Access Adwords’ link.
I did nothing with it; checked out the keyword list for this site, but didnt actually create a campaign. Until today. (the coupon expires tomorrow)
After getting all the way through the process, including billing information, I am presented with this;
Oh, great, so basically, to redeem this coupon that you very kindly sent me, I need to hop in my handy DeLorean, go back two weeks before you even sent me the coupon, and give you all my billing and account details all over again.
To top it all, before you can verify a coupon, you have to enter the rest of your billing details, so now I may be getting slapped with a £5 charge for ‘diddly squat’. Thats gonna be a pain to argue about…
I have no doubt that the rest of the Adwords system is fine, this just really annoyed me.
Tags: advertising, adwords, coupons, google, grievances, marketing
Posted by Bolster on Feb 3, 2010 in
Commentary I am shamed. I’ve let this blog slip in the midst of coming back to the real world of Uni.
A week without something useful going up! Terrible… *stands in corner*
Fact is I’ve been experimenting with so many different things that nothing cogent has come out of it yet.
Some of the things I’ve been working on:
- Virtual Lab- Walk through of the setup and playing with of a virtual computer lab using VirtualBox including Windows, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, Fedora, and Debian servers/clients
- Write up of my automated downloading system and the scripts associated with it
- Exploration of Setup of a VPN using the WRT54G or my MyBook
- A first-timers walk through of setting up Google Adwords campaigns
And somewhere in between all that I’ve been working and getting back to Uni…
Joy.
Posted by Bolster on Jan 25, 2010 in
Commentary ‘Social Media’ has been lauded as the be-all and end all of the future of marketing, advertising, society, and general human decency.
There is no doubt that Social Media has taken over our connected lives. And while I don’t doubt this, I often feel that this is taken as a sign that we can abandon the so called ‘old-school’ of marketing and advertising (In this case ‘Old-School’ includes the Web 1.0 practise of advertising on Search and Comparison sites).
There are 100-and-1 different ways that viral ads, social apps, and a-like that take advantage of the six-degrees-of-separation effect and other social constructs to get all of old-media’s advertising impact with none of the overheads (billboards, tv-time, etc.)
Not all industries can appropriately take advantage of Social Media marketing, but that doesn’t mean they can’t create a random viral video with nothing to do with their product or service and tag their name on at the end, although the effectiveness of these is in question.
But if you still think that its the best idea for your business, check out this comparison (data borrowed from mad.co.uk)
As can be seen, search engines (54%) and comparison sites (43%) are given much greater attention than social networking adverts (28%), and email is even worse (22%).
Does this mean businesses should abandon the inroads made into social media advertising? I don’t think so.
Internet advertising as a whole flattened the playing field; I attended an IETNI Lecture on Entrepreneurship by Chris Williams who discussed his one-man-band use of Google Adwords to dramatically increase useful traffic to his site by over 300% through the use of Pay-Per-Click advertising on his very niche market (specalist electronic design) for a cost of about £1 a day.
Just a decade ago, advertising within niche markets was done through trade publications. I certainly havent contacted any vendors that I saw ads from in Trade publications, and I can’t think of anyone I know telling me ‘I found them in ZX Spectrum Users Monthly’; and Chris’s losses from that particular form of marketing venture were, as you could expect, significant.
Now, there are dozens of tools that allow you to pick words that directly relate to your business and exploit those in Adwords (other pay-per-click advertising providers are availiable) campaigns with the minimal risk; you only pay if they make it to your site, then its up to you.
But I guess thats really the crux of the difference between Social Media marketing and Search/Comparison marketing; Search/Comparison marketing gets the preverbial foot-in-the-door, gets your brand out there into the ‘right’ peoples faces. Facebook/Twitter/Bebo/Myspace/Digg et al. provide a higher level of consumer interaction (eg, Burger King’s ill fated but very successful Facebook Campaign)
When deciding where to spend the hard-to-come-by advertising budget, consider what you want; and to make it easier, heres my thoughts…
- Don’t/SEO: Search Engine Optimisation can often provide sufficient rates of return on investment so that its fairly unnessary to pay for anthing else within the Search and Comparison fields. If you enter three words of your businesses ‘activities’ and your in the top 5, you have little to worry about with regards to Search revenue.
- Google Adwords: The first jumping-off point, with the least rish, most control, and widest (or narrowest if you select) reach of any of the other services. While it should never be the sole means of online-advertising, its a good cornerstone to start off with, and provides you with a wealth of analytics that make it easy to optimise
- Youtube Adwords: Only open to the US at the minute, but all the advantages of mass market TV advertising, with the specificity of Adwords, and added interactivity. If you’re a very visual business this is definatly a great idea.
- Yahoo Overture: AdWord’s less-popular cousin. If you’re appearing in Google’s first-page results, but not in Yahoo’s, consider using this to spread your bets.
- Facebook Advertising: This one is definatly a judgement call on the part of businesses. Facebook can be a huge boon to revenue, but requires an angle. Personally, I bundle the ‘vanilla’ facebook advertising in with Yahoo and Google as PPC or PPM. What I think is really going to kick off are
- Facebook Pages: Car Salesmen tell me “People buy cars with faces”, so give your business a social ‘face’, that can also act as a nexus for consumer discussion over your product (risky but worth it) aswell as a viral jump off point (“Joe Bloggs is a fan of your Business”), not to mention the ability to have overtly public conversations with consumers.
- Twitter:Coming out of left field with no real analogue, Twitter could be Huge for advertisers in terms of interactivity; The saying ‘the customer is always right’ only makes sense if you give the customer a chance to speak and be listened to. Twitter, unlike Facebook, makes the conversation much more personal; when you reply to a customers complaint or praise directly and personally, instead of from a press release, it will raise that consumers view of your business to an almost friendly relationship instead of a faceless economic entity.
- Youtube (Viral): We’ve all seen them. Some of them are absolute genius garnering millions of views or just plain insulting garning the scorn of thousands. Use with extreme caution, and don’t make it major factor in your overall branding.
To wind this up; Social Media is Social, keep it that way. Focus on using social networking sites to improve relations with potential / existing consumers, use Search/Comparison to pluck the ‘maybe’s and to push individual products or services. Its less ‘catch and release’ more ‘catch and cultivate’
Tags: marketing, ppc, seo, social media
Posted by Bolster on Jan 17, 2010 in
Commentary,
Off-Topic Recent events in the cyber-security world have got me feeling paranoid. Between Estonia, Georgia, and the ever-increasing focus on Chinese cyber-political-warfare, geo-political entities are starting to realise that the whole ‘lets stockpile enough weapons to blow up the world enough times for the number to be rendered pointless‘ may not have been the best plan.
China has caught everyone off-guard with its recent, albeit ‘hush hush’, displays of force (while not entirely getting off scott-free), and we should probably be alot more afraid of a cyber war than of flaming pants or security-crossed lovers.
I think there has been something ignored in this most recent spate of Chinese infiltration, is that if there is a bomb on a plane, or at an airport terminal, it blows up, theres horror, theres death and distruction, but if you’re a few miles down the road, your safe, but probably in need of a fresh set of briefs.
This is the list of companies and industries identified as potential victims of the Chinese attacks….
- Google
- Yahoo
- Adobe
- Dow Chemical
- Northrop Grumman
- Symantec
- RackSpace
Just think about that for a second. Dow Chemical, nice big conglomerate of manufacturing and government supply. Nothing to go wrong there, right?
Northrup Grumman
Designer, systems integrator and manufacturer of military aircraft, defense electronics, precision weapons, commercial and military aerostructures.
Yeah, nothing to worry about there…
If you’re on this page, then I probably don’t need to explain the implications of having the worlds biggest source of knowledge ever, one of the most popular network security vendors, and the biggest email provider for the non-web-literate (i.e most vulnerable to phishing attacks) compromised. But I will anyway.
Unless you’re a Schneiner-level security guru, these companies probably have, between then, more information and control over your life than you would like to have given away to anyone, let alone a hostile foreign dictatorship.
There’s two potential actions: Shut Down or manipulation.
Its at this point that I actually want to get back into the security field. Cus frankly, if your not scared, you should be.
Update:TechCrunch has a great article on the financial cost of Google changing its previously politically permissive stance in China
Tags: hacking, networking, security, software, terrorism
Posted by Bolster on Dec 31, 2009 in
Off-Topic Well, its a plan at least.
Tags: finance, personal, plans, programming, software
Posted by Bolster on Nov 25, 2009 in
Commentary For a man who’s title is currently Baron Mandelson, of Foy in the County of Herefordshire and of Hartlepool in the County of Durham, First Secretary of State, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, President of the Board of Trade and Lord President of the Council, educated in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and is hotly tipped to become a major part of the Lisbon-Treaty-generated-unelected-cou-detat-european-super-parliment, you’d think the power-addicted, peace-process screwing, ’shreud loaning‘ rat would leave well enough alone.
You’d be wrong.
Under the Digital Economy Bill, Peter… Sorry, BARON Mandelson has been given unlimited powers to extend penalties to (suspected, theres no real trials) illegal filesharers or copyright violators online. Similar to the much discussed and eventually culled french ‘three-strikes’ rule on filesharing (that Mr Sarkosy would fail), its once…twice…three times a bitch, as £50,000 fine would fall through your letter box (to be noted, this is per household, so thats one movie for mum, a e-book for dad, and a tune for Ann, and poor little timmy foots the bill). But Peter ‘The Baron’ Mandelson isnt done yet.
His powers, under this bill, are extended to that he can appoint whoever the hell he likes to keep an eye on you and your internet usage to catch right’s infringers (i’d say they should look inward for right’s infringement…) , and oust you from the network. No Trial, no Jury, hell, as far as I can read, you dont even need to know you’re under suspicion until your under-arrest. Then you don’t need to know exactly what your charged with, then you have no realistic way of knowing what potential punishment ‘The Baron’ will cook up.
And I mean ‘cook up’. In the bill there is no limit on fine amount or potential jail-time.
The icing on the cash-filled cake is that the the Government have already assured it’s success, by stating that ISP’s who are caught-not-catching copyright infringers will get (at least) £250,000 fines.
This kind of racketeering is shameful and pointless, and to add insult to injury to the internet-generation, the bill says nothing about providing computers for schools, guaranteeing broadband access for disenfranchised families and low-income areas, increasing governmental openess, adoption of Open Source Software in the public sector, cracking down on spams, scams, or credit card fraud. Nothing. Not a bit.
With such pressing matters already pushing Britian’s economy into the under-flab of international competition, what does this bill concern itself with? Ofcom is told to ‘observe’ more (umm, i thought that was their point?), Channel 4 gets public-service broadcast responsibilities (yay, more crap!), and expanding mobile broadband investment (because that’s going to be great for service in already served areas, such as LONDON).
And to finish the whole shambels off, a nice little ditty on compulsory age ratings on all video games…
To quote Cory Doctorow
why is it acceptable for the government to declare that some forms of artwork have to be mandatorily labelled as to their suitability for kids? And why is it only some media? Why not paintings? Why not novels? Why not modern dance or ballet or opera?
Stop the world, I want to get off.
Tags: economy, internet, politics, society
Posted by Bolster on Jul 13, 2009 in
Commentary,
Instructional I’ll try and keep this as short and sweet as possible.
From the looks of my google analytics page(if anyone has a blog or site, i hightly recommend it) people were very interested in my experiences with lenovo, and I’m sorry for not updating.
About a week after my previous post, the problem continued to get worse until it simply wouldn’t boot. I called Lenovo Ireland and (after a suprisingly short hold time) as soon as i said the magic number “2100″ I was asked for my product and serial numbers and an address i wanted the new hard drive shipped to. Now, there was a slight hiccup where the outsourced phone operator recorded my serial number incorrectly, but that was fixed very speedily.
That was on a Friday at around 4:30. By 10am Tuesday, a fresh and shiny harddrive was on my desk.
Something that I should point out is that I got this machine from Lenovo America, with no extra fancy warrenties or anything, and they STILL gave me a great quality of service. I dont want to come across as ‘glowing’ or anything, but my next machine after this is going to be a Lenovo.
My only qualm about the experience was that there is no realistic way to ‘restore to factory settings’ for a blank drive on a machine with on Disk Drive but I wanted to try out Windows 7 RC anyway and installed it from USB. But thats for a different post.
Tags: hard drive, HDD, laptop, lenovo
Posted by Bolster on May 27, 2009 in
Off-Topic Finished my approach to Euler Problem 1 last night and checked everything into github.
If we list all the natural numbers below 10 that are multiples of 3 or 5, we get 3, 5, 6 and 9. The sum of these multiples is 23.
Find the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000.
Was not happy with limiting the specific factors of 3 and 5, and limit of 1000 so i implemented a generalised solution.
def solution(fs: List[Int], max: Int ) = ( 1 until max ).filter( f => fs.exists( n => f % n == 0)).foldLeft(0)(_+_)
Where fs is a List of integer factors and max is obv the highest limit. eg(Answer is in white font, so select the line “Answer” to see it
print("Answer: ",solution(List(3,5),1000))
>Answer: 233168
Thanks to @lichtsprung for the testing help.
The general aim is to complete a few dozen of these in Scala, then switch to Java, or C/C++, or something else, and loop around until i have a complete library of euler problems for all of the languages i end up using; Nothing like having long term goals!
Tags: code, programming, scala
Posted by Bolster on May 12, 2009 in
Off-Topic I must apologise for my lack of activity on the blog, but more is coming.
I’ve begun working towards working with Ian Clarke on his Swarm project, that is if i can bring my Java and Scala chops up to scratch enough to give meaningful impact.
Beyond that I’m heading to NJ this week to be with my partner for her graduation and have my 21st birthday while im over there (21 means absolutly squat in Ireland, so I’m expecting a repeat of my 18th…)
Coming towards the closing stages of my placement at Ericsson and i must admit that I’m going to miss the place, and the people, and even the work, but most of all I’ll miss the free coffee. If you ever get offered a place at Ericsson, take it.
Unfortunately, the usual disclosure agreements are in place, but frankly its alot of standard shell, perl, php, MySQL, Solaris stuff that isn’t exactly “How-To”-able.
Have also been doing alot of experimentation with a variety of VM solutions, but nothing worth repeating ( My recommendation: VirtualBox. Networking and Stability still arent perfect, but for a dev environment, its great )
I’m now in a half-n-half environment; I have kept my new ThinkPad X61s as a windows vista machine (dual booting 7, which i have to say is impressive), but i keep my main box on Ubuntu.
Anyway, update is done.
Tags: career, Ericsson
Posted by Bolster on Apr 7, 2009 in
Off-Topic 
Tags: Comic, humour
Oh, great, so basically, to redeem this coupon that you very kindly sent me, I need to hop in my handy DeLorean, go back two weeks before you even sent me the coupon, and give you all my billing and account details all over again.
