Thought this was interesting (see link below) … if true, that within a few years 88% of Internet traffic will be video views, it makes me wonder what we should be considering for our website. Link Here to REALTOR.com

Disappointingly, he quoted me as saying, “If there was a better product available, we would look at it.” The assumption from the quote in the article is that we would gladly jump to another product if a better one came along. I think he assumed that “better” in my mind meant better from a technological standpoint. But bells-and-whistles do not a better product make.

The product concerned is a contract and document management system that many REALTORS use. Apparently, there is a very good solution from the technical perspective, but it is missing necessary content features. For example, it doesn’t integrate well with the existing contracts we, and almost every other residential real estate agent in our state, use. First and foremost, a better product must include the contracts that everyone is familiar with.

The lesson for me when I put my developer’s hat on is that whiz-bang features aren’t of much value if you aren’t able to use them with the desired content.

When I’m wearing my business operations hat, I always must ask what the switching cost is. In the case of this product, the real switching cost is the loss of the combined familiarity with the existing forms. It’s almost like moving from Facebook to Tent.

Finally, I learned a lesson about how Inman News works. I never received a call from an editor verifying my comments. If the conversation was recorded, I would request a copy of it. Accuracy and verification are two important points in journalistic ethics. Principle 3 in the Principles of Journalism found at the Pew Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism points out that the essence of journalism is a discipline of verification. The time between my interview and the article’s publication was well over a week. The reporter and his editor had plenty of time to verify that the quotes attributed to me were in context, but they didn’t.

I enjoy photography and I wanted to look at this question. The first question I grappled with was how to define a good photo. I turned to the online photo sharing site Flickr. Flickr has an “interestingness” ranking on all photos. This algorithm looks at several metrics, and there’s a pretty good explanation of Flickr’s interestingness algorithm on Wesley Hein’s blog.

Using the photo sharing site Flickr’s API, I wrote a little script that would download the EXIF data on the 500 most interesting photos for each day during the years 2008 and 2009. I collected not only the camera’s make and model, but most of the other settings available. I ended up with information on about 155,000 photos (because not all of the photos had EXIF data available).

In a nutshell, the most common camera with photos ranked with high “interestingness” is the Canon Digital Rebel XTI (EOS 400D) at 4.6%. Next is a near tie between the Canon Digital Rebel XSi (EOS 450D) and Canon’s 40D, each with about 2.7% of the cameras.

The Digital Rebels had release prices in the $600 to $650 USD range. The 40D cost $1299 at its release.

For the most part, these cameras are used by folks who are enthusiasts, like I am. These are not cameras typically used by pros.

My next post about the Flickr database will discuss the cameras used by those whose photos show up repeatedly in the list of interesting photos.

Finally, I will continue to look at Flickr data to see what cameras were used the most among all photos, in order to examine whether the distribution of cameras used in interesting photos is different from the general photo set.

One of my more successful blogs (which I sadly haven’t updated in a while) is The Frugal Couple. For a while, I saw it as a vehicle to promote another online business of mine. (BTW, there’s a great post at Copyblogger that deals with the fact that to make money with a blog, you must think of it as a business.) I paid for ads on Facebook and was surprised by the results.

There are four things to keep in mind when creating an ad for a social media platform such as Facebook. Who you will target, what image(s) to show, your emotional connection, and the offer.

Targeting

Facebook offers advertisers several filters to reach a group. The goal here is to get your audience to between 10,000 and 40,000 users and then to test, test, test.

In order to test, I ran several instances of the same ad, but targeted at different age ranges and at men and women.

Next, I targeted users who used phrases in the interest section of their profiles such as: playing with my kids, spending time with my husband, spending time with my children, etc.

Graphic

The graphic was simple, but it was effective. I believe it clearly got the idea across that the site being promoted was about money for couples.

Emotional Positioning

The Ad Copy: “Become a Frugal Couple. Sign up for the free newsletter and start getting tips on living frugally and keeping your marriage healthy.”

It was a simple ad. There were two sentences in each ad. Each sentence told the user what to do. The main call to action (Sign up for the newsletter) was followed with the result the user could hope for if they signed up for the newsletter (keep your marriage healthy).

This appealed to users’ deep down desire to keep their marriage healthy (or in the case of some subscribers, to save their marriages from the dangerous paths they were on).

Offer

Although the stated offer was a free subscription to a newsletter, the real offer was to save readers’ marriages from turmoil caused by financial disagreements. Again, the offer was more than a newsletter. It was free information that would help the audience meet an emotional need.

Results

At the time when I ran the ads, the average ad on Facebook had a click-through rate (CTR) of 0.04%. That’s 1 out of 2,500 ads shown.

Depending on the targeting, my ads had CTRs of 0.10% (1 out of 1,000) to 0.25% (1 out of 400). In addition, I converted about 20-25% of the clicks into subscribers. I was paying $0.20 per click on average, giving me a cost to create a newsletter subscriber of about $0.80 to $1.00.

My ads had CTRs that were 150% to 525% higher than the average ad. Needless to say, I was happy with the results.

What are you offering?

Not all offers need to meet an emotional need. As much as I dislike it, many advertisements are successful because they promise to meet a desire such as greed or lust, or they boost the ego of a consumer.

As you begin a campaign, think about who you want to target and what that group’s psychological needs are.

Have you created ads that have been less successful than you would have liked or expected? Or if you’ve had great success, let others know about that as well. What worked?

I am slowly consolidating about a half-dozen hosting accounts to my provider of choice: Linode. Linode offers root access in a virtual machine, meaning lots of freedom, but also lots of tweaks. I’ve been able to do everything I’ve wanted with Linode, except for one: email.To be fair, I haven’t put much time into setting up email on Linode. I followed directions posted in the Linode Library, but never got things to work. After talking with a trustworthy developer, I decided to skip hosting email at Linode and let Google deal with the mail.

Setting it up was pretty straight forward. I visited Google’s Standard Apps link (here) and set up an account. I verified my primary domain (davidpodley.com) by creating a file with some Google-defined text and gave it the Google-defined file name, uploading the file to my server in the domain root (davidpodley.com) and asked Google look for the file.

I did this for each domain I wanted to associate with this account. To add other domains, I clicked DOMAIN SETTINGS, then DOMAIN NAMES, then ADD A DOMAIN ALIAS.

Finally, I followed Google’s directions and set my MX records through Linode’s DNS Manager for each domain Google was going to handle email for.

Google’s MX records were found through this link. If you use Linode’s servers for DNS management, you can follow these directions to change the MX records:

• Log into the Members section of Linode (linode.com/members) and  open the DNS Manager at Linode by clicking ‘DNS Manager’ at the top. This should take you to a page that has at least one domain listed.
• For each domain you want Google to handle mail for, you will need to do this. Select the domain. This will take you to a screen that lists several options. Mine lists SOA Record, then NS Records, MX Recods, then A/AAAA Records. If there are any MX records, remove each one.
• Once there are no MX records listed, click ‘Add a new MX Record.’
• You will be taken to a page with a form that says, ‘Add/Edit an MX Record’. In the ‘Hostname:’ field, enter the first address provided by Google. In the ‘Priority’ field, enter the priority provided by Google. You do not need to enter a subdomain unless you have reason to. Click ‘Save’. Do this for each record in Google’s list (again, found here).
• You will be taken back to the previous page. I click ‘Render’ at the bottom. I don’t know that it does anything, but it doesn’t seem to hurt.

You should be all set. For some reason, when I did this, I had to log into the Google Apps system one more time and tell it to activate the email account. In the Dashboard, it showed that the account hadn’t been activated, so I clicked ‘Activate’ next to the account name and all seemed to work.

Alternately, if you’re interested in becoming a Linode user, please use this affiliate link before creating a Linode account.

I’ve been using Linode for a few months to host about a dozen websites and I’ve been very happy with the experience. I have found the documentation at Linode to be clear and concise, especially when it comes to setting up multiple sites using a standard, Ubuntu-based LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) configuration.

# cd /etc/apache2/sites-available
If you run the command

# ls

You will see the sites you’ve defined so far. You will need to create another site titled xyz.YOURDOMAINNAME.com, where xyz is the subdomain of your choosing. You can do this by either copying an existing, working site definition or by creating a new file. I usually copy an old site using:

# cp example.com xyz.YOURDOMAINNAME.com

Now enter the command

# nano xyz.YOURDOMAINNAME.com

You should see a box with text similar to:

<VirtualHost *:80>

ServerAdmin admin@YOURDOMAINNAME.com

ServerName YOURDOMAINNAME.com

ServerAlias www.YOURDOMAINNAME.com

DocumentRoot /srv/www/YOURDOMAINNAME.com/public_html/

ErrorLog /srv/www/YOURDOMAINNAME.com/logs/error.log

CustomLog /srv/www/YOURDOMAINNAME.com/logs/access.log combined

</VirtualHost>

Change the following lines as such:

ServerName xyz.YOURDOMAINNAME.com

ServerAlias www.xyz.YOURDOMAINNAME.com

DocumentRoot /srv/www/YOURDOMAINNAME.com/public_html/xyz/

It should now look like this:

<VirtualHost *:80>

ServerAdmin admin@hiredhired.com

ServerName xyz.YOURDOMAINNAME.com

ServerAlias www.YOURDOMAINNAME.com (EDITED FOR AN ERROR – USE THE LINE BELOW)
ServerAlias www.xyz.YOURDOMAINNAME.com
DocumentRoot /srv/www/YOURDOMAINNAME.com/public_html/xyz/
ErrorLog /srv/www/YOURDOMAINNAME.com/logs/error.log
CustomLog /srv/www/YOURDOMAINNAME.com/logs/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

What we have done is created a new server that notices that a user is coming to xyz.YOURDOMAINNAME.com and it now points the user to a different directory (note xyz at the end of the line in the DocumentRoot section).

Exit out of that screen by typing control-x. You will be prompted to save the file, so click Y for Yes, then hit enter when it prompts you with the file name (it should be your subdomain.domainname.com).

Now we create the directory the subdomain will read from:

# mkdir -p /srv/www/yourdomainname.com/public_html/xyz

Now we need to tell Apache to enable the site. Type:

# a2ensite xyz.yourdomainname.com

Then refresh Apache to know what’s going on:

# /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

You’re Done!

It may take anywhere from an hour or so to a day for the subdomain to propagate through the DNS system. I errantly assumed it would be immediate because DNS was managed by Linode, but it took about an hour for it to respond to my browser.

Help Keep This Site Going
If you found value to this article, please consider donating a dollar or two to help cover the cost of managing this site.

Alternately, if you’re interested in becoming a Linode user, please use this affiliate link before creating a Linode account.

http://www.website.com/this-is-a-test-and-it-is-a-lot-to-type-into-a-browser

into

http://pod.li/abcd

For many years, a site called TinyURL.com managed this quite well, and as far as I know, it still does. But as Twitter has taken off, the number of characters in link has become more important. Twitter’s 140 character limit on posts has driven people to use sites such as http://ur.ly or http://bit.ly for their shorter domain names.

I recently bought the domain name http://pod.li and installed an open source domain name shortening program on it. (In case you’re curious, the .li in http://pod.li is based out of Liechtenstein.)

When I came across Essential Facebook Development by John Maver and Cappy Pop, I figured I’d give it a try because it’s the newest book in this field.

The book is well written and leads the reader through a clear path toward not only building an application, but understanding how an application is built. It uses quite a bit of object oriented PHP, so for someone new to programming, it might not be the best resource, but overall it’s a great book.

The bulk of this post is about two other issues, though. First up is the speed of changes in Facebook’s application development API. The second point is the responsiveness of authors and the value it adds to readers in niche markets.

The ever-changing nature of Facebook’s API must be a thorn in the flesh of authors. Case in point: Essential Facebook Development has a sample application in the book. (Like other good programming books, the code is made available at a site dedicated to the book.) Rather than hand-code the examples, I put them into an application I set up on FB and I got an error. In searching for the solution, the book uses a method to post messages to a FB user’s news feed that Facebook no longer supports. In the last few weeks, Facebook solidified a new way for applications to post messages and communications to users’ news feeds, walls, and other areas of interest.

I reached out to the authors on their site (essentialfacebook.com) and I had a response within 10 minutes from John. His response:

Yes, the stream API was in beta for a long time, so we didn’t focus on it in the book, but of course it was released shortly after the book was finalized. We will be doing a set of blog posts on using the stream API to make sure our readers are kept up to date.

This speaks to a problem we’ve seen in other areas, namely that traditional books are obsolete out-of-date the day they hit the shelves. As this happens more and more with developing technology guides, authors will need to be more and more responsive to their readers.

When Amazon released their Kindle, I was skeptical at first, but when Jeff Bezos announced an updated version of the Kindle, I picked one up and I’ve absolutely loved it. The idea of taking a medium-sized library with me was exciting, and the instant delivery over a cellular network quenched my thirst for immediate gratification.

The first Kindle that showed up had a stuck volume button. (For those who don’t know, the Kindle can double as an audio book reader for Audible books, as well as simply play MP3s.

I called Amazon and explained the problem. A day or two later, Kindle #2 showed up. For the next six months, Kindle #2 and I had a torrid affair. We spent time together in bed, on the couch, and at the beach. But a few days ago, my dear old #2 decided she had had enough of me and gave up the ghost. #2’s display stopped working. (Image of broken display at the end of this post.)

I called Amazon again and explained the situation, and they sent out K#3. #3 and I are getting used to each other, but like a lover scorned, I hesitate to really become attached to #3.

While I was on the phone with Amazon, I asked about adding an extended warranty in case #3 fails like her sisters. I was told that because the warranty service is offered through a company other than Amazon, they did not make exceptions to their rule that warranties must be extended within the first 30 days.

I’ve got to admit that I’m disappointed with Amazon’s quality control. The first Kindle shouldn’t have made it out of the factory. My biggest fear is that #3 will pass away after its warranty period and I will either a) need to buy K#4 in order to read my purchased books, or b) give up my library.

Here’s the image of the screen. Note the white lines where the display simply has stopped working.

The article is a long conversation on how to show a potential purchaser of advertising space (in this case a supermarket chain purchasing ads on a radio station) the return on advertising investment.

It’s a detailed article, but it confuses revenue with earnings.

To sum up the article, the advertising salesperson shows the supermarket executive that if he invests $1 million in advertising and another $500,000 to increase staff at the stores to handle the increase in store traffic, he will see an increase in revenue of $2 million. Mr. Warner states that this is a 50% return on the advertising investment ($500,000 net increase on $1 million in advertising).

What’s Missing?
What is missing is that earlier in the article, the author points out that the grocery store has a gross margin of about 3% including advertising. That means that on $2 million in sales, the grocery sees pre-tax gross profit of about $60,000.

I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and say that the grocery chain’s marketing busget is 20% of sales. This would mean that the margin before marketing is about 23%. On $2 million of sales, the margin would be $460,000.

A profit increase of $460,000 before accounting for a marketing expense of $1 million and the increased staffing needs of $500,000 is worse than never running the campaign.

Even if the increase in sales for the campaign last four times as long as the campaign itself does, the grocery chain still loses money.

Thoughts?