By day I am a programmer and a systems administrator. By night (and pretty much my entire weekends) I work with my girlfriend, my cousin, and his fiance as part of an internet marketing company we created. What we do is to create advertisements to promote other websites, buy advertising space for these advertisements, and we are paid a commission if our ads perform (if we earn money for the website owners). This is known as affiliate marketing. I really love it because we get to combine all of our skills and build something cool. We are paid if we perform, and we lose money if we don’t. In that sense it’s very exciting (as you might imagine).

I had really just been getting started advertising with Google, having worked very hard for the last year to build a bankroll and the skills to believe I could be successful with them. And my first few weeks of testing were going really well. Google has a tremendous amount of inventory and wonderful targeting allowing you to reach your intended audience. Long term I felt like Google was going to be a huge part of our success.

Yesterday I discovered that my google Adwords campaigns had stopped receiving impressions. My cousin who works full time for our company called Google’s support line and was informed that we had been suspended for what we were told was “repeated violations of the display url policy”. This meant that when visitors were clicking on our ads they were not going to the sites that we had written on the ads.

Not to get too technical here but the reason for this was that certain websites only pay for internet traffic from certain countries. So the intermediary between us and these websites (the affiliate networks) will redirect traffic that is not coming from the correct countries to other websites where the traffic can still be profitable. Usually this is ok (because the other website is similar), and the affiliate networks will turn it off if you ask them to. Generally the affilate marketer does not receive any commissions from this “untargeted” traffic. The only way to see if this is happening to to view the link from a computer in that country, or to use what is known as a proxy.

We thought we had all of our campaigns setup correctly. We had asked the affiliate networks we were working with to insure that this geo redirection wasn’t enabled because our first set of ads were getting disapproved for this problem. Eventually all of our ads seemed to be setup correctly and we thought we were good. Then yesterday we get suspended and we were left scratching our heads as to why.

Today, after talking to every connection we have that “knows someone in Google” and getting more feedback on our specific case, we found out that one affiliate network we were working with was redirecting international traffic to an adult offer. We’ve never promoted anything adult ever and don’t intend to in the future. And we hadn’t run any Google traffic with this affiliate network before.

Google caught this problem and the new ads we made were never approved, so thankfully no one was sent to that adult page. This of course got our account flagged though.

Google suspends people for doing horrible stuff. Some affiliate marketers promote very shady offers, and of those some are outright scams. Google has to be vigilant against people trying to game their system for financial gain. Its possible that they saw this situation and thought that we were intentionally doing this.

The only way we could have caught this to to have checked the links from proxies in multiple countries, and in the future I’m doing this with ever offer I run. New advertisers, especially if you are getting into international traffic this is very important to remember.

Google, if you ever let me advertise again, I promise to you I will never promote anything through this particular affiliate network in the future. I’ve turned off all traffic from everywhere else that I was sending to them. This was an accident, we didn’t know what was happening, and it will never happen again. You can verify from your logs, we don’t own the last hop (their tracking domain), and no paid traffic ever went over to them because the ads pointing to them weren’t approved.

Either way I am very sorry, I’ve tried extremely hard to be professional and this is a huge disappointment. At first I thought there was just a technical glitch and now I realize that it was much worse.

To new advertisers, be very careful who you work with. There are now over 300 CPA affiliate networks and some of them will cut your throat to make a few extra dollars. This is a painful lesson for me and ultimately it could be fairly devastating for my company’s long term plans. Fortunately we’ve made it as far as we have without relying on Google’s traffic, but if they were our primary source and we made the mistake of working with the wrong people we would literally be out of business now. So for even experienced advertisers expanding into new traffic sources, be careful as one mistake can cost you dearly.

What makes Evernote special is that has three killer features and a very compelling price point (free for low to medium use and $5 a month for more space than you could need).

To start off with, Evernote has wonderful optical character recognition (OCR) technology which lets you search your images for text strings. Now you can take a picture of someone’s business card and find their info by searching for their name, number, email, address, whatever is on their card. You’d be surprised how often the ability to search images can come in very handy. Looking for a new house? Start snapping pictures of “For Sale” signs as your pass by and search for them later.

Secondly, it has tremendous search capabilities, letting you specify tags, geographical location the note was taken, date created, whether the note contained a to-do item, whether that to-do has been completed or not, etc. Just about anything you can think of, you can search for. And searching is faster than putting things in folders (think gmail).

Finally, Evernote has outstanding syncing capabilities, letting you access and store your data wherever you are. The iPhone app is wonderful and they continue add device specific features to the service (geo tagging using the iPhones’s GPS for example). They have really pulled off one of the best desktop/web/mobile solutions I’ve seen for any service yet.

So what does Evernote have to do with GTD? What’s great is that the tools are very flexible so they can work with your existing personal organization scheme. So if you want to apply GTD principles for example, you create notebooks for GTD contexts and then use tagging for projects. Or you can use notebooks for both contexts and projects and search by combining them. You can create individual notes for action items, or you can have a single note with a number of items each with a “to-do” checkbox. Through its really great UI and functionality, Evernote lends itself to your style instead of forcing you to use it in a certain way.

To wrap it up, Evernote is a great service that can both boost your productivity and help you have to remember less while making your information easily available from wherever you are. For someone like me who is constantly suffering from information overload and has a horrible memory to start with, Evernote is exactly what I needed.

The software isn’t finished until the last user is dead.
Anonymous Support Group Member

The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time…The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.
Tom Cargill

Why do we never have time to do it right, but always have time to do it over?
Anonymous Code Monkey

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.
Brian W. Kernighan

So the iTunes App Store has been out for a little over a month now and we are starting to see some initial sales numbers. The remarkable thing is that some of these numbers are rather, well, remarkable. Let’s look at a couple examples:

1. Tap Tap Tap has posted their (Semi)Final Numbers for July with the juicy takeaway being that their two current iPhone applications brought in $75,177.38, leaving them with $52,815 after Apple’s cut. Simple math here shows that they would be on pace to make $633,780.00 during the next year for just these two applications provided they maintained this pace. Of course, they are already hard at work on their next two applications as detailed in their post here.
2. Mac Rumors has posted that a smaller developer named MintApps is currently making a more modest but still impressive $158 a day from their nutrition application. The significant datapoint here is that this particular application is currently only ranking in around as the 800th most popular application on the App store
3. NeoSeeker reports that overall App sales for Apple are currently raking in $1 million a day.

The really crazy thing is that we are only at the very beginning of the app store. As adoption grows, well you get the picture.

1. Skype, Skype, Skype. If you are going international, get an account and prepay for some phone time. Then buy a portable headset and microphone. Whether you bring a laptop with you or go to Internet cafes, Skype will allow you to make calls for incredibly low rates anywhere you can get an internet connection. For me right now, my cell phone costs 50x what Skype does per minute to call back to the USA.
2. Manage servers? Sign up with Pingdom for active monitoring. You can then rest assured that as long as you aren’t getting emails or SMS messages, your servers are working fine. This is a good idea even if you aren’t traveling, but since you might be checking your voicemail less (or never) if you are on the go, moving more communication to email can be very helpful. This of course requires you to still check email but you might be already planing on doing this anyway.
3. A Nintendo DS can help you pass time on long flights and train rides. But to carry less stuff, get a mod card and put all your games on one cartridge. Only games you already legally own of course (wink wink).
4. On a budget and/or want to meet more people? I recommend exploring the options of couch surfing and staying at youth hostels. In either situation you might end up scoring free wifi as a great bonus.
5. Use online apps to help plan your trip and save money. A great list of the 25 best is located at this geek travel guide

Have a safe and happy trip!

Why Python? Well Google, xkcd, and Mark Pilgrim seem to like it. For me, that’s actually good enough right there. And why Twitter? My good friends Shawn Smith and Mike Lambie think it’s a pretty cool service and will probably keep growing. So I figure it’s worth learning the Twitter APIs.

According to Wikipedia, an Internet Bot is a software application that

“performs tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone”.

The bot we will create today will get a list of all the people a user is following (their “friends”) and then will compute the friends-to-followers ratio of each of those people. Why would you want to do this? Well some people (myself included) feel that a user’s ratio tells you a lot about them. Follow a lot more people than are following you, and you’ll be labeled a spammer. Really interesting people have at least as many people following them as they are following. And some of the best users on twitter maintain a close to 1:1 ratio of friends/followers. So ratio is important, and a bot that can tell us user ratios quickly might be good for other things {insert evil grin here}.

So now that we know what we want to do, we need to figure out how. If you are an experienced programmer you probably know several languages (and maybe you already know Python). You should be able to follow along fairly easily. If this describes you but you’re brand new to Python then I also recommend reading Mark Pilgrim’s book Dive Into Python. It’s available free online and full of Python-to-other-languages comparisons that make the process of learning Python very fast.

If you’re completely new to programming than have no fear, Python is a great first language. In fact, the creator of the language thought it would be useful in high schools as an introduction to programming. A great tutorial list for soon-to-be-programmers is available at the Python website.

In part 2 of this series we’ll get into the meat and potatoes of creating the bot

The most important thing to getting people to use software is to make it easy. Easy isn’t easy, but some companies do a great job of making things easy. The social websites that have done well have done so because they are good at lowering the barrier to entry for people. My grandpa has a Facebook account and I since I never showed him the site I’m not kidding when I say to you that easy is what really matters.

WordPress is some of the easiest web software to install that exists on planet Earth. They have a famous 5 minute install which has worked well for millions of people. But not everyone has web hosting, so they also give a free service for putting up your blog and connecting you with other WordPress users. You don’t have to use it of course (I don’t) but it’s there to continue to make it easy to use WordPress. And remember, it’s all about easy.

Oh and it’s completely free (as in both speech and beer). You can change and add to it all you want if you got mad developer skills. Speaking of changing and adding, WordPress supports plugins which get developed by the open source community. Thousands of them. There are already projects to add social-based features to WordPress. And since the people are WordPress are so smart they have hired a developer for working on this goal. That’s important because for the social features to really get used they have to be built right in. Again, to keep things easy.

In fact, some social features are already being built right into WordPress. Gravatar support is included in version 2.5. For those of you that don’t know what that is, a gravatar is a picture that follows you from blog to blog. So if I comment on a post on your blog running the newest version of WordPress, my picture pops right up. No registration, no select my image for the 8 thousandth time crap. Super easy.

If it’s all done right, every single feature that Facebook offers now could be ported to WordPress. Even a similar apps platform could be made and then – bam – iLike on your site just like that. For an example of this, imagine a world where you your friends can still tag you in their photos with tag links that point right into to your own photo app on your blog. Maybe these applications could even automatically share photos to all people tagged in them so you get your own copy sent to your site every time someone puts up your picture. Plus now everyone can see them without them having to register for Facebook if they don’t feel like it. And if you didn’t want everyone to see them there could still be privacy controls. You control your own content and make is as accessible as you chose. No more walled gardens. Plus everything is a few-clicks-easy… do you see the theme yet?

WordPress can be the social platform of the future. And if it succeeds, we will all have much more control over publishing and using our social content.

Let’s talk about Facebook for a minute (I’ll ignore MySpace for now since it’s basically Facebook’s very ugly and very dumb little bastard brother). Let’s look at both the good and the really stupid. Facebook gives you a way to easily join, and search for friends, and do things with like look at you friend’s pictures and interact using the site. On top of that they build (and let others build) Facebook apps to increase what you can do there. They do it well, but it’s pretty much like every other social site. You join, you put up stuff, and you find your friends and their stuff. Same process over and over.

But the devil is in the details. Facebook is what we call a walled garden. Besides the pain of having to sign up for yet another online account (and remember/update your password, and find your friends, etc) you have limited control over how you interact with the site. Facebook can’t go get your pictures from somewhere else. Facebook can’t talk to MySpace or most other sites. You don’t really control your data. And to top it off, Facebook’s terms of service are ridiculous. I found this out when I tried to build a script to update my status on Adium and Facebook at the same time. It’s messed up.

The truth is, Facebook is basically a middle-man who shows you ads and doesn’t play nice with others. You can’t even see someone’s full profile without registering. That’s ok though. We already have the the ultimate social medium ever created. It’s called the web. And some some very smart people at a very smart company are already hard at work on the problem of helping us tie everything together and understand how websites and accounts and people are all related. Those people also help us search it. And as search and site relationships are better understood, you won’t need to have all your friends on the same social site anymore. Plus, we already have some technologies like OpenID and XFN which are helping solve some of the challenges with the decentralized web.

And ultimately, you should have more control over your content and where it gets sent. They’re your pictures, and you own them period. You can register a domain that only you control for < $10 a year and some people will host you for free if you want them to. Notice I said 'if', since they will also give you their software for free and let you host it anywhere, asking nothing else of you because they are that damn cool. Of course, I'm talking about wordpress.com which uses the best web publishing software ever created which already powers 0.8% of all the pages on the web. And your domain should be the hub in your social wheel from where you send your content to whatever other services you want whenever you want. Your domain should be you and you should be your domain.

The good news is smart people already get this. Matt Mullenweg, one of the developers of WordPress, has already said “It’s clear that the future is social.”

In part 3 of this series we will talk about adoption of WordPress as social platform.

It’s 2008. We are all now spewing information about ourselves in every which way. This is great for sharing our lives online and using the internet as a social medium. The only problem with this is that this system begins to break down more with each additional service that you use. And you have to use multiple services, since you have different friends and audiences on each. You have no choice in the matter. What’s worse, they don’t always often almost-ever play well together. It’s like they don’t even care about you.

Even when there are good tools for brining in content from different services those tools aren’t yet perfect. And the same could be said for tools helping you publish content as well. Things are improving in this area but the lack of features in the tools are only half of the problem.

To illustrate the problem let’s pick 3 services at random which have an overlapping feature. I’ll go with three really popular ones: Facebook, MySpace and Flickr. You probably have accounts on 2 or 3 of these right now as you’re reading this. And if you use them at all, you probably post pictures to them. All three of them let you tag these pictures with additional information like who’s in the picture. When you have new pictures you want to share online, you now have to upload them to all 3 services by individually logging into each service and repeating the process 3 times in a row. What a pain.

That’s totally completely broken and ass-backwards from how things should work. The services should get your pictures from you. You should be able to say “Hey Facebook, here are my pictures, add them to ones you are displaying”. And then if your audience is similar you could then say “Hey MySpace, look in the same place”. Now you update your pictures in only that one place — which is hopefully a place you own since they are YOUR pictures. And it shouldn’t just be pictures, it should be your status updates, you’re shared links, and everything you are publishing online to the same or similar audiences. And believe me, the stuff you publish online is going to increase as the barriers to entry continue to lower. Can someone say YouTube?

In part 2 of this series we will talk about current social networks and why some are full of fail.

Twhirl, everyone’s favorite cross-platform Adobe AIR based client got a public update today with the release of version 0.8. Most notable new feature is added support for FriendFeed. Go download it here.