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Dina Mehta and other Indian Bloggers  are reporting the apparent clampdown of the Indian Government on 12 ‘radical’ websites. Notable among these being Blogger – the popular blog provider for India.

Yes, you read the last one right.

Blogger can no longer be accessed through certain Indian ISPs. The Indian Govt. has painstakingly put together a list of sites, running into twenty-two pages, that must be blocked by all Indian ISPs. Blogger’s one of them

I am speechless. There are so many things, I want to say, but don’t know where to start.

Shivam Vij, tried to contact the authorities seeking a clarification about the issue. He was was made to (virtually) run from pillar to post, and ended up with a curt, “What’s your problem? Someone must have blocked some site. So?” Typical.

A few national dailies took it up and reported it. Hindustan Times and Indian Express each had a story to tell, but it was more of a report than a story. The
Times of India (link not up yet), too had it’s own take on the entire affair. Notice the absolutely moderate, even submissive tone of the reports. It is as if they are trying to distance themselves from the entire fiasco.

Ok, I agree, some of the websites in the list might be classified as fanatic to the extreme. There might even be some Bloggers with extreme religious views. But a blanket ban? Why would anybody want to censor this blog? It’s stupid.

A few years ago, Yahoo! Groups was blocked because they found a few subversive groups using the tool to convey messages to each other. The same blanket ban was enforced even then.

Even if we assume that the websites are guilty of propagating theories and sentiments detrimental to the national interest. Wouldn’t it make much more sense if the owners of these websites were called in for questioning under the same clause? A blanket ban only serves to inconvenience everyone, while helping none.

The dilemma is simple: How far can you stretch the right to express your opinions?

Have the conversations gone a bit too far this time?

Technorati Tags: Blogs, Censorship, Religion

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Last week I sent out a note to our beta group for Performancing Partners, the new ad network we’re building with the help of the Performancing community, to tell them that the New Ad Format for Partners was ready to be viewed and tested.

The response was overwhelmingly positive, with great feedback both in general and technical. In fact, we’ve already managed to tweak the code and produce a better format based on the great feedback we got from the beta group.

Tell Us What You Think

Now we’d like to invite everyone in to see what we’re doing. So do visit the partners ad format testing doc and let me know what you think.

Keeping things Open

You’ll notice that the code is freely available and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5, which means you’re welcome to grab the code, hack on it, share it, or use it in your own applications.

Beta’s Wanted

This was the first newsletter I’d put out to the beta group, and it was everything i’d hoped it would be: A great and truly valuable experience for us and one that has helped us make the end product better already. If you’d like to become part of the beta group, and be “in the loop” on the development of Performancing Partners, please drop your email on the beta signup page and I’ll make sure you’re first with new developments as we move forward.

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I’ve been developing websites with Drupal for nearly 3yrs now, and I’m still passionate about it. It’s a joy to work with as a programmer, and even straight out of the box you can build complex, or simple web2.0 enabled sites and applications with just a little investment of time and learning. So with that in mind, Im really pleased ot see Drupal getting more and more attention, and particularly happy to see the start of an IBM Developer Works Series focusing on the Open Source framework.

Really, if you’re contemplating building a community oriented site (aka web2.0), don’t reinvent the wheel….

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The pretty new and still pretty beta website eefoof.com promises to share advertising income with their users. The model sounds pretty simple: Post your media on eefoof and every pageview creates a share from the total monthly ad income on eefoof.

The idea is great and the service basically looks good at the first glance. A short test …

I went to the website eefoof.com and looked around a little bit. The design is clean but the performance is pretty slow. The offered media types are video, image, audio and flash. Eefoof also offers a forum (2.800 users, 50 topics, 439 posts at the moment of the test) and a developer blog (one article). The published content is the typical teenage stuff (number one link to a nice Japanese video ad with a girl in a bikini). Content theft issues and copyright issues are handled a) by the poster (claims to be author, does not claim to be author = no cash) and b) through community reporting (inappropriate, spam, duplicate). This seems to be a little naive but, well, the page is still beta and somehow it will be refreshing to see the development in the future 🙂

Advertising at the moment is presented by Google and AdBrite. Google is absolutely not the best choice as the pages have no text to offer from which fitting contextual ads could be generated. As not even the little bit of text in the media title, keywords and description is present in the page title or in meta tags you can not expect to see relevant ads. Sorry to say this but using Google contextual ads is really lame!

OK, I registered, received my PW by mail and logged in. The first thing I did was to upload my latest beautiful night shot of the lake Outer Alster in Hamburg through a web form. You can only upload one picture at once and metadata information like EXIF, IPTC or XMP is not imported at all. Instead you have to type in everything (title, keywords, description) manually. Technically this is pretty bad because PHP supports the metadata formats EXIF and IPTC and it is much easier to use a specialized metadata editor instead of filling out a web form for every single JPEG. Even the simple web form is buggy because you can add a longer title then will actually be published. This means double work.

The imported picture looks good and the JPEG quality is well balanced. BTW: Flickr is very bad in balancing the JPEG compression! The same picture on Flickr has 75 KB (500 pixel version) while the image on eefoof only has 28 KB and is also much bigger (793 pixel).

The imported text is buggy because German special characters (ßüöä) are missing. Außenalster becomes Auenalster. This also means double work.

The picture is available only in two sizes: display size and full size. The alt and title tags are filled with standard text and not with picture relevant information.

What really makes me nervous is the missing media navigation. There is absolutely no user centric design at all! You can’t go to the next picture and you don’t have any kind of film strip preview. Not to mention interactive page navigation like “people who have seen this also looked at that”. At the moment you always have to go to the previous overview to get a chance to see the next picture. This really is a negative killer argument for a page which wants to generate income through pageviews. This is even worse then choosing contextual ads which can easily be changed later.

A last point regarding the promotion of eefoof: They don’t even have RSS feds which would be the absolutely easiest way to automatically promote new content.

The last two points lead to my personal scary conclusion that the eefoof guys have absolutely no clue about their site concept.

The basic idea is good. Do you know other services which offer such kind of ad revenue sharing?

Keywords / Categories / Technorati Tags: Markus Merz, 2006, eefoof, media, hosting, revenue, database, sharing

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If we had a list of “classic” Performancing posts then I would nominate my old “Killer Post Ideas” as my contribution. I’m not just tooting my horn here, this post has been round the block and back once or twice now. Just this week what do you know it reared its head in the blogosphere once again. Is there no killing this thing? Heh

How the heck did it appear on Del.icio.us popular and Lifehacker half a year from publishing even though I could have sworn everyone who might be interested had already seen it, linked it/slagged it and forgotten about it?

Nick and I are just as bemused as you probably are. All we can think is there is more power to the “interlinking strategy” than even we thought (buried in the content I linked to the article by way of example).

Here is what I have learned

• There is a bigger audience for your thoughts than you think
• Not everyone links, comments or bookmarks a post first time round even if they are inclined to
• People who post snarky comments don’t like “top tens”
• People who bookmark and link LOVE “top tens”
• The best viral tactics work even months after and even accidentally
• Original content rewards over and over
• Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best

I recommend you put up links to your golden oldie content right now!

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The results are in, and they ain’t pretty.

Market research firm Outsell released a report Wednesday that shows what many already knew — that click fraud in contextual pay per click advertising is a big problem. The report reveals that 14.6 percent of all clicks are bogus, and that 27 percent of advertisers reduced or stopped spending on click-based advertising.

That type of reaction is to be expected, and it’s reflected in Scott Karp’s post asking What Will Replace Pay-Per-Click Advertising? However, closer inspection shows that the majority of the fraud comes from third-party publisher sites, not in the actual search engines themselves, and that vindicates a pay per click model that actually works.

As I indicated in my recent pay per click advertising post, smart search engine marketers don’t bother with contextual advertising on third-party sites. Even without fraud it’s just not a good return on investment.

I’m not saying there is no fraud in the search engine result pages (SERPS) themselves, but it’s easy for Google to detect and discount that, and the motivation is lower. It’s a whole different story on independently-owned sites where a profit motive is present, thanks to AdSense.

AdSense has been a cash cow for Google for one simple reason — it caters to the “money for nothing” mentality that pervades the world of Internet publishing and marketing. You don’t have to sell anything or even add value to the Web… you just need that click.

So, once you have a program that rewards publishers for producing content and pages that effectively encourage people to leave as soon as possible, can we really be surprised that organized click fraud is the natural result? Did we think the millions of splogs and junk web pages littered with AdSense ads would be as bad as it got?

Nope. That’s not how this end game works, and I’m fairly sure Google had to be aware of this inevitable result.

However, pay per click advertising in search engines is still effective, and if the knee-jerk reaction from some advertisers is to abandon all PPC, better for the rest of us. Just understand that you can opt out of having your ads displayed on third party sites and still enjoy the ROI of search engine marketing.

But there is a definite shift afoot, and even Google’s smartly getting into it.

Affiliate marketing is making a strong comeback.

For many (such as myself), it never left. Unfortunately, the emphasis placed on AdSense, especially in the blogging world, has left many newcomers to Internet marketing completely in the dark about affiliate marketing techniques that work. And those techniques generally do not involve banner ads inserted in the spot where your AdSense used to be.

The fact is, you can make money with your blog (and other types of sites) if you’re willing to put some work into it, and invest a bit in learning smart strategies. Just don’t invest in any “make money with AdSense” programs at this point!

This morning, like a few others I would imagine, I was duped into unsubscribing from Guy Kawasaki’s blog. It wasn’t untill I got to my friend Graywolfs post that I even realized I’d been had. This is a problem Feedburner need to sort out immediately.

I’ll refrain from saying “it’s an easy fix”, as running a couple of large tools/services has taught me that things are rarely as simple as most users imagine, but the idea of just not letting someone resuse a feed url is fairly simple, so hopefully they’ll be able to sort it out sooner rather than later.

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