There is clear dissatisfaction with the current state of marketing among the social media mavens.

• Fred Wilson and Union Square Ventures are looking for companies to invest in to take advantage of this.
• BuzzLogic releases their conversational ad service.
• The Inquisitr moves from AdSense to Technorati Media, indicating a potential shift at b5 Media.
• Lookery is providing demographic information that is relevant to social media providers and shaping ad presentation that way
• A completely off-the-radar person such as myself realizes that there is gold in what holds the attention, and that’s not always the latest and greatest

So what can be done? Jeff Jarvis points out that the problem lies with measurement. I agree, as there is only value in a system where all of the people involved agree on what the metric of record will be, and how it can be validly captured.

Currently CPM is the agreed upon metric. In a feed based online world, how does a CPM model work? And, most importantly, why would I continue to place your ads on my site if all your doing is advertising to people based on the words on the page, rather than who is looking at the page and how often that page is looked at.

In effect, advertisers should be the ones thrying to figure out how to get into the community, get into the conversation. As an advertiser, don’t you want to be where the action is? But how do you find an engaged audience in an online world that makes a sand castle on the beach in a hurricane look stable?

The challenge for advertisers is to be able to find the active communities and conversations effectively. The challenge for content creators and communities is to understand the value of their conversations, the interactions that people who visit the site have with the content.

In effect, a social media advertising model turns the current model on its head. Site owners and community creators gain the benefit of being attractive to advertisers because of the community, not because of the content. And site owners who understand who visits their site, what content most engages them, how they interact with the system will be able to reap the greatest rewards by selling their community as a marketable entity.

And Steven Hodson rounds out the week’s think on communities by throwing out the subversive idea that communities are not always free (as in ‘beer’, not as in ‘land of’). If a community has paid for the privilege of coming together to participate in communal events and discussions, then can’t that become an area for site owners to further control the cost of advertising on their site?

While the benefit of reduced or no marketing content is the benefit of many for-pay communities, this benefit can be used by site owners by saying that an advertiser can have access to the for-pay community at the cost of higher ad rates and smaller ads. The free community is a completely different set of rules, but there are also areas in the free community that are of higher value than others.

In summary, the current model is broken. But there is no way to measure the value of a Twitter stream, a FriendFeed conversation, a Disqus thread, or a Digg rampage. And until there is, we are stuck with an ad model that based on the words on the page, and not the community that created the words.

Since I downloaded and started using Chrome yesterday, I have had to rediscover the world of online advertising. Using Firefox and Adblock Plus for nearly three years has shielded from their existence for the most part.

Stephen Noble, in a post on the Forrester Blog for Interactive Marketing Professionals, seems to discover that Chrome will be a source for injecting greater personalization and targeting into the online advertising market.

This is the key reason Chrome exists, right now.

While their may be discussions about the online platform and hosted applications, there are only a small percentage of Internet users who rely on hosted desktop-like applications, excluding email, in their daily work and life.

However, Google’s biggest money-making ventures are advertising and search. With control of AdSense and DoubleClick, there is no doubt that Google controls a vast majority of the targeted and contextual advertising market, around the world.

One of the greatest threats to this money-making is a lack of control of the platform through which ads are delivered. There is talk of IE8 blocking ads (well, non-Microsoft ads anyway), and one of the more popular extensions for Firefox is Adblock Plus. While Safari doesn’t have this ability natively built in, it can be supported by any number of applications that, in the name of Internet security, filter and block online advertisers using end-user proxies.

This threat to Google’s core revenue source was not ignored in the development of Chrome. One of the options is the use of DNS pre-fetching. Now I haven’t thrown up a packet sniffer, but what’s to prevent a part of the pre-fetching algorithm to go beyond DNS for certain content, and pre-fetch the whole object, so that the ads load really fast, and in that way are seen as less intrusive.

Ok, so I am noted for having a paraoid streak.

However, using the fastest rendering engine and a rocket-ship fast Javascript VM is not only good for the new generation of online Web applications, but plays right into the hands of improved ad-delivery.

So, while Chrome is being hailed as the first Web application environment, it is very much a context Web advertising environment as well.

It’s how it was built.

As a part of the reworking of the GrabPERF code, I removed the Google ads from all pages. They were an annoyance, and displayed items were incredibly irrelevant for the site.

I have finally given up on Trillian releasing a new version anytime before the next ice age, and switched to the the messenger client formerly known as GAIM, now known as Pidgin.

Solid, functional, and showing signs that it is in active development. Unlike Trillian, which is slowly becoming the Duke Nukem Forever of messenger clients.

I’m sorry, but promising a cool new product, and then not letting anyone try it leads to scores of new Pidgin users.

Tags: Pidgin, Trillian, Duke Nukem Forever

Around the blogs, there are a number of folks talking about Skype making people pay for SkypeOut calls.

Guess what? Everywhere else in the world, you have always had to do this. So I don’t understand what the problem is.

I know that the QoS will improve on SkypeOut once the feeloaders are gone. Free is good, but you get what you pay for.

Those people who think free is a sustainable business model are either selling ads to pay the bills, or falling into the 1999 trap all over again.

The last two months have brought substantial changes to my life, and to my view of the world. I am in flux, in change, in limbo. Evelyn Rodriguez of Crossroads Dispatches went through a similar phase lately.

The society we live in is driven by disruption, change, atomization. When you actually translate these messages, they are simply new ways of saying “buy more stuff”.

I don’t need more stuff. Given some of the plans we have for the next 12-18 months, we need less stuff; or at least more portable stuff.

And if you want disruption and atomization, live inside my mind for a day. The internal chaos of my mind that I am trying to understand is disruptive enough without having to absorb the external chaos people want to bring to my life. So I crave external calm.

The written word, on paper. The beauty in a photograph. The smell of the woods.

My life has been dictated by achieving the ephemeral, in a world completely addicted to “change for change’s sake”.

I’m tired of keeping up. So I am consciously falling behind. Life is finite, ephemeral. Stuff doesn’t matter.

Change doesn’t matter.

People matter.

Walk away from the technology for a day, a week. Live with yourself.

It’s been a revelation to me.

Time to put the manic energy I have this morning to use.

One of the most interesting things about Bipolar is that genetics plays a substantial role in determining whether you will have it. In my case, my family is a disaster when it comes to mental health.

On my father’s side, there is a long and glorious history of schizophrenia and bipolar, including at least 2 grand-uncles, and their children. Two of my father’s cousins have committed suicide.

My grandfather committed suicide in 1978.

Everyone says that this was out of the blue, there was no reason for it. He left no note, or showed any indication. But as I learn more about this condition, this state of mind, I realize that the suicidal depressions can often swamp you, flood you, to a point where a person who appears fine will take the final action in the next minute.

On my mother’s side, my grandfather medicated with rye. As well, he had amazingly manic states; at least, that’s what we would call them now. He passed the genes along to two of his children, one of whom is my mother.

Over the last 10 years, my mother has degraded to a point where she lives alone, rarely goes out, is socially inappropriate, and has tried suicide at least once.

When I speak with her, it is hard to stare into the face of what I might become, what I must be aware of, what the costs of this condition can be.

So, I was doomed from the start. My father, a man who was challenged by his own demons, married a woman who is a wildly cycling bipolar II.

My family is lucky. As far as I can tell, I absorbed all of the bipolar genetics, leaving my brothers to conquer the world in their own ways, without the chaos that tears my mind apart. I am sure that they look at me and wonder why I am so nuts. I am sure that I am not alone in being the odd family member in a sea of normals.

So when you are in the depths of your misery, or at the heights of your mania, try to step back. Ask your parents, siblings, grandparents, cousins, uncles. Try and find the thread, the trail that leads through your family. Somewhere along that trail, likely in many places, the “characters” or “eccentrics” or “troubled souls” will leap out at you. These are the people who suffered, and revelled, in their condition, and passed it to you.

And realize that you can’t lay blame. You can’t transfer your woe and misery and mania to someone who is likely long gone. You just need to understand that you are the current carrier of a torch that originated long before you were born.

As a teenager growing up in a very small logging town in the BC interior, I had what could be politely termed unusual musical tastes, especially for the mainstream, heavy-metal, hair-banging kids I hung around with.

But when I was alone with my walkman, I listened to the real geniuses of 80s rock: REM, Kate Bush, Talking Heads, and…Lindsey Buckingham.

Lindsey Buckingham?? That guy from Fleetwood Mac?

Want a little aural treat? Listen to Go Insane. I literally wore the oxide off my version of the cassette. Crosses so many different boundaries…and realize that you are pretty much hearing Lindsey Buckingham only. Mick Fleetwood makes a couple appearances, but other than that, it is a one-man show.

Do it. I dare you.

This paper is an extension of the work done for another article that highlighted the performance benefits of retrieving uncompressed and compressed objects directly from the origin server. I wanted to add a proxy server into the stream and determine if proxy servers helped improve the performance of object downloads, and by how much.

Using the same series of objects in the original compression article[1], the CURL tests were re-run 3 times:

1. Directly from the origin server
2. Through the proxy server, to load the files into cache
3. Through the proxy server, to avoid retrieving files from the origin.[2]

This series of three tests was repeated twice: once for the uncompressed files, and then for the compressed objects.[3]

As can be seen clearly in the plots below, compression caused web page download times to improve greatly, when the objects were retrieved from the source. However, the performance difference between compressed and uncompressed data all but disappears when retrieving objects from a proxy server on a corporate LAN.

Instead of the linear growth between object size and download time seen in both of the retrieval tests that used the origin server (Source and Proxy Load data), the Proxy Draw data clearly shows the benefits that accrue when a proxy server is added to a network to assist with serving HTTP traffic.

	MEAN DOWNLOAD TIME
Uncompressed Pages
Total Time Uncompressed — No Proxy	0.256
Total Time Uncompressed — Proxy Load	0.254
Total Time Uncompressed — Proxy Draw	0.110
Compressed Pages
Total Time Compressed — No Proxy	0.181
Total Time Compressed — Proxy Load	0.140
Total Time Compressed — Proxy Draw	0.104

The data above shows just how much of an improvement is gained by adding a local proxy server, explicit caching descriptions and compression can add to a Web site. For sites that do force a great of requests to be returned directly to the origin server, compression will be of great help in reducing bandwidth costs and improving performance. However, by allowing pages to be cached in local proxy servers, the difference between compressed and uncompressed pages vanishes.

Conclusion

Compression is a very good start when attempting to optimize performance. The addition of explicit caching messages in server responses which allow proxy servers to serve cached data to clients on remote local LANs can improve performance to even a greater extent than compression can. These two should be used together to improve the overall performance of Web sites.

[1]The test set was made up of the 1952 HTML files located in the top directory of the Linux Documentation Project HTML archive.

[2]All of the pages in these tests announced the following server response header indicating its cacheability:

Cache-Control: max-age=3600

[3]A note on the compressed files: all compression was performed dynamically by mod_gzip for Apache/1.3.27.

So far, Google Reader is meeting or exceeding all my expectations in all areas except one: auto-refresh. Bloglines occasionally checks back in and loads up new articles, and it would be great if the Google Reader did the same thing.

UPDATE: Looks the interface does this. My mistake!