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.

Three years ago, in a post on this blog, I stated that I thought that the browser was becoming less important as more data moved into streams of data through RSS and aggregated feeds, as well as a raft of other consumer-oriented Web services.

This position was based on the assumption that the endpoint, in the form of installed applications, wouldcontinue to serve as the focus for user interactions, that these applications would be the points where data was accumulated and processed by users. This could be best described as the firehose: The end-user desktop would be at the end of a flood of data being pushed to it a never-ending flood.

Firefox and Chrome have changed all of that.

The browser has, instead, become the window through which we view and manipulate our data. It’s now ok, completely acceptable in fact, to use online applications as replacements for installed applications, stripping away a profit engine that has fed so many organizations over the years.

The endpoint has been shown to be the access point to our applications, to our data. Data is not brought and stored locally: It is stored remotely and manipulated like a marionette from afar.

While Chrome and Firefox are not perfect, they serve as powerful reminders of what the Web is, and why the browser exists. The Browser is not the end of a flod of incoming data, it is the window through which we see our online world.

While some complain that there is still an endless stream of data, we control and manipulate it. It doesn’t flood us.

I have been playing with my personal site, Pierzchala.com, and finally set the re-design loose last night. The last time I touched the layout was 2002 (I think), and it was all done in tables. The new design uses CSS, and makes controlling the layout so easy.

And, thanks to Matt Mullenweg, the header logo rotates for each visit. For someone who wants to improve performance, this is a simple attempt at vanity. Enjoy the home-brew headers.

Tags: re-design, pierzchala.com, pierzchala, logo, matt mullenweg

I spent my entire life escaping from Golden. It’s a much different place, 20 years and one massive ski resort development later.

But, as you got on the Trans-Canada Highway to leave, hopefully for the last time as a 25 year-old grad school dropout, you looked over your left shoulder, and saw this.

[Photo: raarky]

An eerie beauty…the sterotypical vanishing point, where man gives up control to the wilderness he has carved a town from, where the land rises, and swallows your ego.

For a 38-year old man with no outward symptoms of a physical ailment, my daily drug/supplement regimen is one that would leave many of my peers stunned.

The problem is, that like most people who are bipolar, I take a cocktail to try and balance out the variety and multitude of symptoms and effects I undergo. The current melange, as prescribed is:

• 1800mg of Trileptal (900mg twice daily)
• 300mg of Bupropion/Wellbutrin (150mg twice daily)
• 20mg of paroxetine/Seroxat/Paxil (10mg twice daily)

It’s the last one that causes me the greatest concern. Paxil/Seroxat/paroxetine is prescribed much less freely now than it was when I was first given it in 1999. The side-effects can be stunning and as dangerous as the condition they are supposed to assist with.

I have tried multiple times to take paroxetine out of my “diet”. Unfortunately, I immediately slip into SSRI discontinuation syndrome — aggressive behaviour, irritability, and a host of other issues. In the final calculation, paroxetine will likely be a part of my “diet” until I have 6 months in a Tibetan hermitage to wean myself off of it.

Until then, I am adding things such as Omega-3 oils and Ginkgo Biloba to the mix to see if they help my body control my cycles naturally, using the methods it has used for millennia.

It’s interesting to note that, when we are mostly aware of what’s going on, Bipolars are the best ones to play with and adjust their own treatment regimen. Most high-functioning Bipolars seem to enjoy tweaking and turning the knobs in most things anyway, so why not in our medications.

[The reference in the title is from a Star Trek, Original Series episode. You know how to use Google; you find out what it means.]

Since August of this year, I have been exploring the insides of my mind in greater detail. If you read this blog regularly, you are pretty likely aware of the fluctuations in my mood, and the rationality of my behaviour.

If you get the chance, find and watch The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive hosted by Stephen Fry. In his open, intelligent and witty way, Fry tackles the topic of Bipolar Disorders (oh yes, there are more than one), including his own. If you can find it (you will have to try all of the usual channels to get it in North America), watch it.

So, why am I openly discussing the fact that I am Bipolar in a public forum? Why would I confess to the world, to people who may in the future meet me, or even consider hiring me?

It’s simple. Many months ago, I wrote that if you were going to hire me based on what I had done in the past, or what school I went to, I most likely wouldn’t want to work for your company anyway. The same applies to this illness, this condition I suffer from. If you or your company won’t hire me because I suffer from an illness that is beyond my control, that I will have for the rest of my life, why would I work for your firm?

I have had Bipolar for a long time. I can track the behaviours that identify the condition back into my childhood, through my teens, through until today. Normally, the cycling that I go through is benign, punctuated by periods of utter and complete hyperfocus. Most of the time, hyperfocus is a benefit for me — it is what got me through re-building the GrabPERF interface last year, and helped power me to absorb and write as much on Web performance as I have.

The manic side does have its pitfalls. My mania usually results in buying and spending sprees that have often endangered my financial stability. An example of this is my acquisition or stationery supplies, pen, notebooks and books.

Two weeks ago, I cleaned out my desk and aggregated all of the writing instruments I have purchased over the last 12 months. When I was done, I had filled a 1-gallon Zip-Lock baggie with pens, pencils, highlighters and Sharpies.

In my lifetime, I could never use them all.

I fanatically acquire notebooks. Rhodia, Moleskine, Rite-in-the-Rain, anything. How many of them have I written in? Well, lets just say that my kids will be using my blank notebook collection for many years after I have departed this world.

The spending sprees, the intense desire for the acquisition of things, is my most noticeable manifestation of manic behaviour. In most instances, the manic process starts to wind down after a while. In a few instances, it continues upward. It continues upward until my rational mind dissipates, and I start ranting and raving, making irrational and potentially destructive choices in my life. Choices that have (or could have) affected the course of my life.

I suffer from a small subset of the condition, Bipolar I. What differentiates this group from the standard “manic-depressive” or Bipolar diagnosis is that is more MANIC-depressive, with a sustained emphasis on the manic episodes. Depressive episodes occur, don’t get me wrong; but it is the intense and unstoppable mania that has shaped me more than the depression.

However, this condition is not “curable” in the standard way. It also doesn’t manifest any physical symptoms. So in most cases, people just say that I need to get a grip and get on with my life. I am grateful that I have an understanding and (in some cases) forgiving wife who is intent on helping me control and regulate my behaviour. I am also extremely lucky that my current manager understands this part of me, and gives me the freedom I need to ebb and flow with the condition.

To wrap this up (I hate long postings), I leave you with this thought. In his programme, Fry asks his interview subjects the following question (and I paraphrase it here):

If there was a button you could push, a button that cured you of this condition, and gave you a normal mind, would you press it?

Only one of the interview subjects said yes. Everyone else said that despite the pain and suffering that accompanies the condition, there is no way that they would be willing to give back the state of mind that allowed them to achieve what they had achieved.

We are not in our right mind. And I am proud of that.

Technorati Tags: Bipolar, manic+depression, manic+depressive, Bipolar+I, psychiatric+illness, mental+health, depression, mania, manic

So, after 6 years of controlling and managing my own Web server, I have handed responsibility over to 1 & 1. I wish I could say that there was a really good reason why I’ve done this, but frankly, it’s because I don’t need a lot of oooommmmph for my personal domains (they run happily on a low-end Pentium II Celeron), and the price was right.

GrabPERF is still happily hosted by the folks at Technorati, while Wordpress.com controls my blog.

In some ways, I am glad that someone else has these headaches now.

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.

Canadian soldier killed, others wounded in ‘friendly fire’

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — U.S. warplanes mistakenly strafed Canadian troops fighting Taliban forces in southern Afghanistan, killing one soldier and seriously wounding five on Monday in an operation that NATO claims has also left 200 insurgents dead.

This is not the first “friendly-fire” incident involving US pilots and Canadian Ground troops.

On April 18, 2002, four Canadian soldiers were killed in what became known as the Afghanistan friendly fire incident: Sgt. Marc Léger, Cpl. Ainsworth Dyer, Pte. Richard Green and Pte. Nathan Smith. Eight other soldiers were wounded during a night-time live-fire training exercise near Kandahar and Tarnak Farms. The four were killed when an American F-16 fighter pilot, unaware of the exercise, noticed the ground fire and responded by dropping a bomb without determining who the combatants were. These were the first Canadian soldiers to be killed in combat since the Korean War. The pilot, U.S. Air Force Maj. Harry Schmidt, disobeyed an air controller’s order to “standby” while information was verified. Schmidt was initially charged by the U.S. Air Force with 4 counts of involuntary manslaughter and 8 counts of assault. The charges were dropped in June 2003 and in July 2004 he was found guilty of dereliction of duty. [here]

UPDATE: Seems that the Canadian soldier killed on Monday was a track star at Nebraska.

LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — Mark Graham, a former Nebraska track star, died Monday in Afghanistan while serving with the Canadian military. He was 33. [here]

Technorati Tags: Friendly+fire, US+pilots, Afghanistan, Canadian+soldiers

A few years ago, I wrote an article ablout how to best set up Web server cache-control messages to take advantage of this free form of content distribution. Until now, it has only existed as a PDF file.

Last night, I sent a copy to Kevin Burton of TailRank in response to some of his recent musings around making TailRank faster by sending explicit caching messages in his server responses. His response to the PDF was “make it an HTML file”.

You can now find the Caching for Performance article at Webperformance.org, in the Caching Library.

Use it. Live it.

Technorati Tags: Web+performance, Caching, Cache-control, Apache, Performance+tuning