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.

Tags: ad network, ads, adsense, advertising, advertising model, API, attention, audience, b5 Media, blog, blog advertising, BuzzLogic, BuzzMachine, community, content, control, conversation, current, data, digg, disqus, EAD, feeds, Fred Wilson, friendfeed, HTML, HTTP, IE, IM, information, interaction, interactions, IP, it, Jeff Jarvis, LAN, Lookery, Mac, marketing, measurement, media, metrics, Newest Industry, Om, One, online, online world, pr, social media, social media advertising, social media advertising model turns, social media mavens, social media providers, Steven Hodson, Technorati, The Inquisitr, twitter, Union Square, Union Square Ventures

Since I started self-hosting this blog again on August 6 2008, I have been trying to find more ways to pull traffic toward the content that I put up. Like all bloggers, I feel that I have important things to say (at least in the area of Web performance), and ideas that should be read by as many people as possible.

As well, I have realized that if I invest some time and effort into this blog, it can be a small revenue source that could get me that much closer to my dream of a MacBook Pro.

The Analysis

In a post yesterday morning, Darren Rowse had some advice on when the best time to release new post is. Using his ideas as the framework, I pulled the data out of my own tracking database and came up with the chart below. This shows the page view data between September 1 2007 and September 15 2008 based on the day of the week vistors came to the site.

Using this data and the general framework that Darren subscribes to, I should be releasing my best and newest thoughts in a week on Monday and Tuesday (GMT).

After Wednesday, I should release only less in-depth articles, with a focus on commentary on news and events. And I must learn to breathe, as I suffer from an ailment all to common in bipolars: a lack of patience.

A new post doesn’t immediately find its target audience unless you have hundreds or thousands (Tens? Ones?) of readers who are influential. If you are luckyin this regard, then these folks will leave useful comments, and through their own attention, help gently show people that a new post is something they should devote their valuable attention towards.

It takes a while for any post to percolate through the intertubes. So patience you must have.

Front-loaded v Long-tailed

Unless, of course, your traffic model is completely different than a popular blogger.

The one issue that I had with Darren’s guidance is that it applies only to blogs that are front-loaded. A front-loaded blog is one that is incredibly popular, or has a devoted, active audience who help push page views toward the most recent 3-5 posts. Once the wave has crested, or the blogger has posted something new, the volume of traffic to older posts falls off exponentially, except in the few cases of profound or controversial topics.

When I analyzed my own traffic, I found that the most of my traffic volume was aimed toward posts from 2005 and 2006. In fact, more recent posts are nowhere near as popular as these older posts. In contrast to the front-loaded blog, mine is long-tailed.

There are a number of influential items in my blog which have proven staying power, which draw people from around the world. They have had deep penetration into search engines, and are relvant to some aspect of peoples’ lives that keeps pulling them back.

Summary

I would highly recommend analyzing your traffic to see it is front-loaded or long-tailed. I know that I wish that this blog  was more front-loaded, with an active community of readers and commentators. However, I am also happy to see that I have created a few sparks of content that keep people returning again and again. If your blog is  long-tailed, then when you post becomes far less relevant than ensuring the freshness and validity of those few popular posts. Ensure that these are maintained and current so that they remain relevant to as many people as possible.

Tags: analysis, analytics, blog posts, Blogging, content creation, content release, current, Darren Rowse, freshness, front-loaded, hits, long tail, maintain, page views, posting, search engines, statistics, traffic, update, Web Performance

I have a problem: I like to collect GSM phones. Right now, I have seven.

From left to right.

• MOTORAZR V3
• MOTORIZR Z3
• MOTOSLVR L7i (current phone in use)
• Motorola V188 (running V220 software)
• Sony Ericsson K700i
• Nokia of some description
• Samsung T619

Ugh.

Tags: ARIN, css, current, GSM, HTTP, IE, IM, IP, it, Om, One, pr, Razr, run

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.]

Tags: control, current, cycles, Google, HTTP, IE, IM, IP, Issues, it, LAN, leave, media, Om, One, PAXIL, pr

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.

Tags: ads, app, children, current, EAD, IE, IM, IP, it, live, normal, Om, One, pr

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

Tags: Acquisition, app, bbc, Bipolar Disorders, blog, book, control, current, depression, EAD, GrabPERF, HTML, HTTP, IE, IM, IP, it, LAN, leave, mania, normal, North America, Om, One, performance, posting, pr, Stephen Fry, Technorati, teen, tv, web, Web Performance

Scott Berkun wrote a great post that discusses how he encounters the start-up inflection point in companies. This is the point where the company has to make that brutal transition from the fast-and-loose dynamic of the true start-up to the more established and “normal” business methods.

This week, Niall Kennedy provided an example of someone who gave an established firm a try, but decided that the start-up world is more to his liking.
The object here is not to decide which is best, the start-up or the established firm, but to discuss the transition that occurs when moving between these two phases; and the direction of travel is always one-way, to the established firm. For all their talk of “thinking like a start-up”, established firms are what they are.

I have made this transition twice now. The first time was during the exuberance of the 1999 bubble world with a company that had just gone public. Here the transition was initially hidden by the exponential growth and overly optimistic predictions made by the executives. When reality stepped in early in 2001, the true effect of the transition became clear: this was no longer a start-up, and there were people who were more than willing to make the tough decisions. Whether, in the long-term, these were the correct decisions is a question that I am not willing to answer; I was merely an observer.

I was an observer when a similar change occurred at my current company. A start-up in the sense that it was still a VC-funded private firm, this company had (and still has) an excellent product developed by some top-flight technical talent. The issue now was to take that foundation and build a team that could execute. Again, I can’t say whether the decisions that were made were the correct ones, but the team that was built during that time has lead the company out of the wilderness and in a very solid direction.

These are simply my experiences. In my experience, there are start-up people and established company people; and there are the rare folks who can slide in and out of both worlds. Me, I fall into the start-up category. When a company starts edging toward 200 employees, I begin to feel a bit edgy. In a very quick exchange I had with Niall Kennedy on Tuesday, he said that he set a magic number whan a company became a “189″ “187″ (a number he also mentioned was police slang for homicide).

Is there a magic number? Or does it depend on the company? What defines a start-up? What defines an established firm?

Technorati Tags: start-up, established+firm, big+company, Niall+Kennedy, Scott+Berkun, Inflection+Point, transition, management

Tags: blog, business, cro, current, EAD, HTML, HTTP, IE, IM, it, LAN, Microsoft, normal, Om, One, pr, server, Technorati

I now have a true live example of how text matching can provide information on issues where a successful page is returned.

In this example, the TEST AGENT returned a Text Match Failed error, while 3 of the agents running the current production code said the page was a success.

How do I know that the TEST AGENT is right? Take a look at the byte count. For the successful pages, the byte count is in the 3,600-3,900 byte range; the page that had the Text Match failure only returned 1076 bytes. And three other measurements around that time reported the same approximate size, but reported successful page downloads.

If this Agent code shows continued success and robust behaviour, then I will push it into production on August 14.

Technorati Tags: GrabPERF, Agent+upgrade, Web+performance, text+match, content+match

Tags: ads, app, ARIN, content, current, GrabPERF, HTTP, IE, IM, information, Issues, it, live, measurement, Om, Pages, performance, pr, run, Technorati, web, Web+performance

This morning’s bounty of posts brought in two that will make you think.

First was Port80 Software’s comments on using the Cache-Control mechanism embedded in all browsers. This is interesting to read, as I have been trying to get companies to use this mechanism more intelligently for a number of years. I know that the Port80 team gets it, but it is always nice to have some outside validation of a position you have tried to evangelize for a long time.

The second was Tim O’Reilly’s post on Cal Henderson’s new book on Web scalability. While I am likely to purchase the book for a professional interest, I have one problem with Flickr’s current configuration: static.flickr.com does not use HTTP persistence, something I noted last week. This strikes me as weird.

It’s always good to see Web performance rear its head.

Technorati Tags: Tim O’reilly, Cal Henderson, Cache-Control, http, port80 software, persistent connections, Flickr

Tags: ASP, book, browser, cache-control, control, current, EAD, HTML, HTTP, http persistence, IE, IM, it, Om, One, OReilly, performance, persistent, persistent connections, PHP, posts, pr, Technorati, web, Web Performance

After a few month hiatus, I am starting to code for GrabPERF again. I need to exercise my brain; as I am a hobbyist code mangler, I have to take on a project every now and then to keep my not-so-l33t skillz honed.

The change to the agent is one of efficiency. The current production agent opens two database connections to run tests: one to retrieve the test configuration data; the other to insert the results of the tests. This means I loop through one set of database query results while doing inserts inside the loop on a second database connection.

This is stupid.

The new code opens a single connection to the database, retrieves the test configuration, dumps the results to an array of arrays, then inserts the data on the same connection. This is more efficient, as I use persistent connections and compression to MySQL to improve performance.

I have this running as TEST AGENT 1 from the Technorati #2 site.

Let me know if you see any madness…outside of Washington DC, and specifically with GrabPERF.

Technorati Tags: GrabPERF, PERL, MySQL

Tags: compress, compression, current, data, database, GrabPERF, GrabPERF.org, HTTP, IE, IM, it, mysql, Om, One, performance, Perl, persistent, persistent connections, pr, run, Technorati, testing, the other, Washington DC