Tag: Stuff and Money Stuff

Click Fraud Revisited

I just noticed this article on click fraud in Wired care of Boing and found a very odd thing – a moral argument for the rights of property holders:

By splitting revenue with the sites that host the ads, search engines have become, in effect, the Internet’s venture capitalists, funding the content that attracts people to the computer screen. Unlike the VCs who backed the boom-era Internet, search engines now provide revenue to thousands of wildly diverse sites at little up-front cost to them – PPC advertising is one of the few income sources available to bloggers, for instance. If rampant click fraud overwhelms the system, it will muffle the Internet’s fabulous cacophony of voices.

I don’t know how click fraud actually qualifies as fraud in the legal sense. I don’t know of a crime being committed or a contracual relationship being breached. The main example given in the story is one of extorsion, the threatening of Google with release of a autobot clickotron unless payment was made. Sadder still is the illustration of slogs – spam blogs – who exists only to generate traffic click throughs for a wee cheque:

Thousands of splogs exist, snarling the blogosphere – and the search engines that index it – in spam. Splogs are too profitable to be readily discouraged. According to RSS to Blog, a Brooklyn-based firm that sells automatic-blog software, sploggers can earn tens of thousands of dollars a month in PPC income, all without any human effort.

Imagine. Vacuous blogs created for alternative purpose. Whoda thunk it? The problem, of course, is the seduction of the technology generally and what it does to one’s thinking and one’s ethics. How much different is the new economic moral thinking compared to, say, actual legal regulations like copyright and the intellectual property of others. Is it because this clicky activity undermines the beloved as opposed to the actual rights of others? It is primarily the violation of the new moral crime against technological advance that is decried by Wired – we have a new plan that demands new thinking, new commerce and new crimes for the old thinkers…and we will tell you what the new thinking is after we get to it, thank you very much.

Isn’t the real problem the false valuation? Isn’t it incumbant on a firm presenting a new mode of advertising to prove its effectiveness in the marketplace as a mechanism for setting the price? Is it that the clicks are invalid or is it the mechanism which clicks which is. Isn’t the real question whether a click ad represents or ever represented value for money. Interesting to note that the one realistic alternative mentioned is micro-payments…about ten years after they were laughed away by the new think.

Take My Junk Mail…Please

What do you notice?

Paul Lima had a vague feeling he wasn’t getting any mail. When his mother phoned wondering why he hadn’t cashed his birthday cheque, “the penny dropped,” the Toronto freelance writer says.

He called Canada Post, which said he had changed his address in person on Nov. 17.

“Not me,” he said.

I noticed how little the guy must have been getting in the mail. But how long was the person not noticing the daily junk mail and bills? There must be something that would have been noticed if two days went by. What do I get in the mail? Banks statements of sone sort or another. Bills. Magazines. The Child Tax Credit mailbox money. Yet – what a drag to have it happen.

Hall Of Fame

The other day when I did rock, I stood for a moment before the tour t-shirts and decided that, no, I would not buy one for 40 bucks even though there was a brown one with orange printing displaying the large Queen crest on the front. It was not that I would not have occassion to wear it or that I could not find the 40 bucks in the wallet. It was that I could not foresee it entering the hall of fame, that particular pile of t-shirts, soccer jerseys, ballcaps and hoodies that are retired from active use to be pulled out at the right moment years from now seemingly unworn yet displaying information from a point decades past.

There are not enough in the Hall of Fame as I was not as careful in the past as I might have been but that is no reason to judge unwisely and presume. That the 1988 Bill Bragg T is too thin now is testimony to its beauty. That the 1970s “Radio Sweden: Keep In Touch” T from high school is now appropriated by others does not mean its place on the shelf should now be filled by another. Yet entropy is and, despite best efforts, the temptation to wear causes wear and tear and, like ourselves, these things do fade. But for the decade, the brown Queen tour T with the orange ink may well have deserved the place in the pile.

How Much For The Ferry?

Bad news for whoever has a soft spot for the Rochester to Toronto ferry bought by that US city’s Council just this spring:

The city had set aside an $8-million cushion but had to borrow an extra $2-million from ferry operator Bay Ferries Ltd. to keep afloat. On Tuesday night, the City Council voted 7-2 to borrow $11.5-million more to keep the ferry in business next year. Bought for $32-million at auction, the five-story-tall ferry was re-launched June 30 after running for just 11 weeks in 2004…Fewer than 100 passengers had boarded the 774-seat ferry on sailings last month.

I really hope that that was a 100 person per sailing average but, still, there are big problems with spending or borrowing 21 million within the first year on a 32 million investment. To put that in context, 53 million USD is the equivalent of 13.7% of the entire budget [Ed.: watch it – there’s a .pdf under that there link] for the city for the year 2004-05.

Google Bubble

Micheal is putting the boogie curse on my one share of Google. I suppose that the collapse of Google in itself would trigger the end of this bubble economy. But what of the small investor who puts just enough in to get the annual report and little else? What of me that person? Shouldn’t that investor be able to trust in a system that allows irrationality to provide a 3000% annual return and a few decent share splits on an information product that can’t even assure you that the answer provided is the authoritative one on the topic?

Stat-cher

The BBC has produced a interactive game with Margaret Thatcher’s reign’s economic stats including a chart with champagne imports 1979 to 1990. Smoking down. Foreign holidays up.

Remember 25% inflation? Hokey-kabokie! The only upside for me in that was it was undergrad and at the beginning of the term when there was lots of grant money in the bank the monthly interest paid for certain optional necessities which came in brown bottles.

Canada The Powerhouse

There are plenty of folk who use blogs – imagine – to blindly criticize our fair land, saying it is a shame that we do not have standing armed forces of 250,000 to rattle our swords now and then, saying it is a shame that we are taxed for sensible public services looking with envy southward where conservatives get to spend but not pay for it, saying that it is a shame we let people actually live as and with whom and how they decide without asking for permission. So it is good to be reminded that Canada is doing very well these days as it has been doing for quite some time. We’ve even it the lowest unemployment rate for 30 years despite the dollar being now about 25% higher in relation to our largest customer compared to where it was about two years ago.

You wonder when some folk would ever be happy.

Day Off For Nuttin

I decided there is only one thing better than one long weekend in October and that is two. I don’t really take too many days off and usually carry days from one year to the next. It is still a newish idea to me that I have legislated days off as opposed to days that I stay away from work. Here are some things to consider along with me as I aim at achieving a whole lot of nuttin:

  • Anyway, it is the first day of NCPR’s funding drive and eight hours into the week they are already at 31% of their estimated requirements. I will give and, right after I convince you it is one of the best radio stations out there, you should, too.
  • Based on the beer blog and with the goal of having a hobby that pays for itself, I have been invited to take baby steps into the more formal world of writing about been by news-printy inky-handy publications based in Wisconsin and New York City. What would you like written about beer?
  • The blog bubble has taken off in style with a widget being sold for 2.3 million. That is nuts except if there is a revenue stream in the works and I am thinking RSS spam. All aggregators being sent ads amongst their RSS feeds somehow. The future will suck and then collapse as usual.