Surfarama

Greg Linden’s post about Findory’s new advertising engine is very interesting…the gist is that they are taking Adsenses’ contextual ad stock and targetting it even more using their own algorithm to identify user behaviour.

This is big. Adsense is generally pretty well targetted, but to improve on this is a grand achievement. Given the direct correlation between relevance and click through it could make a good business great. Infact there’s probably a business in this itself…no doubt many publishers would pay good money to improve the relevancy of the ads they serve individual readers.

UPDATE: John Battelle and Philipp Lenssen have added some good comments about this. Philipp actually describes how Findory are achieving this and it looks like it isn’t actually that complicated technically, albeit something only available for ‘premium’ publishers. Obviously it is their valuable user behaviour data which Findory is mining to provide the additional keywords for Google targetting. Still, this is a snazzy demonstration of personalisation and am sure will prove very sucessful for Findory. I bet Jason Calacanis wishes he could do this.

Check out this cool graphical representation of Delivr postings on Del.icio.us.

Pretty sweet, although looking at this I’d say Delivr has had its day with del.icio.us posts plateauing at 165.

Eric Meyer has posted some nice examples of powerful uses for hCalendar.

And in reference to Eric’s post Andy Baio confirms that Upcoming will soon have full hCalendar support.

The ball is beginning to roll for these MicroFormats. If I were a blogware developer I would be baking this stuff right in there (WordPress already does XFN). In the meantime I wonder if there are any WordPress plugins for hReview?

I wonder how the rankings table is being calculated for the Contagious Media Showdown?

I am not really worried about it, but I can’t work out where the number of “Unique Visitors” for each site is being pulled from. I would assume it was coming from the Webalizer stats, but apparently not because the ranking in the Top 10 doesn’t accurately reflect the stats as reported by Webalizer for each site.

I guess they are crunching the logs using some other tool, which suggests that Webalizer isn’t very reliable.

Matt Haughey has jotted down some good thoughts on the subject of Adsense in RSS feeds. While he talks about Adsense specifically, his comments can be thought of generally in terms of advertising in feeds…

Haughey’s comments put a new perspective on it by looking at where his adsense revenue comes from…regular readers (more likely to be RSS consumers) or search engine traffic. He reckons it is most likely that the adsense rev is from search engine traffic, ie. so called traffic of good intent. My gut feeling is he’s probably right. For this reason he doesn’t plan to put Adsense in his feeds.

So what about RSS feeds which are subscribed to with ‘good intent’, eg. prospective search feeds, or tagged feeds from places like del.icio.us…the intent in these cases is clear, I am expecting to find new links and resources related to the tag in question. In cases like this advertising in feeds makes perfect sense. So [when] will del.icio.us put ads in its feeds?

When the heck are free to air television stations in New Zealand going to start broadcasting digital signals (to everyone)?

Having experienced terrestrial digital in Australia I got a hankering for it…especially seeing as I have this coolio Topfield digital receiver/PVR sitting there doing nothing right now. I futz’d around for ages trying to get the thing set up (even updated the firmware), before I realized there simply wasn’t a signal to be had…

There’s been lots of talk but not much action so far.

UPDATE: nice one…the Flickr Search API seems to be back up so Delivr is rocking again.

UPDATE: Just got an email from the good folks at Flickr to let me know that the Search API is down for maintenance and will be back up tomorrow…and they like the site, yipeee, that means a lot. Now I feel bad about saying the API was flaky (it is only in beta afterall).

The Flickr Search API is a bit flaky right now. During development of Delivr we had the same problem but they did something (more hardware I think) at the beginning of the week and it has been running real smooth since then…until now, Delivr’s opening day, when it decides to take some time off. Not the first impression I was hoping for obviously.

Oh well, nothing much can be done about it. Certianly not now, at 11:30pm after I got up this mroning at 4am worrying about the site before launch :)

It is only a competition afterall. Hopefully it will be all golden tomorrow morning.

Well, at the time of writing, Delivr is in the Contagious Media Showdown Top 10, but is well of the leaders pace. You gotta hand it to Blogebrity. What better way to get the a-listers to link to you than make a site about a-listers. Pure genius.

Still, it is early days and Delivr was always going to be a slow burner…come on readers, get in there ;)

Enterprise Blogger,
originally uploaded by mathowie.

Note to self, remember to check Flickr before making statements like “I’d be surprised if they did actually do something for enterprise…”. Who knew!

Ready or not I am stoked to unveil Delivr.

Delivr is a super simple service to create your own custom digital postcards. Obviously it is not the only site in the world to do this, but Delivr is unique in a few ways:

• It is powered by the Flickr API, so the number of images available is HUGE and growing daily…how many other ecard sites have a library of 600,000+ images, with 1000′s more added every day? This might just make Delivr the biggest ecard site online.
• All images are licensed under the Creative Commons, and all images are fully attributed, both in preview and in the sent postcard (try it). Delivr does not use images with a NoDerivs license.
• The postcards you can create with Delivr are much more classy than your average ecard…no annoying flash animation or tinny muzak.
• You can even use your own images to create postcards just by searching on your tags.

I hope you like it…feedback and questions welcome.

BTW, for those of you interested in how it works I can add that we use the getRecent interestingness API to populate the index page with all the recent images and this is cached for 30 mins 24hrs, while the Search API is used for user defined queries and these results are cached for 24 hours also so we shouldn’t be too hard on the API.

UPDATE: An anonymous commenter just asked what assurances there are that Delivr isn’t just an email address harvesting program. Unfortunately my spam killer plugin ate the comment before I could approve it (unintended irony). But to answer the question…no it doesn’t store email addresses at all. Once you’ve sent a postcard that’s it. There really isn’t anything I would say or do to prove that the system wasn’t harvesting email addresses, except to point out that I would have to be the dumbest spammer alive to provide links back to my own personal blog, on which you can easily find information which wouldn’t make it hard to track me down. And I while Delivr is NOT affiliated with Flickr, they do link to the site from their Services page so I guess they feel confortable enough that it is not some front to a spamming operation. That’s all.

UPDATE: Just got asked a question which prompted me to update this post. Delivr now uses the interestingness API from Flickr, which I think you’ll agree provides a much more interesting range of images to choose from.

Our ski season doesn’t start until late next month, but I am going snowboarding tonight, yeehaa.

Never been to an indoor slope before, but this should be good to try out the new board and make sure it is all set up right. I had a lesson when we were in Whistler last year and the instructor totally changed my stance around…it is taking some getting used to.

Apparently I had it all wrong for nearly 15 years!…that the instructor wasn’t much older than 15 is a whole other story :)

PCWorld recently did an interview with Biz Stone of Blogger, who apparently acknowledged that yes Blogger were considering doing an Enterprise version(?!). Brilliant! Now I don’t feel so stupid…

See, back in early 2004 I went to SXSWi. One of the coolest things about it was the Blogger Booze up at Club DeVille. I had a few drinks and when I got the opportunity to introduce myself to Blogger bigwig Jason Shellen I said something like, “So, have you guys ever thought about doing an enterprise version of Blogger?”.

At the time I felt an instant cringe because it seemed like such a stupid thing to ask, and Mr Shellen’s facial expression, followed by the hasty retreat he soon beat, seemed to confirm that idea.

Of course it may just have been that I was three sheets to the wind and what I actually said was completely unintelligible…but whatever the case I am comforted to know now that it wasn’t a completely idiotic thing to ask.

I’d be surprised if they did actually do something for enterprise, but it’s nice to know they thinking of us.