FOWA Miami 08

So today, a leap year day, I had the pleasure of attending FOWA Miami and it was very fun!
"where the pioneers of the cutting edge web meet"

Ok I buy that tag line. It was full of energy, ideas and inspirational testimonies of start up woes and success. As a software developer I was intrigued by the speakers sharing their experiences of dealing with issues day to day developing and promoting their ideas. It sounded very much like my own shop and how we are dealing with similar issues and growing pains of making decisions that have effects which may be known or unknown. It was educational and fun and I would certainly recommend it to anyone interested.
So the day started with Kathy Sierra speaking on Creating Passionate Users. She is brilliant and a very good speaker. I thought she gave the best presentation that made me think about my site and answering the provocations that are important to building community sites.
Such questions as:

1. How to create passionate users?
2. How to add human elements to your site?
3. Getting through the mind to the brain.
4. How do you observe the user?
5. Do you have a 'WTF?' button so users can tell you they don't like something.
6. How do you "Touch" your users.

She definitely inspired my team to think about what experience users may have on the site.

The next speaker was Matt Mullenweg from WordPress. Matt had some informative points about site architecture and scalability. I agree with him on the essential issue that when your site starts serving a large number of users the best thing to do is give the users features that they can decide how to best use. So to relate to my site, large lists dont work. Rather, build features that allow the user to choose what works for them. Allow the user to define how they will organize their information on your site thus enabling the user to create their own experience. This is valuable knowledge because instead of saying this is how the user will use the site. You say this feature will allow the user to choose an experience that makes sense to them. This approach says create building blocks and not cookie cutter experiences. Remember, each user is unique!

I feel that these two lessons were really the essence of FOWA and the other presenters had much to say but on the aspect of the future of cutting edge social web, these two lessons speak volumes.
So I feel that the lessons learned are:

1. Create user value first - users must find that it solves a problem
   
2. Allow users to experience the value in their own way
3. social web is about building relationships that matter in various ways
   
4. keep it simple enough that users can intuitively use and relate
5. execution - time is of the essence

Charge!!

Video on free digital economy

A great video on a free digital economy.

http://www.netvision.de/uk/dispatching/?event_id=5bb1b5e95afabb2e62d2b148ded47706&portal_id=369401748e8249f142a700d8098a3473

Search Twitter posts

A very cool thing...

A site to search twitter posts.
http://terraminds.com/twitter/

Pick anything and search twitter. Its a hot tool for the hottest thing on the web.
I searched on 'Microsoft' and after sorting out the crap...I found some great posts.
You can find news here before its posted on the major networks as industry insiders often post their tid bits here first.

Added Google Adsense

ok so i added Google AdSense to my blog. If you have never used Google AdSense or AdWords it its very intereting. Setting up the account and working with the interface it fairly easy. Its really easy to set up a blog and then a Google AdSense account and place ads on your blog. So in like tens years or so I might make $100.00 which with inflation might buy me a lunch. Oh if ever
you could count on your friends its to visit your new site. HA!

A goog tip from the AdSense blog:

Summary:
- make sure the ad unit with highest Click Through Rate (CTR) is first
- more ad units the better
- first ad unit on a page always shows the top ads that win the ad auction
- the first ad unit on the page will display ads first
- use custom channels to determine which of your ad units has the highest CTR
- the first ad unit in the source code is not always the first ad unit that your users will see when the page finishes loading in their browser.
-if you use DIV tags, the google adsense system may recognize an ad unit which users see at the bottom of the page as the first ad unit

source: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2006/11/first-impressions-count.html

Observations of Google AdSense and getting more CPC

I was talking to a friend recently about Google AdSense and how we are using it on our website. So I thought I would blog it and describe some of my observations while implementing it. So I don't know exactly how Google targets ads for a site with AdSense but trying some different techniques and paying attention to the ads that get rendered I did discover that our urls made a big difference. Basically the ads that got displayed seem to closely match what the page url looked like. So if there are powerful keywords in our urls then the ads that get rendered are closely matched to those keywords. So keeping with my examples present on this blog (fishing) ... an example of how this worked.

In our development environment we build ASP.NET applications using Visual Studio we create a web application project with a name such as FishingWebsite.csproj. So if we run that app using localhost then we get http://localhost/fishingwebsite/ .
So running the site on my local development machine and viewing the Google AdSense I might see ads such as "how to fish".
When that site is deployed to a production environment you might have your business domain such as http://www.exampleofafunwebsite.com/ .
If the production url was http://www.exampleofafunwebsite.com/how-to-build-websites/ the ads rendered by AdSense would read like "professional software development" or "build a site now".
This example is as basic as it comes but it gives you an idea of the different results I've observed using AdSense.
After discussing this event with others in my company we agreed that surely Google must use more than simply the url to decide which ads to render but I after that simple test its clear that having a strong url is a good start for get those targeted ads you desire to render on your site.

More proof?
So after learning that simple pattern of keyword placement in the url I decided to take it step further. Our production site includes some content on video on credit cards and credit scores. The page that displays these video links is not targeted to credit cards but it includes language and video links to many different types of content and video. With so much varying content and links its really hard to give that page a heavy weighting toward the topic of credit alone.
Guess what? When I clicked to watch the video on credit scores the ads displayed were "wipe out credit card debt". The phrase 'credit-counseling' was in the url on the page with mixed content. After that test I felt it was convincing enough to make decisive moves for designing my urls to target keywords.

This brings me to my next point...making money! So Adwords has a keyword search tool
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal that allows you to get an idea of what people are paying for certain keywords and some degree of search demand for that keyword. So I used that tool and searched on some keywords and typed in $5.00 for the estimated cost per click (CPC). The results can be both interesting and disappointing because you get some idea of what people are paying for certain keywords but exact numbers are not available. I don't have a lot of experience using an AdSense account for searching keywords so I cant comment on the tool's full suite of options but the free tool is some what helpful.
I searched on the phrase 'florida mortgage' and got some results and saw some numbers that seemed good to me (4.50 cpc).
I find this useful because if I wanted to get AdSense ads on my site with a high cpc I would try to target my urls and page content using the keywords I found using the keyword search tool. Now this is not guaranteed to get those high cpc ads on my site by atleast I know I have designed my urls and page content is closely aligned with keywords that tend to get high cpc ads.
The idea is ofcourse that I have urls that offer users ads that have high cpc. Some of the users that visit the site will click the ads and my argument is that I'd rather have the high cpc ads showing on my site instead of the low cpc ads.

Ofcourse this experiment is still in progress.

the internet start up experience

the internet start up experience