Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts

Techcrunch has a good post on why Panama is important, not only to Yahoo!, but to the rest of us. I agree fully with Michael on this is very important to get more competition in the space. For monetizing traffic for big publishers, we competed with Google AdSense at what is now Ligatus and did so very well, based on different methods and a slightly different idea. Now with Ormigo we are actually banking on a different methodology again, also simply exploiting the multitude of networks that are out there. If you are working on a clicks based system, you need to be huge to compete and I am gladly letting that be handled by the likes of Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft. But still, with this system, a lot of advertisers are left out in the cold, and I don’t think Google’s move to give companies a free web site to advertise on AdWords, will be a real change in this. There are just a lot of people out there who shouldn’t have to care about AdWords, conversion, optimization, multivariant testing, and the like.

All in all, this will be a good year for Yahoo! on the search/clicks marketing front and while I am not sure choosing ad rank based on CTR and Click Price increases the click price itself, it sure as hell increases the CPM, which is what sites really care about. The problem comes in with those networks going for the agencies and the big companies, and then the big publishers suddenly don’t want to play that game anymore, because the would rather talk to those companies directly, and get a lot more money out of them. It will be an interesting 2007. Let’s all have fun.

This was already a small controversy at Le Web 3, though many might have overheard the question posed the the guy from Linden Labs on stage. The thing is that Second Life is saying they have 2 million users and it seems more likely that they have something like 10-20.000. Clay Shirky did a very insightful post on this called A story too good to check. Really worth a read for all those claiming that Second Life will change the world. I still think there is a possibility that this will be amazingly huge, but it will likely take years. I actually had an idea several years ago with friends of starting an online world for educating kids, which I still think is a great idea. I mean allowing kids to learn in an evolving online world (”This is a cow, it makes muhhhh and eats …”), in a secure environment, adapting to their abilities, would be wonderful. I am not sure yet that things like SL are really what some call Web 3.0, believing more in automated agents as the next big trend, but we will see how this game plays out in the next few years.

We love to compare things. That’s why IVW Online is so important in Germany, and others world wide. IVW has started out as the company that measures circulation of news papers in Germany and IVW Online is doing the same thing for Web Sites. The idea is that everyone has a standard tracking pixel on their site and this measures page impressions. I never thought this would be very brilliant as a page impression is not a page impression. Forum traffic is totally different from search traffic or high quality editorial content. IVW Online recently worked with AGOF to give us a unique user count, which took a long time to set as a standard as it is very hard to agree on what a unique user is on a web site.

Why is that hard? Because you can use cookies but not everyone uses cookies and those that do might be three people at the same PC. Those that don’t mostly are not trackable and especially stuff like proxies makes it even more problematic. But they agreed on something that they call true, which is as good as anything else. It just needs to be the same statistic.

Now the problem becomes even worse because of AJAX. Matt Cutts from Google has a great post on it. The thing is that moderate use of AJAX is a good thing, but if you are IVW tracked, it might be a bad thing because suddenly you seem small. I can leave Google Finance open all day and see the share prices move around, only doing one page impression for the site. Thankfully this is something where AGOF can help, but I still presume that lots of sites out there opt out of using AJAX as their traffic will seem to decline, like it did for Yahoo!, who moved their mail system to a new version using AJAX. This is a good move and I hope the start-ups out there go the same direction.

Another good post on the problem of measuring a sites importance is the one by VentureBeat on the new funding of Digg. Comscore for example doesn’t count RSS traffic, another problem for sites having high traction.

That’s that actually, just have a great time with family, friends and loved ones or whomever you want to be with. Back to doing just that for me now.

Akismet currently holds 34000 comment spams and several thousand are added each day, partly moving the server up to loads far over 50 and making everything unresponsive. Hence, I needed another solution and found Hashcash, a wordpress plugin that arguably works better than Captcha. So what does it do? Here is what they say on the site:
Every four hours, your blog picks a random large number (close to 32 bits). Whenever a visitor visits your permalink pages, an ajax call is made which retrieves some javascript. This javascript first decrypts itself, then executes itself again to retrieve the secret value, which it sets in the form. If a comment does not have this value, it is rejected. If a comment is rejected more than four times, the user is blocked for a specified period of time.

Sounds good and I hope it will work. Let’s see what happens. As long as I am not at 3000 comment spams a day, I am happy.