Tom Dalton :: Doer of Good

CNN.com :: Old Journalism

Professional journalists
Professional editors
No direct feedback from audience

Slashdot.org :: New Journalism

Community journalists
Professional (or at least, elevated above regular users) editors
Feedback from audience posted along with each story

Digg.com :: Unjournalism

Community journalists
Community editors
Feedback generates the entire site

Click fraud is all over the news these days. You know the little ads that show up on the right side of search results in Yahoo and Google? Companies pay Yahoo for clicks on those ads. It's called Pay-Per-Click. (See?)

The old story was that people hired companies in India to have armies of people click on competitors' keywords and drive them out of business or at least make them waste tons of money. Yahoo claims to have fixed this with a series of security improvements, such as tracking the IP addresses and click patterns on the ads.

But sometimes companies want to bid on words that people don't search for all that often. Yahoo can't show the ads often enough to get the company as many clicks as it wants. So Yahoo contracts with other websites to host ads there and share revenue with the partner site.

Yahoo -- $.40 per click from Company
Official Partner Site -- $.15 per click from Yahoo

As long as Yahoo is careful about which companies it partners with, all is well. But it turns out, Yahoo has not been careful enough in choosing partners. Some of their partners are setting up unauthorized, third-tier ad serving relationships. People who Yahoo would never approve contract with Official Partners and set up an arrangement where they get the ads from the Official Partner and send clicks back to that Official Partner. The Official Partner sets up unique tracking code on those ads, so it can credit the Unauthorized Site. Then the Official Partner reencodes the link and simulates clicking on its own ad.

Yahoo -- $.40 from Company
Official Partner -- $.15 from Yahoo
Unauthorized Partner -- $.05 from Official Partner

And the coup de grace: the unofficial partner could be using adware, generating popups or even entirely artificial clicks. The Official Partner has no incentive to monitor the validity of the clicks. And Yahoo can't trace the clicks back all the way through to the Unauthorized Partner.

This is what I call "click laundering."

Some researchers have stumbled across instances of adware that used Yahoo-generated ads. This highlights the problem, but it does not suggest a wholesale way to fix it, or even detect all of it.

A properly managed PPC program will be profitable, no matter the extent of invalid clicks, because it is an auction-based system and people can just lower their bids. Unlike the old, targetted attack rumored to be conducted by Indian (or other countries) firms, this type of fraud is broad and affects all the companies bidding in a given keyword space.

So it that the answer? Until Yahoo starts a much more thorough vetting of their programs, or develops a novel use of reverse-proxies, or finds a way to actually enforce serious penalties for violators... Yes.

This is just one more reason you should have professionals (in-house or outsourced, whatever) running your PPC program.

I did a search recently for a newish Google product called "Local Business Ads." It's a new kind of advertising service that I wanted to evaluate for our clients and see if we should start using it. What I really wanted to find were some thoughts from people who have been using it already.

What I found, though, was a whole bunch of posts from the day it launched -- all of them reading something like this:

"Google just launched Local Business Ads! It's too early to tell if it will work, but it looks like it might be really cool..."

Literally all 20 of the top-20 results were from the day of the launch. (Excluding the official LBA product page on Google's site.) One guy had taken screen shots of each step of the signup process.

Where's the thoughtful contemplation? Where's the careful consideration of pros and cons? Retrospection?

I'm careful not to write a bunch of "me-too" posts on my own site. Maybe I'm missing a bunch of traffic that I could be getting in the weeks following a splashy product release. But I hope my site reflects a little more thought about the things I choose to write.

(And yes, I'm still doing my thesis on the value of blogs as original information sources and trend indicators.)

When is a personnel decision not personal?

Hiring is inherently personal. We try to be objective about it, of course: resumes, job profiles, degrees and ridiculous job interview questions are all designed to fit people into buckets. Sometimes we're lucky and we can pretend the process works -- people sort themselves out into discrete buckets and then we can just hire the best bucket. But more often, it comes down to a decision between similarly qualified individuals -- who is the "best fit" for the position, the team, and the culture?

I think it's similar on the other end of things as well. When somebody is let go, or downsized, or whatever you want to call it. There are definitely structural reasons for that, sometimes. Purely arbitrary; about as impersonal as could be imagined. A rule like, "Reduce staff by 20%, eliminating the most recent hires." But even a rule like that is based on personal considerations -- how will the layoff affect the remaining employees? What will it do for morale and productivity? What if we lay off the most expensive people, and keep all the newbies?

And sometimes it's not even that clear-cut. Sometimes it's specific people. When a CEO says, "This person has to go." That's a personal decision. But is it wrong?

When I was an LDS missionary in Korea, there were about 200 other missionaries in my mission. All of us were aged 19 to 21. We were organized into zones and districts, with leaders at each of those levels, and then we had a mission president who was an actual, grown-up real person. (As opposed to whatever we were as a bunch of not-yet-grown-up-but-trying-to-be kids.)

Our mission president had to select missionaries to be the district and zone leaders. He had a large area to cover (almost 1/3 of Korea, by area) and he couldn't get around to see us very often. When he could, it was typically for a very short time. Once every three months, we had a 'zone' conference that lasted about four to six hours. In that time, he had to communicate his vision and goals to the zone and district leaders, especially, so they could lead the missionaries in his absence.

The missionaries all noticed fairly soon that most of the zone and district leaders were the athletes, the sports junkies. Some missionaries were very upset about this. (At the time, serving as a 'zone leader' seemed especially lofty and important. We didn't have a good sense of perspective.) I was in the small group of missionaries who defended our president and suggested that perhaps he needed to pick people with whom his personality was largely compatible. He needed to be able to convey complex ideas quickly and know that they would be received as he intended them to.

He was fond of sports metaphors. In a discussion about eating habits, he told me that Darryl Strawberry had colon cancer; I was supposed to be eating more fiber. I stared at him for a minute until he asked me, "Do you know who Darryl Strawberry is?"

I was never selected to be a zone leader.

(I have since read a biography of the former Rookie of the Year and his story is sadder and much more complex than a mere lack of fiber in the diet. But I still understand my old mission president's counsel, and I try to eat good food.) (Though my wife would suggest otherwise.)

Compatible visions and personalities are essential for quick, reliable communication. If you have time and energy, incompatible visions are just fine -- indeed, the debate and analysis that is often prompted by conflicting personalities and goals can be very illuminating. But at a certain level, a leader cannot afford that.

A general whose lieutenants constantly questioned orders until they totally understood and agreed would be unable to lead the army effectively. Business is not the army, of course. But neither is it the Greek agora, the unfettered forum for debate idealized by philosophers who had nothing better to do than stand around and discuss issues endlessly.

And so, back to the point of this all: even a 'personal' decision isn't necessarily wrong, just because it's personal. It's unfortunate, especially when it costs a great employee. And it says a lot about the management style of a company.

But ultimately, even 'personal' decisions can be business decisions, and any extra bitterness is only a waste of energy.

(Which is not to say that I'm not bitter about what prompted this whole post. But that's going to remain unblogged.)

Ever send a message that never got answered?

During one of my family's many moves, we left some of our stuff at a storage company. Their security system included a key-code box at the front entrance which would unlock the gate some 20 feet beyond. It had a red light that would blink on if you typed your code wrong. If you typed the code correctly, "a green light would blink on" would have been the right answer. But there was no green light. If you typed the code correctly, the red light didn't come on.

But then, if you just typed the whole thing wrong and didn't even enter a valid code, the red light didn't come on, and then you'd drive up to the gate, find it still locked, and have to jump out of your car and walk back to try again. The second or third time, you'd be feeling really dumb and you'd have to go talk to the gate guard who would tell you they'd changed your code. You needed to type a pound sign first. That activated the system, see?

The point is "feedback." Any good system will have feedback for positive and negative conditions. And maybe even preliminary feedback for 'pending' conditions.

Email is a bad system in that regard. Under ideal circumstances, you'll send an email and get a response. But more commonly, you send an email and get no response. Sometimes, you'll send an email and get an error message. But not every error results in an error message. (And some errors are delayed for days or even weeks in resend loops and other technical whirlpools.) So you never know.

Outlook takes a funny approach to fixing this with the "read receipt" system. It's an attempt to provide active feedback for every sent email. The problem is, it relies on the client of the user and most people don't have it setup for that to work. The really funny part of it is that the same system also provides a "retract email" function that works the same way -- and is crippled by the same reliance on the recipient's client. I laugh every time I get a "recall the last message" email because I've disabled that function so I get to see the whole chain.

But is there a better answer to this problem?

In Speaking Into the Air, John Durham Peters examines a more general instance of the problem of "disseminated communications." It's a great book, full of interesting metaphor and discussion, but ultimately it didn't tell me how to fix the problem of email. It did help me realize that the greater problem includes such issues as:

Even if the message shows up in someone's in-box, how do I know they read it?
Even if they read it, how do I know it conveyed my ideas accurately to them?
Even if it conveyed my ideas, were my ideas worth conveying?

I think most of what I say is pretty unimportant to most of the world. But to the people to whom it matters most, I'm usually able to get through somehow.

I just got off the phone with "CHS Surveys." The caller was conducting a survey -- I asked for clarification, and was told it was about "a wide range of questions." (You aren't supposed to tell people what the subject of the survey is, or they will be biased, see.)

It quickly became apparent that it was about the oil and natural gas industries. The questions were priceless; I wish I had a phone call recorder. From memory, here are the best two:

1. Would you say the progress the oil and natural gas industries has made in the last five years has been: (a) excellent (b) very good (c) somewhat good (d) fair or (e) poor?

Do you see what's wrong with this range of answers? And I hadn't previously stated that I felt the oil-and-natural-gas industries had made any progress at all over the last five years.

2. Would you say the oil and natural gas industries are our families, friends, and neighbors?

I don't know which company, exactly, but something about that question just screams "corporate slogan" at me.

In the spirit of this kind of fair-and-balanced questioning, I thought I'd write my own survey questions for you!

1. Would you say I am (a) devastatingly handsome (b) jaw-droppingly attractive (c) pretty darned good-looking (d) above average or (e) kind of funny looking?

2. Would you say I am one of the smartest, kindest, funniest people you've ever had the good fortune to meet, the sort of guy who lights up a room and can be counted on when it really matters?

Feel free to post your answers below. Remember, this is for posterity, so be honest.

Q. Mass can be converted to energy -- but what happens to the inertia of that mass when it is converted?

What I'm thinking is, take a 50 billion ton object. Say it's a spaceship and I've accelerated it by slingshotting it near a star or something. Now I want to turn it 90 degrees to the left. That would take a tremendous amount of energy. Could I just convert it to energy, somehow rotate that energy, then reconstitute it as matter?

Of course, this is a stupid question. But for a science fiction idea, let's play with it. Is inertia a property of matter that persists when it's converted to energy? Or would it simply be converted into more energy, because its mass has actually increased with its speed. Then when I convert it back, I'd use that extra energy to accelerate it in the new direction.

And how about converting most of its mass to energy to speed it up incredibly. Store that energy -- the intertia would simply result in the smaller mass moving more quickly. Then I could slow it down again by converting that stored energy back into matter.

Maybe that's what stars are. Fuel dumps for an ancient civilization that seeded the universe with pit stops.

How dumb is this?