Categories
Analytics Privacy Technical

Tutorial on Top-Level-Domain Names, Cookies, and Privacy

Ever notice that when you sign into, oh, say, Gmail, you sign in at www.google.com? What’s up with that? The reasons are technical, but it should be noted that when more and more traffic goes through the same domain name, you should wonder why. Before I go off the nerd deep-end, if you don’t know […]

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Analytics Bugs Email Privacy Security The Sky Is Falling

Google sees 92% of “top” web traffic

I had to write after reading this article in the New York Times. In short, Google “sees” 92 percent of online traffic for the top 100 internet sites. Other big boys, Atlas (60%), Omniture, and Quantcast (54% – I assume combined) don’t even get

Categories
Business Marketing The Sky Is Falling

Summary of “Advertising is Failing” on TechCrunch

Like hundreds of others, I have to respond to Eric Clemens Why Advertising Is Failing On The Internet article on TechCrunch because it appears to be linkbait or flamebait, or worse. What follows is a summary and discussion of his arguments, most of which seem to ignore the past 14 years of internet evolution.

Categories
Business Marketing The Sky Is Falling

Advertising is the Canary

This expression relates to the coal mining days when ventilation in coal mines was often insufficient, and mining was was a very dangerous and difficult task. Coal miners would bring a canary with them. Canaries tend to be sensitive to methane and carbon dioxide and so when the canary died

Categories
DNS Email System Administration Technical

DKIM TXT Records in DNS exceeding 255 characters

Wow. It’s 2009, and apparently DNS can only support reading configuration file lines which are not greater than 255 characters. I received the following error

Categories
Analytics Business Marketing Privacy Technical

Analysis of Google outbound link tracking

I noticed in the past two or so months, after Google upgraded their SERPs to enable users to rearrange and delete results (see thumbnail to right) that the outbound links Google was posting on SERPs were redirects through the google.com site (meaning, they were tracking clicks on outbound links.) Since I often search for something […]

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Analytics Business Marketing Technical

Uh-oh. AJAX-powered search kills keywords in referrers

Well, according to Clicky, Smackdown and a discussion forum on Webmaster World, many webmasters are fearful of AJAX-only search from Google. As I wrote in a recent article on Helium (a low-traffic one, at that), Google is a near-monopoly, and user Shaddows here points out that opting out of Google’s index (say, in protest) is […]

Categories
Marketing Technical The Sky Is Falling

At first I thought Google was being hacked

Ever seen Google down? Me neither. Sure, I’ve seen the “Gmail not available” message, and “Service unavailable” once or twice, but it was only for a few seconds, really. That said, last month for about 15 minutes, it appeared that Google was down. At first I did what’s called a Domain Name lookup in DNS […]

Categories
Analytics Business Marketing

Why people like ConversionRuler

In full disclosure, I work for Market Ruler, LLC which makes a Marketing Tracking Tool for Marketing Agencies called ConversionRuler, and have a vested interest in the success of aforementioned company. That said, I recently had the pleasure of working with a new sales consultant, who asked a rather benign question: Why do your customers […]

Categories
Analytics Technical

Time is hard

I’m talking about time as represented by, say, your watch, and I’m talking about it in context of internationally agreeing on time. You think about time and it’s no big deal, right? Twice a year we have to change our clocks for some insane reason which has to do with farmers milking their cows or