Friday, August 11, 2006, 11:01 AM
I have recently started an AdWords campaign. For any of you who don't know what AdWords is, do a search on Google and keep an eye on the right hand side of the search results page. You will see paid for advertising on the right hand side of the page. These are AdWords.
What is interesting about AdWords is that it results in highly targeted advertising spend. You select your message wording and you select hidden keywords that will trigger an impression of your adevertisement on the search results page.
You pay per click to your chosen landing page. You set the budget per month or day and depending on the package you've chosen you can set the maximum cost per click for individual keywords.
Certain keywords cost more per click than others and the more you are willing to pay the more impressions you get. However Google do not charge the maximum cost per click all the time. Google actually have a bidding engine that sets the price per click and the more you are willing to pay the higher the position of your advertisement.
Considering the revenues that AdWords generates, how do you know if you are getting fair value for your bid? To be honest I don't know the answer. How do you put a value on words after all?
Well, Google have found a way of putting a value on words. As they say in Readers Digest -'It pays to improve your word power'. Google no doubt agree!!
David Howe
David Howe is Managing Director of Howe Systems. The views expressed in this article are his own and do not represent company policy.
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Wednesday, August 2, 2006, 11:20 AM
Mozilla recently announced that Firefox has recorded its 200 millionth download of the web browser. This places Firefox amongst the most successful internet ventures in history. With great features like tabbed browsing and pop-up suppressors Firefox has set the standard for others to aspire to. Firefox has emerged from the rubble of the old Netscape browser by way of the Mozilla project.
As a long time user of Firefox, it is difficult to contemplate using any browser that does not support tabbed browsing.
Why is Tabbed browsing so useful? It reduces clutter on the desktop and allows the user to open multiple sites and skip between them seamlessly. Just imagine you are doing comparative shopping between several sites, with Firefox you have a sane way of comparing the offers from vendors.
And when your finished, you can close all the sites on Firefox in two clicks. The second click is to verify you want to close all the current tabs. No need to hunt around your desktop for open websites and multiple pop-ups. Sanity in an increasingly insane world.
David Howe
David Howe is Managing Director of Howe Systems. The views expressed in this article are his own and do not represent company policy.
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Wednesday, July 12, 2006, 07:30 PM
Microsoft anounced that it will stop supporting it's Windows 98 product from the 11th of July 2006. This is a problem for over 70 million users whose operating system will not be maintained by the vendor.
In a statement Microsoft said it was "ending support for these products because they are outdated and these older operating systems can expose customers to security risks". This is extraordinary, surely the longer an operating system is supported (patched and revised), the more stable and secure it should be. At least thats the experience with other operating systems.
So Microsoft in its wisdom is creating 70 million honeypots. Honeypots are computers that attract what Microsoft like to call "the bad guys".
Microsoft are urging their 70 million customers to upgrade to a newer operating system which I guess may involve an additional cost and junking all your old software.
What if a proportion of customers dont upgrade. The problem is that
these customers now represent a security threat to everyone else. Imagine if it was possible to take control of a fraction of these machines. Thats a hell of a lot of processing power in the wrong hands. In addition the "bad guys" now have a stationary target to hone their skills on.
As a responsible corporate citizen Microsoft should provide security patches. Its not like 70 million is a small number of customers.
David Howe
David Howe is Managing Director of Howe Systems. The views expressed in this article are his own and do not represent company policy.
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Tuesday, July 11, 2006, 08:48 PM
Don Quixote famously mistook windmills on the plain of La Mancha for giants. Perhaps its human nature that we see giants that need to be vanquished where there are none. The Giants in Don Quixote are like modern day brands, they exist in our imagination and are more powerful for that.
In his book "Primal Branding", Patrick Hanlon examines the 7 factors that make up the emotional attachment to a brand. Of course the idea is to create a belief in a product that makes the consumer use a belief system when buying a product. How powerful an idea is primal branding? Well, most of the great wars of the past and present have been fought on the basis of beliefs. The Crusades and the war on terror are good examples. Linux v Microsoft is another example.
In the book "Why Johnny can't brand", Bill Schley & Carl Nichols take a product centric look at the Dominant Selling Idea. They argue that you can allways be number one in your chosen field. Of course the magic word is "chosen". Also they examine the power of the Tag Line. Most today are meaningless but to be powerful they must have resonance or a strong belief system behind them.
I wonder what the tag line for Linux is?
Linux the free OS?
True but there's a problem with the word free. The belief, that if its free, it must not be of saleable quality. People in the know realise that the word free relates to freedom.
Perhaps the real resistance to Linux is that it challenges our assumptions that capitalism is king. For the winmills/giants read Microsoft. Yet Linux a no cost OS (assuming you have boadband) exists and is thriving.
The real surprise is that Linux is most effectively used by the largest companies, who could afford to buy the OS of their choice but choose Linux, just ask Google.
David Howe
David Howe is Managing Director of Howe Systems. The views expressed in this article are his own and do not represent company policy.
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Friday, July 7, 2006, 06:31 AM
I find it amazing that ASCII files from the dawn of the computer age are still in use. The American Standards Association (ASA, later to become ANSI) first published ASCII as a standard in 1963. 1963 - imagine that. 43 years old and still in rude health. The media for storing files may have changed but ASCII is still here and current.
Compare this with proprietary formats. Most proprietary formats from 10 years ago are unusable, even where backward compatibility was guaranteed by the vendor. So a word to the wise - make sure your old files work with a new version of software before adopting it. Otherwise you could end up with the appalling vista that thousands of man hours of work are now garbage.
So when the city of Boston (MA) worries about data longevity and insist on the Open Document Format (ODF) they have a real issue. Imagine a paperless city where records are stored for future generations, it seems reasonable to insist on a format that is non proprietary i.e. Open.
David Howe
David is the Managing Director of Howe Systems. The views in this article are his own and do not constitute company policy.
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