tombiro.com

Okay, not like it’s been a surprise or anything, as I’ve not been a regular poster on one of the bigger blogs I’d written on over the years, but I “officially” closed The Media Drop today, about five years and a week since its debut.

It’s been a long time coming, I’ve had a zillion conversations with people about what to do with it and how to handle the sorta conflict of working in public relations, talking to media people all day long, while working for a media company. Tricky, right? In any case, it was a total blast while it lasted, was one of the cooler things I’ve been able to do on the Web to date (unless you want to count my “Look! it’s Enrico Palazzo!” quote on the Internet Pizza Server back in 1995, while still in college), and I’ll definitely miss it.

Will it be back? You never know. I’m not taking it “down,” if you will, and am obviously working on a ton of projects that some of you are already aware of, so that’s where it’s at. Just thought some of you might like to know in case you’re still holding out hope in your RSS reader that TMD will be back in action – alas, it isn’t in the cards.

Well, it looks like yesterday’s post about ads “pointing” at Wikipedia re: “total internet traffic” searches in Google might have done the trick (or at least gotten someone to notice) as the ads are gone, at least from where I’m sitting.

On Tuesday afternoon, my Web host Alex IMed me asking me to check out a search for “Total Internet Traffic” – sans quotes – in Google. You’ll notice, if you perform that search, that one (or two) ads come up in the sponsored links. The following is what I got the first time:

And here’s what I saw the second time I tried it:

You’ll note that the ad appears to be taking you to “en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_traffic,” at least according to the URL below the link. But note the text to the right, which says “Do You Want A Flood Of Traffic? Sign up and start the flood!” Certainly doesn’t sound like something in Wikipedia.

Copying and pasting the full URL for the Google ad gives you this: http://www.google.com/aclk?sa=L&ai=CIsrrqm1_SY2DAc6Ktgf41oGBBbPrmF-L3sWNCLWGm8QBCAAQASgCUJTsn6gDYMn2pozQpOQPyAEBqgQZT9C7s0w5kWJwDVWN3sa0IiO119aBR3wtyQ&sig=AGiWqtx6XG_n6SZLN8nwlCRd1LPf-QEfvg&q=http://longdrv4u.twtraffic.hop.clickbank.net/%3Ftid%3DZZ01

And you should note that it has clickbank.net in it. Heading to clickbank.net immediately takes you to their “Network Abuse” page, here. It appears that whomever is utilizing the www.total-web-traffic.com site that is the recipient of these Sponsored Links does some business through ClickBank, which describes itself as an “Internet retailer that sells digital products, such as ebooks and software, to millions of customers per year,” so I’m guessing it’s an affiliate site.

Both links – the “Wikipedia” one and the second one, take you to “http://www.total-web-traffic.com/”

What I want to know is how they’re managing to have the URL stick in the ads, when it’s clearly not going anywhere near Wikipedia. Having seen the backend of AdWords before, I remember some of the detail on how it said you could set your ad campaigns up, but I could have sworn there was a specific filter for this purpose. Oh, wait, that’s what it was (I literally just had the a-ha moment here), the AdWords crew made a policy change April 1st of 2008, which they informed us all about on February 19, 2008 in this blog post. Check out the following from that item:

In response to advertiser and user feedback, and in an effort to provide more relevant advertising results and a higher quality experience for our users, we have made the decision to no longer allow certain exceptions with regards to our display URL policy. This includes, but is not limited to redirects and vanity URLs. This policy will be strictly enforced regardless of past approvals and will apply to all advertisers, beginning on April 1st.

In line with our existing policy, we will continue to require that your ad’s display URL match its destination URL (the URL of your landing page).

Now I don’t know about you, but I’d say this is pretty much exactly why that rule was put in place in the first place, no? While the second ad is most certainly legit, the one “pointing” to Wikipedia is misleading, IMHO.

Update: 2:42pm As I’m eating my lunch and checked back on this, I’ve noticed that the “Sponsored Link” at the top of the page in Google has disappeared, but the ad is still visible with the Wikipedia link on the right sidebar, per the below screen grab. Something moving along over at the house of AdWords? (I had sent them a note earlier, as did Alex)

Update Nevermind, just a glitch. It’s back from time to time in the top shaded section of results.

So I’m playing with some newsletter options. I’m familiar with Constant Contact, know that HARO uses AWeber, but I’m kind of digging Emma, and the startup fee that includes a pretty hot little template makes me happy. Anyone have any experience with the above (or others) and want to chime in?

I’m finally working on getting my personal side projects off the table, and one of them is going to be newsletter-based.

Having some site / Wordpress wonkiness right now… Hope to have it worked through in the next day with my host. Thanks!

[update 1/8] It’s fixed! Thanks, Alex!

WAY back in November, I flagged this NYT article by John Markoff, about how some technologies people are using are causing them to leave a “trail,” whether or not they realize it. Amusingly, my first thought about the item, even before making it halfway through, was that if I were one of the people that the fictional (gulp) Skynet computer system from the world of “Terminator” wanted to track down, I’d be screwed. Brightkite, Facebook, Loopt and a host of other services would do me in quicker than I could say “I’ll be back.”

While I can poke fun at it, I almost feel like these type of location-based services – which I’m in love with, truly – are to me and my “generation” of tech-heads the same as the doing-in of a lot of our teenagers and 20-somethings via their Facebook / MySpace photos and other permanent items on the Internet will be when some of them decide to become elected officials one day in the very near future. It’s not so much that I’m worried about time-traveling, relatively invincible machines that look like humans coming to my apartment and throwing me out the window, all while deeming my cat a non-threat, but between this, the use of EZ-Pass to pay tolls (or whatever your region of the U.S. or world might have), and other “helpful” items we rely on all day, we’re sort of putting it all out there for anyone with a couple of servers and some brains to crack down into something genuinely useful. A corporate terrorist (a domain name that I and a few friends somehow managed to not buy in the summer of 2001, thankfully) could easily do in a company’s team of tech-heads simply by figuring out who they were, and taking them out in one fell swoop at a “Tweet-up” or some other gathering in a public place, for instance. Okay, so maybe “useful” is in the eye of the beholder.

If this type of thing isn’t a marketer’s dream, then I don’t know what is. You thought Bluetooth-delivered advertising was something frustrating in the last couple of years? Wait to see what you’re going to get by posting your status on eighteen different services through whatever FriendFeed turns into next. Just sayin’.

Tonight in the elevator, while leaving the office, I mentioned to a colleague that I’d started following him on Twitter. He mentioned having read my blog a bit, and that I hadn’t posted much, and busted my you-know-what on not posting much of any import. Whether he was kidding or not isn’t the point, it’s that he’s kinda right. I’ve been so up-and-all-over for the last few months, and have been flagging items to blog about and having conversations on Twitter, Facebook, etc., and not here – where I like to have them. So if anything, I’m trying to put a good face on ‘09, and post a lot more regularly. I’d love to get back to the 1-2 posts per day, but if I ever get this and some of my other projects back off the ground, it’ll be at least that often but over those sites. In any case, here’s to getting back to “normal” here on tombiro.com.

This weekend, I made the final two payments to the “old” credit cards that I’d opened over the last 15/16 years, had since closed, and been paying off. Not directly, but it all started back in 1993, when I started college, and opened up my first card to cover some of my books, et al, expenses. I had been working in a law firm at the time quite a few hours, doing some work study on-campus, and taking classes. While student loans and some grants paid for the bulk of tuition, there was always a couple grand a year that didn’t get covered – and either got charged, got partially paid and charged, or was paid off – all depending on what I wasn’t spending on my car payments, insurance, or having a social life and commuting.

Getting into “that habit” of charging things over the years definitely puts you in a spot. It’s funny to think about how much available credit I was able to create and rack up during that time. There were points where I would fluctuate pretty well over the summer, catching me up, but by the time I had some major car repairs, went on a few vacations over the summer months, or started to see my grants dwindle and the cash due to the bursar’s office increase that it most certainly got charged. Of course, getting out of college and feeling like I was afloat made the ability to charge stuff here or there for the next four or five years pretty easy. In the early 2000’s, I definitely started feeling the crunch after a few years of nice salary bumps flattened out as the economy changed a little bit, and 2002’s stock market fluctuations definitely changed how banks worked with people – not like today, but definitely an adjustment – almost four years ago, I made a move to really start paying more than the minimum balance(s) plus some of the interest to the cards that were now closed out.

It took a whole lotta work, some creative ways to have fun (spend time and money on things like wine and nice dinner at home vs. dining out, and so on), and some bummer pay periods when I had to follow the rules set up by a friend with the CPA background, where any card that gets to a certain threshold has to be paid in full, and taking the monies previously paid off to a card the prior month now being shifted to the other(s). It sucked quite a bit, and doesn’t mean I’m stoked with dollars – with some wedding savings going on, student loans and some other bills still around, but it was kind of strange to make those electronic payments (let’s equate hitting “send” on my banking site to “writing checks,” k?) and grasp the fact that I was, for all intents and purposes, done with the “past” monies that I’d spent.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m most certainly not advocating the non-use of credit cards. I’ll definitely do so, but will keep much better of an eye – or plan – on them, and unless I’m spending what I’ve got in the bank, or coming next paycheck, it’s probably not getting bought. A big part of that is having gotten used to – for two or three years now – a significant portion of my purchases coming off my check card, straight out of my bank account. Now, I can just contemplate getting some nice frequent flyer miles or something like that, instead of a headache.

Thanks to all of you who pushed and told me the best way to handle things and gave me some plans – down to the dollar – over the last few years. You know who you are.