Macy

Just picked up Macy from the vet’s office after her surgery for a torn ACL.  She’s doing great and has officially joined the stitch club with Schaefer and Sylvia.  With all of our pups’ surgeries, amputations and blocked intestines, we’ll be more than prepared for Mary Hudson’s schoolyard bumps and bruises that will inevitably happen!

ConvergeSouth This Week

ConvergeSouth is happening this Friday and Saturday down the mountain in Greensboro, NC. I’ll be speaking there on affiliate marketing and web2.0 stuff, but there will be some real luminaries from the tech world there as well. Should be a blast!They’ve even put together a spiffy map if you’re in town:

ConvergeSouth 2007 Venues:Google Maps

Let me know if you’ll be there and we’ll grab a coffee.

GMail Lockdown

While downloading mail from GMail via pop today (something I do every month) I got this wonderful screen on my GMail acct (which, of course I use for work and personal mail):

That’ll learn me, eh?  Especially after I left a few glowing comments about GMail on Andrew Wee’s post about GMail memory usage.

I’m chocking on the irony here, folks.

Anyways, if you want to reach me please use the me@samharrelson.com address.

Ubuntu 7.10 Updates


I’ve been using the release client of Ubuntu 7.10 (the final release is due this Thursday) for the last few days and think it’s a great step forward for the Ubuntu distro. Lots of great features (better power management, integrated Compiz, better monitor resolution, new Gimp, Tracker search etc) make this my favorite distro so far.

Just wanted to note that this morning there was a huge update in the repositories for all sorts of programs and the Ubuntu desktop. So, if you’re already using 7.10, prepare to hand over some cycles to the update manager!

The Ellington Hotel Debate in Asheville

I’ve been following the Ellington Hotel / Condo issue here in Asheville for a while and I still don’t understand the various arguments from the critics (“the building is too high!” “it will cause too much traffic on Biltmore!”, etc).  While I am a fan of sustainable growth, it doesn’t seem as if the Ellington will add anything unbearable to the Asheville skyline or the already crazy traffic on Biltmore.  The locals know how to avoid all that anyway 🙂

ASHEVILLE – For opponents of The Ellington hotel and condominium building, a key question as the project goes to City Council tonight is whether city streets can handle the additional traffic. For backers, the answer is clear: no problem.

Seems like more political pandering by city council members seeking re-election to me.

CITIZEN-TIMES.com: Ellington critics question accuracy of traffic study

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Macy’s Torn ACL Benches Her for the Fall Squirrel Chasing Season

Macy tore her ACL on Sunday while doing her favorite thing in the world… chasing squirrels around the yard.

She’s undergoing surgery on Tuesday morning to repair the tear, so keep her in your thoughts if you don’t mind.  She’s not happy about being benched or going through rehab.

Put me in Coach on Flickr – Photo Sharing!

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PPC Recession Looming?

Steve Rubel writes on his MicroPersuasion blog that there is a looming recession in the pay per click advertising business and gives 5 reasons why he thinks this is so:

For the last several years, search engine marketing has been on a tear. While the big advertisers sat on the sidelines in the beginning, they have lately been ramping up their spend on pay-per-click advertising, primarily on search engines but also affiliate sites like those that run Google Adsense.

However, I am calling a top to this market now. Here are five reasons why a pay-per-click advertising recession looms. (If you depend on Adsense for the bulk of your revenue, this applies to you as well.)

Steve is an always thoughtful writer and one of my favorite bloggers, so you should definitely head over and read his 5 reasons.

Nonetheless, I have to disagree a bit (not just because I work for a paid search agency).  I’ll keep it short and sweet and say that Steve is correct in his 5 reasons as to why pure search marketing on a PPC metric will hit a glass ceiling (if it hasn’t already).  However, smart marketers and advertisers have already noticed this trend and have positioned themselves to evolve with the marketplace. 

This is especially true with his #2 (“Transition to CPA”) and  #3 (“Rising Costs”) reasons.  However, there is still a promising market for the search companies and agencies wise enough to blend PPC into a CPA or affiliate model and insure performance metrics that work out on the back end.  Rising costs are definitely an issue for the PPC world to tackle with, especially in the realm of ad networks like Commission Junction with their respective commission structures.  The trick there, as many search agencies have already figured out, is to go direct.

So, I agree with Steve that the PPC model in its pure state will see a cap or even downturn.  However, smart marketers and advertisers have already seen the writing on the walls (or search results) and have moved to make their businesses flexible and wide enough to deal with these market changes.  Look for those agencies to rise to the top.

AdBrite’s Full Page Ads

Just when you thought the current crop of “I make money blogging” bloggers couldn’t get any more annoying, here’s even more fuel to the fire:

Ad network AdBrite announced this morning that they have begun selling full-page ad units of the sort that you’ve no doubt seen on some of the bigger, more old-school web sites like PCMag and the New York Times. Now you too can interrupt your readers’ time with a full page ad in the middle of their time on your site.

More power to the “I make money blogging and so can you!” crowd out there, but I just don’t see why you’d want to pollute your space of creativity and expression with ads that are probably not going to make you much (if any) money anyway. Sure, a few ads here and there are fine, but interrupting your readers attention and experience by throwing up a full page ad before they can visit your site or splicing AdSense units into your post just seems pathetic to me.

For bloggers with less than a million page views per month, the trade off just doesn’t seem worth it since all you’re doing is propping up the ad networks by participating in these schemes.

AdBrite: Full Page “Skip This Ad” Units Now Available for Everyone

Jewish and Early Christian Art


One of my main passions offline is research into Dura Europos. I had the privilege to catalogue, photograph and work with much of what remains of Dura Europos’ artwork while a grad student at Yale (Yale led the Dura Europos excavations in the 1930’s and brought thousands and thousands of pieces back to the Yale Art Gallery where much of it resides in the basement of the Gallery now).

I’ve always been intrigued by the Synagogue at Dura Europos. It’s an amazing and even puzzling place for westerners who like to assume that Jewish communities have always followed the non-graven images rule strictly in their worship spaces since Sinai. However, the Dura Europos Synagogue is filled with artwork, both biblical and pagan in nature, and shows a complex artistic tradition that extended beyond the Syrian desert where Dura Europos is located.

Here’s a well thought out (and researched) post expanding that idea entitled “The Protestant Revision of History” from the Turretin Debate Blog (Turretin was a Reformed theologian who was especially influential in Calvinist and Puritan circles… evidently this blog should be read through those lens):

Neither were later Jews against images and veneration. The ancient synagogue at Dura-Europos, which was destroyed in the mid 200s AD is filled with icons and imagery. And ancient house churches from the same period were also found containing icons. As the Christians inherited Jewish worship practices, they must have been guided in interpretation of Exodus 20:4 by the Jewish practices, which clearly were not iconoclastic. No wonder Orthodox churches are covered in images, since the Jewish synagogues were the same. And yet there is no condemnation of the Jews by Christians over this issue…Protestants think to themselves that the early church must have been
primitive and basic, with no relationship to the ornate and colourful
world of Orthodoxy with its churches and vestments. But the facts and
archeology say differently. Ancient Jewish and Christian worship is
characterised by the ornate, by images, icons and symbolism. The
ancient Christian catacombs contain icons, including those of Mary
holding the Christ child as would be familiar to any Orthodox
Christian. (Ouspensky, Leonid, Theology of the Icon, Vol 1, Crestwood,
NY (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press), c1978, pp. 74-75).

Fun stuff to ponder on a beautiful Monday afternoon!

Callwave

I use a service called “Callwave” to handle my voicemail. Basically, it turns incoming voicemail into txt messages so I don’t have to listen to every message.

Or that’s what it’s supposed to do. Looks like the service has been down all morning and I can’t login to my account via the website to even check on things or cancel my account. I’ve spoken to a couple of other Callwave users who are seeing the same thing on their accounts.

They’ve got a blog but haven’t updated it with any issues today. Ugh.

Looks like I’m declaring voicemail bankruptcy! The joys of being an early adopter…

Callwave

Narcissus Called… He Wants His Blogosphere Back

Everyone loves fame (except for the wise ones), so it’s no surprise that there’s been an over abundance of “popular” lists and rankings emerging from all areas of the blogosphere lately.

The sad fact is that no one really cares.

Hot on the heels of the Techmeme Leaderboard, the newest offenders are Scoble and TechCrunch:

So Google recently made it fairly easy to determine the number of Google Reader subscribers around a particular blog. Gabe Rivera at Techmeme did a little work on excel and came up with an unofficial list of the top blogs and the number of subscribers each blog has on Google Reader. He sent the list around to people for comments – with his permission we’ve published it below.

Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim has the right idea:

Here’s some honesty. I love seeing Marketing Pilgrim on any list–like many bloggers–and I suggested MP be added to this new list. Guilty, as charged. But then I stopped and asked, “when will this blog-list insanity stop?” Do we really need to keep compiling lists of top blogs?

The blogosphere is all about the “long tail.” If we continue to highlight only the top 0.0001% blogs we do nothing but encourage the echo-chamber when instead we should be trying to delve deeper/wider into the blogosphere.

I’ve recently discovered a great trick to get past my disgust at such navel gazing… unsubscribing. Seriously, it works wonders to vote with your feet eyeballs attention and let the free market figure out when bloggers have spent too much time staring into the puddle of Narcissus.

There’s a wide world of incredible things happening online in terms of new platforms, new programs and new marketing paradigms… I’d rather focus on those and read bloggers who are doing the same instead of admiring the size of their feed numbers.

Doctorow and Le Guin in Spat Over Fair Use

Two of my favorite writers, Cory Doctorow and Ursula K Le Guin, are in a bit of a spat over the perception of fair use and creative commons in relation to a short Le Guin piece that Doctorow published on the uber popular boingboing.net blog:

In a nutshell: I quoted, in its entirety, a one-paragraph story that Ms Le Guin sent to the fanzine Ansible, in which she made fun of a book review in Slate that said that Michael Chabon “has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it.” Le Guin’s paragraph was a long one, about 500 words, and I pasted the whole thing in, because I thought it was delightful.

In my own non-important view, I have to side with Doctorow here… he seemed to have nothing but the best of intentions and wanted to introduce a new crowd of readers from boingboing to Le Guin’s excellent work. Additionally, his explanation of Fair Use seems to be right on… but I’m not a copyright lawyer (thank the gods), so what do I know?

Yet again, here’s an instance of the offline and online publishing worlds having a difficult time grok-ing the intricacies of each others’ systems, customs and practices.

You say tomato, I say tomato… let’s call the whole thing off.

An apology to Ursula K Le Guin – Boing Boing

Colbert Opinion Piece in the NY Times

Stephen Colbert assumes the role of Maureen Dowd in today’s NY Times. Very very funny:

Surprised to see my byline here, aren’t you? I would be too, if I read The New York Times. But I don’t. So I’ll just have to take your word that this was published. Frankly, I prefer emoticons to the written word, and if you disagree :(I’d like to thank Maureen Dowd for permitting/begging me to write her column today. As I type this, she’s watching from an overstuffed divan, petting her prize Abyssinian and sipping a Dirty Cosmotinijito. Which reminds me: Before I get started, I have to take care of one other bit of business:

Bad things are happening in countries you shouldn’t have to think about. It’s all George Bush’s fault, the vice president is Satan, and God is gay.

There. Now I’ve written Frank Rich’s column too.

Great stuff… go read the whole thing.

Pictures and Videos

I’ve had a couple of people email me to find out where the videos and pics of Mary Hudson, etc are located on the web.

Pictures: http://photos.samharrelson.com (or you can just go straight to my Flickr site which is the same thing).

Videos: http://tv.samharrelson.com (or you can just go straight to my YouTube site which is the same thing).

There’s a constant stream of pics and videos flowing these days since Mary Hudson is having a lot of “firsts!” so be sure to check in or subscribe to those places if you’re into feed reading.

BTW, I’m also a heavy Twitter user. If you’re a user add me (http://www.twitter.com/samharrelson) or sign up and give it a go. It’s good for your constitution.

Affiliate Marketers Can’t Decide Who or What Affiliate Marketers Actually Are

What does this say about the affiliate marketing industry when leading “affiliates” …er… publishers can’t decide on a proper definition for themselves.  Let’s debate how many angels can dance on the head of a pin next:

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Affiliates Grow Up and Exit

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Mediocre Marketing

Seth Godin lays down a beautiful analogy for those who watch the innovators and then attempt to follow their success in light of the Radiohead album release of In Rainbows.

This is exceptionally true in the case of online marketers who are frequently beyond watchful in their appraisal of new marketing approaches and hence beyond mediocre (video, social media, etc):

So, in every industry, the middle waits. And watches. And then, once they realize they can survive the switch (or once they’re persuaded that their current model is truly fading away), they jump in.

Seth’s Blog: Radiohead and the mediocre middle

Mary Hudson, Dionysus and St. Denis

Mary Hudson was born on Oct 9, which is also St. Denis and Companions’ Day in the liturgical calendar of the Roman Catholic Church.  We’re not Catholic, but since I do study religion (particularly ancient religion), I thought this was interesting:

This martyr and patron of France is traditionally held to have been the first bishop of Paris. His popularity is due to a series of legends, especially those connecting him with the great abbey church of St. Denis in Paris. He was for a time confused with the writer now called Pseudo-Dionysius.

The best hypothesis contends that Denis was sent to Gaul from Rome in the third century and beheaded in the persecution under Valerius in 258.

According to one of the legends, after he was martyred on Montmartre (literally, "mountain of martyrs") in Paris, he carried his head to a village northeast of the city. St. Genevieve built a basilica over his tomb at the beginning of the sixth century.

St. Denis and Companions – Saint of the Day – American Catholic

And here’s more about St. Denis from Wikipedia (he seemed to be quit head strong):

Saint Denis of Paris (also called Dionysius, Dennis, or Denys) is a Christian martyr and saint. In the third century, he was bishop of Paris. He was martyred in approximately 250, and is venerated especially in the Roman Catholic Church as patron of Paris, France and one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers. The modern name "Denis" derives from the ancient name Dionysius, "servant of Dionysus"

According to the Golden Legend, after his head was chopped off, Denis picked it up and walked several miles, preaching a sermon the entire way.[5] The site where he stopped preaching and actually died was made into a small shrine that developed into the Saint Denis Basilica, which became the burial place for the kings of France. Another account has his corpse being thrown in the Seine, but recovered and buried later that night by his converts.[2]

Specifically, Denis is invoked against diabolical possession and headaches.[7]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis

OK, back to changing diapers!

Best “What’s In Your Bag?” Entry Ever

I love the "What’s In Your Bag?" Flickr pool where people can post up the contents of their day packs or bags for the world to see.  Pure gadget and manpurse (murse) pr0n.

I’ve even put up one myself in the past (though I need to update with my new canvas bag).

Anyway, this is the best entry I’ve ever seen, hands down.

What’s in my bag? on Flickr – Photo Sharing!