Saturday, January 24, 2009
Friday, January 23, 2009
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Friday, January 16, 2009
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Earnings Report Totals
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Monday, January 12, 2009
Random Thoughts
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Differences?
roduct Links
Basic Display - Detail Page (Product-Preview-enhanced)
Build more 0 0.00% 0 N/A 0 0 $0.00
Basic Display - Detail Page (Impression-counted)
Build more 2 0.00% 0 N/A 0 0 $0.00
Basic Display - Offer Listing Page (Impression-counted)
Build more 0 0.00% 0 N/A 0 0 $0.00
Basic Display - Offer Listing Page (Product-Preview-enhanced)
Build more 0 0.00% 0 N/A 0 0 $0.00
Enhanced Display
Build more 58 0.00% 0 N/A 0 0 $0.00
Friday, January 9, 2009
Amazon Campaign Performance
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Bounce Rate
This may not be a proper metric. What if the landing page has only external links? The page may be exactly what the user is looking for.
"Use this metric to measure visit quality - a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren't relevant to your visitors"
Google looks down upon this. For example, a page may have a listing of popular DVDs with external links. The user may be looking for a DVD, find it, and click on the external link. This hurts the rankings. I may make a "learn more..." link that goes to a page all about that item and then the user can purchase it. This would be two page views and it would not constitute as a "bounce".
Traffic Zap Directory
Website Design
That service looks interesting. I wonder if it is manual or automated. A bot may crawl the web looking for sites to list. It looks like it is manual, however.
Hot Technology
Netbooks. In a weak economy, these small and cheap laptops will continue to be popular. Already loaded with Wi-fi, webcams and other features, these ultra-portable computers will soon come with GPS and touch screens as well -- all for prices under $500. Look for a new wave of them at CES.
Thin OLED TVs. You've heard of LCD and LED -- now meet OLED, which stands for organic light-emitting diode and creates a gorgeous picture. For now, they're also way too expensive -- Sony's XEL-1, the world's first OLED TV, costs $2,500 for an 11-inch screen -- but they're cool to look at. The screen panel on the Sony model is only 3 millimeters thick.
Mobile devices. Touch screens, once limited to high-end smartphones such as Apple's iPhone, are filtering down to mid-range devices as well. Cell phone manufacturers also are increasingly building phones that shoot sharper photos and better video.
Wireless home electronics. Will this mark the year we can finally say goodbye to that cumbersome tangle of wires behind our TVs and stereos? Probably not, but we're getting there.
More "green" products. Motorola is rumored to be launching a phone made from recycled tech waste. And at least several manufacturers are promising to unveil pioneering, environmentally safe batteries -- including one made without lithium or lithium ion.
Downloadable video players. "We're going to see a lot of devices that offer downloadable video, be they Blu-Ray players [or video game consoles]," said Costa of PC magazine, who believes prices of Blu-ray players will keep dropping. "All these devices can download video over the Internet, some of it in HD quality. That's the type of device we're going to see a lot more of, and it makes perfect sense when people are looking to nest [at home]."
Hackers Crack SSL Certificates
Researchers have officially cracked the MD5 algorithm that certificate authorities like Verisign use to issue the SSL certificates that help secure web communications. Find out how they did it, and what this crack means for Web security.
Computers
Computers
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Campaign Update
Also, Ads were placed on my Quiz Apps from Facebook. There will be about 500-800 impressions per day for these Ads. This seems as though it would out-perform the SocialMedia ads that were there previously. The SocialMedia ads seemed to take a real plummet over the last several months. It is averaging out to less than $0.01 per click for earnings with a low CTR. That is unacceptable. It would not even be worth placing the ads there at all.
Details of this experiment will be posted back here every few days. Be sure to check back.
Amazon - Developer Resources & Featured Solutions
Developer Resources
Here are a few highlights and new additions to our Developer Resource Center.
Making Secure Requests to Amazon Web Services
Ensuring the integrity of requests to our APIs is of the utmost importance to AWS, as is maintaining your trust and confidence. This article provides detailed information about making secure requests: 1. Always use SSL-protected API endpoints. 2. If you are not using SOAP, use Signature Version 2, a new method for signing requests for Amazon SQS, Amazon SimpleDB, and Amazon EC2. These methods will be required as of September 30, 2009 so we urge you to read this article and migrate your applications as soon as possible.
Security is always a nice feature to have built into a system.
Manager for Amazon CloudFront
A Windows application for uploading files to Amazon S3 and distributing them through Amazon CloudFront.
Easy to use?
Stock Quote Example: Using Amazon SQS for Scale
This article shows how Amazon Simple Queue Service can be used to build a highly reliable, highly scalable application.
Interesting article.
Featured Solutions
Check out what your peers have built with AWS. These solutions include interesting web applications built on top of AWS as well as tools that help you integrate with AWS.
Vembu
Vembu StoreGrid's online backup software now supports AWS. Now you can start an Online Backup Service with your backup server running on Amazon EC2 and using Amazon S3/EBS for storage.
I am assuming this is not fast to access as it is aimed for back-up.
RunMyProcess
RunMyProcess delivers a cutting edge and ergonomic "BPM as a service" platform, enabling rapid SaaS integration and workflow applications design.
Business Process Management as a Service?
Dropbox
Dropbox is a desktop file sharing tool that makes it easy to store, sync, and share files online. Dropbox automatically backs-up files to Amazon S3 and is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
This is nothing new except that it automatically backs up files to Amazon S3.
Amazon Anouncements
Anouncement/Response
EC2 Crosses the Atlantic
Developers and businesses can now run their Amazon EC2 instances in the European Union (EU) to help achieve lower latency, operate closer to other resources like Amazon S3 in the EU, and meet EU data storage requirements when required. The new European Region for Amazon EC2 contains two Availability Zones enabling you to easily run fault-tolerant applications with the same scalability, reliability and cost efficiency achieved with Amazon EC2 in the US.
The servers offered by Amazon sound very appealing for companies. I personally do not have enough traffic.
Public Data Sets
AWS has announced the availability of public data sets hosted in Elastic Block Store (EBS), part of Amazon EC2. These data sets are available for free, with only EC2 runtime charges for accessing and using the data. The first data sets come from various biology, chemistry, and economic sources.
This information could be very valuable to do scientific research. This data could highlight trends in human behavior in order to make some prediction on what will happen.
Requester Pays Option for Amazon S3
Amazon S3 has released the Requester Pays feature that makes it easy and cost-effective to share data stored in Amazon S3. You can now configure a bucket to bill the requester, rather than the bucket owner, for both request and bandwidth fees. Also, when used in conjunction with Amazon DevPay, you can sell access to data stored in Amazon S3 either as a subscription or by marking up individual request fees.
This is not really applicable to me as I do not get nearly enough traffic to even slow down my own server running through DSL.
New SQL-like SELECT API for Amazon SimpleDB
To make it even easier to get started with SimpleDB, the SimpleDB team has released the SELECT API, which is very similar to the SQL syntax. The introduction of this query option allows developers to quickly become productive using the web service without sacrificing the intrinsic benefits of the SimpleDB model: scalability, flexibility, and high availability.
This is interesting. It reminds me of Facebook's FQL.
Featured Case Study: Channel Intelligence
In commercial applications, automated subjective intelligence is neither cheap nor easy to implement. Using Amazon Mechanical Turk, Channel Intelligence was able to leverage human intelligence around the globe and decrease task-specific costs by 85%. Read the full story.
It is always good to share intelligence!
The Office - An American Workplace
For the Template that I used "minima by Douglas Bowman" (the first in the templates to chose from as of now), the variables to change are the 'width' for both main-wrapper and sidebar-wrapper:
#main-wrapper {
width: 510px;
float: $startSide;
word-wrap: break-word; /* fix for long text breaking sidebar float in IE */
overflow: hidden; /* fix for long non-text content breaking IE sidebar float */
}
#sidebar-wrapper {
width: 120px;
float: $endSide;
word-wrap: break-word; /* fix for long text breaking sidebar float in IE */
overflow: hidden; /* fix for long non-text content breaking IE sidebar float */
}
I adjusted mine so that a video from Amazon can fit in the main body and a tall, skinny ad can fit in the right side bar.
View the blog: The Office - An American Workplace.