Well, last night it was announced that USA Swimming was giving Phelps a three month ban.  Additionally, Kellogg is pulling their endoresment deal. Are these actions fair?  Similar to my stance on legalization of marijuana, I’m not really interested in discussing that. People will form their own opinions — and I don’t really care to waste time on an argument where neither side will yield and feels that they are absolutely right.

So what the heck am I here to talk about?

Actually, I am really here to wonder out loud… how long before these Internet photo outings will become so overplayed that the general public views them briefly and then moves on as if nothing happened? I mean really, how long before we become so de-sensitized to this stuff that we just give a “oh, is that so” reaction?

It seems that everyday another high school or college kid has a scandalous photo posted on MySpace, FaceBook, Flickr, or a personal blog; a pro athlete has a photo posted with a drink in one hand and a hot chick on each arm; a teacher somewhere has a photo posted somewhere while doing something amoral like having a beer (gosh forbid); or some moron puts together a video of themselves acting like a fool for 15 minutes of fame

The viewing public, after pausing The Jerry Springer Show on that there Tivo machine, acts outraged that this kind of thing can happen in America — somehow America is plunging in to an ever apocalyptic spiral to hell. Oh, then Bubba presses play on that there Tivo machine and gets back to their own version reality.

Every night on my local news I hear breaking news of people getting killed by a estranged spouse. Teens get murdered at 3 in the morning on a street corner (there are no motives and the mom can’t understand why someone would do that to their precious son — don’t get me started on that). And my point? After these reports, the talking heads move on to the next story with no indication of impact over what they just said. We have become de-sensitized to those stories because they happen every day in every city, and we’ve seen the dead bodies on the street for years now.

It is only a matter of time before we just turn the page after each public Internet photo outing. Please, I hope this happens tomorrow.

I realize this post may be of no interest to most, if any, of you. However, I am using it as kind of my own de.licio.us bookmark — a place that I come to often, and can modify as needed. Here goes:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Mixx
• MySpace
• Digg
• OpenSocial
• Not social media, but important to me: Wordpress API

Telephone Problems

We are having issues with the phone lines in our house. Not really issues, it is more like our phone lines are possessed. Having some knowledge of the phone companies policies, I know that if you plug a phone in to the NID (the little box that your phone service runs through, typically on the side of your house) and it works, the phone company will charge you dearly to fix the problem. Upon determining that the issue is in the internal wiring we called Verizon to check on their services. The CSR was polite, told us about their rates (somewhere in the vicinity of $1.4 million to diagnose our problem, and another $32.15 to fix it — I kid, but only slightly), and then quite unsolicited mentioned to my wife that pretty much any independent contractor could do the work at a much more reasonable rate. That is not the customer service of which I speak (that is still to come).

Then I started calling independents listed in the phonebook (since no local contractor either have a website or can do SEO good enough to beat out the lead gen sites or the scrapers). After leaving about 6 messages I finally got a callback. Nice gentleman. Questioned me about the problem, gave me a couple hints, and then told me that his business was not in to residential phone line repairs, rather they were typically in to new builds. Then unsolicited, he mentions that there are a few companies that do offer this service, and proceeds to give me insight as to which he would go with and why, while mentioning the quirks about them. It was a very positive conversation… one which ended with him saying that if the companies he referred were not able to meet my needs that I should call him back for more options.

This guy had no obligation to be this pro-active. As a matter of fact, he was one of only 2 people to call me back out of the 7 or so that I ended up leaving messages at.

I recently needed to set up a fax service for my business. Hardly anyone I deal with uses fax, but for the occasional client that is in to fax I needed it in place. I have a multi-function printer that can handle this, but I honestly did not feel like giving the phone company an extra ounce of money to have a dedicated line, for a service that I would not use more than a few times a year. Almost all of my SEO clients are fine with swapping PDF proposals and even signed contracts if necessary.

It had been a while since I checked out online fax services. I know that there are several out there that have good reputations, and several that have great prices. I was looking for both — a fine mixture of price and service. My decision was ultimately based on the basic services that were must haves

Basic Services

The particular services I was looking for in an online fax service included:

• Toll-free number – I think I can spring for the cost, if I am getting a client to fax a signed contract back to me
• Complete web interface – I was not looking to have to install some desktop app. I want to be able to get to my faxes or send faxes even if I was not using my laptop (almost never happens, but occasionally when I go to the beach it does)
• Safe online storage – On the chance I lose a fax, I wanted to have an online location to retrieve the fax again
• Digital signature – I wanted to be able to store my digital signature online to send back in a fax
• PDF delivery – I store most of my corporate documents in PDF format, so this was the desired delivery method.

Internet Fax Services

The 3 services that I spent the most time looking at were:

• eFax – They offer a free 30 day trial! You can get a local or toll-free fax number. Of course they allow you to send and receive faxes by email.
• Trustfax – Like eFax, the also offer a free trial. The plans they have fit my specific needs quite well and I ultimately chose them. I prepaid for a year, just under $100 for a toll-free account, and have plenty of capacity for my faxing needs
• MyFax – MyFax actually offered the next most favorite solution for me, and I think I may have been fine with choosing them. It was a coinflip between MyFax and Trustfax. I thought about either their free sign and their buy two months get one free.

Solution

As mentioned in the list of online fax services that I looked at, I chose Trustfax. Again it was strictly because TrustFax was the most like what I wanted. I think I would have been just as happy with MyFax, but you have to make a decision sooner or later.

Site Usability

I always like to check out the website for usability before I sign up for any service. I figure, rightly or wrongly, that if a company that wants my business can’t have a site that works cleanly, they obviously don’t want my business (this goes for online stores and ad networks alike). It’s a pretty enough looking site, and I understand from other posts that this is a redesign from a previous incarnation. Looking back at the archived versions of the site, it is definitely an improvement, but to me functionality is more important that smoke and mirrors.

The site worked fine enough, and I could generally find my way around the site with just intuition. As mentioned above, I think a little more history in the “About Us” section would lend some credibility for someone who just stumbles on the site. I did like that they had a calendar of events, and I can see where I might find them at upcoming conferences (maybe Affiliate Summit east in August in Boston!).

Sign Up

Next step… sign up. Since I had done some prior research and saw nothing that led me to doubt their viability, I initiated a sign-up (about 9:40p EDT — 5/5/08). A simple form (I Like!), easy to understand and quick to fill out), pretty standard terms and conditions. I received the obligatory “we received your application” email which I think is a required step for all online forms of any significance.

Acceptance

I received a followup phone call on Tuesday at about 2p. The affiliate rep was friendly and asked enough questions to learn about my websites and to ensure that I was not some scammer. I can’t recall her name (a fault of mine), but she was pleasant and seemed pretty knowledgeable. She activated my account and then proceeded to update me on MarketLeverage (bonuses, referals, offers, etc) when I told her that I had done a bit of research before signing up.

The Service

While they have some nice exclusives, the offers they provide are not incredibly different from other affiliate networks and the payouts are similar, some higher — some lower. I’ve come to expect this from all affiliate networks, as they all seem to be fishing in the same streams to try and find the next hot offer. One can only expect this. So why pick any affiliate network over another? Service, reliability, comfort level, and the extras are what does it for me.

Their extras…

• Bonuses paid out for good performance. Amex cash rewatds based on the level of commissions generated. We’re not talking about for the super affiliates, but good affiliates to. I mean, with a $1000 monthly commission you can start earning an Amex cash reward. $1000 per month may seem like a lot, but if you really put your effort in to it I think you can blow past $1000 per month.
• They have a nice referal program. Lifetime 5% of your refered publisher commissions. Most networks (ad or affiliate) cap off at a year or less.
• Fedexed checks. While this is not of great importance to me, I see where lots of affiliates are pretty psyched about this extra.

Final Thoughts

It is going to take me a few days to really slide MarketLeverage offers in to my rotation as I like to make sure that I get the right offers on the right pages. I plan on doing a follow up post once I’ve sent them some traffic, seen some conversions, and received a check.

Good Product

I find that many people who bash OpenOffice have never really given it a chance.  I first tried it when it was still StarOffice. It was an okay product back then, but not a real competitor to Microsoft Office.  I used it in parallel for about a month, then deleted it from my computer. When Open Office can in to being around 2002 if memory serves me, I tried it again.  I was impressed, but still stuck to Microsoft.  I kept it installed though. As version 2 came in to being, I tried once again.  This time I kept it. The latest releases are good products. Fully functioning office suites that offer no degradation in function in my mind. When I purchased by current laptop I just went with an OpenOffice only solution.

Philosophy

The open source philosophy is something I can embrace. I’m not an open source zealot, but I have no issue giving positive reviews. My former employer (a quasi-government agency) was dead set against open source at the time — refusing to even use Apache as a web server because they did not have to pay for it. I thought it was crazy, and argue that anyone running IIS because they have to pay for it over Apache is crazy.  Choosing software based on the payment methodology over functionality is just counter intuitive to me.

Price

Okay, I must admit that to me the price of a comparable version of Microsoft Office is a buzz-kill for me. I’m willing to pay good money for software that I feel is superior.  I had no problem dropping $650 for Adobe Photoshop CS3 — it’s a good product that is just superior in many ways to open source options in my mind. Microsoft Office is expensive for the benefit to me.  I have an installed copy on a laptop that I passed on to my wife.  It’s a good product, but I can get everything I need out of OpenOffice.

So I guess my point is that just because you dropped a few hundred dollars on an office suite from Microsoft, don’t assume you got a far superior product. It is a good product, but there are alternatives that are quite good.

• Google – Whether or not you buy in to the conspiracy theories about Google becoming the big evil corporation, you will have likely used their search engine to get the information.
• MSDN – Despite my leanings towards Linux, you can’t argue with the fact that MSDN is a basic source of API and coding information that can not be overlooked. By the way, does the constant badgering to install Silverlight bother anyone else?
• IRS – How can anyone not consider the IRS as a great source of information? It is such a fitting site to visit as we grow ever so closer to our deadline for filing tax returns. Yuck.
• 411 – I obviously can’t leave out 411.com since this post was really about getting the 411.
• Alexa – Since they bill themselves as “The Web Information Company” I have to include them. I use Alexa for what it is worth — a decent way to judge how the top sites rank relatively. For smaller sites, I find the Alexa ranking to be an amusement.
• Windows Live – Taking this in the context of Alexa rankings, Windows live ranks above Google. Curious to me, as their search engine results are weak at best. My guess is that the home page on all default IE installs now point to Windows Live. I can’t confirm that as I’ve not installed IE in a long time.
• Yahoo – Of course you can’t leave Yahoo off the list. I can remember a time (early 90’s through mid/late 90’s), when Yahoo was the dog. The only dog of any consequence when it came to getting information. I still use my Yahoo home page regularly, but I only search there on occasion. Has anyone else had issues with their Ajax interface crashing Firefox with regularity?
• Wikipedia – I know a lot of people who use Wikipedia as a definitive source of facts. While I use it for some fact gathering, I usually double check my facts against other resources when I am dealing with a topic that marketers might consider gaming for SEO benefits (I’m just paranoid, I think)
• LinkedIn – Not a favorite site of mine, but when I find it useful to check out profiles of clients I may be preparing to meet with.
• Craigslist – Skimpy on design, can be a little spammy, but can you think of a better classified resource on the net. It’s interesting to me that a national site was able to grow to such an extent that it can be effective at so many micro geo-targets.
• IMDB – The definitive resource of movies. It is awesome as a resource to check out the resume of actors from big time stars to local commercial actors with credited parts in movies.
• W3Schools – If you need basic information about pretty much anyt web related technology, they will likely have something for you. You will find some advanced topics discussed here as well, but I find that by the time you get to advanced topics, you are likely seaching for specific keywords that may not be here.

Everyone obviously has their favorite sites to go to for help, and the list of information sites could be as long as one wants to spend writing. Another excellent source of information on the web are social networks. They have so many pages submitted that their search results can often provide great information, especially for highly targeted searches. Some of my favorite social media sites that can be used as information resources include StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, and sometimes Digg.

I think this afternoon, I will leave work a little early to celebrate my National Information Day with a beverage of choice. I think I’ll go here to find out the information I need to make a good choice.

So I searched for a Office 2007 conversion utility and found that Microsoft had one. Sweet, they are good for something. Wait a minute! The download link on the Microsoft site pointed to a 404. Now how humorous is that? Very in my mind, but my giggling at the Microsoft 404 did nothing to help me get the image out of the file and thus complete my project — it was a Pyrrhic victory at best. Ding dang!

So, on I searched (over hill and dale) . Finally, I found an obscure blog posting about docx files, and found that they are nothing more than a clever compressed file. According to the article, if you changed the extension to .zip, you could open the resulting file in any of the popular compression tools (e.g., WinZip , Winrar). Could it be that simple?

Since I did not need any text out of the document, just an embedded image, I gave it a try. I renamed the file to a .zip, opened up my licensed copy of WinZip (I support shareware), and voila! My image file was listed in the archive as clear as day beside all of the XML files that are used by Office 2007 to save your file. My guess is that I may have even been able to pull out text based content had there been any present.

Granted, this tip may not help you in all cases. I’d say that it is a good stopgap should you need a last minute solution though.

It means, with a few scripts that are written for MTurk to understand, a few configuration files (which can basically be cloned from implementation to implementation), a PHP script or two (total time about 10 minutes), I am able to have people review, classify, comment, create, and otherwise make/enhance my content for me. In my first implementation, I had a series of recipes to be reviewed for proper formatting, to be classified, and to have a sentence or two description written.  We are not talking rocket science.  Each recipe takes about 45 seconds to scan, comment, and classify.  After about 10 of these though my eyes roll and I reach for the beer.

Paying others to do this with essentially micropayment is another matter.  The 50 minutes it took me to set up my first mturk implementation (this includes all coding, configuring, testing, etc), was reduced to 40 minutes the second time around. And now, for a simple mturk implementation, I drop about 30 minutes of time. I pay out a few pennies per action by the reviewer/commentor/classifier/etc.  They make money, I get my work done, we are all happy.

First off, pulling up the predefined superglobal $_SERVER variable offers a few things:

• $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] has where the cloaked link was clicked from. How valuable is that? Well, what if you had these links multiple pages of your site? Store this in a MySql table, and you’ve got some very interesting data to report on… like maybe which page on your site has the most click — might that page be more optimized to increase traffic? Maybe you could even set a subid based on this value so you can track which referer is sending clicks that convert better.
• $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] has the IP of the user (granted you need to do a little extra work to get the actual IP in the case of someone going through a proxy). Now you may now want to track user’s IP, but you might be interested to see if you are kind of getting DOS’d (same user clicking over and over — or maybe just clicking all your ads). This would be of use if you were trying to track anomalies.

After $_SERVER, you may want to take a look at using cookies. On a couple of my sites, I set a cookie based on the initial click in to my site (especially if the user came in via a PPC campaign). Well you might think that is stupid, but from that data I can track incoming clicks to outgoing clicks. Ahh you say! Now I can come very close to tracking the actual conversion rate on each click to my site. You will lose this data if a user does not allow cookies, but it is possible to implement the same type of thing via sessions that avoids data loss.

One other thing you might choose to do is to take the IP of the user, and if a particular offer is not available in their country, you could optionally redirect the user to a more appropriate offer.

Once you store all of this data in your database, you can then redirect the user through to their intended location with a standard header function call. In my mind then, a PHP redirect offers you ultimate power. You can start off using it for a simple redirect, and then over time you can add in any of the functionality above (all without changing the redirect link. Your imagination is the only limit of what you can do.