Online Marketing ROI

TechCrunch founder and editor Michael Arrington and Facebook advertising guru Dennis Yu scored a couple victories for the Good Guys this week by forcing decisive action from MySpace along with Social Gaming platforms RockYou and Zynga.

Arrington started the ball rolling with Scamville: The Social Gaming Ecosystem of Hell and Yu pushed the gas pedal to the floor with, How To Spam Facebook Like A Pro: An Insider’s Confession.

The result of these searing indictments of sleaze is that MySpace publicly flagellated these scammers, toughen up their TOC for applications and advertisers and pledged to get serious about enforcement.

Maybe Facebook, Google Adwords/Adsense and Yahoo will follow suit and get serious about cleaning up the scams.

The ROIguys (and gal) took the show on the road for July for what was ostensibly a vacation, but as the great philosopher Buckaroo Banzai once said, wherever you go, there you are. In this case, one of the places we went is Adams Morgan in Washington, D.C.

We stayed with a dear friend who is one of the top real estate agents in the area. She was lamenting the lack of a really good site focusing on the neighborhood she lives in. The first thing we did when we go home was to secure a domain and do a little experiment in Hyper Local for Adams Morgan.

The result is a lovely little site dedicated to information about restaurants, shopping and nightlife in a great neighborhood along with specific information about Adam Morgan Real Estate.

The site still has some dust with a few pages under construction and some place holder images, but we are pretty excited about the results.

I finally got a chance to put launch the website about my recent trip to Siem Reap.  Cambodia is an interesting, magical place and the Angkor Temples are something that everyone needs to see at least once in their lifetime.  I have over a thousand high resolution pictures, including some fantastic shots on Bante Srey and Angkor Thom, so I put about 50 of them online.

Enjoy

If you move a section of articles from one site to another and you properly 301 the urls, sometimes Google still hasn’t crawled the OLD URL so it thinks the new URL on free online credit report is duplicate content.  No big deal when you move one article, but it can really cause havoc when you move a whole section.  This is particularly an issue if the old content has a low crawl frequency, so the question is, does posting on a semi-respectable blog with RSS trigger Googlebot to crawl the link?

Jonah Stein

Looking for a really unusual vacation idea?  Going to Wales?  Check out this really cool vacation rental in a Medieval Manor.

Nothing like sleeping in an 800 year old manor house in Caldicot to remind you that America is a new country.  This is a great find if you are thinking of going to the Ryder Cup in 2010, because apparently all the hotels within 100 miles are sold out already.

This should show the polldaddy widget

If you are too social for words, you might consider this nifty widget from People Search Engine Wink.com. What’s cool is that if you take a few minutes to consolidate your identities, you can use this widget and it links to all of your profiles from a single location.

where i’m at…

people search by

make your own Wink Widget!

We all recognize a bad neighborhood when we are walking or driving.  Trash and broken glass lay scattered on dirty, cracked concrete.  Billboards adorn the buildings on every corner, presiding over liquor store & payday lender.  Pan handlers, can collectors, scam artists, drug dealers  and prostitutes lurk by the bus stops and most of us lock our doors while we try to find a safer neighborhood.  Urban blight inevitable leads to plummeting property values and anyone who can afford to do so quickly flees in search of a better neighborhood.

Websites and virtual communities suffer from the digital equivalent.  Spam, Sock Puppets, Bot Attack, Slogs and Advertorial mix with aggressive affiliate programs, ads for debt consolidation, pay day lenders, porn, casino’s and pharmaceuticals without a prescription –   everything you encounter online that makes the web feel like a bad neighborhood have been given a name along with an interesting new site that wants to create a discussion about how to combat it- Virtual Blight .

Like it’s real world counterpart, blight left unchecked it will chase away the  inhabitants of a community and destroy the value of the site and the brand.

The Utility Computing revolution apparently arrived in the form of AppLogic from 3tera.

Modern applications are complex systems comprised of the application software, web servers and databases, operating systems and drivers, numerous servers, storage for application data, switches, firewall, and the networks that connect it all. Deploying and operating these systems requires significant expertise and scaling complex systems is a not-trivial problem. Applogic is trying to address these issues:

Applogic starts with grid operating system that puts together standard servers to creates a single supercomputer.  A grid can be built from commodity servers and may contain anywhere from 1 to 5,000 machines (so far, they claim they don’t know the effective upper limit).

3tera recently completed Grid Computing Benchmark Test along with dedicated server hosting provider Layered Technologies. The benchmark measurements show that Applogic really delivers performance.

An overall performance benchmark of 42,540 was achieved with the UnixBench WHT utility while consuming 443 CPUs. Based on the single CPU server result for the same benchmark of approximately 100, this implies that users can harness the equivalent of 420 single CPU dedicated servers through the utility computing service. This is no way represents the maximum performance of the system. During the benchmark we did not reach any fundamental architectural limit of the system, but ran out of hardware resources to add to the test.

Applogic makes very clever use of software virtualization, a process that can make almost any piece of Linux software or infrastructure hardware (Switches, Firewalls, Storage Arrays) and replicate them as a virtual appliance. A visual mapping tool allows the user to model complex IT application systems and transform them virtualized infrastructure — completely self-contained solutions that be propagated from one datacenter to another or seamlessly scale from a fraction of a server thousands of servers without reconfiguration.

We have yet to measure this Grid solution under real world tests, but the technology seems very promising

Happy Bat Mitzvah day to Hana Jael.