Over the last few weeks, our office LAN became extremely unstable under certain circumstances. In particular, a Vista Business machine would hang randomly and cause the network to slow to a crawl. The first wave of fixes involved downloading the latest hardware drivers and Windows updates for all machines on the network. After further testing, it turned out that 1 particular XP (SP2) machine would crash the Vista Business machine when accessing a mapped network drive on the Vista box. It seems that this issue has been documented in a few places online but no fix has ever been posted… until now that is.
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The purchase of a company for its intellectual property and assets is common practice in the business world. But sometimes, companies often make a purchase that does not seem to make any sense… at least not in the short term. This was the case for ValueClick purchasing Be Free in 2002 for over $100 million dollars. After the dot com bust, this valuation seemed overly aggressive. Fast forward six years to today and the real reason for the high-priced purchase emerges.
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Online marketing is becoming more sophisticated and marketers are looking for even better tools to help them do their jobs and more importantly, to gain that edge over competitors. In the past, it was difficult to target a specific audience in a Google AdWords campaign. Normally when you use keywords in your ad groups to contextually target ads, Google will match them to relevant pages across the hundreds of thousands of sites on the Google content network. But have you ever wanted to bid more (or less) for a specific content network site you’re contextually targeting? Or write customized ad text for a precise group of pages, such as news articles or relevant discussions on social networks? Now you can!
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As of today, it looks like Google Adsense is requiring publishers to update their logins to a Google Account if you have not already done so. As mentioned in an earlier post (Confused by Google’s Consolidation of AdSense Login to Google Account), Google did not allow users to use an existing Google Account to update your AdSense login if it is already associated with an AdWords account. Although the instructions indicate that you should update your AdSense account with a Google Account, it looks like you can still use a non-Google Account to do the update.
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For those who run their own servers, the cPanel control panel has been a truly remarkable piece of software that allow non-technical users to perform even the very technical of tasks. But like many types of software, even this tried and true work horse shows a glitch here and there. This latest one threw our IT support team (including cPanel tech support, server management company and experts in various online forums) on a wild goose chase. WHM showed two unauthorized users have gained access to our server! Talk about a worst case scenario security breach! After some internal testing, it seemed that there was more to the cPanel alert than meets the eye.
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Even though we are living in a day and age of high technology, software manufacturers knowingly continue to release products containing major bugs. It is a pity that this happens but it is also normal practice and reality in the software business. Having said that, a good software company will also try to resolve these bugs by releasing future patches and service packs. So when Microsoft Update informed me that Windows XP SP3 (Service Pack 3) was ready to be downloaded and installed, I was happy to check it out. Unfortunately, the result was a disappointing experience. SP3 actually broke Windows Update and it required some time to troubleshoot and fix.
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Earlier this month, the BBC technology television show, Click, reported that their developer was legitimately able to use a 3rd party Facebook application to retrieve private information from Facebook users who have specifically asked to keep this type of data private. Now, 3rd party applications on Facebook are beginning to steal user identities for the sake of spamming.
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A few months back when Google began penalizing sites for selling direct text links, I talked about a specific case where computer.org went from a PR9 to PR5 literally overnight. A few months later, I noticed it is also possible to go from a PR5 to PR9.
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In a world where profitability and return-on-investment often direct business decisions, it was nice to receive an email today from PR Newswire announcing that they will waive all China earthquake relief effort news fees. PR Newswire is showing how a for-profit organization can do its part and try to help the more than 10,000 people who have been killed by a recent powerful earthquake in China. If your company has applicable news release, take advantage of this offer and get in touch with PR Newswire. Hats off to PR Newswire and our hearts go out to the families of the earthquake victims.
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It is always nerve wracking when Wordpress needs to be updated. In fact, I just updated from Wordpress 2.3 to 2.5.1. This time, I used the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin to perform the upgrade and it was indeed a treat. While it used to take me 30 minutes or more to manually update Wordpress, this time only took 15 minutes or so. There was a slight learning curve but now that is done, future updates should take no more than 10 minutes. The update process was fairly painless and the step-by-step instructions were easy to follow. Nicely done Keith Dsouza. After the dust settled and all plugins were reactivated, I noticed the query load time of this blog’s home page more than doubled from when it was running 2.3. Something in 2.5.1 was causing this page load increase and I was not about to let it go.
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Attending internet marketing conferences like AdTech San Francisco 2008 will help you stay up to date with new developments in the marketing and advertising realms. In addition, these events are also where you find new business contacts and strengthen current relationships. I just returned from AdTech and once again, the out-of-conference relationship building was just as important as the actual conference itself.
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Next week is AdTech San Francisco and I have compiled a list of people & companies that I need to meet up with. As the date of April 15 draws closer, the list seems to magically grow by itself! If it’s anything like last year’s AdTech San Francisco, my meeting list will continue to grow, especially during the days of the conference itself. I also just received official instructions on how to pick up my press pass at the event so I will be able to attend some speaker sessions and report back with any interesting findings.
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