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It appears that Microsoft ads are back on Facebook's groups including the F**k Islam group. The ad URL is http://ads.ak.facebook.com/ads/creative/msn/120x600FBKGR3.html which appears to be a Microsoft advertising hosted ad frame.
I guess they feel the mini-storm has blown over. Advertisers on the F**k Islam site include Healthy Choice and the University of Phoenix.
Technorati Tags: facebook, microsoft, business, advertising
I wrote an Op Ed on America's Supply Chain Transparency Problem which I believe can be addressed by pursuing Fair Trade more deeply:
While America’s food, drug and toy manufacturers struggle with a lack of transparency in their supply chain, American consumers live with the consequences of poisoned food, lead coated toys and sick and deceased pets. Recently, I traveled to Peru with American importer Equal Exchange and saw a much different kind of supply chain (watch my trip slide show). Equal Exchange is a twenty-one year old worker-owned cooperative that imports and sells Fair Trade coffee, chocolate and tea. Equal Exchange doesn’t have problems with supply chain transparency because the Fair Trade certification process requires it. In many cases, Equal Exchange employees know the farmers and exporters personally and have stayed in their homes.
Watch my slide show from the Fair Trade trip to Peru with Equal Exchange
Technorati Tags: fair trade, coffee, peru, equal exchange, food, product safety, toy recalls
I heard that Microsoft has offered a retirement package which includes complete vesting of all your stock options if you remain with the company until you are 55. When I was at Microsoft, junior employees received stock options that took four and a half years to vest. At that time, large jumbo grants were being given out to executives with seven year commitments. With each year's review, you'd receive more stock options that would vest four and a half years on... and so on... Eventually, you might have millions of dollars ahead of you if you would only stay with the company longer, hence the term golden handcuffs.
When I left to start GiftSpot.com in April 1999, I left more than a half million dollars stock that would vest in another few months and more six months after that, and six months after that, etc. I couldn't stay because GiftSpot needed to launch in time for the holiday season.
According to the Microsoft Web site, the average of employees has risen to 36.9 years with more than a third of employees now older than 40. Essentially, Microsoft is giving an incentive to their older experienced employees to stick it out with them for more time (perhaps another 5 to 20 years depending on their proximity to 55). I expect for many veterans, this will impact their long term planning. Oh, cruel world.
While GiftSpot didn't work out financially, I try to remember that I was very fortunate to earn as much as I did in my eight years at Microsoft and that the experience of being a CEO of an Internet startup during the dot com boom was ... priceless. i try to remember that whenever GiftCertificates, the company that acquired GiftSpot, dilutes their stock ... which they did again this week (the first time was by a factor of 500).
Technorati Tags: golden handcuffs, microsoft, retirement, stock options
The new Herkimer Coffee store is quite nice. It's at the North end of the University District:
View Larger Map
The store has WiFi but only one power outlet by design. I think they want to discourage laptop users from camping out for longer than their battery life.
Herkimer Coffee is NOT Fair Trade ... yet ... but I have spoken to them about this and hope they will work on this long term.
Technorati Tags: herkimer coffee, seattle
Google has quietly raised the required minimum traffic limit for small sites who wish to use its AdSense API to 100,000 page views per day. The AdSense API was introduced in March 2007 as a way for sites with user generated content to share advertising revenue with their members. From "Policy change introduces page view requirement" in the AdSense API Forum:
Since we opened the API to all a few months ago the response has been incredible and we're pleased at being so popular. However, this popularity has led to us providing less than the highest levels of support for our developers that we strive for. As a result, only developers who expected 100,000 (one hundred thousand) page views or more for AdSense API pages will be able to go live. This policy change will probably result in fewer developers going live and give us a chance to enhance our support resources and processes to more easily support a greater number of developers in the future. Developers who have already started on their implementations are not effected by this change... To those who don't meet the page view requirement, we hope to be able to lower it in the future as we become more efficient at supporting our developers!
While Google advises that integration approvals may take a week, longer if changes are required, the policy review for the APIs seems to be stretching out to a month for some customers. I've been waiting two weeks for NewsCloud's application to be approved - the technical approval did take only one week.
While the AdSense API is a more sophisticated service than Google Analytics (which allows access for even small sites), is this an indication that Google plans to offer its services less democratically in the future? Or, is this just a bump in the road to help them provide a higher quality of service? I tend to believe its the latter and take them at their word for now.
When Analytics launched, many sites had trouble getting data recorded at first as the site scaled. GMail was launched primarily via closed invitations and in tiers as it scaled. So, perhaps this isn't unusual. However, it does remind me of the initial delays with getting Facebook applications approved. In contrast though, any small developer can release an application in the Facebook environment within days now. Squeezing small startups out from being able to access valuable Web Services that larger corporations can could have a similar effect as the possible end of status quo "net neutrality".
While the AdSense API isn't necessarily as profitable to small publishers (or Google) initially, offering revenue sharing is a powerful way to attract new members and grow. It could be part of the secret sauce to successfully expanding user generated sites. I would hope Google can make the AdSense API available to everyone again in the future.
Technorati Tags: adsense, adsense api, facebook, google
Technorati Tags: bush, bin laden, war on terror
Daily Show News is getting a lot of google search traffic for "swinging some pipe" today.
Technorati Tags: swinging some pipe, kucinich
So while Facebook hasn't commented on the obscenely named groups that violate its own Terms of Service, the code for the Microsoft Digital Advertising Service has been removed from all Facebook groups - even legitimate ones. It will be interesting to see what decision Facebook comes to on language and inflammatory language and hate speech on its site - and then how this gets reflected through its advertising partners.
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