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AdSense for Games: Only for the Big Players, For Now

When I was Tucows’ Technical Evangelist, one of the areas the company was researching was casual gaming and the opportunities it presented. During the research phase, our casual games guy Scott Murff pointed out the difference between the ads on casual and hardcore game sites: while the ads on hardcore game sites were generally about other hardcore games, the ads on casual games sites were aimed at a broader audience, and many were aimed at women.

The next logical step is to take the ads on the page area surrounding casual games and and move them inside casual games, and it’s now possible with AdSense for Games, which makes it possible to insert AdSense advertising into Flash games. Here’s an example provided by the Inside AdSense blog, which shows gameplay and a “and now, a word from our sponsors” moment featuring an AdSense ad (the ad comes on at the 0:53 mark):

For the time being, your casual game will have to be a hit to qualify: it has to have half a million game plays a day and 80% of its traffic must come from the U.S. and U.K.. As with original recipe AdSense, it’s likely that the “long tail” crowd will eventually be admitted if AdSense for Games takes off.

For more details, see the Google In-Game Advertising page.

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Terminated, Part 6: Laid Off Still Life

Here are two “still life” shots I just pulled off my camera.

The first was taken two Thursdays ago. It’s a photo of the stuff that I brought to the office over time and took home that night:

My stuff at the office

I know it’s unusual to bring in your own office chair, but ones at the office were sub-par, and I ahd a decent one just sitting in my apartment’s storage room. The desktop computer is one that I haven’t been using much; at the office, I treated it as a big backup hard drive and iTunes machine.

I took the second at the Spadina and Richmond Starbucks just a couple of minutes ago. I thought it might give you an idea of what a high-tech job search looks like:

Still life at Starbucks

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Scoble’s Resume Tips

Panel from a "Life in Hell" comic by Matt Groening: "The Unemployed"

If you’re in my situation — that is, looking for work — make sure that you read Robert Scoble’s article titled So, you need a job? Man, do resumes suck. In the article, he provides two lists:

  1. A list of surefire ways to guarantee that your resume will quickly be put into the “crap” pile. This list includes incredibly basic mistakes such letting misspellings slip by, sending only the resume as an email attachment without actually writing anything in the body of the email and applying for positions for which you are clearly either over- or underqualified.
  2. A list of surefire ways to stand out from the crowd. This includes having a blog, doing some homework on the person or organization to whom you’re sending the resume and writing not only for humans but for resume-scanning software as well.

Watch Out if You Use Word 2007

Scoble makes a very important point in his “Don’t” list that I’m going to restate because a lot of people make this mistake: Don’t send your resume in .docx format!

The .docx format is the default file format for Word 2007, and prior versions of Word can’t read it unless they have the add-in that can import those files. Since the last really useful new feature in Word — the red lines beneath suspected misspellings and green lines beneath suspected grammatical errors — appeared in Word a couple of versions ago, most people don’t feel the need to keep up with the absolute latest version. If you send out your resume in .docx format, there’s a good chance that the people receiving it can’t read it. If you use Word 2007 to write your resume, use “Save As…” to create the version that you’ll send out and save it as a “Word 97-2003” document, a.k.a. a .doc file.

Here’s a quick guide to the differences between the file icons:

Differences between .docx and .doc icons

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An Anime Guide to Over-the-Ear Headphones

This one’s for you audio junikies who are also into anime: illustrations of various makes and models of over-the-ear headphones, worn by anime girls. Click the image below to get a 1280 by 800 pixel version, suitable as a desktop background image:

Preview image of the Anime Headphone Guide -- various anime girls modelling over-the-ear headphones.
Click the picture to see the full-size version.
Image courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

I don’t know where my friend Miss Fipi Lele keeps digging up this stuff, but I’m glad she’s still sending it my way!

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Who Got the PowerBook?

In the previous post, I announced that I was giving away my old 12″ 867 MHz PowerBook G4 and said that I’d give it to the person who emailed me with the most compelling reason to give it to him or her. The most compelling one came from Sue from CARD — that’s Community Association for Riding for the Disabled — who requested it for her organization.

CARD logo

CARD’s mission is to improve the lives of children and adults with disabilities through therapeutic horse riding programs, which helps with their mobility, communication and social skills, and self-esteem. All riders are assessed to ensure the program will benefit them, and to ensure they are placed appropriately in a hippotherapy, psycho-education, therapeutic riding or horsemanship class. Some of their riders who have progressed through the ranks and competed internationally at the Paralympic games and in other ParaEquestrian events.

CARD is 100% self-funded. They rely on grants, donations, sponsorship and fundraising efforts and don’t get any government support. They need to update their office equipment and are looking for donors and donations; they’re currently running on 8 year old iMacs. Of all the people who emailed me, CARD sounded like the people who needed the PowerBook the most, so it’s theirs.

I’ve got another machine to give away, so watch this space!

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Terminated, Part 5: The Great Computer Give-Away, Part 2 (Apple PowerBook 12″ G4 867 Mhz) [Updated]

Update: The PowerBook has been given away.

Last time, I gave away a Mac clone from the ’90s. This time, I’m giving away this machine: a 2003-era 12″ PowerBook G4:

12" PowerBook G4 867 Mhz

Some specs:

  • 867 Mhz PowerPC G4 processor
  • 640K RAM (the maximum)
  • 1024 * 768 screen resolution
  • 40 GB hard drive
  • “Combodrive” (Reads and burns CD-ROMs, reads DVDs)
  • AirPort Extreme card

Here’s a peek at the ports on its left side:

Left side of PowerBook G4

The right side has just the CD/DVD slot:

Right side of PowerBook G4

And yes, it can be yours…FREE!

How Can You Get This Machine?

Alas, you can’t anymore; it’s been given away.

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b5media’s Changes to Blogger Pay: Right, Fair and Still a Sweet Deal

b5media logoOver at TechCrunch, Mike Arrington posted an article titled Big Blogger Pay Cuts At b5Media. As a recent ex-b5er (I’m the former Technical Project Manager), I thought I’d provide a former insider’s perspective:

  • b5media paid bloggers based on pageview statistics drawn from AWStats, which produces its results by analyzing the the server log files.
  • In b5’s experience, AWStats reported pageview counts that were significantly inflated — I’m talking numbers that were sometimes two-thirds higher than reality — and this was confirmed when AWStats’ results were compared with those reported by SiteMeter, a package we believe is far more accurate.
  • b5 recently made the switch to Omniture’s web analytics package, which delivers more accurate pageview statistics and can do the kinds of detailed analysis that the company needs.
  • As a trusted third party, Omniture provides results that can be trusted by:
    • The bloggers. Unlike AWStats, which is run by b5 and based on data on b5’s servers, Omniture’s data is collected and processes by a neutral third party with a solid industry reputation.
    • Advertisers. Just as TV ad buyers look at ratings and newspaper and magazine ad buyers look at circulation, blog advertisers look at pageview stats, and they need to be able to trust the numbers we provide them.
    • b5’s investors. They use the size of the readership as a metric for the company’s performance, and like advertisers, they need to be able to trust the stats.

Simply put, up till now, b5 has been paying bloggers based on inaccurate, inflated pageview counts. If you’re a b5 blogger and your pay drops as a result of the switch to Omniture, you’re not getting ripped off; it just means that the system no longer makes errors in your favour. It was a nice ride, but it had to end sometime.

Even under the new pay structure, blogging under the b5 umbrella is a pretty sweet deal. A guaranteed minimum CPM of $4? That’s awesome compared to the alternatives out there. Consider my personal blog, The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century, which has been averaging about 200,000 pageviews a month (outperforming most of b5’s blogs) and has had over 2 million pageviews this year according to StatCounter. I do a big happy dance when my CPM makes that rare climb over $1.10. $4? Sign me up!

To summarize, I believe that b5media’s new pay system for bloggers is both the right thing for the company and fair to its bloggers. I stand behind CEO Jeremy Wright and the rest of the b5 team in their decision.

Recommended Reading

For more details, I recommend you read Jeremy Wright’s blog post in response to the TechCrunch story.