BlogAllAlong

So yesterday was the end of the Premier League season, one of the toughest soccer leagues in the world, and my favorite when I want to watch some soccer. I was shocked not to see any news about the match today in Al-Jarida newspaper, I checked it 3 times and even did a search online. The first thing that accured to me is maybe the game was late, but no. It was only 7 PM when the match finished. They had news about Italian League, which was only 1 hour before. Heck, they even had news about the Turkish league. Both Al-Watan and Al-Qabas had the news covered in details.

I’m not a big sporting fan, and I don’t watch more than a handful of matches per year. My post here is not just to fill in empty pages, and neither it is coming from an obsessed Manchester fanboy who wants to read his team news every where in the press. Rather, it’s for me a sign of how outdated and lacking some new comers in the newspaper industry are. You want to win customers, you have to give them what they want. I did post about their bad deliver service before, and how they fixed it later on as well. After which, I was really enjoying it for a while. But after today, I am rethinking my opinion about the newspaper as a whole.

Any news after 6 PM will have to wait 36 hours? Bad Call Really. Don’t expect any breaking news for the elections then.

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For Firefox users, this is a small hack that I think might come in handy sometimes. Firefox Search Engines support on-the-fly auto-complete, which IE7 as I know doesn’t. This feature however is rarely utilized, but the default Google search engine luckily does use it. It comes pretty useful sometimes, especially when you want to search for something that you don’t know how to spell. Now suppose you want this auto-completion to search for specific product on Amazon rather than Google. You could do that easily without moving your hands off the keyboard as follows:

1. Start with Google as the default search plugin, press Ctrl+K (Move cursor to Search Engine box)
2. Start typing what you are looking for, say “HTC…”. Stop right there and you will see list of suggestions, one of which happens to be what I’m looking for. The “HTC Tytn ii”

   

3. Move with the Down key to the desired result, say “HTC Tytn ii” in our case.

   

4. Click Ctrl+Right key (Select current option). Cursor will move back to search engine box
5. Click Ctrl+Down key (Browse installed search engines) until you reach Amazon Search Engine.
   
6. Enter

That’s it. You can apply this to any other search or search engine you want, without moving your hands off the keyboard.

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Last week just before the P2BK forum, I was surprised to receive 3 email spams. One for P2BK, and two others for elections. I am usually very careful where I put my email, so my best guess is one of the online sites in Kuwait I deal with is selling my email.

Today, I got this rudely and clearly email spam from 6alabt.com:

Clearly as the title says, United Networks ad coming from 6alabt.com. I usually wait to resolve the matter with the company, but this is outrageous and cannot be explained. Funny thing is I was standing at their booth last week discussing their business. They’re doing pretty good, making thousands of KD per month. But it seems nothing is good enough for them so they chose to make money out of our emails. My simple reply to them was “Why are you sending us spam email please?”

Well thanks a lot 6alabt. Now I’m neither ordering from you nor coming near United Networks. I think we should gather to build a list of Kuwait spammers to protect users from them.

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Microsoft have finally made the official release of Windows XP SP3, which in their words  “includes a small number of new functionalities, which do not significantly change customers’ experience with the operating system”. Yet, the public is giving it more attention and interest than Microsoft hopes for, in it’s continuing effort to kill the OS, and replace it with Vista. Despite their official announcement to kill XP from retail store this coming June, PC manufacturers like Dell and HP have found a loophole in the possible downgrade option from Vista to XP, and will sell their computers preinstalled with downgraded XP version. This would ofcourse incur little extra cost, that they seem to be welling to take.

To read the SP3 update details, download the PDF file from here.

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26th April marks my birthday. It also marks the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster. The same memory has been used to spread a Windows Virus by the same name, which some might argue it as a good day). I have had several bad incidents on my birthday before, I started wishing I could just skip it. It’s just in my mind I know, it’s a low probability that just happens. This year however it was different. Nothing serious happened. It was rather a normal weekend, with a bit extra childly noise. But once my wife asked me “How does it feel to turn 28?”, I just thought for a second, and all I can think of is “How old I am, and what have I done so far”. I’m not so young anymore. Time passes by, and we somehow easily manage to let it go.

I write this thinking of the great “The Alchemist” novel and the boy’s journey to pursue his Personal Legend, and how Paulo best describes it saying “It was my fear of failure that first kept me from attempting the master work.  Now, I’m beginning what I could have started ten years ago.  But I’m happy at least that I didn’t wait twenty years.”

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So my mother kept nagging on me to stop being lazy and open a shareholder account in Mishref Co-Op to get some promotions and profit from the purchases I make. I preferred to just use my family account instead, until I gave up and opened one for me and my wife. Ofcourse months passed without collecting the cards that I felt a shame of going asking for it anymore. My wife did the favor, and as I’m writing this right now I still don’t remember the account number. Only once I did know and use it. It was worth it. I made some extra profit this month right here:

There is even a typo in it, mishref-frofit. I really laughed when I saw it. It’s also nice from them to bother them selves and my bank to send over this money. My only complain is I didn’t get the SMS alert for money deposit :).

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Google and Yahoo! have been undergoing a testing period for the efficiency of delivering Google Ads alongside Yahoo search results. This is to measure how the ad click-throughs are compared to Yahoo’s own ads. Yahoo themselves estimate that Google Ads bring 60-70% more revenue than Yahoo. This is because of ad relevancy for one, and two I’m sure from the large collection of advertisers Google has. The more options you have, the more possible it is to deliver better results. Also, the user won’t get bored from the same results all the time. And when it comes to global market, say the Arabic region for example, or any other non-English site, it’s pretty difficult to get any geo-targeted ads. I don’t see any Arabic ads at Yahoo or any other ad network, while Google is getting more and more every day.

The test was to show Google ads at 3% of Yahoo search results inside the US for two weeks only. How did it go? Both parties have spoken general good deal of it so far. The Justice Department have been officially informed about the ongoing tests, and questions are rising right now about whether a deal between the two would give Google a monopoly over the internet ad market. Frankly, I would love for my Google Ads to show on Yahoo results for two reasons. One, Google is the best advertising program I’ve tried from many others, and gives very strong ad control and tracking. Two, I don’t want to split my money and time following multiple ad programs. Still however, for a multi-billion dollar business that large, I believe Google are over looking certain areas and need to improve on them:

• Ad Filtering: Filter unwanted ads on my site. Sex & gambling mainly. Google does a brilliant job catching fraud ads, ads that do not reflect the site content, heck they even ban certain Arabic words if they are about medical terms without valid permit. I’ve had one keyword disabled “عقار” which means both real-estate and medicine. It was banned because it’s a medical term and I can’t promote medical stuff without any proof of permit, even if I really meant real estate. So their filtering is strong when they want to, yet their Google AdSense competitive ad filtering is pretty lousy. I filter a certain site and after 12 hours I can still see the ads showing up on my site. This could be really embarrassing and bad for a business. I also don’t get any chance to disallow gambling and sex sites, which I believe should be a normal easy to implement option. Google already offers to filter offensive content in it’s search, so an option to disallow those sites from advertising on mine should be pretty simple.
• Customer Support: How easy is it to contact Google for support? And how long does it take for them to reply. Not what you hope for from a leading company. Google support has always been disappointing to me.
• Wire-Transfer: For AdSense, most countries are still not supported for money transfer. Many smaller sites are ahead of Google and transfer to any place in the world. Google is only slowly expanding, and yet promoting the green environment thing.
• Money Split: For some reason Google just don’t wish to tell you how much your share is from the click. Many other sites do. The ad is on my site and we are sharing the revenue. Any business would usually include share percentage. Google always gives vague unclear answers about the subject. If it’s bad, then you’re doing EVIL. If it’s good, then say it. One report was published before by New York Times based on announced 2006 Google financial reports estimating 78.5% of the AdSense clicks going to the publishers. Such a big number makes you wonder why wouldn’t Google reveal it. One reason I can think of is maybe they don’t want competitors to know the percentage and start a percentage share war.

All in all, Google remains a very strong source for advertising and revenue that I would like to see expand further. A bit more attention is required hoewever for customer needs.

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