Get This Man a Doctor

These past few days in Miami I’ve had the opportunity to cruise its mean streets. I saw these bus benches on the side of the road advertising a service called “Google BenchAds”. I have to keep up on the online marketing world, so the prospect of Google entering into the physical media market seemed like a big news story.

The picture reads, Your Ad Here: Google “Benchads” 1-800-4-BENCHADS. Become Part of Nadel’s Growing Media Co.

Google is one of the largest providers of online marketing media on the Internet. AdWords was launched in 2000 to provide a revenue stream, but in 2002 it was redone to conform with Google’s user-centric philosophy. Rather than deal with large corporations trying to target large demographics, as most marketing had previously done, Google AdWords allows small companies to target individual keywords. Although the effects of this revolutionary method have been underutilized and barely understood by marketers, its success has been part of the (dare I say it) leitmotif of the past five years of Internet advertising—the emphasis of direct communication with the consumer over demographics and uniformity. Of course, the fact that the past five years of Internet development in general has been focusing on communication and individuality is hardly a coincidence.

But enough preaching, the point is that my first reaction to seeing that bench was to imagine Google participating in some form of real-world corollary to AdWords, probably linked with its online twin. I imagined marketers being able to buy keywords and also checking the “BenchAds” option, selecting geographic regions where they would like their ads to be shown.

So I got home and starting researching, finding a few people who also found the benches, but still no indication that Google was associated with them.

I finally found the company’s site when it dawned on me that, distracted by my fantasy world, I had misread the benches. The benches weren’t associated with Google—the company was simply providing a resource location in the form of a search engine query. So I was just supposed to Google for the word “benchads”.

It’s still an interesting case in Internet marketing, considering how domain names are overemphasized. Some marketers seem to think that people are going to 1) Remember their domain name, and, 2) Type it into a browser when they get home. While a memorizable domain name is necessary, it is rarely useful to publish it or expect people to use it. The most common way we share sites (other than hyperlinks) is to say something like, “Just search for X”, where X is some unique keyword guaranteed to bring up the site as the first result. So I’m glad to see that some marketing companies out there are actually competent enough to realize that.

Or whatever they’re called. Since New York is such a Catholic city, I’ve decided to participate in this whole Lent thing for the first year ever. I mean… why should the Catholics have all the fun?

Since I’ve never done this before, my first vow was to give up my Catholicism for forty days. I figured that would be something easy to start out my first Lent—I probably wouldn’t have to repent or anything like that.

I don’t exactly know the rules, but I don’t think you can take back a vow. Which sucks, because an article on the New Scientist blog inspired me to pick an every more relevant vice to give up, namely stupid Internet videos. I’ve actually been doing pretty well—I had my first temptation from Satan today in the form of a video of a guy getting kicked in the face. But I persevered and didn’t watch the video and get +1 Holy or whatever.

So to clarify, a stupid Internet video includes anything on YouTube (including, sadly, my new favorite show, Infinite Solutions). Stupid Internet videos do not include Ze Frank. Stupid Internet videos do include anything on CNN.

Give me strength O Lord baby Jesus…

Via Ze Frank, this little flash game lets you draw a 2-D figure, then animates it dancing for you in 3-D. The soundtrack’s a bit annoying, and normally I don’t go for dumb little flash games, but I always enjoy anything that involves actual creativity.

This reminds me of the One Million Masterpiece art project, especially since you can see everyone else’s figure being drawn.

Oh yeah, I made the whole crew:

I have a new article up on developerWorks about CakePHP. It’s part four of a five part series, and I have nothing to do with the other parts. I have to admit that it’s not the finest article I’ve written for them—it wasn’t a great experience writing one fifth of someone else’s article. I’ve already gotten some corrections sent to me by CakePHP developers.

A while back someone alerted me to a nice little collection of free (a.i.B.) icons at Famfamfam. The set is called Silk and release under an CC attribution license. I’ve used it in projects and personally like it because it’s massive (700 icons commonly used in modern web applications) and also includes a few meta-icons that can be superimposed on other icons (plus, minus, edit, play, stop, etc.).

Anywho, I was recently startled when everyone’s favorite Firefox plugin, the web developer toolbar, started using the icon set. I swear I keep seeing it around the Web and it’s starting to give me spooky déjà vu feelings. So someone needs to come out with a few more icon sets that break the mold—I’m thinking something with fewer pastels. Maybe black and white or Technicolor.

The Official Google Webmaster Blog recently release an entry on Google’s fight against artificial manipulation of PageRank, namely comment spamming and link selling. Apparently, they have new algorithms to discount tampering with your search results by making yourself seem more popular than you are. From TFA:

To sum up, even though improved algorithms have promoted a transition away from paid or exchanged links towards earned organic links, there still seems to be some confusion within the market about what the most effective link strategy is. So when taking advice from your SEO consultant, keep in mind that nowadays search engines reward sweat-of-the-brow work on content that bait natural links given by choice.

Way to stick it to ‘em, Google. Will this stop certain marketing companies from violently abusing Google’s name? I highly doubt it.