Foreningen af Danske InternetMedier: “Et andet område, der er i kraftig vækst er søgeordsannoncering. Her er det – selv meget konservativt estimeret – Google der trækker det tunge læs med deres søgeordsprogram.”
Andet kvartal 2005 ser en omsætning på 52,6 mio. kr, eller 210 mio. på årsbasis, og en vækst på hele 40% over samme kvartal året før. Det er skønt at se, selvom beløbene er små.
Når annoncering begynder at fungere som seriøs indtægtskilde åbner det op for en lang række nye muligheder for at lave forretning på nettet. (Tak til Jonas Thing, som jeg ville linke til, hvis han turde få sig en blog.)
Foreningen af Danske InternetMedier: “Et andet område, der er i kraftig vækst er søgeordsannoncering. Her er det – selv meget konservativt estimeret – Google der trækker det tunge læs med deres søgeordsprogram.”
Andet kvartal 2005 ser en omsætning på 52,6 mio. kr, eller 210 mio. på årsbasis, og en vækst på hele 40% over samme kvartal året før. Det er skønt at se, selvom beløbene er små.
Når annoncering begynder at fungere som seriøs indtægtskilde åbner det op for en lang række nye muligheder for at lave forretning på nettet. (Tak til Jonas Thing, som jeg ville linke til, hvis han turde få sig en blog.)
I put the
gVisit snippet in pl/lace to see where my readers (that’s you) are coming from, and here’s the current result:
So mostly North America, a little Hawaii, Venezuela, Europe, Australia, and a bunch of Asia. Yesterday there was a lot more Europe.
This is fun. The service is free if you have limited traffic, and it’s really easy to set up.
Am I the only one who really
dislikes Adobe (what happened to Acrobat?) Reader on the Mac?
First, it installs a plugin for Safari for showing PDFs inside the browser, which makes Safari really slow. You know the feeling where you clicked on a link not realizing it was to a PDF, and you curse yourself all the way through the unbearably long time that your computer is frozen while the Adobe plugin is loading? So you manually go delete the plugin afterwards.
Having deleted that, you launch it stand-alone, and it’s slooooow to start up. And to add insult to injury, one of the reasons it’s so slow to start is they go check if you’ve been naughty and deleted the plugin, and helpfully offers to “repair” your installation. No thanks!
And then a bit later, once you’ve closed it and sighed a sigh of relief that it’ll be another few months till you see its face, an application icon starts dancing saying you should upgrade to the latest point release. I go “sure, if that keeps you happy” and click install. But wait, I have to quit Safari first, so they can install the evil plugin again. That’s when I hit cancel. Arghh!
I’m sick of it, they so don’t get the Mac. Which is odd, given how Adobe really got started on the Mac. Hm, times change, probably a different team responsible for it today.
It all reminds me of Windows. Remember the file type turf wars? Where different programs are fighting for the same file types, so every time you launch an app, it checks and asks you if it should reclaim the ones its lost since the last time. Poor users—imagine your fridge and your freezer fighting over the pasta sauce. Enough already, just leave it where I put it!
But what to do about the Reader? Just say no to Adobe Reader!
Frederiksberg Bladet: “Og så bekræfter tallene, at de elektroniske medier – herunder internettet – ikke er den trussel for de trykte medier, som nogle har ment, siger Svend Aage Linde, sekretariatschef for Ugeaviserne.” (p10, “Du læser i en success…”)
Vi får se … :)
I had to snatch a number of icons for different file types from the jaws of my
OS X. To spare others the detective work, here’s how.
As Mac developers will probably know (but I didn’t) is that icons are stored in files named *.icns, so locate icns produced a long list which can be combed through for interesting icons to use. Getting from the icns format to something usable on the web like GIF or PNG turned out to be a little tricky, but thankfully the little Iconverter software does the trick.
But then there were the MS Office icons—there were on icns files to be found for these. I never did manage to find out where they store them, but luckily I found this other software called IconGrabber that lets you pluck the icon straight from a file that bears it.
ImageMagick’s convert took it from there.
Paul Graham: “I dislike being on either end of it. I’ll work my ass off for a customer, but I resent being told what to do by a boss. And being a boss is also horribly frustrating; half the time it’s easier just to do stuff yourself than to get someone else to do it for you. I’d rather do almost anything than give or receive a performance review.”
Reading this made me realize just why it was that I’m happier and more productive now that I don’t have an office and don’t have employees. It’s just not the way to get things done efficiently in 2005.
These days I like working while standing in my kitchen carrying my baby on my chest in a baby carrier. And I frequently do it between midnight and 3 PM because she tends to have trouble sleeping on her own then. But it works out just fine. And it turns out that being forced to spend more time away from the keyboard means I get more thinking done and get more ideas, which doesn’t hurt, either.
John Batelle: “No one ever got rich overestimating the public’s taste for nuance.”
And now it’s my turn to play with Google AdSense here. So far, I was surprised at how easy it was to setup – even though I was expecting it to be easy, I wasn’t expecting that easy. I’m not too happy with the $0.00 earnings in the first 5 minutes, though. :)
Today I was, at long last, reunited with Weaver of Dreams, a legendary album by Don Grolnick. I used to listen to this album, and particularly the title song, all the time some 12 years ago, but then the cassette player went out of fashion, the CD is out of print, and I haven’t managed to find an electronic copy anywhere. But just a few weeks ago I found someone in Brooklyn selling a used CD copy, and this morning it showed up in the mail. Sooo sweet! I love the way this guy plays, his phrasing, it’s so corny, yet so straight, no-nonsense, bluesy and jazzy and a little rock-and-roll, and just … nice. If I was a piano player, I’d want to play like him.
Uhm, had it in Buenos Aires, and it’s quite different from the regular kind, and very tasty. Actually, I had better pizza in Buenos Aires than I’ve had in New York, and that says something. And the best pizza by far was in Naples, but that’s hardly surprising, except it was in a tiny market stall, while practically the whole city was closed for easter. My favorite New York place was and still is Grimaldi’s. Maybe I should try that Coals place. Any others? (Via Jason Calacanis)
Computerworld: “The basic problem is that airports [and other public facilities] see wireless as a potential revenue stream, whereas Continental makes its revenue on plane fares and sees wireless as a way to keep their customers happy.”
Why can’t the airport see it as a way to make customers happy? After all, we travelers pay significant amounts of money to use the airports, and a little service, especially when it is so cheap to provide, wouldn’t be unreasonable. Is it a wise business decision? Is there enough competition in the market for there to be a real choice of airport, so this could be a deciding factor?
It’s also more than just the money, it’s the hassle, too. I think at least a quarter of the times I’ve had problems with the payment, from software bugs, servers being down, to terms not being clear. That’s gotta cost the provider money, too. Why not just make it free and be done with it? (Via Dave Winer)
The next tool I’m missing here is a simple time-tracking tool. I’ve played with a couple, including
TimeLog, a desktop app for Mac, but I haven’t found any that I’m actually willing to pay money for. I like the fact that the timer runs on my desktop, so it reminds me to log when I’m working, but the interface is poor. There’s also the
other TimeLog, which is web-based and very powerful, but it’s too much and too expensive for my small needs (Disclaimer: I know the people behind Timelog.com).
What tools do you use?
The other tool that I’m missing in my globalized Fortune
5,000,000 world is a tool to help me manage my cash flow. After all, if
DNROOC (Do not run out of cash) is good enough for Google, it’s probably good enough for me.
The reason I can’t just use Excel, apart from the usual reasons, is that I do business in multiple currencies, including both USD and EUR, and so my cash flow budget needs to reflect either current rates or what I (foolishly) predict those rates to be at the time.
For all I know, no good tool exists for this, so I’ve built one myself which queries Yahoo for the latest exchange rates, but it’s not very satisfactory overall, particularly since I didn’t bother with any UI, so I have to log into a server and edit Tcl code every time I want to update it.
From this post over at Blinksale, it seems I’m not the only one dealing in multiple currencies at the same time. How do you deal with this?
I just sent my first invoice with
Blinksale, and it’s a nice change from the under-maintained home brew I had before. It’s a keeper.
One gripe, though: It doesn’t let me add text to the invoices with my wire transfer info. I could add it as a $0 line item, but that’s just too nasty. My theory is that it’s because they still predominantly use checks in the US. Could this get on the list to fix, Josh?
Comparing this to this. In Sweden, SEK 449/month buys you 24 Mbit/s. In Denmark, the same amount (DKK 358) buys you only 1 Mbit/s. That’s 24 times more expensive here than in Sweden.
Did anybody say monopoly? Where are the regulators? How do law makers not see something like this happening and do something to create real competiton when they privatize? We’re getting ripped off. I’m outraged! (via Michael)
Went for the first long walk with Flora in the baby carrier on my chest, and Dave Winer’s morning coffee notes in my ears this morning, and I quite enjoyed myself—I’m going to have to do this again.
I’m also going to have to do a Winer-style programming-and-sightseeing road trip some day – it’s quite cool to have a job that lets you do this, although it might not be so easy to combine with the baby thing.
Journalism.co.uk: To make things worse, the industry’s executives still don’t understand what the web is for: “So it doesn’t make money, and it’s not a back up for the newspaper?” (via Jonas Thing)
