A Donkey on the Edge

Thank you Billy for pointing this out:-)

So exactly how often these days can you see a chap roasting an entire pig on a spit and what’s a burdock root anyway? Broadway market is looking pretty darn amazing right now. These guys come back every saturday—there’s smoked fish and meats, roast pork, bespoke jewellery and fine organic cheeses—I’ll be making the trip next week:-)

I’ve just spent the evening in a dark, smokey room in London packed with sweating, jumping crazy people punching that air in time to “I fought the law”.

Marquee club, 23rd May 1977?

Nope, punk-rock karaoke night upstairs at The Garage (whose downstairs bar is apparently worth the visit even without a selection from the Undertones) and I totally recommend it—even those under 40 wil enjoy this:-)

For the record, I made a complete disaster out of Pete Shelley’s What do I get? And YES, I’d do it again:-)

So I bought Nicki a Sony Ericsson K750i as she’s starting to write about food again and she needed a decent camera to upload to Flickr with. I just can’t get over the image quality on the thing. I pumps out 1600×1200 jpegs with only the faintest artefacts visible in blurry areas (it looks like a ccd pixel-grid, it sort of leaves background noise in the shape of vertical lines)

Click on the image if you’re curious to see what the high-resolution image file looks like—truly astonishing:-)

A friend of Billy’s wanted this word spread:

Dear All

I would be grateful if you would do two things for me to mark one John Peel’s passing:

As in the spirit of the original Festive Fifty, please send me your top three tracks (singles or LP tracks) in order 1 2 3. Please ensure you send both name of track as well as artist/group

Send this email to a bunch of people, asking them to send their top 3 to me at geoff.curran@btinternet.com by midnight 17th December

I will collate the answers and put out a definitive Festive Fifty at www.festivefifty.net on 24th December this year

I know this sounds a little…….but my love of music was fuelled by Peelie and having read the Mick Wall book, it brought it home how much he gave us and I would like to give a little back myself. If you think this is bollocks, then please do not reply but do me a favour, send it on as there are plenty of people who will not feel that way.

Cheers

Geoff

Will have to have a think… The hardest part with these things is remembering an awesome track that wasn’t released in December 2004 if you know what I mean.

Chris Wheatley makes a few observations about iTunes 6. In particular:

Gifting - like it
Just For You - the jury’s still out on that one.
Reviews - whatever.
Videos - very cool, dependent on content obviously
However, no CD or DVD burning for videos - nooooooooooooooooooooo, bad Steve, naughty Steve.

Now, I think Just for you is an irritant and I’ve disabled it (smart of you to give me that option Steve), but the no-video burning is criminal. You know, it’s time we start a mass education movement. Copyright law doesn’t work anymore and if Disney can get the rules re-written everytime Mickey is about to go into the public domain then the world’s music-buying public ought to have some sway.

The EFF and the Creative Commons are great ideas and certainly influential but the guy flicking through jewel cases in V Megastore needs to stop buying buying music and write his MP.

In the short term here’s were I’m at:

1. Apple’s Fair Play isn’t, If you bought a CD but the label said you could only listen to it in Fives ‘authorised’ rooms and that the burden of managing those rooms’ authorisation was on you you’d return it.
2. All iTunes Music store users should claim the fair use of their purchased music. Do this by downloading Hymn and removing the rights management bollocks from your MP3 files
3. Oh bugger, iTunes 6 has broken JHymn—developer is working on it, check back soon.
4. Tell your MP that you want a new deal on copyright. We all agreed on the current deal at a time when the benefits of cheap access to books outweighed the downside of reduced access to copying (seeing as you needed a scribe or a printing press to copy a book). It’s time for a new deal.

And while I’m banging Stallman’s copyright drum, I’ve got another consideration. The music industry will tell you that they need you to not make copies of your music because ‘illegal’ copying harms music and reduces creativity. Film studios will say it takes millions of dollars to make a movie and studios need to recoup that cash somehow.

They’re missing the point.

These industries need to make a profit to survive, but they don’t need a giant turnover to do it. Find a way to make a movie for $1000 and sell it for $2000 and you’ve made a 200% profit. My point is that all industries have to change over time. There just isn’t a law that says that everyone in the record industry has a right to a glamourous, cocaïne-fuelled lifestyle—nope, in the future, record company execs will need to find new ways to remain profitable. In the new world, record execs will drive second-hand Lada Nivas and privacy sellers or spam blockers will be bathing in gold tubs.

My point is that a sweet deal doesn’t get to stay sweet forever—move on.

I think we may have a thing here.

Can you imagine the impact on Google’s share price if it turns out they’re actually the Big Bad Google and legions of Gmail, Adsense and Google search users take their business elsewhere?

So yup, I’ve started digging around and we may have something here (thanks wAntAn productions: Google AdSense Account Disabled)

The post lists a couple of Adsense alternatives

• Adsense alternatives on threadwatch
• Yahoo Publisher Network

Just read a post on the Google Print copyright debacle which reminded me I got a bit tipsy last night and had a vigourous and interesting converstation with a barrister who specialises in intellectual property. We sort of have a similar conversation every time we meet, but this time he put a little more energy into deconstructing Stallman’s argument which was quite interesting.

In UK law, most cases proceed from the initial assumption that any and all copying is illegal. In other words, the debate isn’t about what you do with your copy, wether commercial (record a film from the back row and distribute copies for money) or not (tape a cd you just bought so your wife can play it on the car stereo). This is crazy as most people will copy stuff without even being aware of it (do you use a photocopier in your office?). Clearly, this law was written at a time when a copy was a difficult and expensive thing to produce—it made sense to say that doing so intentionally made you a premeditating and determined criminal.

For me, this reinforces the urgent need for a review of copyright law. In the meantime, I will continue to exercise my fair-use rights as a consumer with whatever means are at my disposal.

> Hello,
>
> As you know, Google treats instances of invalid clicks very seriously. By
> disabling your account, we feel that we have taken the necessary measures
> to ensure that invalid clicks will not continue to occur on your site. Due
> to the proprietary nature of our monitoring system, we’re not able to
> disclose any specific details of these clicks.

Wow, that’s convenient isn’t it. You can’t see what specific people are doing on specific machines behind firewalls so you analyse behaviour patterns and penalise individuals based on those assumptions. I did wonder how you would handle the fact that you couldn’t afford to adjudicate each click with human inspection. You’re in murky waters indeed…

> Publishers disabled for invalid click activity are not allowed further
> participation in Google AdSense. However, if you can maintain in good
> faith that the invalid clicks we detected on your ads were not due to your
> actions or negligence, or the actions or negligence of others working for
> you, you may appeal the closing of your account.

Please accept the present note as a formal appeal.

> Google reserves sole discretion in considering whether to take any action
> on an appeal.
>
> In order to appeal the disabling of your account, please email us at
> adsense-adclicks-appeal@google.com with the details requested below. We’re
> unable to consider appeals that do not contain all of this information:
>
> - Your name

Dug Falby

> - Your company’s name (if applicable)

N/A

bq. > - Your publisher ID number (located in the AdSense code on your website
> with the format, pub-################)

pub-6496886088358499

> - Your website’s URL

A - http://www.donkeyontheedge.com
B - http://www.labellife.com
C - http://www.pumpernickle.net
D - http://www.bigsaucer.com

> - Date your account was disabled

19 October 2005

> - Your website’s audience

A - UK designers, parents and those interested in my activist ramblings
B - New launch, not sure of actual audience but target is UK record industry execs
C - People searching for UK-based usability specialists
D - New launch, to date, zero traffic (not been publicised yet)

> - The source of your website’s content

A - Self-written
B - Manually aggregated by two record industry specialists.
C - Self-written
D - Written by a food journalist

> - Frequency of content updates

A - weekly
B - weekly
C - infrequent updates
D - posts are added almost daily

> - The primary sources of your website’s traffic

A - links from other blogs (have been slashdotted and boingboinged in the past) as well as traffic generated by alistapart.com
B - Traffic to small to analise
C - No specific referrer stands out - general
D - No traffic yet

> - The number of people involved with the administration of the site

A - 1
B - 4
C - 1
D - 1

> - Any relevant information that you believe would explain the invalid
> click activity we detected

Well, seeing as your idiotic policy prevents you letting me know what the specific problem was, I can’t very well isolate any one incident can I?

However, the problem may have happened because of bigsaucer.com.

When I launch a new site, I check the Adsense ads carefully to see if I need to do any filtering. During the first week or so I check back often and visit all the sites advertising through google. As a result of this, bigsaucer had a ridiculously high ctm.

To give you an example of why this is important, I published another site for a major UK museum. We had a whole series on Graffiti art in the UK and all the ‘targeted’ Adsense ads were about graffiti-removal services.

This was clearly really bad news and your ads made us look very stupid. (Can I suggest this problem might be something you guys need to look into).

I’ve been checking ads that look wrong or those that visitors or clients complain about on all my sites since I started using Adsense. I would be surprised to hear that your TOS does not include this in a ‘fair use’ definition of your service.

If it doesn’t, you really need to give publishers a way to register their IP (or some other technique) so you can filter them out and allow them to do this checking without penalty.

> If Google decides to evaluate your appeal, we will do our best to inform
> you quickly and will proceed with appropriate action as necessary. If we
> have reached a decision on your appeal, subsequent or duplicate appeals
> will be ignored.

Thanks, I look forward to hearing from you

Best,
Dug

—
Dug Falby
http://www.donkeyontheedge.com/

So Nicki, at long last, has started to blog about her experiences with food. She’s a professional food writer so was apprehensive at first, but it looks like she’s settling in nicely:-)

She just returned from a cheese tasting thing in Cumbria, but her experiences include chomping on gusano de moriche (tree grubs) in Venezuela and crunching up scorpions in Beijing.

This piece over at Digital Dad™ made me chuckle. Clemmie isn’t a toddler anymore (she’s three) but she’s been obsessed with computers, stereo, iPods and telephones almost since day one.

She now has an account on the G5 workstation and she demands time at the keyboard by saying “Daddy, I need to do some work now, OK?”

The Lecture List is a non-profit site that aims to promote public speaking across the UK. The site was launched with a generous grant from NESTA but for the last two years has been entirely supported by the time and money of its founding editor Billy Clark. Billy collects Google Adsense revenue to help with the hosting costs (which are ever growing as the service’s popularity increases).

Recently, Google has decided that the site has infringed their terms of service and have decided to deduct the value of six months hosting.

I’ve complained to Google (see letter below) and I know that if you value the existence of services such as The Lecture List, you’ll want to complain to Google as well.

If you’d like to share your outrage at Gooogle’s behaviour, please contact:

Ema Linaker
UK PR Specialist
+44 (0) 20 7031 3130
ema@google.com

Debbie Frost
International PR Manager
+1-650-253-4660
dfrost@google.com

Thanks,
Dug

Dear Google,

On 27/10/05, Google AdSense wrote:

> Therefore, we have deducted $971.38 from your account. This amount
> represents the earnings previously credited to your account from invalid
> clicks.

If you deduct $971.38 from Mr Clark’s account, you will be terminating The Lecture List.

The Lecture List is a high-profile UK educational charity that relies entirely on Google Adsense to pay its hosting bill. Remove Adsense revenue and you remove the hosting.

Aside from the fact that the $971.38 was NOT the result of illegal clicks and that you cannot prove that it is, you are making a grave mistake.

I’m sure Google wants to be supporting (or seen to be supporting) noble, public-service initiatives such as the Lecture List and that on reflection you will change you mind and refund every penny to Mr Clark.

I don’t wish to sound threatening, but I can assure you that the disappearance of the Lecture List (and Google’s corporate greed) will not be a private affair. You may wish to consult with your legal department and your press office before replying.

> We also request that you remove the following language from your
> website:
>
> “Click on a Google Ad
> It’s just pennies, but every little helps.”

Thanks, we’d be happy to remove this (because of course, as a charity with too much cash on our hands, we don’t want people clicking on our Google ads), but could you confirm you are OK with the copy on our home page:

“Any ad revenue is entirely reinvested into the Lecture List’s operating fund”

> If we find your account to be in violation again

May I point out that YOU DIDN’T FIND us in violation, I wrote to you for advice on making sure the Lecture List didn’t break any rules.

Finally, it’s a well known fact of life that charities are often excused from the terms of onerous contracts such as yours. A simple example of this is that charities don’t pay tax and donations to charities are tax deductible.

I find it surprising that while the Unites States Treasury is willing to cut non-profits some slack, a publicly owned company such as Google takes a harder line.

All the best, Dug Falby

Technical Consultant
The Lecture List

Been meaning to have a play with this javascript slider. Oh, and the individual templates are broken while I try and fix comments…

Just back from seeing Kiss kiss bang bang at the London Film festival (thanks Billy) and tomorrow Billy has scored some tickets to hear the director talk.

Actually, he talked tonight so that’ll be two in a row. Billy and I are trying to think up some interesting questions for tomorrow…

Which, as far as my crude appreciation of the language of Siegfried goes, translates to the wall isn’t so motorcycle-friendly (he’s commenting on an orange crash barrier he avoids at a corner’s apex).

I downloaded this thing late last night and had a watch this morning—and I’ve forgotten the site I found it at—will credit later if i can track it down.

The most noticeable feature is the smoothness of the ride, no harsh moves and very little slowing down. It feels like a Gran Turismo education tape, particularly the one were you have to complete a time trial in a Eunos Roadster. The car is very underpowered, and it’s impossible to complete the Mountain track on time without the most delicate touch.

This particular lap is done on what looks like an R100 BMW, so not exactly a horsepower fiend, but the left-hand needle rarely drops beneath the 240kph mark

Drool…