A Donkey on the Edge

Doing a little research for a client and came across 101 Cookbooks and love the writing:-)

Ever shred a cherry on a box grater? I haven’t, but now I’m thinking about it.

Love Coudal’s response to the agencydotcom Subway thing

My thoughts…

• White people dissing the poor
• The ad biz can now generate its own w.o.m. effect (well, we knew that already—see viralmonitor)
• The hairdressing budget must have been massive
• Miami has ad-schools?

Futurelab’s Blog: How Agency.com Pitched Subway Via YouTube

How Agency.com Pitched Subway Via YouTube at ExperienceCurve

More good stuff from Dion Hinchcliffe. Does every organization need a Web 2.0 strategy?

Also today, came across these two amazing presentations:

• Jeff Han
• Hans Rosling

Billy has recently received another threat from Google re the design of the Lecture List pages.

A bit of background: Billy supports the list entirely from his own pocket. The hosting is quite expensive as the list runs a large database and requires a dedicated server. The Google adsense revenue covers about a half of the hosting charge so you can imagine how Billy feels when the check from Google doesn’t show.

Google turned off the money last year complaining about the wording on some of the site’s pages. At the time, we made all the changes Google required, had them review the site, and finally got their blessing (after, I’m sad to say, lots of calls to the Google press office).

So the ‘not evil’ mob are at it again:

From: “Google AdSense”
Date: 2 August 2006 17:34:01 BST
To:
Subject: Google AdSense

Hello, While reviewing your account, we noticed that you are currently displaying Google ads in a manner that is not compliant with our policies. For instance, we found violations of AdSense policies on pages such as http://www.lecturelist.org/content/view_speaker/2304.

Publishers are not permitted to encourage users to click on Google ads or bring excessive attention to ad units. For example, your site cannot contain phrases such as “click the ads,” “support our sponsors,” “visit these recommended links,” or other similar language that could apply to the Google ads on your site. Publishers may not use arrows or other symbols to direct attention to the ads on their sites, and publishers may not label the Google ads with text other than “sponsored links” or “advertisements.”

Please make any necessary changes to your web pages in the next 3 business days. We also suggest that you take the time to review our program policies (https://www.google.com/adsense/policies) to ensure that all of your other pages are in compliance.

Once you update your site, we will automatically detect the changes and ad serving will not be affected. If you choose not to make the changes to your account within the next three days, your account will remain active but you will no longer be able to display ads on the site.

Please note, however, that we may disable your account if further violations are found in the future.

Thank you for your cooperation.

Sincerely, The Google AdSense Team

So here we go again! Here’s my reply to Google:

Dear Google Adsense person,

I have just now heard that you have once again threatened Billy Clark from The Lecture List (http://www.lecturelist.org/) about compliance with your TOS.

The lecture List’s pages have not changed since you last discussed this issue. Your team reviewed the Lecture List pages and found them to be compliant. I don’t understand how if this page was compliant last year, it is not today?

As your notes should hopefully show you, the list is a UK no-for-profit company and they rely exclusively on the revenue from Adsense to pay their ever-increasing hosting charges.

I notice that you have disabled Mr Clark’s account as ads are not appearing on the site. Please re-instate these immediately.

I regret to inform you that, in exactly the same way as we were forced to do the last time you became evil, we will have to make this a public conversation.

We are informing our friends and supporters, including the press offices of all the major universities and museums in the UK as well as Emily Bell, Editor of the Guardian’s online pages who is a staunch supporter of the Lecture List.

I urge you to act swiftly to make sure that Google is not seen to be evil (something your founders were keen on I understand)

All the best,
Dug Falby pp/ Billy Clark

Meanwhile, Billy isn’t going to be able to cover this month’s hosting, I’m keeping fingers crossed:-(

Tags: google, adsense, Google adsense, charity, nonprofit

I first approached a major FMCG client about helping their brands join the conversation over three years ago. That particular contact kept my original email so there was at least a degree of interest at the time.

The last three months have been very interesting. I finally managed to get an FMCG brand to have a go at transparency (see Birds Eye’s pea harvest blog) and even more recently I’ve been flooded with enquiries at work. The good news is that most, if not all the clients I discuss co-ceation, blogging and transparency with actually get it.

I think we’re about to see a whole bunch of really exciting communications initiatives coming from traditional brands as department heads realise they can build social software into their product offering (we’re currently discussing how that might work with a restaurant!) without needing to struggle past big IT or big brand budgets.

So Faris, that’s my 2¢ for your presentation:-)

Talent imitates, genius steals: Blogs and Brands

There is currently a spider hiding in my keyboard. He’s wedged under the white panel the keys stick out of and is moving from beneath key to key. No amount of shaking or blowing seems to be able to convince him my keyboard is not a good home.

In fact, as I type this, if I hit a key he is under he simply scampers over a few and settles in again.

OK… This is slightly freaking me out here…

My Boss just came in and is legitimately today’s enraged mutton. I mean he’s standing in the queue at Café Nero on the Kings Road and

I’d like a small decaf soya capucino

I mean what’s the point?! If it were my café she’d be barred:-)

Well, I’ve been thinking about finding a low cost CMS that has both good static page management and nice blogging tools like Movabletype and have looked at a number of options.

If it’s important to stay with static page publishing for scaling and server resource reasons and you believe PHP has too high a security maintenance overhead for your project, the options start to become quite limited.

In any case, we’re still evaluating a couple of options but in the meantime I set about thinking about how one could customise the Movabletype interface in such a way as to integrate static page handling. I set myself a number of requirements:

• The system would have to allow users with no settings or template-editing priviledges to create static pages (ie I didn’t want to go the index-template route)
• If possible, the same user should be able to edit the heirarchical tree of pages using an interface she had already learned
• The user would have a choice of templates to apply to the new page (these templates to be edited and created by an admin user using the standard template-editing tookit)
• The user can choose between standard and index-list page types. The index list page type supports lists of authors, lists of file downloads etc.

So I’m working on an idea. I’ve created a new data type, the ‘static page’. In MT-speak, it is the same object as an entry, but with a few more properties. It has the following additional attributes:

• family relations (parent, child, sibling)
• page template association
• page type definition

The idea behind describing pages this way is to make them similar to entries. This way users familiar with the concepts of creating new entries and associating categories to them might not freak out at the idea of creating new static pages and assigning a parent to them.

By the same token, if you’re familiar with the behaviour of the “entries” function, you’ll probably be happy with a “pages” function (one lists all entries, the other all static pages).

So I’ve got a new object, now how do I manipulate the hierarchical tree of page nodes? What interface do I use to manipulate the relationships between pages?

Well, here’s a theory: you use the same interface Movabletype provides to manipulate hierarchical lists of categories. Now, hold on there, I know I’ve said before that I hate this interface and yes, I still think it’s unfeasibly clunky and unintuitive (sorry Ben, no offence intended), but it exists!

This means I can grab much of the source code and javascript and, more importantly, the poor users who have struggled to learn the category interface won’t have to learn a new one, they can just use their existing skills to manipulate these new features.

Here’s how the “manage static pages” screen might look (click for a bigger version) sorry about the crap graphic quality, had to do this in a hurry, will correct details on images asap:

And here are some close-ups of the new attributes being selected. In this case, the user is creating a new page about leaflets in the “publications” section. The page is a child of “publications” and becomes a sibling of “essays” and “white papers”:

The page type is selected (in this case a standard page):

And finally, the user chooses her pre-prepared templates to associate with the new page. In this example, an admin has created a template expressly for the new publications section:

The “adding a static page” screen would look very similar to the existing “new entry” screen, also reusing as much code as possible:

Has anyone out there been working on anything similar? Feel free to chime in.

Tags: movabletype, Movable Type, Movable-Type, Blog, Blogs, Plugin, Plugins

It’s amazing what you find on the shelves at Tesco. For starters, “security protected?” I wonder if the guy putting that sticker on the box saw the movie… And how the hell did they get Tarantino to approve the game (I mean what’s the gameplay, sit and watch your mate bleed to death for eight hours?).

ME: Thanks, this looks good. Could you please send your spreadsheet document as a delimited text file as I can’t open opendocument files…

THEM: Sure, attached. Have PDF’d it too, I think that it is probably easier to read in that format.

(I really need to investigate Open Office but I couldn’t help getting a chuckle out of that exchange)