Aww, Aurora's no longer freeware

Aurora's a pretty cool app for the Mac. I don't use it very often, but when I've been traveling, it's been nice to have a backup alarm. As I do every day, I ran my little Application Update widget and got really excited when I saw a new release! New cool, free software!

I like things that are free.

Unfortunately, Aurora's become a shareware app. Well, it's not really unfortunate. It's a cool app. I'm sure there's people for whom it'll be worth the $15. It's just not for me; I don't use it enough. So now I'm left to wonder "Do I keep the old version and get taunted by the AppUpdate widget every time there's a new release? Or do I remove the old version and learn to live without it?"

Really, that's what's currently going through my brain. I think I might actually remove the app. It's no offense to Aurora, I just don't want to have that pang every time the widget displays new stuff.

Fake AirTunes? Hells Yes.

So, about 2 years ago, I wrote a post wondering:

I’ve decided what I really need in life is a little application that runs on my laptop that’s hooked up to my stereo. This would make iTunes think that my laptop was an Airport Express, and my laptop would show up as remote speakers in iTunes.

There were a handful of random Sourceforge projects, but nothing that hit reality or worked. Which kinda sucked.

Then I'm dorking around looking for cool Mac stuff this evening after filing my taxes, and what do I find but this gift from the heavens: Airfoil 3.

There's a Mac version and a PC version, as well as a little app called Airfoil Speakers. That's the magic bit. I could download Airfoil Speakers, run that on my MacBook Pro, and hook that up to my stereo in my bedroom. At the same time, I could run Airfoil 3 on the PC, and broadcast music--in sync--to my laptop.

Badass. Now, the one downside, of course, is that it'd be $25 x 2 (that's $50!) for me to get both the Mac and PC versions. I could probably get by with just the PC version (since that's where my music is), but it'd be cool to have the Mac version as well (though without a second Mac, I really don't need it). Pretty awesome.

Now, if Rogue Amoeba can create some Airfoil Windows Speakers, then I could take my old laptop out of the closet, have it sit on my stereo, and be a permanent receiver for my iTunes. That'd be pretty darn slick.

Anyway, thanks Rogue Amoeba. One of my most popular post was that fake AirTunes post, which still picks up residual search traffic every week. Maybe if I throw a sale or two your way you'll hook me up? Really? That'd be great! Thanks so much. You're the best.

Trying Out MarsEdit

So, I'm trying out MarsEdit, to see if I'll post more (which I really want to), if I move to using a local editor, rather than always trying to do things through the WordPress web interface.

I have to say that, so far, I'm impressed. It does a nice autoconfigure to get you set up. Then, it knows that if you're inserting a link, it's probably on your clipboard, which is pretty bad-ass. Plus, I can do stuff like emphasis and bold with your typical hotkeys. Kinda hot.

It automagically knows my categories, so I can quickly tag this appropriately. That's pretty cool too.

Note the use of hot and cool to mean nearly the same thing. I'm nothing if not confusing.

There's also some cool Flickr integration, where I can quickly grab images I've uploaded to Flickr and include them in my post. Like this:

Apparently you can also make it use your real blog style for the local preview. I'm going to have to muck around with that.

The only disappointing thing is that being a Mac user now costs me money. All the cool apps cost a little dough. I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to shell out the money for this because I'll post a whole lot more using this interface. Damn you MarsEdit!

Edit 1: The default Flickr bit linked right, but didn't have a visible image. I had to fix that.
Edit 2: Editing a post is darn easy. I like this.

Random Work Pictures

In lieu of actually writing something, I bring you random work pictures from the past few days.

Shots of the road leading to work that I took through my windshield. This is after that big ol' storm we had on Monday.

I think it's funny to put signs on people's doors and cubes and whatnot.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year.

I've got a podcast coming soon with my fave songs from '07. I hope to do that this week. In the meantime, here are some pics I took with my new camera. (Yay! First new camera since 1999. Thanks Christmas money and giftcards!)

Affiliate Marketing is the Drizzling Shits of the Internet

Preface: These comments are mine and not those of my employer or anyone else. Ok, maybe they also represent the voices in my head.

Advertising on the Web

There's lots of advertising on the web. The biggest web company in the world (Google, ever heard of them?) generates pretty much all of their revenue from text (and now some image ads) based on the context of your web searches, email, or web page content. Big media sites like ESPN or ABC or NBC generate some revenue and awareness through the old late 90s staple of the banner ad. Blogs, podcasts, and video sites get in on the action with pre/post-roll ads, typical interstitials, and sponsors. Tons and tons of ways for sites to generate some income, but they're all pretty much based on getting a large number of eyeballs.

With the recent growth of blogs, forums, and just the general smaller sites run by individuals rather than corporations, folks have wanted to cash in on some of that free internet money. But banner ads and AdSense cash really don't work too well unless you gets loads of traffic. Now, granted, there's tons of ways to do that (which is why a bunch of the junk that fills up sites like Digg and Reddit these days are obvious linkbait bullshit attempts to generate lots of traffic), but the internet in general--through better algorithms and crowdsourcing and such--has gotten pretty good at weeding those things out. Besides, only a few linkbaiting attempts can work in a given time period, so even this is not a surefire way to get yourself that sack with a dollar sign on it.

Affiliate Marketing: Good

This gave way to a new niche: affiliate marketing. In all honesty, this started a while back with Amazon. And, to this day, Amazon's method isn't really bullshit. Amazon's affiliate system and basically a way for people who review stuff or talk about different things they want to link to those items on Amazon and get a kickback if someone purchases through their link. Everybody wins in this situation; the buyer gets an object they wanted, the site owner gets a few bucks back for setting up Amazon and the buyer, and Amazon gets to sell an object.

Plus Amazon gets some search engine love from having lots of sites link to them.

I've used the Amazon affiliate system when doing my not-very-often-update podcast. I've never made a dime, but that's because I don't do it very often and I'm not exactly linking to highly sought after stuff. But disclosure is important, because it's the lack of disclosure is a big reason that affiliate marketing is currently the <insert your horrific disease here> of the interweb.

Affiliate Marketing: Bad

Somewhere along the way, the affiliate stuff got bastardized. It was, of course, inevitable. We live in a world of pyramid and get rich quick schemes broadcast in half-hour increments on late night TV. But the internet's version is far more nefarious. The BS seemed to start in earnest with BzzAgent, a Boston-based marketing company that paid "agents" to go around talking up products--products that the agency had been paid to promote. There was no disclosure; "Hey, I've never actually tried this product! I'm getting PAID to tell you that I think it's awesome!" Of course, BzzAgent took some heat for their arguably deceptive marketing. It was not intentionally deceptive, but they were implicitly offering people incentives to be deceptive. After some bad press and some backlash, BzzAgent claims to be all about the disclosure.

Affiliate Marketing: Worse

Similarly, a company called PayPerPost sprung up. Here's a group that will pay you to write about a product, service, or other site, right on your own website! You write up a few paragraphs, throw in a few links, and you make some money. The sponsoring company gets some search engine juice and some good word of mouth. PayPerPost gets some money for bringing the two parties together.

Not so different from the Amazon model, right? Sure, except that there was no required disclosure that the post was, basically, just a paid advertisement. Posts from PayPerPost folks weren't required to be tagged as advertising, the way that those fake magazine articles are. The writer never even needed to try or use the product they were writing about. It was obvious to everyone what was going on: blatant link buying in an attempt to game the search engines.

(For a more complete story on PayPerPost, try TechCrunch.)

So what's the difference between this and the Amazon model? The end-user. The buyer. They're getting hosed in that they're just the commodity being traded in the middle. Taking someone to Amazon, where they're then exposed to any number of other reviews for the product in question (which, by the way, is almost always a consumer product that's a tangible good) is incredibly different than linking them to a web hosting company (more on that later) or some other digital good that is not quite as easily identified as something a user does or doesn't want.

Particularly when all of the reviews for said product are paid for, and thus biased, by the aforementioned affiliate system.

So BzzAgent and PayPerPost started paying people to write about products and services, without a requirement of disclosure, and in many cases, without actually even trying out the product they were promoting. Sure, they were just trading on their online identity--burn people enough and you're opinions are worthless. That is, of course, unless you can create endless domains and identities. The two companies were rightfully shat upon by the honest folks on the web. Both have started to talk about honest disclosure and transparency in attempt to stay relevant and to ensure their clients don't run away for fear of being painted with the same dishonest brush.

It hasn't worked for PayPerPost, whose business was rightfully crippled by Google when Google basically dropped the rank of any site found to be working with PayPerPost. If PayPerPost's business is as honest as they claim it is, this wouldn't have mattered. The paying companies would still be lining up to get reviews and links. They're not. They wanted search juice. And that's not for sale, well, not through PayPerPost, at least.

Affiliate Marketing: The Drizzling Shits

Which brings me to my biggest pet peeve, and the one that hits closest to home: bullshit web hosting review sites. There's tons of them. They claim to review web hosts. They don't. They rank sites based on who pays them the most money per hosting sign up. It's, quite frankly, a pox on the hosting industry. Each web host offers the affiliate a little more money. In return, the affiliate gives them good links for SEO, some traffic and new sign ups, and a couple of web STDs.

From some of our internal research, somewhere around 20% of all sign ups that come through affiliates are fraudulent. Most of them have a life span significantly shorter than a typical sign up. Many of the sign ups that make it through the front end fraud checks are still BS accounts. They sign up, collect the affiliate fee, and then cancel. With most web hosts, if you did that 10 times a day, you'd make in the neighborhood of $100k a year.

I'm not kidding.

Why is this so bad? Again, it comes down to disclosure. None of these sites reveal they're doing this for pay. Most of them layer some arbitrary, made up review score on top of their listings, depending on which host is paying the most that month. The affiliate doesn't care that it's slimy--they're getting paid. The web host doesn't care that it's slimy--they're getting new "real" hosting accounts. Who cares? The actual honest person who did hit Google or their search engine of choice to look for a web host to open a blog or a place to host their pictures of their grandkids. They find a review site, sign up with the top rated host ("oh my, this host is rated the top on ten different sites!"), and then find out it's a completely crappy host. The poor grandma doesn't realize that ten different review sites were all run by the same person/group/company. She didn't realize that the top host was paying these affiliates so much because their service is so bad they're hemorrhaging customers.

I'll admit, my company pays affiliates. Slimy ones, at that. We're not hemorrhaging customers. We've actually stepped up our game, I think, and have started to deliver a better hosting experience for most of our customers. But growing organically by word of mouth isn't good enough for us, so we put on the full body web condom and deal with the underbelly of the internet.

It's disgusting and immoral and we shouldn't do it. Many of us have made that case. But, unfortunately, the dollars trump us. So we build in workarounds and special rules to pay off certain affiliates to make sure they get the conversions they want so they'll keep sending us traffic. And keep linking to us.

Affiliate marketing isn't inherently bad. But, as with anything, when you mix it with the internet, it ends up being more bad than good. It's the drizzling shits of the internet.

Soon enough, Google will step up and kill this trend. And it'll be a great day when we can focus on stuff that matters and not spend thousands of man-hours building search algorithms to weed out fake sites, building fraud detection to weed out the fake sign ups, and trying to convince ourselves that just because other folks are doing it, we need to do it to keep up.

Yuck.

Save Us Obi-wan

Dear Matt Cutts,

Can Google please fix the fake review sites? It would be awesome.

Thanks.

Your pal,
The Interweb

Affiliate marketing is everywhere now. Google it. You'll find hundreds of blogs devoted to how to get a spammy, content-less site ranked high in the search results, get people to click your links to generate conversions, and how to basically make money being dishonest. Granted, all marketing is somewhat dishonest--promote the good stuff, hide the bad stuff. But when it's a first party doing it, you know to take what they say with a grain of salt (which is why good companies are transparent and talk about their occasional foibles ... it makes the marketing spin look less spinny). When a supposed neutral third party is hiding the fact that they're making money off of their "review," it's not easy to discern that. It's ugly and stupid and dishonest. And it makes people loads of money.

Again, it's why affiliate marketing is the drizzling shits.

Examples

Just in case you're wondering, here's what a bullshit review site looks like. I shouldn't claim this to be authoritative. I don't know with 100% certainty that these are fake review sites. But they fit the mold. They cloak their affiliate links, bring you over to the web host with an affiliate cookie, and have surprisingly similar reviews. I won't link to them, but you can paste them into your address bar.

http://www.best-webhosting2007.com/
http://www.web-hosting-review.toptenreviews.com/
http://www.web-hosting-reviews.org/
http://www.web-hosting-top.com/
http://www.webhostingtoplist.com/
http://www.webhostingfever.com/
http://www.websitehostingreviews.com/
http://www.100best-free-web-space.com/

Super Lazy

I've been super lazy about posting, mostly because I've been ridonkulously busy with work and the holidays and all that fun stuff.

But, I try to update my Twitter (if you care). And I'm going to try to post a bit over the next few days of my vaca (top music of '07! the drizzling shits that is affiliate marketing! something else!). In the meantime, hope your holidays rocked as much as mine did and the jolly fat man (or whatever the representative of your holiday might be) brought you Jelly Bellys.

I should spend sometime update my del.icio.us links too. Merry Festivus.

Oy.

I'm waiting to get on a red eye back to NY (and then on home to Boston). When checking in, I saw a boat load of teens heading off to go somewhere.

I hoped to hell they weren't going to be on my flight, since I'm hoping to sleep.

I'm not going to sleep. Fun.

On the bright side, I'm at least watching some TV I missed this week thanks to fox.com.

New Theme!

Vacation means I do stuff.

Like changing the theme on my blog (thanks http://www.blogohblog.com/).
Updating plugins.
Writing.
Other stuff.

So, if anything is broken, let me know.

Would you rather be overworked or homicidal?

The company I work for has been growing. Rapidly. Our business model (as I think I've mentioned before) is that we acquire other hosting companies and merge their customers into our pretty scalable, manageable platform. It's generally a ton of work, replete with headaches, stress, and lots of long hours.

But, at the end of the process, we've got a bigger company, more customers, new tools and applications for our entire base, and a few months to stabilize and work on new projects. It's a hard cycle, but one that works well, and one that has worked exceedingly well because we've kept our team small and focused. Pretty much everyone knows what's going on, is clued in on the ins-and-outs of the platform and any new changes, and understand the implication of every decision. It was an ideal situation. When you had to cut features to hit a deadline, drop support for something because the work expended dwarfed the number of customers who used it, or changed the way something worked--everyone was on board. When work ramped up, people who hadn't previously been involved could pitch in and help out without making this later (i.e. defeating that rule established in The Mythical Man Month). A small team, busting ass, getting really hard tasks done just under the wire.

Our new acquisition makes our company significantly larger. The process of moving customers is also significantly larger. We've added a ton of staff across the entire organization to theoretically help make things work better/more smoothly/with ice cream and puppy dogs.

It just doesn't work that way. You lose the closeness of the team. The ability to communicate quickly and have everyone on the the same page. You add more people who need to be trained on the existing platform before they can even start working on new stuff.

Sadly, you add people who just don't really care at all about pitching in.

With a small team, people can't really hide. If you're not pulling your weight, it's obvious, and your peers kinda take care of it. As you grow, people figure out how to duck out, stay invisible, do the bare minimum to get by without being noticed.

This is going to sound conceited, condescending, and douchebaggish, but I think the folks who get in the way as you grow generally fall into four categories.

1. New people who are just too new to help out
   Obviously, you can't blame these folks. They're coming to help out, but they just need to get up the learning curve before they can be counted on to be effective without being a drain on the team (i.e. the Fred Brooks' rule that adding people to a late project just makes it later). If you're lucky and you hire well, these guys will come through the first month or so of their employment sucking up as much info as they can, ready to help out within 4-6 weeks. But, with most new hires, it's a bit steeper curve, and you've got some folks who are anxious to pitch in that you need to keep diverted on other stuff.
2. "That's not my job"
   As you grow, you tend to hire people into specialized roles. When you're small, everyone's a generalist. Everyone can do everything, and will pitch in wherever they can. Eventually, you cross the threshold and start to hire people who are specialists and have no desire (or ability) to generalize. So when you need to spread the load for a big project (or lots of little projects) across your newly enlarged workforce, you all of a sudden encounter a new set of responses:

   "That's not really what I do."
   "I'm not really interested in working on that."
   "I'll try, but I don't think I really understand what you mean."
   "That's not my job."

   Obviously, that sucks. It's crunch time, you're reaching out to people, and they can't get over their job title enough to pitch in. You just have to hope you're smart enough not to hire many people like this. There's a slight alternative to this person ....

3. I don't have enough work to do so I make up my own
   "What?" you say, "How could someone not have enough work to do?" Well, sometimes people are specialized. People who've been hired and pigeonholed because they're really not that good at their job, or because they're a pain in the ass to work with, or <insert your reason here>. Often, these people will (rightfully, and properly) want to do something. The problem is they'll go hunting creating a problem so they can make up their own solution. They'll start to churn up trouble ("I don't really like the way this works. I think it should do this.") or start working on changes to things.Normally, this isn't too bad. New ideas are generally welcome. In fact, a new perspective will almost always bring with it some nice nugget that allows you to make your stuff better.

   The problem is that it happens in the middle of crunch time when your focus needs to be on the project at hand. It's further complicated because the people who start looking for problems in need of solutions, often try to solve problems that they don't quite understand. They may not have been involved in the initial project(s) and thus don't get that the problem they're "fixing" is unfixable for technology, platform, manageability, or any number of reasons.

   You end up with people who are further isolated thinking their ideas aren't valued and your focus is diverted from the necessary work.
   
   

4. It's Miller Time!
   When you get bigger, people lose the mentality of sticking around and pitching in until the work is done. Granted, everyone needs to get out of the office. And there's nothing wrong with working a 9 to 5. But on big projects, particularly ones that affects tens or hundreds of thousands of customers, sometimes you need to stick it out.There are those folks who look at the fact that there are people leaving, so even though there's some project work left, they duck out. Or they say "hey, there's a few people left, they can handle it."

   The result is a bunch of people who are pissed because they're staying and doing the lion's share of the work, and another chunk of people who are alienated because they don't think people should expect them to have to stay and work late.

In all of these cases, it's pretty easy to see both perspectives. And my intention isn't to be an ass and call out the people in these groups. It's simply a set of observations from a project manager/pseudo-engineer who's been working at a company that's grown from 40 employees in one office, to 100 or so spread across the country.

So, it all leads back to the question at hand:

Would you rather be overworked or homicidal?

Would you rather work at a small company, busting your ass, feeling stressed and overworked, but knowing everyone is putting in 100%? Or would you rather work at a larger company, with a ton of people to do the work, but ready to throttle those folks who aren't pulling their weight?

I'm in the former camp. It could be an age or life station thing (though, it doesn't look like it, in my limited experience), but I'd rather just be working somewhere I can bust ass and know that everyone else is too. Small teams or small companies or startups.

I think that my company will figure out how to make it work. It's just going to be an adjustment. There's going to be some growing pains (there already have been, as we've lost a couple of good people). As long as we don't lose any more good people, we should come out of this and understand (hopefully) that our current strategy doesn't work.

We've been a textbook case of forgetting the rules of The Mythical Man Month. Maybe that'd be a good gift for some folks in our company.

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