Incendia Sparks

As you may or may not already know, there are many ways for Flex to consume data from Drupal. Using the Services module you can have access to Nodes, Views, Search and User objects using the AMF protocol (via Services + AMFPHP). You can also consume data one way using XML (either through the default XML feed or via RSS:Views and custom template functions). If you're really ambitious you can use the XMLRPC mechanisms provided by Drupal to consume and post data.

This question gets asked a lot and is often discussed by people in the ISP crowd (see today's Slashdot post). It's an especially critical question for small to medium sized ISPs who are struggling with profitability and continued investment in infrastructure to meet with the changing needs of today's technology.

People Hate Ads! No! People Love Ads!

Now the tag line of this article might be a bit misleading, but it's equally inappropriate to suggest that all viewers hate ads. Unfortunately though, many Internet users, especially technologically adept ones, despise advertising on their favorite websites.

There's been a lot of talk recently about AdSense revenues declining. Publishers are seeing drops in revenues and they're coming up with many different plausible and implausible scenarios to explain the drop. Some are postulating about Smart Pricing, Search Clicks Improvement, Ad Blockers and other things that don't really get down to the root of the problem, and that is; simple economics.

Who decided what you get to see? Are YOU Digg Worthy? Is Mahalo really subjective?

Social Bookmarking and Human Powered Search Results are a phenomenon sweeping the Internet. Sites like Digg, that decide what content is most popular by the number of "diggs" (or votes) are allowing users to presumably visit Digg.com, find their favorite categories and locate "the best" content relevant to their interests. Mahalo is a "human edited search engine" meaning that the results you see are filtered by humans.

Smart Pricing has always received a lot of attention in publisher forums & online discussions and - next to MFA - it is probably one of the most important topics for publishers earning money from AdSense.

I have to also mention that; as we launched some poorly-converting sites with very low CTR (they were brand new sites in a very competitive niche), we saw an entire AdSense account of 35+ sites go from a very high CPM down (very far down) to almost exactly match that of the newer, poorly converting sites. So in our observation, it seems (from our experience and that of our peers anyway) that Google will smart price entire accounts even though you may only have one or two poorly converting sites.

What do they mean to you?

What is MFA and what does it mean to you the publisher? Basically MFA is "made for adsense" or "made for advertising" sites. What this means is, a company will create a page that is basically made up of 100% ads using targeted keywords. The MFA site owner will drive traffic to their various sites through different means including Google Adwords by supplanting those very same keywords in the AdSense system with hundreds if not thousands of ads that they buy for pennies.

To break it down:

Around here we're big fans of Greg Stielstra's book Pyromarketing. I believe everyone (especially in the Internet business) should give it a good read. It describes how many companies are still failing their customers and gives some good solutions to common problems marketing people face today. It also provides good analogies to describe the steps of pyromarketing to the "uninitiated".

AdsBlacklist (ABL) is a relatively new service for publishers that carry Google AdSense advertisements. Ads Blacklist claims to be able to increase your revenues by filtering out MFA (made for adsense) and penny advertisers. They do this by creating a list of sites you can ad to your Competitive Ad Filter. The unfortunate thing of course is that Google's Competitive Ad Filter only allows you to add up to 200 URLs in the list, and there are a lot more than 200 MFA sites potentially targeting your site's keywords.