Posts by Russell Brown
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I have used the Student Job Search site to find casual babysitters, and firends have used it to find after-school caregivers. It's worth giving it a go.
Good call. I just had a useful conversation with one of their people - it was worth leaving a message and waiting for the callback rather than going via the website.
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Russell, unless you are going to start to shit on all religions equally (yes, even *gasp* Islam!), maybe you should give the anti-Christian stuff a rest. It's getting boring.
I thought I made it clear that I thought the ad parody clips were clever and interesting - I'm intrigued to know what's going on - more so than just picking out the ill-science creationist stuff.
And, well, the clowning stuff is pretty freaky. I don't see how pointing that out is an attack on all Christianity.
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those fancy book-learnin numbers are a bitch eh ross when you're using them against people who can like, count and read and stuff.
Ross's facts come from the Ron Law/Barb Sumner lobby. Their use of the "unexplained deaths" phrase was scurrilous, but obviously, "other causes" doesn't sound scary enough.
I think there are legitimate questions about the way the MeNZB rollout was handled, but these aren't those.
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Conservapedia, Godtube...jeez wayne - what's next? JesusSpace?
Why yes ...
Actually not a real website so much as a placeholder set up to game Google ads.
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What do they mean by '13 unexplained deaths'? Does it mean they were caused by meningococcal disease?
Basically, it just sounds scarier when they put it that way.
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russell, what exactly do you need re: 'person who's able to do that initial introduction-to-programming tuition? tuition for leo or a programmer for the site?' any more detail would be helpful, could probably find volunteers for either.
The tuition part. And of course, thanks to what people are doing for us, we can pay. I tried the Student Job Search website, but that basically wants you to sign up like you're a major employer, which didn't seem quite right.
He took really well to Alice, which introduces kids to object-oriented programming via 3D animation. If anyone had skills with that it would be ideal. He also uses 'Gary's Mod', which opens up the Half Life 2 engine (ironically, all the interesting stuff is in the shooters) and lets the user create stuff. He made us a fireworks display for New Year's Eve.
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Er, yeah, good try Robin ...
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Russell has some quite exciting ideas about building on this as well, which I daresay he'll have plenty to say about at some stage.
Or maybe now. I'm pretty humbled by what people are doing for us, but I realised what would really make it work would be extending some of the impact to the community.
One thing that will come out of it is an Asperger/autistic spectrum website for support and lobbying, and I've already talked to some IT people about developing some sort of practice for introduction to computer programming that would be portable to other kids. The degree to which people have been eager to pitch in on both is amazing.
I asked this a while ago, but perhaps this is is good time to ask again: I'm still looking for that person who's able to do that initial introduction-to-programming tuition. Via Alice, Python, game mods, whatever. I don't think formal qualifications are as important as the ability to share a love of it with a bright, systematising kid.
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I made the same point on PA System a few days ago about the header, personally I would place the top leaderboard ad below the PA header. As you say though each publisher gets to design their site the way they
want.We tried a few different ways of handling it, but in the end, we went with what looked best. It's less of an issue with System, which was designed with banners in mind.
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I actually don't object to advertising on niche sites, but the adblocker is, for me, essential to block the overwhelmingly corporate advertising I don't want to be bombarded with...and its hard to draw a line (or tweak for every site), hence my unanswered question about blocking pop-ups..if PA decided that such was desirable, as many niche sites do, do you think I should open my browser to those too?
I noted a little while ago that when the Firefox team were considering what functionality they should offer users as a default, they put the pop-up blocker right the in the browser, but kept the ad-blocker as an extension that users had to seek out. There is a difference: pop-ups are actively intrusive.
I would imagine too that if the option to block sites from those that use ad blocker software was widely implemented (I thought it was already available) then most of the current users of a site such as this would have trouble accessing it, or many other sites....
I doubt it. The Vodafone banner did about 12,400 impressions yesterday, so clearly someone's loading the pages.
I know very few web savvy people who don't use it.
I don't. It hasn't occurred to me. Yep, I ffwd through TV ads on the PVR, or mute them (unless I actually want to hear what they say), but TV ads take an unseemly chunk of my time to watch. If I don't like an online ad, I ignore it.
The problem is, again, the nature of the creative. It's one size fits all. There are cool things you could do with advertising in this medium, but no one does them: narrative, timeliness, simply providing different creative for specific sites (which ought to be cheap enough - you're not having to go out and shoot a double-page spread after all).
Interestingly, the ads that have worked best here (in terms of click-through, which is all we can measure) have been the most sophisticated, which usually means the ones we've created in-house. When we did the little contra with Whisky Galore at Christmas, I did three different ads, and the most offbeat one got twice the clickthroughs that the others did.
But at least the big advertisers are there. When we started running advertising here, my hope was that we would attract a lot of smaller, retail-level advertisers. They turned out to be a pretty hard sell, even though you can be with us for a week for the cost of one or two radio spots. What is there is agency advertising, usually through the sole internet media buyer, sold on a cost-per-thousand-impressions model. And those guys want banners and skyscrapers.
The fact is that display advertising is currently the only thing that'll keep internet content free (especially news media, which costs real money to make). It doesn't matter so much if all the good TV's on pay, but if you start throwing up paywalls around internet media you break the whole internet dynamic. That's why it annoys me when some lefty-liberal sites insist on linking to to the printable (and thus ad-free) version of an external story. It's not a very clever sort of protest.
Anyway, enough rambling. I've discussed advertising decisions with our audience more than any other publication I know and I'll continue to do so. But I've got an investment to return and a household to support, so the ads aren't going away ...
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