My allegiance to the University of Oregon is not a secret to anyone who knows me, so you’d suspect that my favorite sports story of the year would have a tie in to their sports program. However, it’s not so much a story of success, but the story of a couple of the team’s football players getting involved with a 17-year old kid who was on his last days due to brain cancer.
(more…)Jawad Shuaib wrote a guest post for ReadWriteWeb today called “What Yahoo Must Do to Survive”, and I thought it was worth some comments as I have some disagreements with it.
(more…)Here’s a 4-minute highlight video of the 2008 Civil War football game between my beloved Oregon Ducks and the Oregon State Beavers. It was one of the most satisfying football games I’ve ever watched as a diehard Duck fan. Highlights in the video include “More Than A Feeling” by Boston as the soundtrack, and many shots of dejected Beaver fans realizing they aren’t headed to the Rose Bowl.
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My employer Yahoo! announced today they’ve launched Yahoo! Web Analytics which was formally known as IndexTools.
The product is rolling out to various customer segments through the rest of year. It looks like Yahoo! Small Business merchants, advertisers making microsites, and developer partners will be the first to get access. I believe previoius IndexTools customers already have active accounts.
As an analytics nut, I must admit I’m ashamed to have not used it, although I did give IndexTools a test run before the Yahoo! acquisition. From my experience I felt like as a free product under Yahoo! it was a more powerful application than Google Analytics, so I think it will be well received in the analytics market.
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In the middle of economic crisis, it’s always good to have a little humor.
Enter another ahort-lived internet meme, Sad Guys on Trading Floors. The captions are the best part.
I haven’t been posting much to this blog lately unfortunately, and there are some legitimate reasons why.
First, adding a third kid in Caiden to the family has definitely cut down on the free time that much more. He stays up later than my older girls which makes it a bit harder to fit in blog posts at night.
Second, work has been absolutely crazy as my team has had a big role in the new ad management platform APT from Yahoo!. (more…)
Doug Wintz has a nice article about common ad operations disasters that can occur for publishers who are large enough to have sales and ad operations teams.
(more…)Most publishers talk about the risks of getting dangerous or unwanted ad creatives from ad networks, but as Greg points out it looks as though they should also be careful with who they sell their inventory directly to, and what kind of ad code that advertiser is choosing to run on their site.
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Yahoo! Buzz has been a success story for Yahoo! so far with it’s impressive ability to generate traffic for the initial hundred or so publishing partners who were allowed to submit articles to the service.
This allowed for quality control, but kept it from really being an important service for all the publishers outside of the lucky few who could participate.
(more…)As of 11 pm PST on Friday night, any website or blog using the popular and free web analytics service SiteMeter is not loading in Internet Explorer. This is significant because it’s worse than just one site being down and harming itself, because SiteMeter is an analytics provider any site that’s running it’s code is not loading in IE. This includes all the popular blogs of the Gawker Media network like Gawker.com, Valleywag.com, Gizmodo.com and more. Additionally popular gossip blog PerezHilton.com is also down.
The sites appear to start to load until the Sitemeter tag is rendered, and then get an “Operation Aborted” error from Internet Explorer which then refreshes the site to a blank page.
Since many bloggers and web developers use Firefox or Safari, they may not initially notice this is occurring, but I’m sure there will be plenty of user complaints flooding their inboxes and blogs will begin to sound the alarm. Let’s hope Sitemeter rectifies it quickly.
Sitemeter’s basic service is free, and this may be a case of you get what you pay for, but it’s been a reliable analytics provider for years. This may be a prime example though of the damage that can occur when using a free web service and the impact it can have on a business. It’s unknown whether Sitemeter Premium users which pay for the analytics application are experiencing the same problem.
