Scott Switzer

raven2099 - thanks for the query.  I am no longer supporting Advertising Manager.  OpenX still supports it I believe.  You may want to try their forums or twitter to get an answer.

OpenX logo:

Oyster.com logo:

This article about how Google is using 'Android Compatibility' as a tool to dissuade manufacturers from using Google competitors is just like what Microsoft did in the nineties to encourage their OEMs to use Microsoft preferred browsers, ISP's etc.

In this blog post, MongoDB gives a  high level overview on how document databases are particularly suited to ecommerce (as well as analytics).  There are a few people who are using MongoDB for ecommerce, and I think that this is one area where document databases will perform well.

There is yet to be an open source ecommerce application which uses a document database (to my knowledge).  Perhaps the start could be for Mongo, Apache, or some other open source project to release a the document equivalent to a 'reference schema' for an ecommerce application.

There is some work being done on the Vespolina project (which uses MongoDB and Symfony2) here:

https://github.com/vespolina/vespolina

Redditor describes how Americans were 'celebrating in the streets' upon news of Osama Bin Laden's death.  I had a similar feeling as the poster - however, my disgust was toward news stations who manufactured this silly reaction.  I don't (refuse to) believe that celebration was on many of US people's minds.

This is what I get when I try to install a Magento Extension:

Error: Please check for sufficient write file permissions

Your Magento folder does not have sufficient write permissions, which this web based downloader requires.

If you wish to proceed downloading Magento packages online, please set all Magento folders to have writable permission for the web server user (example: apache) and press the "Refresh" button to try again.

So, in order for Magento to be able to install extensions, all files and folders need to be writable by the web server user.  This seems to be a very risky solution for an application that has access to a payment gateway.

Surely there can be a more surgical approach to permissions - for example, I imagine most extensions work with just the following folders made writable:

app/code/community

app/etc/modules

app/design/adminhtml/default/default/template

app/locale

Mike Arrington effectively said that a blog should not buy traffic if they were a 'real blog'.  hmm.  Let's think about this a moment.

Using analytics, it is easy (or, if not easy, possible) to segment your users into different buckets.  For example, three buckets of engagement, high, medium, and low.

Using an ad server, it is possible to report on the revenue that is made from advertising per visitor.  Not just the ads that a visitor sees during the session, but across sessions over 30 days (or even better, lifetime value of a visitor).

I bet that Techcrunch's most engaged users make them over $5 per month.  How do I arrive at this number?

eCPM: $5 (very low estimate), meaning 1000 ad views per month per engaged visitor

6 ads per page (count'em!), meaning 167 page views per month per engaged visitor

This means that the highly engaged folks only need about 8 page views per work day to make $5 per month!

If Techcrunch bought traffic and tracked the percentage of engaged visitors they attract for a particular search term, they could optimise their spending pattern accordingly, and vastly increase their site traffic and net revenue.

My team did this for a BBC property in the UK, and tripled traffic (and more importantly, vastly increased revenue net of paid traffic).

Can you imagine Amazon saying that they are 'too much of a premium brand' to buy traffic?  Don't they spend about $500K or more per day or something on Google Adwords?  Ecommerce is no different than online publishing - they are just way ahead of online publishing when it comes to segmenting and measuring their visitors, and applying this data to online marketing campaigns.

I suggest that Techcrunch consider buying traffic, and imagine being 3x bigger, more net revenue, 3x more well known than they are today.

Fred Wilson wrote a post about how companies build their mobile presence first, and their web presence second, showing a shift in how people use the internet.

I would probably modify this idea, with the following:

API First, Mobile Second, Web Third

Microblogging is the practice of providing quick updates which are published out to your 'followers' or 'friends'.  Consumer microblogging platforms (e.g. Twitter and Facebook status updates) are major ways that people keep updated on what others are doing in an extremely efficient way, and something that did not occur until recently.

Five years ago, if I wanted to update a group of people with a message, I would have sent out a group email.  There are a number of reasons that this method is inefficient (e.g. maintaining who is on the distribution list, annoying those who do not want to hear my updates, using the same platform for casual updates as important 1-to-1 messages, etc.).  Facebook and Twitter have been so successful in the consumer space because they provide the perfect platform for status updates.

The interesting thing is that microblogging is not replacing email - rather, it is additive to email.  My email inbox is still as overflowing as it always has been - however more people know what I am doing because of my Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare accounts.  These products have changed how the world communicates with each other.

However, when it comes to work related matters, I still am using email and IM as my primary communications platforms.  I was very excited to hear the story of StatusNet a few months ago.

StatusNet is an open source microblogging platform, which is perfect for enterprises for two major reasons:

StatusNet can be customised and integrated into other corporate information systems (e.g. using corporate LDAP for login, integration with Microsoft Sharepoint, etc.)

The highly private communications data that is generated by employees can live behind the corporate firewall, so that it is totally owned by the enterprise.

I think that StatusNet has built a recipe for the ideal enterprise microblogging platform.  FirstMark recently invested in Montreal-based StatusNet, and I also personally invested and joined their board.

We run StatusNet here at FirstMark to communicate with executives from our portfolio companies.  Start using StatusNet for yourself!

The body of this O'Reilly Radar post gives a pretty fair description on the state of healthcare data (spoiler: its in pretty bad shape).  It will take decades for physicians, hospitals, and other healthcare institutions to move from paper to data, or to format data into a usable format (e.g. there are competing and inadequate standards, etc.)

It is great that the U.S. government is kick-starting this process.  It won't be easy, and I assume that there will be years of reduced efficiency until the network effect takes over and provides efficiencies of scale.