2010-02-04 Thu

16:15 Donate your AdSense earnings to help Haiti (3654 Bytes) » Inside AdSense

As you may have already seen, Google has made various efforts to contribute to the earthquake relief response in Haiti. We've heard repeatedly from AdSense publishers on forums about wanting to help, and today, we're pleased to let you know how you can do so with your AdSense earnings.

We're currently accepting donations from AdSense publishers with an unpaid account balance through January 31, 2010. To see what your unpaid account balance is, please visit the 'Payment History' page within your account. Your January earnings will post in the next few days, so feel free to refer to your 'Advanced Reports' page for an earnings estimate until those are finalized.

Working with our teammates at Google.org, we've identified Partners In Health (PIH) as the recipient of these funds. Your funds will go to provide medical aid via PIH and their Haiti-based partner organization. Any contribution you can make will help to ensure that PIH can continue their work throughout this time of great need.

Photo courtesy of PIH

You can donate a portion or all of your entire unpaid balance as of the end of January. Whether you have a balance of $0.10 or $100 in your account, we invite you to participate within the next week.

As you may expect, there are certain restrictions to donating, and all our normal policies still apply -- so even if you're donating, please don't ask others to click on your ads in order to increase your earnings. For more information on how to participate, visit our donation form.

Posted by Elizabeth Ferdon - AdSense Payments Team

07:38 Hot Scalability Links for February 4, 2010 (2253 Bytes) » High Scalability

Lots of cool stuff happening this week...

Voldemort gets rebalancing. It's one thing to shard data to scale, it's a completely different level of functionality to manage those shards intelligently. Voldemort has stepped up by adding advanced rebalancing functionality: Dynamic addition of new nodes to the cluster; Deletion of nodes from cluster; Load balancing of data inside a cluster.
Microsoft Finally Opens Azure for Business. Out of the blue Microsoft opens up their platform as a service service. Good to have more competition and we'll keep an eye out for experience reports.
New details on LinkedIn architecture by Greg Linden. LinkedIn appears to only use caching minimally, preferring to spend their efforts and machine resources on making sure they can recompute computations quickly than on hiding poor performance behind caching layers.
The end of SQL and relational databases? by David Intersimone. For new projects, I believe, we have genuine non-relational alternatives on the table (pun intended).
HipHop for PHP: Move Fast. When you make millions of widgets saving pennies per widget quickly adds up to real money. Facebook released HipHop, a PHP compiler, aimed at shaving off cycle of CPU and bytes of memory in production of their social widgets.

02:45 What's expected vs. what's amazing (3300 Bytes) » Seth's Blog

I visited a favorite restaurant last week, a place that, alas, I hadn't been to in months. The waiter remembered that I don't like cilantro. Unasked, she brought it up. Incredible. This was uncalled for, unnecessary and totally delightful.

Scott Adams writes about the cyborg tool that is coming momentarily, a device that will remember names, find connections, bring all sorts of external data to us the moment we meet someone. "Oh, Bob, sure, that's the guy who's friends with Tracy... and Tim just tweeted about him a few minutes ago."

The first time someone does this to you in conversation (no matter how subtly), you're going to be blown away and flabbergasted. The tenth time, it'll be ordinary, and the 20th, boring.

Hotels used to get a lot of mileage out of remembering what you liked, but it was merely a database trick, not emotional labor on the part of the staff.

Today, if you go to an important meeting and the other people haven't bothered to Google you and your company, it's practically an offense. We're about to spend an hour together and you couldn't be bothered to look me up? It's expected, no longer amazing.

On the other hand, consider Dolores, a clerk with kidney problems at a 7 Eleven, who broke all sorts of coffee sales records because she remembered the name of every customer who came in every morning. Unexpected and amazing.

You can raise the bar or you can wait for others to raise it, but it's getting raised regardless.

[Irrelevant aside: Linchpin made the New York Times bestseller list yesterday. The list is hand tweaked, unreliable and often wrong, but it's still a great thing to have happen the first week a book is out. Thank you to each of you who pitched in and spread the word. Unexpected and amazing, both.]

2010-02-03 Wed

17:39 Excited about NoCOUG Winter Conference (1 Bytes) » I'm just a simple DBA on a complex production system

14:15 Troubleshooting tips part IIa: Ad relevance and targeting (3261 Bytes) » Inside AdSense

Last week, we took a closer look at implementing your ad code, and today, we'll address some of the common issues related to ad targeting.

If you're seeing irrelevant ads or public service ads (PSAs) on your pages after you've pasted the ad code into your HTML source code and waited the recommended 48 hrs, here are a things to check:

Have you placed the AdSense ad code in frames separate from the main content of your website? If so, you may experience ad targeting issues. In order for our crawlers to match the ads to the content of your website, it is important to place the ad code in the same frame as the main content of your webste. If you're familiar with HTML, and your website is talking about several different topics you could also consider implementing section targeting on your site to highlight relevant content.
Do you have mostly dynamic content on your site? Our crawlers currently can't derive meaning from these types of files:
- audio and video files (.wma, .mpeg, .mov)
- mp3 files (.mp3)
- images (.jpeg, .bmp)
- Macromedia Flash movies
- Java Applets

To receive more relevant ads, we recommend including plenty of text-based content on your site, including complete sentences and paragraphs.
Do your pages use session IDs? A session ID is a piece of data serves as a unique identifier for a session. If your pages use session IDs, you may not receive targeted ads on those pages. Since this session ID - and therefore the URL - changes every time a different user views a page, the URL will not be indexed and will need to be crawled from scratch. Once the URL is crawled, however, the session will most likely have expired. This means that pages seen by the users are rarely in the index. You'll need to remove the session IDs in order to show more targeted ads to your users.

We hope these tips help you resolve any targeting issues you experience with your ads. Next week, we'll take a look at some other reasons why you may see irrelevant ads or PSAs on your site, and how you can best resolve them.

Posted by Ulrike Jung - Inside AdSense Team

08:19 NoSQL Means Never Having to Store Blobs Again (1452 Bytes) » High Scalability

Morgan Tocker has an awesome article and comment thread in the MySQL Performance Blog about When should you store serialized objects in the database? Before the NoSQL age is was very common to simulate schemalessness by storing blobs in MySQL. Sharding was implemented by running multiple MySQL instances and spreading writes across them. While not ideal for the purpose, developers felt comfortable with MySQL. They knew how to install it, back it up, replicate it, in short: they knew how to make it work. Yet they also needed to store objects without the penalty of joins. Searches and aggregate queries were handled by indexes kept in separate tables, this offloaded the fast path to objects.

This all made perfect sense. Usually we just want stuff to work and going with what you know is often the best path to that goal. And what we have known is MySQL. All the different pros and cons of this approach are covered wonderfully in the post.

But the world has changed.

03:45 Hunters and Farmers (4771 Bytes) » Seth's Blog

10,000 years ago, civilization forked. Farming was invented and the way many people spent their time was changed forever.

Clearly, farming is a very different activity from hunting. Farmers spend time sweating the details, worrying about the weather, making smart choices about seeds and breeding and working hard to avoid a bad crop. Hunters, on the other hand, have long periods of distracted noticing interrupted by brief moments of frenzied panic.

It's not crazy to imagine that some people are better at one activity than another. There might even be a gulf between people who are good at each of the two skills. Thom Hartmann has written extensively on this. He points out that medicating kids who might be better at hunting so that they can sit quietly in a school designed to teach farming doesn't make a lot of sense.

A kid who has innate hunting skills is easily distracted, because noticing small movements in the brush is exactly what you'd need to do if you were hunting. Scan and scan and pounce. That same kid is able to drop everything and focus like a laser--for a while--if it's urgent. The farming kid, on the other hand, is particularly good at tilling the fields of endless homework problems, each a bit like the other. Just don't ask him to change gears instantly.

Marketers confuse the two groups. Are you selling a product that helps farmers... and hoping that hunters will buy it? How do you expect that people will discover your product, or believe that it will help them? The woman who reads each issue of Vogue, hurrying through the pages then clicking over to Zappos to overnight order the latest styles--she's hunting. Contrast this to the CTO who spends six months issuing RFPs to buy a PBX that was last updated three years ago... she's farming.

Both groups are worthy, both groups are profitable. But each group is very different from the other, and I think we need to consider teaching, hiring and marketing to these groups in completely different ways. I'm not sure if there's a genetic component or if this is merely a convenient grouping of people's personas. All I know is that it often explains a lot about behavior (including mine).

Some ways to think about this:

George Clooney (in Up in the Air) and James Bond are both fictional hunters. Give them a desk job and they freak out.
Farmers don't dislike technology. They dislike failure. Technology that works is a boon.
Hunters are in sync with Google, a hunting site, farmers like Facebook.
When you promote a first-rate hunting salesperson to internal sales management, be prepared for failure.
Farmers prefer productive meetings, hunters want to simply try stuff and see what happens.
Warren Buffet is a farmer. So is Bill Gates. Mark Cuban is a hunter.
Hunters want a high-stakes mission, farmers want to avoid epic failure.
Trade shows are designed to entrance hunters, yet all too often, the booths are staffed with farmers.
The last hundred years of our economy favored smart farmers. It seems as though the next hundred are going to belong to the persistent hunters able to stick with it for the long haul.
A hunter will often buy something merely because it is difficult to acquire.
One of the paradoxes of venture capital is that it takes a hunter to get the investment and a farmer to patiently make the business work.
A farmer often relies on other farmers in her peer group to be sure a purchase is riskless.

Who are you hiring? Competing against? Teaching?

2010-02-02 Tue

15:45 Did You Know: Early Spring Warm Up in Florida! (714 Bytes) » Kalen Delaney

No, this is not an early response to the next T-SQL Tuesday topic. Rob Farley will be hosting that one, and wants us to write about relationships. So getting warm doesn't refer to a nice cozy relationship by the fire, while the snow is relentless in Chicago and the world is frozen in the Northeast. Not to mention Scandinavia, where I'll be going in April. Of course, Rob is from the Southern Hemisphere, so the seasons are backwards and he's not thinking of a warm fire in any case. You can come to...(read more)

15:15 Free inspiration and insight (1815 Bytes) » Seth's Blog

The Lemonade movie is so professional, engaging and inspiring that you've probably already seen it. If not, here it is.

Todd Sattersten has written a free ebook about pricing that's well worth the time it takes to review. It will change the way you think about pricing.

And if you can, take a look at this poetry video from Gabrielle Bouliane. She left us a very powerful message before she left. It might change your life. (Thanks Paul).

05:34 Scale out your identity management (499 Bytes) » High Scalability

BigDataMatters is focused on the issues faced when processing and managing large amounts of data. In light of this, it would be a crime not to blog about the security of this data. Over the next few weeks, I will write a series of posts focused on identity management in the enterprise. Before you read any more, how is your identity secured?