Advertising

I never thought that I would ever put a ad on my site, then the spam sucked up my bandwidth and I don't have a choice. For me to keep posting I needed to start advertising. I apologize in advance and hopefully I can block most of the spammers so I can get back down to my affordable bandwidth threshold.

Chris

Update
I removed my advertising. I started reviewing and blocking the IPs that were causing all the trouble. Truthfully I didn't really like having ads on my blog. I mean the purpose of the blog is to get information out to the masses. Not - get information out to the masses while making a buck. Maybe this is naive of me, but that is how I feel.

Chris

Visits are not always Visits

As I posted a few months ago I started tracking all my traffic and then posting my reports to everyone. Well that backfired, with posting all my traffic details I opened myself to spam. Automated engines would traverse my reports and see their website on it then constantly hit/visit my site to make sure it was number one. Why you ask? Because of relevance, if the site is number one it would be viewed by everyone that visited my report pages. This adds more traffic to my site and indirectly references to their site. The visits also sucked my bandwidth to an extent that I couldn't manage/afford. It was an ugly proposition, so I had to disable all my links to my reports. Another thing it made me realize is that there are only a handful of people visiting my site a day (not that is a bad thing, I welcome everyone and anyone). With filtering all the spam and bot traffic I went from 200 Visits a day to 10 - 20 Visits a day. It is actually a really good thing, now I can see what content is valuable because real people are looking at it. The thing that kills me is that I already knew this because I have lived through it many times. It is just different when t happens to you. Maybe it is the geek in me that thought/hoped it was a reality. Well I am now using Google Analytics and I hope the spam leaves me alone.

Chris

Feeding the change in the world

Data feeds are changing the way the world deals with information. It has changed the distribution and colation of data.

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Google Analytics: They aren't just storing the data...

It's a fact, they are now using data they have been collecting... to what level is still unknown, but they are definitely using it as revealed by this article.

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Google starts accepting new Analytics registrations.

Google has started to open up it's Analytics service once again. As of right now, there are 236,780 accounts up 2055 from when they stopped accepting sign-ups.

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Spam is not Tasty

So, I had to remove all references to Webalizer and Nettracker on my site because of the massive influx of spambots. These helpful little bots are eating up all my bandwidth and disc space. I also installed the free Google Analytics which looks pretty promising for a free application. I think that it will be an awesome solution for small to medium businesses. It still needs to grow to be a viable enterprise big business solution.

CD

Automotive Internet Roundtable

Every year J.D.Power conducts an industry roundtable to discuss all the positive was that the automotive industry has progressed online. This was my first year there and I thought that there was some really good learning, but more for C level executives. The information was more about "you need to concentrate on your consumers" and "you need to invest in online media, specifically behavioral targeted media". They did have some panel sales pitches that were a little over the top, but what conference doesn't have that entity. To sum up the conference it is the same message as the Forrester Consumer forum: Listen to Your Consumers and Market with them not to them....

Sound advice

CD