Category: Site Related

So I have been noodling with the idea of putting ads on Searchblog. Why? Well, I spend a fair amount of time working on the site, and a little beer money would be not a bad thing. Also, it helps me understand a market in a much more personal way. And thirdly, I’m genuinely interested in how various ad systems work. I’ve taken a look at a lot of ad systems over the past few months, many of which I have also reviewed in my role as “band manager” for boingboing.net.

I’ve looked at Henry’s BlogAds, but find them too narrow – there’s no real market of search related companies there, and I don’t want to be in the business of building it up. Of course there’s AdSense, but I prefer to not take checks from Google while I write about them. Then there’s Kanoodle, which is getting some buzz lately. And the stealth MarketBanker, which I’ve found less than ideal to communicate with (they are in something of a quiet phase – no they are not going public, just…reworking some stuff, from what I hear). There are others, and if you loyal readers care to suggest from among them, or to comment on the choices I outlined above, I’m all ears.

Then there’s the idea of simply selling sponsorships one by one, which is what Boing Boing decided to do, at least to start. But the problem with that is I don’t get to learn what it’s like to work with the ad networks. So this is my lazyweb request: What do you think I should do?

…sort of. After trying one place, then a second, I’m pleased to report that I have gotten my data back, a month after the crash. However, it’s going to be a long rebuild, as I’ve learned, you create an entire ecology when you live through the screen, and things don’t work so hot when it all goes to hell, then gets recovered. I have to port all the data to a new system, sync, etc. Not fun, but still, many many thanks (and a lot of dough) to Ontrack for doing what others could not, and to all of you who sent me great tips and well wishes.

I’m also back from my vacation, and continuing to work on the book. I’ve gotten a lot of writing done, and will continue to make the book, plus Web 2.0 (just added: Jerry Yang, Danger Mouse, Google, many others), my priorities for the next couple of months. Thanks for bearing with my lighter postings…

…everyone take off at least ten days from blogging at least once a year.
It’s rather interesting to see how your filters shift when you leave the Feed for a while.
Of course, it helps if your hard drive is totally fried at the outset and you lose all your feeds, all your email contacts, your entire ecology of computing/communicating (including all my music…grrrr). Thanks to all who sent me replacement mail and encouragement as I try to rebuild (keep it coming at jbat at battellemedia dot com if you haven’t already!). I did have a nice week in the Sierra, fishing and such with my family, and that is impossible to lose to a faulty hard drive.

I am still in the process of rebuilding. Before the crash, I bought copies of Ecto and Shrook, but I am now back on the 30 day trials, as of course my proof of payment were…in my email files, which are still in terminal limbo. That is quite a story, yet to be resolved. I’m somewhere in Act Two. There is not yet resolution. But I’ve decided to ignore my past life – all 40 gigs of it – and move on. I backed up most of my important writing work – I lost only about two weeks, not bad considering – and I’ll consider it a blessing if Ontrack can fix it. Drivesavers, alas, could not.

Here’s the frustrating part: My data is just fine. No fires, no trucks rolling over my drive, didn’t trip and toss my laptop into a mountain stream. Nothing like that. Just a bad tape between my motherboard and my drive, which shorted out some random part that – I’m told – is very very hard to replace, as it’s rev’d about sixty times a year, and only the rev *I* had in my particular machine can be used to make the drive spin again. Jesus.

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Hello readers –

I’ll break my silence to ask those of you I work or play with, or who have contacted me in the past – please send me an email. When my G4 died last week, so did my email and address book, and while I do have backups, they are not easily reconstructed. So if we’ve corresponded in the past, please shoot me an email at jbat at battellemedia dot com, so we can once again correspond. It might be weeks before I have this thing rebuilt.

Public memo to self: Run mirrored drives from now on.

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My laptop’s fried and so am I, heading to the mountains to work on the book. Happy summer all!

That last post made me think about this one, in which I predicted, at the beginning of the year, what 2004 might bring. How am I doing, I wondered, six months in?

Well, in the preamble, I thought I’d be done with my book by about now. That was pretty damn funny. Now I hope to be done by Fall, and with luck I just might.

My listed predictions were:

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