02.14.08
Posted in Responses at 12:04 am by Brandon Wirtz
I loved SimCity, and I played some of the original Sims. I just plane love "God Games" I think it is that sense of being in control. That is why I am excited about Spore. But there is more to it than that. I am excited about Spore because explaining to my girlfriend why I’m excited about Spore, she got excited about Spore.
There are two types of gamer in this world. The ones that think Hexic is the greatest game ever, and those who think Hexic should be banned from this earth. Spore appeals to both.
Spore is about evolution and making decisions that effect your entire evolution. It is also about jumping in at what ever point in the development of your creatures you want and just having fun.
This is why Spore should be so amazingly fun.
I could be wrong but Maxis has a lot riding on this game that has been something like 6 years in the making.
Sorry Duke Nukem, I’m more anxious about Single Celled Organism that evolve, than Single Brain Celled HGH junkies who have devolved. And so is my Girl friend.
This post is in response to: Why Spore Will Be Absolutely Huge
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02.13.08
Posted in Technology News at 11:22 pm by Brandon Wirtz
Dave sent me a link to a site called Spock.com that has scraped a whole bunch of sites to create an all about Brandon Wirtz page. Only problem, is that I don’t want to have my Name and Address and current social status some where other than where I put it. Since I didn’t agree to share that information. So I sent the below letter to privacy@spock.com .
Hello,
It has come to my attention that your site has "Scraped" many of my pages hosted on numerous social networks.
This kind of Activity would be a violation of the Terms of Use of these networks and potentially of federal and state laws.
Please confirm that in the future you will not scrape or otherwise attempt to obtain in any manner information pertaining to Brandon Wirtz, and that you will immediately delete and not use in any manner any such information you may have previously obtained.
I reserve the right to take any appropriate action in connection with any activities that violate the Terms of Use and/or applicable laws, including the pursuit of legal remedies.
Please reply to this email.
Brandon Wirtz
We will see if they respond, but over all I dislike the dis-service. If I have a Myspace page and want to make it private I can. With Spock I have no control over how my information is used. And while Myspace and Facebook have detection built in to prevent scraping to some degree, any information that ends up on Spock is beyond my control.
The Image I wish to put out on LinkedIn, Yahoo, Facebook, a Myspace are all slightly different versions of me. I only agree to share the information I do in those places in return for the benefit that I get from them. LinkeIn.com offers me an opportunity to grow my business. Facebook is where I keep track of my co-workers goings ons, and Myspace is where I interact with my highschool friends. Each of these services have a TOS to protect my information from non-members. Spock.com violates these terms of use and I would be personally very happy if Facebook, Myspace, and Linkedin enforced those terms with legal action.
Some what related to this post Facebook disabled my account
*Update
Hi Brandon,
Please reply with the URL of your search result so that we can look into the matter. If you would like to have your search result removed, please make private the page from which we crawled. This will ensure that we do not crawl your page again in the future.
Best,
The Spock Team
So I sent the following:
Follows are the two URL’s on your site. I have no obligation to make private any of the services I am using, as the terms of their service grants them right to the use of my image and text with-in their copyright. I have a similar agreement with Google for the use of images on my site. I have no such agreement with Spock, and as such view the use of my Images and Text as an infringement on my copyright, and the copyright of the photographer.
http://www.spock.com/Brandon-Wirtz-I49aH1bw
http://www.spock.com/Brandon-Wirtz-RXUZU1iQ
Doing some searches through Spock it was not hard to find definite copyright infringements. Somehow I don’t think Spock has permission to use images from ABC
Heath Ledger image from ABC linked on http://www.spock.com/Heath-Ledger
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Posted in Advertising at 4:07 pm by Brandon Wirtz
Have you ever had a chip in your windshield? It really annoys you for the first month, but after a while you don’t even see it anymore. Ads on Social networks are the same way. You don’t look at them, especially if they blend in. I recently ran an experiment where I ran two ads with the same text on Google’s content network (ads that are not on the search results page) and on Facebook. I targeted the same keywords.
My Facebook Click Through Rate was .08% my Google Content Network was 1.9% While I paid a pitiful 3 cents per click on Google I was charged 12 cents on Facebook. From both a Brand awareness and a Cost per Acquisition standpoint Facebook lost. Why? Because most people didn’t even notice the ad sitting on the left margin. Adding an Image to the Facebook ad got me to .4% and didn’t cost me any extra, but it still is about 1/5th the CTR of the least qualified Adsense campaign.
Seeing as I was able to target the FaceBook ads to a razor sharp point if I wanted to You would think that I could hit targets that were exactly what I am looking for, unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be the case. I tried several experiements where I tried to target groups of Varying sizes ranging from 320 people to 1.2million, and my CTR’s didn’t vary much at all. In Fact running ads that had nothing to do with the keywords they were run against seemed to have about the same CTR. The Best example of this was an ad campaign I ran for a Psychic Hotline had the same CTR, run against users with the word Psychic in their profile as against the word atheist in their profile.
With all this additional targeting you would think that the price of advertising on Google would be coming down over all with a higher Price Per Click. Because the Ad was more targeted you would pay more per click but you would get a better sell through so your over all cost would be down. You would also think that the money earned as a publisher would be up, since the ads on your site would be better targeted, so the Earnings per Click would be up, and the CTR would be up, but this is not what people in the Blogosphere are seeing. It is in fact the opposite.
I am paying more to run my ads, my CTR is falling, and my site earnings are down. How can this be the case? Well Google doesn’t share a fixed percentage with its Adsense users, so small changes in their commission can make huge ripples in the earnings and the costs associated with advertising.
Lets say for example that Google changes their commission on an Ad Campaign that is buying ads at .03 cent CPC, and that the commission is variable based on the size of the order. All of a sudden a small campaign that was doing 100k impressions a day and spending $150 a day may have an effective bid that is lower than it was the day before, so they are now only getting 50k impressions, and because the bid is lower is hitting less qualified pages so it is now spending $6 a day.
If I was the top hit for the keyword that small campaign was targeting I am likely no longer getting 50% of that $150 on my page, but instead have a larger big brand Ad that is being shown on lots of pages and so my audience likely has already seen it, and my CTR falls. My Page can go from doing $75 a day, to doing $4.
As someone who makes his living "owning" terms this can wreak havoc on my pages. I am in a constant battle to fend off ads that I know my users won’t click on. You can run ads all day long for Blemish removers but they are not going to get clicks on my how to Calibrate your HD Home Theater page. Nor are all the Human Growth Hormone ads. So I am losing and so is my audience.
Now is a great time to be doing branding campaigns however. I can get you 10 Cent CPM’s for your ad. (and I will still get atleast my 30% buyer’s fee) You want 10 Million people to recognize your logo, you give me a call, I’ll help you out.
This ariticle is in response to: Social networking and ads-who’s paying attention-
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Posted in Money at 3:08 pm by Brandon Wirtz
I might have titled this piece the Perfect storm that caused the housing mess, but I think blaming terrorists is more likely to get you to read it.
The story really starts in the Dot Com Bust. Post Y2K the price of Housing was falling. They really started their descent in 1999 and when September 11, 2001 hit the economy and the housing market really slumped. While interest rates were approaching record lows, people were too worried about their jobs to go get houses, or be optimistic with how much they could afford.
In December of 2003 the Federal Funds Rate dipped below 1%. All of a sudden you could by a house on an interest only loan for a fraction of what the rent would cost. The availability of credit caused a surge in the housing market the value of homes increased nearly 8% a year for 5 years, meaning if you bought a $400k home in 2003 it would have risen to nearly $600k making you an easy $200k and saving you the money you would have spent on rent, meaning you could have easily made $200k with out spending any money that you wouldn’t have spent anyway.
We all know that as interest rates doubled, tripled and Quadrupled, so did the monthly payments, creating the mess we are in now.
But why are we looking for a Government bail out?
When the Dot Com’s went belly up and that bubble burst we didn’t bail out the fools who lost money on investing in stupid.com. We didn’t bail out the people who lost money in the Enron Fiasco.
So why are we bailing out the people who can’t afford to stay in the house they shouldn’t have been able to afford in the first place? Why not let the market correct itself, and those of us who can now afford the adjusted pricing can live the good life for a while?
Part of managing the economy is keeping growth of investments in check over all. Part of making the economy balanced, stable, and diverse is making sure that risk reward is maintained. If everyone can get 10% return on investment buy X, then no one will by Y at 5%. If 50% of the people can make a 25% ROI on X and 100% can make a 5% on Y there will be a better balance, as some people will choose the safer option.
Personally I would be happy to see all of those people with home foreclosures move in to apartments. If they want an economic bail out, it should be in the form of saying that lease agreements can’t bar them from renting based on a credit check. And if their house is worth less than when they bought it, well the bank and them will have to work something out, but I’m ok with bankruptcy court settling it.
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Posted in Microsoft at 1:57 pm by Brandon Wirtz
Maryam who you may know as the good looking one in the Scoble house, asks "Are they Crazy" in response to Yahoo turning down Microsoft’s buy out offer.
No Maryam Yahoo is quite sane. While $31 a share is a better price than Yahoo is getting on its stock at the moment, Yahoo is unlikely to benefit from a merger with Microsoft.
Microsoft hasn’t really figured out how to make money online. Neither has Yahoo. So merging the two companies is unlikely to create a power house, but rather compound the issues they both already have.
The biggest thing Yahoo has going for it is Mail. And Yahoo users are unlikely to like running the Microsoft Live Mail, so the only benefit there would be a unified Advertising front.
Yahoo’s communities, Dating, Games, Answers, and Yahooligans could be made immensely profitable if they could unify their profiles and data.
The problem that both Microsoft, and Yahoo face every day is that they are a collection of Pillars. The teams don’t collaborate, they don’t build on each other’s technologies.
Google on the other hand knows that it’s core business is Data. Everything Google does is about how to get more data about what users are doing, and then figures out how to monetize that information later. This leads to a lot of cross group and cross product collaboration.
Google Merging with Yahoo would be an unstoppable force on the Internet which is why the FTC would never let it happen. Who Yahoo really needs to merger with, that would also make Microsoft and Yahoo share holders happy about. Facebook. Facebook doesn’t know how to monetize yet, but they could learn that, what face book has going is that they are sharing data, too much at the moment, I get a headache from the overload of information about my friends everytime I log in to facebook, but… stay with me on this….
Imagine you are looking for a Date. If you used Yahoo Singles with Facebook integration the service could know if your friends are compatible, I would pay big money for that feature alone.
Imagine you are looking to buy a car, a degrees of separation number could come up, so that you could see if your friends would be willing to buy a car from that person.
The possibilities are endless, and the possibilities would add value. Value you can monetize.
Microsoft doesn’t need Yahoo. It needs Facebook. But it needs Facebook to have free reign to use it’s technologies to make block buster web applications. It needs Facebook to be it’s new Bungie.
Yahoo on the other hand needs to find a middleware company and buy them and make all of its parts speak the same language so it can aggregate data.
This post is in response to: Maryam on Yahoo’s rejection of Microsoft
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02.11.08
Posted in Microsoft at 6:50 pm by Brandon Wirtz
So are you excited about the newest version of Internet Explorer being only a short ways away? No? How about if I told you that it was actually the most standards compliant IE yet?
Well sort of. The problem with changing how IE renders web pages is that with so many web pages already made, and so much of the population creating pages to render correctly in IE6 or IE7 all of those pages could break.
Imagine being Myspace and all of those millions of templates that used to work, all of a sudden don’t. That could be a support nightmare.
Fortunately Microsoft has a solution.
meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8"
when stuck in the header of an html file it kicks on the new rendering, and if it is not there IE8 Renders the way IE7 did.
Where this gets tricky is, when you start doing fun things with Meta Tags for IE, is when Safari, and FireFox want to do the same thing. I can’t see having a Meta Tag for every browser on the planet, and since other browsers aren’t likely to support IE 8 Super Standards mode, using this mode will alienate some portion of your users.
I’m not sure what the "Right" answer is.
One person suggested that this should be supported in the HTTP header
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.org
X-UA-Compatible: IE=8
But I think that would cause problems as files passed around the Internet or get saved to hard disk.
It is important to remember that just because a file started on your server doesn’t mean that will be the last place it lives.
This article is in response to:
IE8 and opt-in versioning mechanism (w3.org)
Compatibility and IE8 (blogs.msdn.com)
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02.05.08
Posted in Responses at 4:51 pm by Brandon Wirtz
In response to Tim Sneath’s post about hiring a Windows 7 Evangelist
Tim,
I personally am disappointed that Windows 7 is looking at hiring someone with Dev Background. Windows Vista is reasonably well accepted by the dev/geek crowd, it is the "normal" people that just don’t get it.
Take a look at 2008 Server beta, the CDN, and Hosting Providers are chomping at the bit to get it. It has a nice spec sheet that people understand.
This is the antithesis of Vista which has a similar spec sheet and can’t gain traction the way it should. And even if the Sales numbers aren’t "that bad" on Vista it is not as well recieved as XP was, or possibly more importantly as much as the last MacOS update was.
I am hoping to see Microsoft hire someone who is willing to ground pound in Silicon Valley to get Venture Capitalist excited about putting their products on the platform, to get Hardware manufacturers to get drivers ready at release, and then hop a plane to the Midwest to work with Educators to understand why they can lower costs with a more stable more secure platform. Then go back to Redmond and talk with the dev team and the project leads about what all of those people said.
This is going to require a very technical background, but I don’t think it is a Developer background per se.
The problem with most corporate Evangelists are that they are like Televangelists. They only spread the word they don’t hear it in return. You can attend the Crystal Cathedral via television each week, and it will be an uplifting experience, but you won’t get a sense of community, and it won’t get your concerns addressed, Dr. Schuller won’t pray for you directly.
Robert Scoble did a pretty good job of reading the blogs of hundreds and discussing some of the issues that were raised, but he was a bit two-dimensional in that regard. He didn’t go to meetings with house wives and school superintendents .
In that regard Chis Pirilo or Jake Ludington were far superior evangelists to Microsoft.
Microsoft’s MVP program never seems to get the love of Microsoft’s paid evangelists. Larry Hyrb doesn’t do monthly conference calls with the Xbox MVP’s and Ben Waggoner doesn’t do a monthly conference call with the Windows Media MVPs.
All in all Microsoft has sucked at building an audience, and getting end users to feel they have a stake in the finished product. If there is one thing Dr. Rober Shuller knows, it is how to make you feel like you have a bigger part of something than you really do.
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11.03.07
Posted in Site News at 3:13 pm by Brandon Wirtz
Taking the Bridge is the new home for my "thought pieces". I had been using XYHD.tv for all of my writing, but since that has really evolved into the gaming and gadget site, and the random thing I think will get me Google Traffic site. As I am stepping into a CTO role I need a more serious grown up site for my ramblings on Start-ups, Managing Development, and Tech Industry news.
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