Why are your Google Adsense "ad impressions" counts lower than your page hits?

I read with respect these earlier defenses of why Adsense impressions could be different from other counter impressions.
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/adsense/2frvdOVxz2g
https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/55613?hl=en
Neither arguments were entirely satisfying to me. I for example was seeing, in the Blogger Stats for my Ocean Videos site, more than 30 hits PER DAY, whereas Google Adsense only saw 28/WEEK. I was even more puzzled, based on studying the difference in page hits between various posts. I had been sending out tweets for each new posting, and tweets that I knew were more-well-written and/or to more-interesting pages were getting a 3-5X higher number of hits. This seemed to be proof that Adsense was messed up. (I didn't think Google was scamming us but that perhaps there were some laziness or lack of clarity about the policy for "activating" ads).

I noticed that the minimum number of hits was 3 for a tweet. So I tested the "tweet interestingness" theory by using a junk, alternative Twitter account with only 32 followers. I put in four nonsense-letters, followed by a link. It got at least 3 hits. This made me wonder if there were THREE bots scanning twitter, and hitting on every URL posted.

So I did some math. I took the top ten page hits according to the Blogger stats, and subtracted three from every page. The total was 25. Google Adsense's performance report over the same period said I had 28 impressions.

Mystery solved. There are three bots harvesting (my) Twitter-posted URL's. Adsense ignores the bots.

Causal understanding of water displacement by a crow

Fascinating study of crow intelligence. Various experiments where they show they can understand the concept of water displacement.

Do Dogs Make Counterproductive Choices Because They Are Sensitive to Hum...

Researchers try to find a way to get dogs to make the "wrong" choice. Diet tips for dog owners.

NY Times Obituaries

A pal posted a "wordle"word cloud of tweets from the NY Times Obituaries twitter feed. Only problem is he only used one month's feed. Here's my much cooler version, using a full year of the feed:

Android engagement, continued.

Many others, lukew included, have written on the mystery of why Android devices are unused. Here's my own survey. On Amtrak trains immediately before and after Thanksgiving, 2012, on a trip from NYC to Washington, DC, I walked along multiple cars to the dining hall. Both times, I checked out the electronic devices in folks' laps. I ignored anything the size of a laptop (with a keyboard). Here's my survey

• 28 iOS products (iPhone/ iPad/ iPod)
• 2 Blackberries
• 2 Samsung products

I just had to tell someone.

iPhone Recursion

What happens when you point the export of a iPhone camera at an external display?

Shameless plug: tuna

Google blogger now allows one to post outright ads on your blog. In searching for something to advertise, I was disappointed in how few options there were for actually selling food. Perhaps it was too close to dinnertime when I was posting this. This tuna snack has served for a meal for me at work at least once in my career.

35 minutes searching visual references, 15 minutes drawing w/o reference

Call it: the unveiling of the underwater diamond.
Lame, yes, but had Kirby on the mind. Trying out various layers on a Wacom Bamboo tablet.

Playing with Wacom tablet

My stackoverflow badge

Not that I have or ever will be able to make any contribution...

Christina Aquilera!

I'm donating one post on this blog to the World Food Program's response to the Somali famine.

I don't know exactly what Christina Aquilera has to do with the famine, but it's probably nicer than seeing pic of starving baby, which was another option.

Social Media Best Practices, IV

In this installment, I show how paper.li links in Twitter are just plain annoying and non-conversational.

Social Media Best Practices, III

In this video, I really tear into foursquare. I point out how boring and aggravating it is to pollute Twitter with 4sq links.

How to Twitter

First, get an account, at twitter.com.

Then, decide what you want to learn about. Pick two to ten things that interest you: knitting, NASCAR, rabbit raising, fishing, NBA, etc. For each of these, if you already were to know a famous person in that category, say Dale Earnhardt, Jr., or Danica Patrick for NASCAR, go find out his or her Twitter feed. Type in the name in search box under "Who to Follow" link on Twitter. Just be warned that some celebrities have had pranksters (or earnest fans) create fake accounts in their name: some of these accounts are useful, some are not. Click on their name, then "View Full Profile." "Follow" him or her. Then go to that person's "Following" list and Follow the whole list-- everyone on the list. Don't worry for now as to getting "too many"-- you'll weed out the creft later. On to your next interest. Say you're a huge fan of Pixar movies and like especially the ones directed by Andrew Stanton. Find him-- his userid is actually "6Mman", and follow everyone he's following. You could also just search for a topic -- try "rabbit raising." Follow everyone.

http://twitter.com/#!/who_to_follow

http://twitter.com/#!/DALEEARNHARDT8
http://twitter.com/#!/DALEEARNHARDT8/following

http://twitter.com/#!/DanicaPatrick
http://twitter.com/#!/DanicaPatrick/following

http://twitter.com/#!/6Mman
http://twitter.com/#!/6Mman/following

Perhaps you need some more. Go to wefollow.com, and search for some celebrities your admire or topics you are interested in. For example, if you're a Lutheran, you could go search for "lutheran" . Follow lots and lots of people-- maybe both Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner. Again, when you find interesting persons, go and follow ten or twenty people that they follow as well.

http://wefollow.com/

Hopefully, you will have gotten to a thousand people to follow. One mistake I made when I started Twitter was worrying too much about all the textual garbage that shows up when you view the tweets a person has made when you "View Full Profile". There may be many messages to individual Tweeps in the form of "@Johnny blah blah blah" but these won't show up in your view of Twitter unless you also follow the person addressed. Use instead the quality of tweets in your timeline to decide whom to unfollow.

Now weed out the creft.

Now look at your Timeline. Some people on twitter are saying or sharing links to things which are witty, entertaining, inspirational, or highly useful all day long. On the other hand, some people are repeating themselves every few hours, engaged in inside jokes, puffing themselves up, making a half-dozen posts in a row, and other behaviors that wouldn't be tolerated at a dinner party. Unfollow them. You don't have to apologize, this is not a social friendship in the same way that Facebook friends are. Think of them as news feeds. Do you apologize to CNN for turning off the channel? There are also a number of practices that some Tweeps engage in that are not helpful. If you see someone you admire say something like, "Follow my friend @Johnny, he has links to great steak recipes," that is, give a reason for following him, you may want to follow Johnny. If however you see, "#FF @Johnnie @Billie @Suzie @Millie @Maureen @Doreen @Squidleen", then you probably want to unfollow this person. There is a silly tradition by some to just blindly mention names of people to follow. If you watch these tweeps, you'll find that some of them recommend the same folks over and over-- get out while you can. I find it annoying. There's also an absurd tradition to "Retweet" the "#FF" when you get mentioned; probably some fools who will offer thanks back for the retweeted #FF. Do you see the point? At a dinner party, a friend tells you "Johnny thanked me for thanking him." ???!! It pollutes the stream with text that our already overloaded eyes have to jump over to get to the next tweet. Another pet peeve is multilingual tweets. I'm unfortunately monolingual, so if someone posts even 10% of the time in another language, my eyes get tripped up as it takes me a few seconds to figure out it's a different language.

If you start making tweets and start to get followers, don't worry about following them back. Some are spammers & phishers, some are shameless commercial promoters, some just have bad "dinner party" conversational habits. Some are real people wanting to converse. Again, CNN & Barack Obama & John Boehner will not probably not follow you back. Personally, I do not expect them to follow me until I have built a reputation for the kind of tweet they are interested in.

What's the optimal number of people to follow? Well, for basic users, Twitter has a limit of 2000. My advice first is to grab quickly a thousand people who might seem to be interesting, then weed out any and everyone over the course of a few weeks who makes a single post that is either annoying, uninspiring, or unintelligible to you. You'll probably still have a few hundred, and just check the stream when you can.

If anyone else is boring, tweets too much, or gives unintelligible information, get rid of them. This is your feed. Don't worry about having more total tweets coming in to your timeline than you can read in one day. Twitter is like a dinner party, or a webcam feed from the coolest dinner party ever. Tune in when you can, then turn it off and get on with your real life.

Social Media Best Practices, II

Social Media Best Practices

What if people used social media in the same way that they talked in real life? What if people talked in real life the way they do in social media?


I say what's stupid in one setting is stupid in the other.

Top Twelve Twitter Sins

1) SIN: Post in more than one language. Maybe I'm a lowbrow, but I only know one language, and suddenly finding something in a language I don't speak really disrupts the enjoyable, quick scanning that is possible with a long Twitter read list.

SOLUTION: Why don't you instead set up _es, _en, and _fr separate accounts.

2) SIN: Post more than two items in a row. I note that The Washington Post, CBS News, USA Today, even three local papers in my region, never post more than two in a row. But the paper for my hometown makes ten posts in a row randomly sometime between 6 AM and 7AM. Twitter is like a dinner party or a discussion in a university philosophy or history class. That is: talking much during a class may be tolerated only if you really were that profound; talking uninterruptedly in one stretch would be taken universally as a sign of arrogance.

SOLUTION: Get Hootsuite and set up delayed postings if you have lots of stuff to say right now.

3) SIN: Same exact text, back to back, from an "org" and a "person." Somewhere along the line I must have subscribed not only to a humanitarian or artistic or scientific organization, but also to the one guy or gal who runs it. In three separate situations, I've found the same text in back to back posts, and felt my intelligence insulted.

SOLUTION: Give up delusions of grandeur.

4) SIN: Cursing. In one case, I watched a guy post on a political topic over the course of days and go from a mindset of determination to unfocused sexual cursing. Like dude, were you upset that the world's leaders weren't reading & obeying your Twitter feed? Before you call me a prude, it wasn't just the "f" or "d" words, but described his enemies with references to women's bodies parts. That demeans women and is surely ad hominem. (But if you agree with me on the sexual cursing, maybe I have a point on the f & d words < wink > ). The cursing at the end of the month only gave reason for unfollowing to those who might have shared his conviction at the beginning of the month. I've been known to curse at times, but I am of the opinion that loose use of it shows a lack of critical thinking.

SOLUTION: Get off my lawn!!

5) SIN: Foursquare. I'll subscribe to any interesting artist or scientist around the world, but I'm not interested in where he or she ate pancakes. I have enjoyed tweets from multiple tweeps about how they enjoyed a meal, but 4sq links about their presence at a diner just annoy. I realize that there are a myriad of users will have a myriad of purposes for using Twitter, and some of these will be connecting with friends. But I'm not interested in knowing that my f2f friend became mayor of a train station.

SOLUTION: visit pleaserobme.com

6) SIN: Same post AM & PM. Some days, Twitter has been the first thing I read before retiring and first thing I read upon rising. And I've found the same post from the same guy (new time stamp, of course!) Isn't this an insult to the readers? SOLUTION: Get a life.

7) SIN: "The 'blank' Daily is out!" I respect what paper.li is doing, but the announcement in a Tweet that a paper is out is non-information to the reader.

SOLUTION: put it in your profile.

8) SIN: "Retweet for charity". Maybe I'm a Scrooge here, but shouldn't the person giving cash just go and do it? I wonder, if this practice is not overly tacky, that I should set up a few dozen fake Twitter accounts to make retweets from. Isn't that what the person is after?

SOLUTION: give cash directly, and do not let your right hand know what your left hand is doing.

9) SIN: Links to things that do not give me the promised information on the first click. It's on a site with click-thru ads, buried somewhere deep on a busy page, or to be found on a link from your meta-site.

SOLUTION: Consider the user's time and trust, both of which you just spent unwisely.

10) SIN: Polluting the hash tag stream. In one case, I wanted to learn about a religious denomination. Human Resources employees of the denom's pastors' pension fund were trying to get all the pastors in the denom to do some paperwork. So two of them made a couple of tweets a day urging pastors to to this paperwork, for weeks. Q: Were all pastors following that hashtag (are a tenth of them even on Twitter? )? Was the purpose to annoy all pastors (let alone laypeople) until the last one fills out the paperwork? But that's not the bigger problem. Several well-meaning members of the denomination kept retweeting the announcements every day, I guess as a way of supporting the financial health of the denomination. So, to go to this hashtag, one would find it filled with retweets of the same bureaucratic announcements, reworded each day. The value was lost, I gave up going there, I imagine others would too. And that, my friend, must be a way in which the retweeting harmed the denomination more than its ability to help it (because of filled-out paperwork).

SOLUTION: Think about the aggregate effects of what you are doing!

11) SIN: dumping same content, verbatim, into every social media internet service that exists. For a time, I was following President Obama on both Twitter and Facebook. That is, I would actually read the material that came from both sources. When your brain sees the same exact words twice, you feel gamed, that subscribing to one of the sources is a waste of time. An equally dense version of this is using your Twitter feed to encourage folks to come to your Facebook page. (Will we find invites to go to the Twitter feed there?
SOLUTION: Give different angles-- even stick through a thesaurus machine or something-- if you're going to dump material into multiple media.

12) SIN: Follow Fridays, and thanks for RT.
SOLUTION: Abstain!

School of Visual Arts, MFA playlist

While poking around Youtube, I found this school's channel. Every one is a masterpiece. This is great stuff. It reminds me how quality storytelling is possible in a short film.

Vendor lock-in, the quick sell, and the rise of smart phones

ITEM:
Two or three years ago, I wanted to buy a GPS system. I was searching the database in Amazon.com of all of the models of GPS units produced by Garmin. At first I was astounded by the vast array of options available, then I eventually figured out a pattern in the table that Amazon made available. Every model that had a capability of subscribing to a Microsoft-based traffic information service cost about $100 more. I didn't figure I lived in a city big enough to have its own traffic data; I don't like Microsoft; I was happy to save $100. About a year later, Google announced a feature of the Droid phone OS which would provide turn-by-turn navigation. In response, Garmin's shares plummeted in October 2009, according to the Wall Street Journal. Google was giving away for free on a smart phone a feature that you could have easily paid $200 for as a standalone device, plus $100 or more for the right to pay additional subscription fees to Microsoft.

ITEM:
1) I bought a clock from Brookstone that was supposed to never need resetting because it was permanently set with the correct time. Guess what-- it needed resetting out of the box, it didn't have the correct time. I took it back.
2) I bought two wireless weather clocks from Brookstone. It broadcast the correct time and 5-day weather forecast for my city. It was an amazing device. Miraculously, both stopped working after about 4 months (even with replaced batteries). There wasn't any sign in the store informing me it was a limited time service.
Both of these items have features that are duplicated by the smartest of smartphones. Ads for Google's new Nexus One tout its ability to display the correct weather and time when left on its charger stand.
In my humble opinion, there's some cynicism behind both companies' decisions listed above. Not so much how can we serve the customer but how can we get their money. Both problems just want me to rely on an Ipod Touch as my only alarm clock. The problems make me want to get a Google Nexus One. I believe what is radical about these phones is not just the new technology but the empowerment of the consumer. Instead of purchasing a series of single-purpose, barely functioning, electronic devices, we'll just buy another $3.99 app for the multi-purpose device we're already carrying around. As it's probably more fair and green, I hope this model continues to be a business success.

Flickr stream of creative commons pics with "beach" tag