The Google IO conference is providing a host of interesting announcements. One that is currently getting a good deal of coverage is “Google Wave“. Of course we have to see what actually shows up but what it looks like is a bunch of snazzy Web2.0 AJAXy (with added HTML 5!!!) frontends and tools to a wiki. This is not necessarily a bad thing - wikis tend to be somewhat idiosyncratic and also very poor at handling anything other than raw text - but a jazzed up Wiki doesn’t sound quite as revolutionary as perhaps Google would like us to think Wave is.

On the other hand the announcement of SaaS/cloud interoperability between Google and Salesforce.com, which doesn’t sound particularly novel, may in fact be truly revolutionary for the users. By combining the clouds it becomes possible to write applications that use numerous Google tools and utilities (including I suppose Google Wave) and access the business data in Salesforce.com. This sort of integration may end up having a signficant effect on the business world at large because it permits even very small companies to have the seamless IT backend that hitherto have required large MIS organizations and have therefore only been possible for large enterprises. Indeed many large organizations have problems integrating customer facing sales and support data/applications with internal ones so it is possible that this integration may actually tip the balance in favor of smaller nimbler companies.

The one downside I can see with this integration is that it potentially leads to worse security breaches because a poorly written google API app could now expose all the salesforce.com data to an infiltrator. This, on the other hand, is something that the Wave team seem to have thought about since Wave will, we are told, not be tied to Google’s servers and can in fact be installed inside the company firewall.

Much of the world has been twittering and blogging over the weekend about how Amazon appears to have been removing certain works from its sales rank algorithms. The works are removed because they are (allegedly) “adult” but in fact the real issue common feature is that these books seem to be about homosexuality rather than other “adult” issues.

There is, of course, much outrage - particularly because Amazon’s “glitch” excuse simply fails to meet the usual definition of a glitch. This problem seems to have started in February if not last year and to have gradually ramped up over the last couple of days. All in all this doesn’t sound like a “glitch” so much as a major software failure that has been exploited by humans.

I’m not alone in this basic viewpont, it seems to be shared by Information Week’s Mitch Wagner amongst others. Indeed there are some livejournal posts that indicate that the explot is the work of either a single hacker or a small group.

However the issue is not so much whether it is a hack or a concerted group so muchas to shine a light onto a what may be an architectural weakness of Amazon’s site. Amazon basically relies on site visitors to provide tags and to flag things as objectionable. It seems likely that for the most part these flags and tags pass through the Amazon system with no human supervision. This is probably partly because there are simply too many for a single human to verify and partly because for legal liabilty reasons Amazon found it better to not have someone make a corporate decision on the matter of “objectionable material”.

If the problem is indeed that people are gaming the system then fixing it while retaining the benefits of the “wisdom of crowds” approach that helps Amazon scale so well is going to be hard to fix - indeed it may be impossible. I’m sure that Amazon programmers are busy rolling back the auto-objectionable code and that someone is about to permit “objectionable” material back into the Amazon ranking systems but that is a short term fix and doesn’t solve the problem that Amazon faces regarding people not wishing to see “objectionable” content.

This problem is partly caused by the fact that different people have very different ideas about what is “objectionable” so no large group of people will ever agree. However it is exacerbated by the fact that Amazon attempts to present a single storeface to all. The situation then gets huge visibility because Amazon is such a major reseller that books often depend on Amazon ranking and Amazon visibility for success. Thus removing certain works from the ranking scheme is bound to get those associated with the works in question very worked up because they can see their revenue disappearing into a rankless desert.

The New York Times had an interesting article last weekend about click fraud.

The article points out that click fraud seems to be a growing problem and one which is not well addressed by the market (although the article hints at the various efforts being made to combat it by different groups); however it seems to me that it misses a couple of key points, points that are also missed by some of the other blog commenters, and for that matter by the Business Week article on the same topic.

The critical advantage online advertising has over its printed alternative is that it is accountable and that you can really measure reponse rates. This is the reason why click fraud exists online and no equivalent really exists in the traditional publishing world (although inflated circulation figures may have a somewhat similar effect). Quite simply, until click it was extremely difficult for advertisers to determine the effectiveness of their advertising spend except in fairly cumbersome ways that involved fairly long delays. Hence a small amount of overpayment is probably an acceptable tradeoff for almost instant feedback about the effectiveness of the campaign. This is no different to the petty losses that many businesses suffer (from employee pilfering for example) and which they turn a blind eye to because the cost of stopping it is greater than the saving that results. So long as click fraud is a small amount of the overall spend, and, critically, so long as the conversion ratio to actual purchases is high enough to pay for the campaign, click fraud is something that businesses will accept. Of course they will (and must) look to reduce click fraud and look to recoup losses when fraud is discovered, but it is something that is manageable and an acceptable trade off.

For different businesses the level of aceptable fraud may vary because the effectiveness of the online advertising will vary. Buzzmachine noted a WSJ report that showed how careful choice of keyword advertising could make an enormous difference to a small business (the relevant part of the WSJ report comes after a piece on blogging vs PR which is also worth a read). Online advertising can help businesses reach customers which simply could not have been reached using any other method - or at least not without enormously greater expenditure - and hence tolerance for click fraud may turn out to be equally large.

If (for example) a company sells widgets for $10, makes a $1 net profit per widget and sells an average of 1000 a day before advertising on line (i.e. daily net profit of $1000) and, as is far from uncommon, sells double or triple that afterwards, then it will still benefit from online ads, so long as it makes more than $1001 net profit (i.e. after advertising and other costs are taken into account) a day it sees a benefit from its on line campaign. If sales more than double then click fraud rates that result in up to $1000 per day advertising spend still make the company money even if the genuine advertising spend were $500 / day. Now if click fraud does result in such a hypothetical doubling of advertising spend then that would be worth chasing, but given that the company is clearing over $20,000 per day insetad of the $10,000 it was before identifying whether the true spend should be $600 or $700 may not be worth it since the difference is just 1% of the increased daily turnover.

Finally it would seem to me that an operation that scanned logs looking for fraud and were paid a significant percentage of any repayments identified could be very very successful - perhaps I’d better brush up my programming skills….

John Scalzi, a Science Fiction author and blogger, writes on his blog about two pitches he received from people who thought he should advertise their service on his blog.

I would generally speaking recommend that you read it all. But if you are a busy executive pressed for time then here is his (abridged) analysis of why the good pitch works:

1. The marketer knows who I am. Or at the very least gives the impression he does: He name-checks the books I’ve written [...]
2. The language is good. This guy is not trying to be the hippest dude in the room, he’s just got an idea that he thinks could work out well for the both of us. [...]
3. The offer is to be helpful, not to do me a favor. Napster is “willing” to give me money. Tower Records, however, is ready to save my readers a couple of bucks. [...]
4. This pitch understands its market. [... B]ecause the guy also seems to have a clue what I do on my site — I recommend books and music on a constant basis, and I feel reasonably protective of my readers — he pitches his offer to me on the basis of behaviors I exhibit, and spins the offer to put my readers first.
5. This pitch isn’t pushy. It knows what it’s about — it is trying to get me to link to Tower, after all — but it lets the value proposition speak for itself, and the person writing it lets me know that if and when I want to talk to him more about it, he’s ready to work with me[...]

In today’s internet world where consumers are also producers are also salesfolk this is the only way you can get a pitch to work. You have to personalise the pitch so that it is clear that it is addressed to a single individual not spammed to 5,000,000. This is not a big task, even if you are pitching to 100 or so, it is comparatively easy to visit the websites/blogs pick up a couple of hints from the top content and incorporate them into paragraph 1 of your otherwise standard boilerplate pitch. (Also targeted sales/marketing where you pitch to the right 100 tends to be more successful than untargeting marketing to millions). You also have to make it a win-win-win because the readers of blogs and the like are frequently also the friends, acquaintances etc. of the blogger so if you pitch something that ends up ripping off the blog readers they will let theit (former) friend the blog writer know and he will most likely remove you from his site and blog about what a scumbag you are.

Negative publicity is a BAD BAD thing