John Allsopp

Professionally engineered Internet solutions for humans

Wind energy: 30 June 2008: OK, here's something I really don't understand. Maybe I'll stick it into Guardian Answers (or whatever it's called) and see what I get back.; Wind power. Gotta get more. Let's put loads of those white pole things up with the twin blade propeller.; When you see a wind farm on land, the turbines are quite far apart. Doesn't there seem to you to be a whole lot of wind passing by uncaptured? I mean, if you're going to go through the hassle of planning permission and driving people to the site to do maintenance every five minutes, why aren't there more turbines on the same piece of land? And if we're going offshore, these things don't have to look great.; Plus, they say there are only a few manufacturers of the turbines themselves, and they will struggle to meet a huge increase in demand.; I'm thinking a better design would be this (or the sort of thing you see as a wind pump on farms).; But what's really on my mind, and I'm sure I've seen these as kids toys on the beachfront .. I'll have to have a wander .. is an offshore box frame containing a zillion small props like that, each connected to a small turbine. Something that would capture most of the wind passing into it.; Offshore, the bit white pole design has to be drilled into the ground. Bet that's expensive.; My box frame design would just float, so it could go anywhere within cable reach. And there are cables between the UK and the US.; Incidentally, I think the white pole things are inspiring, I really like them. But I can understand people thinking they mess up a view (although, a power station is the alternative). So why not really mess up the view in a few industrial sites, and leave lots of other sites pristine?
Rebecca: 30 June 2008: Rebecca to win Big Brother.; I've thought so since the beginning. I love the fact she seems completely grounded. She's constantly attacked for her weight, but she stands around completely naturally in her grundies .. *she* has no problem with how she looks. That's a proper achievement.; And in arguments, she stands her ground on her rights. She'll say "I have a right to have an opinion, and that is my opinion".; She takes what's rightfully hers and protects it. She's cute in her own way .. she's made her own space .. and she's funny. As a female role model (hey, what do I know about that), I can't think of better. If I were her father I'd be planet-size proud. I might even vote for her.
Video: 28 June 2008: I've just compared a page to which I added a demonstration video with how it worked before.; Basically, we can track how well a page converts visitors into sales. Prior to adding video to this page, it brought 7 sales, after adding the video, it brought 17 sales for the same length time period, so that's a 242% increase in sales. Plus, it's a pretty boring amateur video. If I can do it, anyone can.; Of course, we put the video on YouTube and other video sites. Recordable traffic from youTube is admittedly fairly low (many more may visit by searching for the company name rather than clicking the link we provide), but those measurable visitors convert at 2.13% against a Google average of 1.2%; So. Make a video. Put it on your website. Just-about triple your sales. Easy.
I photographed the sunrise: 26 June 2008: But before that, while on holiday in Youlgrave (local) / Youlgreave (OS), I took some photographs of hedgerows because I truly find them possibly my biggest source of inspiration.; Sometimes drumming hurts. This is a blister I got from it.; What a macro lens does to a cat.; Dawn over North Bay. Just proving a point.; Wandering around to South bay ..; I'm told I'm wrong about this and that the purchasers can decide where their bench goes. But there are a lot of these purchased and dedicated benches at the end of the harbour. I can't imagine they get full of people, yet along North bay they've been removed. Why do I get the impression they are cheaper all parked up here where they don't get damaged?; Scarborough's South bay ..
Floral Cakes: 24 June 2008: Checkout the petals on this, a new case study. No, really, they're pretty awesome.
George Carlin: 23 June 2008: "I look at it this way... For centuries now, man has done everything he can to destroy, defile, and interfere with nature: clear-cutting forests, strip-mining mountains, poisoning the atmosphere, over-fishing the oceans, polluting the rivers and lakes, destroying wetlands and aquifers... so when nature strikes back, and smacks him on the head and kicks him in the nuts, I enjoy that. I have absolutely no sympathy for human beings whatsoever. None. And no matter what kind of problem humans are facing, whether it's natural or man-made, I always hope it gets worse." Source; 7 (+3) words you can't say on TV. Probably not true any more.; Check around youTube, I bet you don't get away within 30 minutes.; And if you missed white people and voting, catch those.; How the hell did I miss this guy? Shame he died yesterday (especially for him).
Functionality, a quick example: 22 June 2008: I often talk about adding functionality to websites but it may not be clear what I mean by that. So here's a quick example.; I have a small glossary of terms to publish as part of a larger website. Looking around, others have a main page with clickable letters of the alphabet, so you click the 'a' and get all the terms beginning with 'a'.; The problem with that is, partly, that the 'a' page isn't optimised for the search engines, because it contains a bunch of words whose only connection is they start with 'a'.; So I'm putting my terms into a database. Then I can serve it up in a number of different ways, including the alphabet way.; I can add a search. And if people search and find a term we have, I can add a count to that term. Then I can rank terms by popularity and perhaps highlight the top 20% of terms in a list. That becomes something that will rank highly in the search engines and so bring us traffic.; I can capture terms people fail to find, so I can write definitions for them if I wish, so our glossary becomes responsive.; I could, later, take those terms and create a set of questions or a quiz, serve them for mobile use, send people a term a day.; All of those things are useful and make the website more attractive, more noteworthy, and help people feel comfortable they are in a place that will help them, as well as encouraging them to recommend the site to their friends. That's functionality.
youTube: 22 June 2008: Having downed a massive three pints of Bombardier after watching Mike Leigh's Happy Go Lucky, which isn't shite (some people have said so) but is actually really rather beautiful, we staggered home through a night that smelled of new summer rain, past a pub full of people dancing to a covers band playing Elvis' Suspicious Minds and, inspired by the Alma jukebox, found the following jewels on youTube.; The many incarnations of Spizz weave through my adolescence. For some reason "cold, windy, city" as a chorus still holds memories of standing in the queue to the Sandpiper, Nottingham's main punk venue. Anyway, here's something that gives me great pleasure.; Most people remember Germ Free Adolescence when asked about X Ray Spex, but there's a whole load of beautiful punk stuff before that, here's Identity which is simply thrilling.; And the song, given that it was Saturday night, that I thought might actually be on the Alma jukebox, given the tunes it did have, was Saturday Night Beneath the Plastic Palm Trees, by the Leighton Buzzards.
Click Fraud: 20 June 2008: A client claimed to be suddenly suffering hundreds of pounds a day in click fraud and wondered if I could help.; For the uninitiated, there is a system called Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising online, in which you can place an ad for free, and pay only when someone clicks to go through to your website. If you do a Google search, the first couple of results and the right hand column are Pay Per Click ads using Google Adwords.; You can place those ads on your own website, in which case you get a cut of the amount the advertiser spends on clicks (see the top right of this page). While that was intended to allow you and me to make a little from our websites, whole online moneymaking schemes have sprung up to create websites wholly to generate clicks and income for their owners. You can usually spot them for the inanity of their content, complexity of their navigation and the proliferation of "google sponsored links" on each page.; So, if you have dedicated yourself to making money this way, how tempting might it be to click one or two of the ads on your own site in order to make a few extra pence. To work out how much you could make per hour just by sitting and clicking. To build that up into a network of friends doing the same. Even to employ hundreds of people in low wage areas to do the same.; Rather than wearing out your clicker-finger, what about getting into writing viruses that take over a machine and act like a user, you could get thousands of machines all clicking your ads?; OK, stop. That's all very bad. It's click fraud. It's theft. Google will switch your account off in an instant and probably do legal stuff too, and Google is a big bear to fight. So don't do it.; So. What do do when someone does do that to you and, effectively, steals your ad budget? This can be serious stuff. If you're running £50 a day in PPC ads and they suddenly go up to £100 a day with no increase in sales, that's a serious threat to your business and needs to be dealt with.; Now, I'm no Adwords expert. I've limited experience. But I do use it every day, I've run several campaigns, and I've read a fair amount about it. So within the bounds of my knowledge and given what I'm seeing as I research the answer, here's how I currently feel about dealing with click fraud.; What you do about it is partly tied to how much time, effort and worry you want to put into it. It's an infuriating problem, I know. But the solution lies in managing how you feel about it combined with having a system to deal with it.; Because click fraud is so emotive, it's not easy to think about it effectively, our thoughts tend to be clouded with emotion. When someone's stealing your money every day, all you want to do is find them and punch them very hard. No-one can think while upset, and every time you think about how much money you've lost, you get upset, so it's really hard to handle. In fact, click fraud and how you solve it is enormously complex and doesn't readily lend itself to being solved by computers.; If you knew about PPC ads before, are you saying you've never been tempted to click an ad (perhaps for a company you don't like, a competitor, or one that's given you poor service in the past) in order to cost that company money? If you click it 100 times, sure, Google might spot that. But just that once? Google will never know. The central issue is: a computer can never know the intent of the person who clicked.; This is a beautiful scenario for people who purport to sell a magic bullet solution. You hurt, here's the solution. I'd be very, very cautious about that.; So here's what I think you should do to handle click fraud. I think there are three levels of reaction to it, kind-of laid-back, pragmatic, and nuclear.; The laid-back approach is where I most often sit (partly because I've not lost significant money to it (yet)). Consider that Google's whole business rests entirely on the quality of the search service they provide. Click fraud directly attacks the core of Google's business, so we can assume that Google is doing its best to limit its effect.; At the same time, it's very difficult to eradicate entirely. Since the people who work for Google are very clever, we might also assume that what Google is doing is more or less all that can be done (so buying additional services may not help). Therefore, what click fraud there is is just part of life's rich tapestry.; Consider, too, that some behaviour that might look to you like click fraud may be down to legitimate behaviour. For instance, if your ad spend suddenly rises, that might possibly be down to some casual mention on a talk show or some celebrity doing something that might indirectly cause people to seek out what you offer .. nothing you can nail down, but legitimate nonetheless. And such casual enquirers may well not be buyers.; So, the key to happiness is to accept that PPC comes with some click fraud, and run your business accordingly rather as a retailer would when considering shoplifting costs. You may feel better, too, if that means you find PPC works less well for you and you cut your spend in favour of other methods, because it's Google that loses out in the end.; The pragmatic approach would be to be a bit more active about tracking and monitoring your ads and here's where I'd be if I could see what looked like real cause for concern in a campaign. If you've farmed out your adwords management to someone, they should be doing this for you as a matter of course.; There are many things you can do using Adwords and Analytics to work out where the click fraud is happening. If you haven't got some form of analytics working on your site, you're really not doing a good job, and Google Analytics is free. What it gives you is an interactive way to interrogate information about your website visitors, so you can see where they come from, what they typed into the search engine in order to find you, and so on.; One angle of attack is to remove the reason for someone undertaking click fraud. It may be you have enemies or competitors who simply want to cost you money (you can't do much about that other than be nice to people and work with your competitors (probably a good idea)). But most often it's people who want to make money who perpetrate click fraud. In Adwords you can choose whether you want your ads to just appear on Google's search pages, in other search engines, and crucially on other people's websites. AFAICS most click fraud comes from the latter, so switch it off.; A more sophisticated approach would be to set up (if you haven't already) an Analytics goal for your website, perhaps a money-off voucher for people who come into your shop. Incorporate in that goal page something only a human could do. Ask them to type their name and perhaps the name of the product they are interested in along with their email address. If the product name matches a product, fine, otherwise it's probably a spam robot. That prevents spambots from reaching your 'goal' so in Analytics you can then see where the traffic that converts is coming from versus the traffic that doesn't, and kill off the non-converting ads. How can I say this strongly enough: This should really really really be part of your everyday process anyway, because if you're not reacting to your audience, you're not doing a great job and someone else will.; Through this you can probably work out that it's traffic from a bunch of IP addresses, from particular countries, at particular times of the day, from specific websites, using specific keyphrases, and so on and you can knock those out of your PPC campaign.; If you need to, in Adwords you can split out problem areas into different campaigns in order to manage them more closely.; Of course, that all takes time, and that has to be paid for, so perhaps the bigger campaigns can be more sophisticated (but are also more complex to manage anyway so .. perhaps not).; You can look at this very positively. You should always be trying to improve your ads so you get the best return on investment anyway. So naturally you should automatically be filtering out spam and trying to move closer to your goal. In that sense click fraud is like a penetration test (where you employ people to try to break into your network in order to check for vulnerabilities so you can close them), it alerts you to your own inefficiencies. Perhaps if you get click fraud, see it as a helpful heads-up that lets you know you're not managing your PPC campaign well enough. Maybe you need to allow more resources to do that, and perhaps you can have that for free because what you spend on management you'll save in cutting the waste in your Adwords budget.; Just one thing: always set a daily limit. Otherwise the spambots could have a field day while you're out to lunch, and you won't know anything about it until it's too late.; If you're really not satisfied with all that, you're into some serious stuff, the nuclear option. There are companies such as whosclickingwho.com, clickforensics.com and adwatcher.com who charge to help. Google's argument is they do the best job for free and that such companies inflate the problem to motivate you to buy from them. I don't recommend any of those services as I've never used them so can't comment.; Report your suspected fraud to Google and provide as much supporting evidence as possible, although be prepared for automated responses. Often people get a small percentage of their costs back but in clear cases others have had lots of their budget returned.; A class action case was successful.; Consider other advertising methods. Yahoo! MSN. Facebook. Beyond PPC.; Have a read of Wikipedia on the subject. I've downloaded and printed the Tuzhilin report therein and plan to read through that. That may change my mind about some of the things I've written here, and if it does I'll be back with an update.; My personal feeling is the best way to manage click fraud is first to manage how you feel about it, but I acknowledge that's not what most people who call me want to hear. Then if I recommend accepting it as part of business, at least a little bit .. that doesn't go down well either. But there are some things in life that are just true and can't be solved, and there are even more things that can't be solved by a computer.; If you are using someone to manage your Adwords campaign and you're getting lots of click fraud, they are the people you need to talk to. I'd check how the campaign is being managed and whether more should be being done. Think about how you are you paying for that campaign. I've no idea how people charge for that service, but I'd be keen to check there isn't a motivation to keep your ad budget high. The ideal situation would be that every ad appearance results in a click that results in a big sale. Charging, say, 5% of your ad spend or something for each click doesn't get you there, it motivates the company to keep the budget high.; Thinking of it off the top of my head, I guess the only fair way to charge would be to fund the right number of hours to manage the campaign and to protect that somehow from the usual management/accounting reflex of trying to get more for less. In this case that would be counterproductive, because cutting management would just increase ad wastage and decrease effectiveness. So I guess you really have to trust the company you're using. Interesting.
Splat!: 20 June 2008: Remember as a youth I was the guitarist in a band called Splat!? Well possibly our best moment was playing a gig at Amsterdam's Melkweg. We hired a transit van, ran out of petrol, made a friend throw his hubble bubble pipe into the sea in case of a customs search, almost got killed instinctively looking the wrong way before trying to walk across the motorway, that sort of thing.; Anyway, by the wonders of t'Internet, Dave Moscow t'singer has uploaded a recording of that gig to last.fm. I love last.fm and urge you to sign up if you haven't already. While I'm always disappointed by our vinyl recordings, this gig sounds great. I mean, OK, it could still be improved, but there's a real groove there. Have a listen. This would be around 1980 or so maybe.; Incidentally, the description says I moved to Newark. I never moved to Newark, I'll try to correct that.
I've been away: 19 June 2008: I've been away, and such a lot's happened that I wanted to blog about (but didn't have time to). There was the David Davies resignation that I thought was an absolute masterstroke, a beautiful piece of politics, around lunchtime when it happened. It would force a debate, make a stand, keep the pressure on Brown (not that I necessarily support either the stance or the pressure), but by the evening it had turned into "nutcase Davies has thrown away his career on a stunt", which is amazing.; There's Alexandra on Big Brother, and her amazingly bad interpersonal style.; There's the whole Youlgrave, Bakewell, caravan thing, for that is where I've been. The area felt great (as opposed to Buxton which was really starting to have a bad Manchester influence (starting, as in, it's closer to Manchester so we felt the influence as we drove). We were really surprised at how culturally rural Bakwell was, from the sheep auctions to the local Youlgrave pub selling duck, rabbit, hare, venison and wood pigeon for tea and where most of the clientelle up in a 'proper' Land Rover and drank outside.; Then there's the whole Runner's Knee/Paleo for Athletes thing. About, maybe six weeks ago now I stopped running because I got an ache in my right knee that stopped me driving. I booked into my GP, to podiatry, and later, to Jenna Wheatman (despite Scarborough AC not responding to my request for a recommendation, this is, I think, who they would have recommended had they come back to me) who diagnosed Runner's Knee, gave me a sports massage that made me laugh out of discomfort, and made me start my Yoga routine again.; Then yesterday at the end of our holiday we went to Body Worlds in Manchester. I possibly had too high expectations for it. I wanted, for instance, to know where our organs are relative to our external features (but because of the way the body is stripped away in layers in dissection, I still don't feel I have that), I wanted to understand my knee problem, but still don't know which is my ITB (the muscle Jenna worked on the most (I haven't had time to work it out)), I wanted to be shocked and awed but wasn't hugely. Although I did come away from the stretched out Aorta with its aneurysms and distortions and from the kidney with multiple cancers with the feeling that, yes, sometimes when a doctor tells you there's nothing they can do, there really is nothing they can do. Oh, and now I 'get' the brain's white matter (connecting nerves) and the grey matter (brain cells) and have a really good sense of just how much of the former there is. That gives the brain structure for me. So it was life changing, and although I wanted a good sit down afterwards, that was just fatigue not shock.; There's the helplessness I feel about what's happening in Zimbabwe. I don't understand why Infoshop isn't carrying much (perhaps Zimbabweans just don't have much Internet). Maybe Sokwanele and Wikipedia will help. And I don't want to wake up and realise actually it was all a big media Mugabe demonisation project.; Then there's the Obama excitement, which now seems a tad weird from the soundbite I saw where he said he'd use "everything in my power" to stop Iran getting nuclear weapons, which seems more of the same to me rather than 'change'. Pilger seems to think similar thoughts. Not that I want t'other chap. I'm really excited about an Obama win. But perhaps it's not going to be the great America love-in that I really wanted. I'm reading Chomsky's Understanding Power which is seriously, deeply unsettling and I've only reached perhaps page 20.; Oh, and I've been reading Le Corbusier's The Modulor.; And I don't understand why separated-at-birth Desperate Dan lookalike Mario claims he has a fan club. He clearly doesn't, so where's the benefit in claiming one? And on what basis would he have one?; These things are concerning me.; Anyway, more later.
Live ships: 12 June 2008: Wow. Check this out: live shipping data. See a ship on the horizon, check what it is, where it's going, and what it's carrying. Ain't the Internet something? The Scarborough Evening News listed this, it's rather groovy.
Murakami: running and writing: 9 June 2008: I found this article in Saturday's Guardian spoke to me. He writes of being an author and of running marathons and of the similarities between the two tasks and how one informs the other, each makes him better at the other.; If you scroll down to or search for the paragraph that starts "Writing novels, to me, is basically a kind of manual labour", and read that and the next, that really summarises a whole lot of stuff for me. But it might be a running thing. It meant nothing to my g/f.; I think you can very easily substitute the task of writing a novel in that article for that of writing or creating a website. Yes, it's absolutely as creative. That's the amazing thing about programming and web development. You start with a blank screen and your imagination, just exactly the same as when you start a novel.
Another case study: 9 June 2008: Another case study for you, this time MBA-Advantage, an accounting training course aimed at helping MBA students get through the accounting module, but good for anyone who needs to understand accounting reports and terms. I intend to take the course, although I scored 68% on the "how much do you already know" test, yet to be published. How irritatingly smug. Oh, and it's not boring. Honestly. I mean, OK it's not like the first time you heard Love Will Tear Us Apart, but it's pretty cool. Honest. No, really, it is.
It does hurt: 9 June 2008: Much as I may brush such things off, rejection does hurt even if it's business rejection. What seems to hang around for a while are the words people use. One client called a page of mine a 'mish mash', a phrase I still can't quite look in the eye.; I think what hurts most is that the phrases reveal that I've really comprehensively failed to connect. This is rare, I might add. A mish mash is surely something fairly random whereas what I'd done followed all sorts of graphic design rules and wasn't something that just fell out of a cupboard onto the screen. For this long-term client, I was suddenly faced with the realisation that he didn't actually perceive what I was doing, even though I'd been doing it for years. Things like usability and liquid design and conversion and how humans interact with screens and innumerable other bits of knowledge and experience that had gone into making that screen were basically unappreciated, perhaps had always been unappreciated, and perhaps this client wasn't even aware of them. So what hurts isn't the client, but that in an instant I'm staring my failure to communicate those things in the face, up close. Me, nose to nose, with my failure. Brought to the brink of helpless, frustrated anger by one phrase: 'mish mash'.; My best was someone who was 'mortally disappointed' by what I'd done, seemingly unable to accept that it was functionally good but I just hadn't done a great deal about how it looked yet, all I'd done is let the client in on the development page so they could watch progress. I blogged about that before.; Todays was the reaction to a quote I sent off last week. This person is new into a business that's about to undergo great change. They showed me a variety of websites they liked the look of including Disney .. just think a minute .. Disney .. that gazillion dollar, mega company that specialises in animation, and he quite likes the animations Disney have done on their website and wants to take inspiration from there. OK. Sure.; They also want to appeal not just to tourists, but also to Scarborians.; I'm asked to prepare a small, medium and large quote.; So I did. Small was to iteratively maintain and gradually improve the current website. Medium was to develop a new website with a new 'look'. But large was a beauty. I gave the best ideas I had. Lots of community involvement in order to wow people and get them to love the company .. it was transformative and I was really looking forward to the next stage, the dialogue that went "well, I like that, that will never fly, but we can do this, what about that, love that idea but can we .. " etc.; What I got back was "it sounds like a runaway train".; A runaway train is out of control and dangerous. I was asked for my ideas, and I gave them. This business is going to change a lot, but we don't yet know how. So how could I be specific? So I gave outline costs as a discussion point. There really was no sense that I was asking for an endless pot. This business, too, can afford it, I wasn't asking for the impossible. My costs are always controllable, and if it feels like a runaway train then let's get together and talk boundaries.; So today it's my turn to be mortally disappointed. The phrase "runaway train" will join the select group of phrases that will probably make it onto a t-shirt one day in an effort to exorcise them. This project really had fabulous possibilities. I was inspired. But there you go, it isn't to be. The errors are there for all to see. I'm off to read High Probability Selling again.
Whitby: 6 June 2008: I went to Whitby the other day and took some pics.; I have a thing about showing the motion of organic things against the stasis of inorganic and thought the Nikon would allow me to do a really long exposure, but when it came to it I couldn't work out how. So I took a few pics over a few minutes with the camera resting on a bin or post and overlayed them later in The Gimp. I think there's something for me to explore here.
The Whitby music scene: 2 June 2008: Here's a great blog about the Whitby music scene, particularly about the Forefathers who I know pretty well. They are good.
The Organic Farm Shop: 1 June 2008: I can't remember if I've mentioned them specifically, but I'm undertaking an improvement program on the website for The Organic Farm Shop. Probably half what you see is mine, now, but the whole site was inherited so it's not my design.; I'm here to improve the site, generate traffic and get them new customers.; So, some early results for you: in the last month traffic is up 31%, page views are up 42%, the bounce rate (the percentage of people who arrive and then leave immediately) is down 20%, the average time people are spending on the site is up 40% and the number of pages people visit is up 8%.; My favourite is perhaps this table of seasonal vegetables (in Yorkshire), partly because I got the current month to highlight automatically. It's a small thing, but I like it. And, others like it too because we have traffic searching for exactly that. Groovy.; I'm just about to update the news page and write about Fair Trade.
Signature: 1 June 2008: So this is what the UK is talking about today. Dance. Amazing.
Open Studios: 1 June 2008: Oh, the angst of Open Studios. Andrew Cheetham selling his soul (I only do this 'cus I love him and winding him up seems to bring us closer somehow). At least he has one to sell.; Other stuff
Robin Hoods Bay: 1 June 2008: We spent quite a while trying to work out what this world of just-opened gorse flowers smelled of. Then we got it. Toasted coconut.; I can't quite tell if that last pic is the right way up or not. I'll have to check the next flowering gorse bush I come across.
Next door's rabbits: 1 June 2008: .. are quite cute