Detecting click fraud collaboratively and in real time should be quite a feat. I suppose it would mean much less relative arbitrary auditing, and probably much more transparency about why any given click would be approved or not.
If it succeeds, it should make quite a difference.
Just in case the Googles of the world ain't paying attention:
This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project will provide a commercial solution to click fraud identification and prevention. The current existing solutions can not detect the so-called software click. This STTR project proposes a real time collaborative click fraud detection and prevention system to detect these software clicks. The approach draws on data mining techniques for fraud identification using detailed user activities. An accurate and efficient classification method based on association rule mining and data stream mining will be formulated to identify the click frauds.
The system will protect Pay-Per-Click advertisers from click fraud and improve their return on investment. The new data mining techniques discovered during the course of this research will be applied in multiple fields related to online business marketing, user analysis and other fraud identification processes.
The Guardian (UK) has put out a new list (and commentary) on the 100 Most Useful Web Sites. I might argue about some of their choices, but I am not really mainstream ... I am pretty much immersed in several areas of what is sometimes called Web 2.0.
Scrolling down the list, it is considerably more Web 2.0-ish than in previous years, meaning that the list is crammed full of web sites where users interact, participate, and either (or both) take content to remix and publish or upload content for others to use.
While many people have complained about the term, the Web is clearly becoming a vast arena for copious amounts of "user-generated content".
And while content has long been considered "king" (it's what attracts the mainstream metric of eyeballs), this relatively new report from Bear Sterns (The Long Tail: Why Aggregation & Context and Not (Necessarily) Content are King in Entertainment) concentrated on television / video suggests that increasingly context and the aggregation of material will play critical roles. Thus, Bear Sterns concludes that a key part of creating value is how content is packaged (Slide # 29) ... for distribution and use (use being a term that covers many forms of what people do with content).
Anyway, back to the 100 Most Useful Web sites. i think that this is an irreversible trend pointing us to an environment where people will eventually move back and forth seamlessly between two worlds, and in many cases sites like those on the list play an essential role in many peoples' daily activities (if they don't already).
Two years ago most Britons didn't have broadband and Web 2.0 was barely a twinkle in a developer's eye. Things have changed - as our cream of the crop for 2006 shows
In 2004, the internet was a different place: there was, for example, no YouTube, and most Britons online didn't have broadband. That's changed dramatically: now, more than 75% of users have broadband, and the arrival of Web 2.0 has brought sites where the interaction is as fast as if it were on your machine. So we've revisited the "cream of the crop" that we brought you two years ago.
Some of the crop is brand new; some has stood the test of time. As before, we have 100 sites in 20 categories.
It's becoming increasingly popular to use a video clip as an integral part of a blog post, and usually to help "anchor" a post's focus and meaning.
Its also becoming clear that advertising can be shaped to fit the ambient or direct subject area of a blog post, and that paradoxically using keywords to choose and place ads gives you more control over the advertising strategy for your blog.
Here's Joe Q. Public, talking about getting paid to blog about a product or a service using PayPerPost.
Re: the video clip ... I surfed over to YouTube, ran a quick search, found this and viewed it. Then, it took me one click to save the embed code, one click to open the Insert HTML function, and one click to say OK ... then finally one more click to publish the blog post.
Content in circulation in various social networks where people are sharing ... video clips, songs, recipes, recommendations ... is what advertisers are after. They are seeking better ways to reach increasingly harder-to-reach niche markets.
Put the tools into the hands of the people who are making and growing the networks, and who are "using" other people's content and mashing it together with their own.
Offer Qumana and Q-Ads to your audiences ... use them to reach into and "shake hands" with your readers, advertising-wise.
SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES INCLUDING MYSPACE and Facebook are driving a bigger portion of traffic to retail sites than a year ago, according to new research by Hitwise. Social sites are driving more than 6% of retail traffic, up from 2.9% in 2005. MySpace alone accounted for about one-third of that traffic.
The increase in retail traffic reflects social sites increasingly becoming a starting point for Web users. "What we're seeing is a trend among social networking sites, particularly MySpace, becoming a home base for Internet users," said Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise. That trend in turn generates more traffic from social sites to online retailers.
While we're working on making Qumana compatible with the new Blogger, I'm wondering about other features. New features. I use Qumana all the time. Couldn't live without it really. I have to, on occasion, use our competitors products for specific blogs and for testing, but I always come back to Q. But I was thinking today that we're due for a new feature. Something bloggers want and need. I'm not talking about a built-in egg timer or something to remind you it's time to blog, I'm talking about something really useful.
I'm open to suggestions. Of course we can't put everything in. We want to keep Q simple and easy.
Ok .. so we've rearranged our priority list to move to the head of the list making Qumana 3.0 operate smoothly once again with the newest version of the Blogger platform.
None of us here use the Blogger platform.
Would any of you out there who used to use Qumana with Blogger (and hopefully still use it if you operate blogs on other platforms) mind giving us a hand by helping us zero in on what doesn't work, what Qumana does poorly, rudely, or not at all when attempting to publish to Blogger using it ?
Your help will be invaluable .. we want to modify / repair Qumana as quickly as possible.
... for bloggers not to download and try the new Q-Ads tool and service, other than a blogger exercising a complete ban on advertising.
There are many many bloggers who put up Google advertising on their blogs and then basically forget about it ... or if they are really serious about advertising on their blog will expend a lot of effort creating interesting content but just leave the delivery to Google without any means of controlling what they receive as advertising, since Google's algorithm's deliver what they are designed to deliver.
Using categorized keywords tailored to your audience(s) is an effective way to begin developing an advertising strategy and tactics for your blogging that allows you to control what advertising you choose to expose to your readers, and this ability to choose and control advertising has always been at the heart of Qumana's tools' ability to insert advertising with the selection of a keyword and a click.
2. Signing up for a Q-Ads account is free, and only takes 5 minutes
3. The Q-Ads revenue-sharing program is generous and fair.
4. There is a powerful and easy-to-use ad design function available in both the Q-Ads tool and the Qumana editor. We intend to add templates and other ad formats just as soon as humanly possible.
WE WILL BE ABLE TO CREATE AND DELIVER MORE INNOVATIONS SOONER IF WE GET MORE AND MORE USERS ... IN OTHER WORDS, HELP A FRIEND OR THREE TO DOWNLOAD AND TRY QUMANA AND THE Q-ADS TOOLS.
5. Once signed up, you don't HAVE to use advertising all the time, or in every blog post .. it's completely up to you as to how often you insert an advertisement.
6. If you download the Qumana editor, you can choose to advertise or not .. if you don't want to, just don't use the Insert Ad function. You still get to use a powerful, feature rich and versatile blog editor, whether you blog using a Mac or a PC.
Here's where I try something i have been wondering about for a while .. in principle it should be relatively easy to give users a default ad presentation setting that would result in an ad displaying in their blog post as follows ... probably an issue depending upon template chosen by user, but sometimes those things can be made adaptable.
But for now to make an ad look more clickable on a site using Qumana and Q-Ads, I would ...
1. Use shift__underscore to create a line across the window of the editor
2. Pull and place a Q-Ad
3. Center align the ad
4. Copy-and-paste the line from Step 1 below the ad
UPDATE: Trying out the addition of a second advertisment
