Category Archives: Web

Google AdSense ad serving has been disabled to your site

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It’s amazing that Google is as successful as they are given their customer service.

I received the following email last night, and it still has my fur standing-on-end (defensive rage).

Subject: Google AdSense ad serving has been disabled to your site

This message was sent from a notification-only email address that does not
accept incoming email. Please do not reply to this message.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hello,

During a recent review of your account we found that you are currently
displaying Google ads in a manner that is not compliant with our program
policies
(https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=48182&stc=aspe-1pp-en).

--------------------------------------------------
EXAMPLE PAGE: http://foolswisdom.com/

Please note that this URL is an example and that the same violations may
exist on other pages of this website or other sites in your network.

VIOLATION(S) FOUND:

It is important for a site displaying AdSense to offer significant value
to the user by providing unique and relevant content, and not to place ads
on auto-generated pages or pages with little to no original content.

Your site should also provide a good user experience through clear
navigation and organization. Users should be able to easily click through
your pages and find the information they are seeking.

Please review Google's Webmaster Quality Guidelines (
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66361 ) for
more information.

ACTION TAKEN: We have disabled ad serving to your site.

ACCOUNT STATUS: ACTIVE
Your AdSense account remains active. However, please note that our team
reserves the right to disable your account at any time. As such, we
encourage you to become familiar with our program policies and monitor
your network accordingly.

Issue ID# 3227412

--------------------------------------------------
Thank you for your cooperation.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team
----------------
For more information regarding this email, please visit our Help Center:
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=113058&stc=aspe-ai4-en.

Emphasis was mine.

The only pieces of useful information would seem to be “EXAMPLE PAGE: http://foolswisdom.com/“. The reason is provided as an exercise for the reader to solve, and the status of disabled, but active almost makes the whole thing humorous. The email also has the feel of treating good customer’s like criminals, because of how “bad” customers behave.

So what do I do with this information? “Please do not reply to this message.” That’s the real problem, not my AdSense account. I’ve received an anxiety causing email, and I’m helpless.

Don Dodge, then at Microsoft, now at Google(!), wrote October 27, 2007 what still resonates with me today “Will Google Docs and Spreadsheets succeed in the enterprise? I don’t think Google will succeed in the enterprise. Why? Customer Support.”

“Google doesn’t understand people,” [Don Norman] said. “Have you ever spoken to a Google support person on the phone? They don’t have them. Sure, they’ll direct you to their blogs — where you’ll be lucky if you can find the answer you’re looking for — or they’ll let you give feedback. But do they ever give you feedback on your feedback?”
FROM “DON NORMAN: GOOGLE DOESN’T GET PEOPLE, IT SELLS THEM” BY BOBBIE JOHNSON ON GIGAOM.COM, SEPT 5, 2011

I think they do understand people, and have a stubborn resolve to demonstrate that machines can be programmed to help man better than man can help herself.

They’ll tell you it’s a scalability problem:

If you have a billion users, and a mere 0.1% of them have an issue that requires support on a given day (an average of one support issue per person every three years), and each issue takes 10 minutes on average for a human to personally resolve, then you’d spend19 person-years handling support issues every day.

If each support person works an eight-hour shift each day then you’d need 20,833 support people on permanent staff just to keep up.

That, folks, is internet scale.

That is cold, machine cold, comfort.

Customer support isn’t the 1 in a 1000, 10 minute on average problem, customer support is the support you receive under exceptional circumstances. This is when you need support, and when most companies fail to deliver.

So what do you do when you need support from Google? Either you know a Matt Cutts (there is only one!), or you hope your friends, like Chris Messina, working on Google+ and other promising tools with warmth, will help Google find balance and treat their customers, like you know, people.

Oh, and if there is anyone on the Google AdSense team reading this, I suspect that there is a bug in your “review of your account” software, as you probably should have terminated CloudFlare’s account, not mine.

Joyent RASH

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Just as I was starting to get in a writing flow my shared web hosting at Joyent had a 31 hr outage.

I never really know what I should expect from shared hosting, it’s all Random A$# Shared Hosting (RASH), but this still pained me.

I emailed Joyent support yesterday:

“Regarding http://help.joyent.com/index.php?pg=forums.posts&id=942&pc=2 why is there no final resolution on that thread? Why did it take ~ 31 hours to resolve this issue? What is being done to prevent this issue in the future?

It’s also upsetting when an issue is downplayed as “performance issues” or “slowness”. I couldn’t publish content to my site at all for over a day and a half, and Google Analytics show that few visitors made it to my site those days and those that made it might be thanks to the front end content delivery network CloudFlare.”

The response only made me feel a little better:

“The why didn’t it get updated would be my fault as I didn’t post when the resilver finished.

The why it took 31 hours, is that is how long the resliver process took (minus the losing 5 hours on the first replacement drive failed and had to be replaced a second time)

Sorry about the issue.”

I know I’m a bottom tier customer, and it was a long time ago that Joyent was really in the shared hosting business, but I still imagined them being able to resolve almost any problem within a handful of hours.

It’s worth noting that Joyent has been pretty good to me these past 5 years.

host-tracker.com free 30 minute interval:
2011 :ast week uptime:78.40% Downtime:1 day(s) 7 hour(s)
2010: Yearly uptime: 99.96% Downtime:2 hour(s) 52 min(s)
2009: Yearly uptime: 99.71% Downtime:6 hour(s) 31 min(s) – started monitoring only 2009-03

2008: The first half of 2008 was a dark year on textdrive, and I whined to some people I knew at Joyent back then.
2006-2007: was OK on textdrive.

Online Productivity Expensive?

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With a young family I’ve found myself drawn to calendaring and to using “to do” lists extensively. It has freed my time and energy to instead enjoy it with my wife and son.

I’ve turned my eye to doing some selective time tracking. This class of software is most often integrated into billing applications.

I’m looking at a few Mac apps:

And a couple of web services:

The spread in pricing of the web services surprised me. How does FreshBooks justify being so much more expensive?

Those prices are a year’s worth at the “solo” levels of these services. Except toggl, these web services are magnitudes more expensive than the Mac applications.

Gmail’s Sweetest Feature, the URL

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Gmail’s sweetest feature is that each view has a unique URL.

This provides simple integration with other applications. In other words, I copy and paste an email’s URL into my to do list, and at any time, with a single click I can get right back to the email.

Try doing that with any other email client!

The Clear Six Apart Open Web

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One of my inspirations Simon Willison, as well as his excellent deep analysis on numerous web development issues, provides pithy links and comments in from “elsewhere” on his blog. I highly recommend subscribing to his feed.

Today, he shared this quote from Anil Dash:

“It’s clear that, even those who are privileged by access and wealth and the ability to amplify their own voices have anticipated that we’ll all be disenfranchised by the private companies that own and control our networks of communication. And yet, most of our effort and ambition in the technology industry are not going towards building for the open web.”

Anil Dash, The Web in Danger, Nov 16th, 2009

Oh, how clear it is. As I commented on Simon’s post:

Anil is a VP at Six Apart.

Why do images on TypePad not have file name extensions?

Why are there no export features for Vox?

I could go on… I’ve emailed Anil Dash personally months ago about each of these issues. As has historically been the case with my interactions with Anil, I’ve only got hand waving back.

Here are the Get Satisfaction threads on those two issues:

This is something that gets me emotional. Even if Six Apart did not compete with us (WordPress/WordPress.com/Automattic) in some spaces, this issue is one of my emotional Achilles’ heels.

For all of their tooting about the open web, not only are Six Apart’s main services not open source projects, but they have long outstanding issues with locking in their customers.

Being able to get your content and data out is the greatest fundamental of the open web!

Update (later the same day): Announced today at Web 2.0 NYC, Anil is no longer employed by Six Apart. He is now Director of Expert Labs. I wish him all the best in his new job trying to effect change on the greatest scale.

Gmail’s Opportunity to Help Protect Against Tagged.com Mistake, Spam, and Phishing

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Now for the part of the Tagged.com story, I really wanted to tell. As I mentioned in “Tagged.com Spam? Phishing? Nice Guys? My Personal Story” I try to look at situations and problems from different angles.

There is a clear opportunity for online email providers and social networking sites to limit the damage of phishing and email spam by giving customers tools to regulate the flow of data.

Yesterday, before New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo suing Tagged.com story broke, I cold emailed a member of the Gmail team:

Gmail could help web security a lot by providing:
1. Authentication (OAuth) to Gmail address book making it clear that you were not providing your Gmail passsword to a 3rd party web site.
2. Default level of access only provided names and salted hashes of email addresses from address book (possibly 3rd party web site part of salt)
3. Allow only a limited number of actual email addresses to be requested in a time period. I’m guessing ~30 would be a sweet spot.

That would seem to be one possible solution. If this is not a good solution, I think it’s important for your team to look to tackle the problem described below in another way.

EXPLANATION

[Background information described in my "Tagged.com Spam? Phishing? Nice Guys? My Personal Story"]

I’ve seen similar UI at othe web services, where everyone in your address book is selected by default. I think there is an awesome opportunity for your team to create an experience that works well for your partners and protects your customers from the type of mistake described above and more importantly from malicious sites.

Some of the problems that I think Gmail and other online email address book and social networking sites should at least take partial ownership by:

  • Not allowing 3rd party sites to embed login forms. They should use OAuth or a similar approach. (Even on AppEngine — train us well).
  • Having a really clear experience about what data you are giving access to (how pissed your friends might be), and a way to provide only limited data.
  • Providing salted hashes instead of email addresses, so that a person can find their friends on a 3rd party service without having to hand over the actual email addresses of their friends.

I don’t think I read the Google Chrome Operating System announcement until after I sent that email. When I did read the announcement, I thought about how empowering and freeing it will be for our computing to be in the cloud, but I also thought about problems like this one, and how many scary things can happen when you are no longer hold the container(the harddrive in your PC) for your information and data.  There is a lot of design still to be done to create a safe and friendly experience.

Tagged.com Spam? Phishing? Nice Guys? My Personal Story

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Today, the story broke about the New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo suing Tagged.com . This situation has a personal element.

Brad Stone‘s New York Time (NYT) article today “New York Attorney General Sues Tagged.com” begins:

“Turns out our recent article on the spammy social network Tagged.com …”

Rafat Ali‘s paidcontent.org article today “Social Net Tagged Getting Tagged…Er…Sued By NY AG” begins:

“High time someone asked harder questions: Tagged …”

Laura Northrup‘s The Consumerist article today “NY Attorney General Unfriends Tagged.com, Files Lawsuit“:

“… social networking contact-spamming site Tagged.com. …”

As you can see by how those stories start, there is a lot of bad will for Tagged.com. Some weeks ago I was researching this very topic, but did not find the recent Alina Tugend NYT “Typing In an E-Mail Address, and Giving Up Your Friends’ as Well” article about Tagged.com nor did I find Tagged CEO Greg Tseng response on their blog. In my web searches these were buried by years of complaints about Tagged.com phishing and spamming.

I guess, I should go back to the beginning. June 6th, I receive a Tagged.com invite from a dear older family friend,

“[redacted] sent you photos on Tagged Want to see the photos? Please respond or [redacted] may think you said no :( “

Clicking the link did not take me to photos, but instead to a registration form. The registration did not allow proceeding without providing my login to Gmail, and every person in my address book was selected by default to invite before proceeding. ((Another email account, that I don’t use publicly also received the email invite, and since then — coincidentally I hope — has now received it’s first spam email.))

Oh no! I immediately let the family friend know that they signed up for what seemed to be a phishing and spam site and that it was important to change her passwords. The friend was really upset and explained that she received the invite from a professional friend of hers, and was worried for everyone else that might have received it from her.

I didn’t think of it much again until some weeks later, when she described still being bothered by it, how embarrassing it was, and that she didn’t feel confident using the web any more. She had removed all her photos from Flickr. So, I decided to take another look at Tagged.com and that takes us to all the complaints I described finding above.

I checked the Tagged.com’s site, and was surprised to find the board of directors included Reid Hoffman, Founder & CEO of LinkedIn, and two members of the Mayfield Fund: Raj Kapoor and Allen Morgan. All people I deeply respect.

I scratched my head and tried to look at the situation from different angles. I discovered that Tagged.com has rave reviews from a young audience. That the pushy, in your face Tagged.com experience works for this young audience. I guessed that Tagged.com might be tacky enjoyable like MySpace is to many young people.

So, I decided to reach out to CEO Greg Tseng through a mutual connection on LinkedIn. The email took about a week to get to him, and July 7th I received a thoughtful and apologetic response.

The timing of the lawsuit seems really unfortunately for Tagged.com as it seems like they were already in the process of cleaning up their act. I fear that there is a lot of circumstantial evidence against them, and any lawsuit won’t go well.

Update: Read my next article “Gmail’s Opportunity to Help Protect Against Tagged.com Mistake, Spam, and Phishing“. I think it’s at least as interesting part of the story.

Watch Videos Online? I Download Later When the Tubes are Clear

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I’m a web worker. My work is online, and it all slows to a snail’s pace if I’m streaming or downloading a video.

I have “High-Speed Xtreme-I” which promises “up to” a-lot, but the metered download rate is much, much lower than advertised, about 1.5-2Mb/s up and 0.75Mb/s. Fire up a video download and I’m in slowmo.

I want my favorite online video content delivered to me. Some of it is available on iTunes. Others like WordPress.tv is available on Miro.

Currently, I download a batch at the end of the day, but for my family the web is no fun if I’m downloading video podcasts in iTunes.

Is there a way to self-throttle or meter specific streams, downloads or applications on Mac OS X?

Unfortunately, there is a lot of content that isn’t even available for downloading. Mostly, I imagine because the content is supported by web page ads. I’d pay for that content, why is there no Audible.com for video podcasts? Or is there?

Even if available on iTunes or Miro, there is not even a link back to the online discussion, let alone comments, inline comments and tags (Viddler), and other resources. I would like it all to be pulled into my video player, except for YouTube comments ;-)

Am I alone? Any help fellow web workers? Any help from NewTeeVee pros?

Google Chrome’s Greatest Challenge? Open Source Development and Support of a Consumer Desktop Product

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I’ve seen a lot of fantastic articles about what Google’s beta web browser Chrome is and isn’t, will and won’t be.

My good friend Chris Messina wrote a very interesting article, which in many ways comes down to a large, influential part of the web development community being disenfranchised from Mozilla.

Doom! Of course John Lilly is playing cool on the outside, because they have long fought giants. Mozilla’s ability to combat goliaths, and live with fear and uncertain contribute to them being the best browser development community there is.

Although Mozilla is the best browser community, like Chris Messina, I consider myself part of the disenfranchised community, tired of the Firefox is the web mentality. But I will readily admit nobody has a better track record than Mozilla for open source consumer software development.

As impatient consumers, particularly impatient geek consumers, we all want our pet issues addressed right NOW. One of the greatest achievements of Mozilla these last few years is worrying about the right problems at the right time. And one thing they’ve always gotten mostly right is enabling participation in all aspects of Firefox development, promotion and support.

My instincts tell me that it has slowed them down (a lot), but positions them well for the long game.

In many ways their community, their team, is like the guiding principle of the Internet, they can remove a number of members, and the team will continue to function. Firefox development is highly robust and survivable.

Are leaders like Dave Hyatt, Ben Goodger, Blake Ross, Joe Hewitt, and Mike Schroepfer missed? Of course they are, but these are only a few of the many Mozilla champions.

“We build Firefox with an open development process. At Mozilla people earn respect, authority and decision-making ability by demonstrating their abilities. This allows individual people to become full, equal participants, with both authority and responsibility for building a better Internet. The development process for Firefox demonstrates the type of Internet we want to build. (Not perfectly, of course.)”

Chrome will be the browser built by Google, like Safari is the browser built by Apple. Firefox is the browser built by everyone.

Everyone that can cope in the structured, programmer-geeky rule laden Mozilla open source community. But maybe that is what is required for such a complex and important product.

What track record does Google have in open source development of consumer software? Any?

By extension what track record does Google have in supporting consumer products? Here they do have one, and it’s a poor one. Automation ultimately doesn’t cut it. Also, it’s much more fun when the software is installed, as opposed to a web service that you fix and update any time.

What community leaders has Google assembled for these heady tasks?

What open source tools do these Google leaders have in their arsenals? As great of gifts as the Netscape source code in 1998 were the open source tools to develop and collaborate on development.

Although today using Bugzilla and Bonsai (with Hg Web Viewer a poor replacement) would probably drive me nuts, those are a couple of the tools that makes development of a large, complete product by a large Mozilla community possible.

Google Code seems great for small projects, or non-consumer software projects with small teams, but I’m not convinced that Google Code is up for the challenge of a web browser. But I suspect it doesn’t have to be.

I don’t expect Chrome to become a leader in the browser space. I expect it to be about writing cool code, solving cool engineering problems, and pressuring Mozilla into solving the problems that Google cares about, or someone else will take Google’s code and solve them.

The greatest gift of open source isn’t the right to fork, but the ability to merge. I expect Apple to be the first to incorporate this generously licensed code (third-party software). But Mozilla won’t be that far behind, because with the top teams collaborating on WebKit, the myth of the masses will be eroded. Sure, Mozilla’s development team may be made up mostly of volunteers, but those contributions are often picking at the surface of problems or polishing generally solved problems. The complexity of code necessitates highly skilled, highly focused, full time developers.

Chrome’s technologies will be powerful forces for the Mozilla disenfranchised. Will WebKit one day power Firefox? What other technologies or experiences will we see Firefox adopt from Chrome?