A couple of bugs have been reported at the Google AdWords API blog, and web developers using the API should be on the lookout for these issues.

Jon Diorio, Sr. placed a pair of posts about bugs that have cropped up with the AdWords API.

One bug affects the API registration process, as described by Diorio:

(The bug) is preventing some developers from successfully entering their billing information and accepting/rejecting the Terms and Conditions. We have identified the issue and hope to have a fix in place in the next few days.
Please note that this bug only affects the "billing information" stage of the registration process. Therefore, all users are still able to complete the "developer and application information" stage of the process.
In the meantime, if you need to review the new Terms and Conditions, you can find a temporary copy available at http://www.google.com/apis/adwords/terms_preview.html.
The other bug Diorio discussed affects the API Sandbox:

we identified a bug in the AdWords API sandbox that results in requests returning error code 131. We are working on a fix now. In the meantime, we would like to recommend a work-around.
Developers can still work with the sandbox by using the older V4 request headers. Specifically, developers should use "token" instead of "developerToken," and they should not include "applicationToken" in their headers.
Google makes the API available to assist developers in their construction of applications that can interact directly with the AdWords platform. Developers can build applications to generate custom reports, integrate AdWords data with other databases, and otherwise manage accounts, according to Google's API homepage.

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Tag: AdWords API

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SEOmoz's Rand Fishkin has twenty-one suggestions on ways to improve blog traffic, ranging from the choice of blogging software to building the brand.

"I got 99 problems, but the blog traffic ain't one of them."
-- a little remix of Jay-Z's '99 Problems'

Fishkin does not have many problems with blog traffic either. The respected SEO expert speaks at the Search Engine Strategies conferences and we're sure he is well-known within our readership.

His latest blog post discussed the ways bloggers can grab a better shot at drawing more traffic. Fishkin's strategies apply as much to the business-oriented blogger as they do the individuals.

"Rather than charging $400 an hour to give advice on the subject, I thought it would be valuable to share many of the most common pieces of advice here," Fishkin said of his blog entry.

He advises people to always host a blog on a domain they control. "A blog on your domain can attract links, attention, publicity, trust and search rankings - by keeping the blog on a separate domain, you shoot yourself in the foot," Fishkin said. The best option here would be to make the blog a sub-section of the primary domain.

Tagging content makes it available to the growing realm of social media. Relevant tags on blog posts will be found by those who search for that tagged content on Technorati. Fishkin said tagging can help bring in a big traffic bump from social news sites like Digg and Reddit, and the StumbleUpon sharing community.

There are a couple of things Fishkin advised bloggers not to do right away, like enabling comments or dropping advertising on a new blog. Both can be enabled later.

"Once you're upwards of 100 RSS subscribers and/or 750 unique visitors per day, you can open up the comments and see light activity," he said. As for ads, Fishkin thinks they "have a direct, negative impact on the number of readers who subscribe, add to favorites and link" to a site.

The rest of Fishkin's hints should be very helpful to anyone who wants to be a better blogger. While a massive volume of traffic can't be guaranteed, following his suggestions will make for a more rewarding blog for its visitors and its writer.

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Tag: Blogging

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Weblogs Inc. CEO and AOL executive Jason Calacanis has a bone to pick with AOL employees not taking his directive to launch their blogs before he counts to three. His new directive: blog or die, man.

We assume he means that in the video game Skate or Die way and not in the Ralph Macchio/Mr. Miyagi-outside-the-karate-tournament way.

On his blog, right where a good executive should be, Calacanis relates that he's "been begging" AOL's busy product managers to start their own blogs.

Harried by initiatives like cleaning up data spills, getting off of the badware list, reassuring the world about Goodmail, laying off workers, restructuring the business model, and digging for spammer's gold, the staff, with few exceptions, have told Calacanis, "we're busy."

You wouldn't like him when he's angry. Calacanis responds in bold print:

If you are in the Internet industry and you don't have time to blog about your product then you should quit. Go home, give up, and find another career. Your competitors are blogging about their products and talking to the market, and there is no way to compete if you don't engage the discussion. So, by not blogging you basically are giving up and telling the market that you don't care. That's the honest truth.
Blog or die!

The illusive Mr. K, in the comments, thinks that's not quite the right approach. He thinks Mr. Weblogs CEO should teach them how:

…maybe you should offer some suggestions to these potential bloggers rather than just say "Do it or quit".
Writing a decent blog means writing skills in addition to being knowledgeable about your topic. Not everyone is a writer, especially middle management and above folks, who specialize in the short, terse, as-few-words-as-possible email. Maybe they don't want to blog because they think they can't write.
What are your suggestions on how you come up with posts and how you approach the idea of blogging on a regular basis?

You expect to see Google at the top the of list in pretty much any search breakdown, followed distantly behind by Yahoo!. But would you, in any category, expect MSN to be outdone by MySpace? Online shopping just got a lot more social.

Hitwise reports that Google was the top US search engine driving traffic to the Shopping and Classifieds category of websites for the week ending August 26. Yahoo! sends waves of traffic that way to the tune of 4.69 percent.

Though Hitwise puts MSN in third with 2.33 percent, it's only because of the name of the category. The list was for search engines, not social networking sites. MySpace directed more traffic to the likes of eBay, Amazon and Craigslist than MSN, accounting for 2.53 percent of all US upstream visits.

"Holy smokes" should be the phrase bounding in your head.

"Search is a proven method of acquiring traffic and Google is the leader in driving online retail site traffic," said Bill Tancer, general manager of Global Research at Hitwise. "With the growth of MySpace and others, online retailers should expand their focus beyond search to consider social networking sites as a source of additional traffic."

The report also revealed the top searched brands, generic terms and products driving searchers to shopping sites for the month of August.

The top brands: eBay, Craigslist, Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Amazon, Home Depot, and Sears.

The top products: Barbie, iPod, Heelys, Crocs, Bratz, Lego, Webkinz, Bowflex, Proactive, Air Force Ones.

The top generic terms: lingerie, sex toys, Halloween costumes, auto parts, textbooks, shoes, furniture, cell phones, checks, flowers.

MySpace, MSN

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The purists and pirate-pardoning, and by that I mean anybody outside the business, know that music wants to be free. The world's largest music company, Universal Music Group, seems to be the first megalith to get that. Before the end of the year, expect your music to ride freely on the back of a SpiralFrog, courtesy of Madison Avenue.

Startup SpiralFrog signed an agreement this week with UMG, to open up the company's music catalog, which includes music from GWAR to Johnny Cash. Songs and videos will be available for download in the U.S. and Canada on an ad-supported network, complete with digital rights management (DRM) technology embedded. That means it has to stay on the computer if you want it for free.

"Offering young consumers an easy-to-use alternative to pirated music sites will be compelling," said Robin Kent, SpiralFrog's CEO. "SpiralFrog will offer those consumers a better experience and environment than they can get from any pirate site."

That "better experience" he speaks of means the ability to download legal digital files (no RIAA legal notices) with no viruses or spyware.

"We want to provide the best environment for everyone - our partners and the recording artists, as well as consumers," Kent said. "Piracy continues to be one of the biggest issues facing the music industry where illegal file sharing and unauthorized CD burning are the prime means of music piracy. Digital rights protection will help us combat piracy and provide peace of mind for the record labels and the artists."

Kent cited research indicating that consumers are more than willing to 'pay' for their content by watching targeted advertising online, where ads are part of the usual landscape.

"We believe SpiralFrog will deliver an audience we highly desire and need to reach," said advertiser Oscar Feldenkreis, Vice-Chairman, President and COO at Perry Ellis International, Inc.

"Our audience is heavily into music and can be more easily reached on the web. We see SpiralFrog as an ideal place for us to communicate and build lasting relationships with our core audience and which give us unique new revenue opportunities."

The rhetoric they use takes to fun right out of it. Leave it to grey-suits to take free music and turn it into a PowerPoint presentation. Next they'll be using the phrase 'target audience.'

"Our target audience is the driving force behind the changes in how music is created, discovered and consumed," Kent said. "They are the future of music."

I knew it. A target audience is never the driving force behind how music is created, Mr. Kent. It's the driving force behind how Paris Hilton is created, whom we can have less of, thank you.

SpiralFrog's target audience is between the ages of 13 and 34, what Kent called "an advertiser's dream." Sigh. Is it a music-centric experience, too?

"This is the core audience we will attract by building a music-centric experience and destination that is second to none, legally delivering what the majority of users want - content they pay for only with their time. It's content that advertisers are willing to pay for on their behalf."

Figured as much. Better leverage your core-competencies and best practices in order to propel your client-server architecture into a ubiquitous multimedia experience. While you're doing that, the rest of us are gonna rock the @$%! out!

Thanks for the free music anyway…just as long as you don't pull an AOL or Sony and start rooting around in our computers and popping up advertising every 30 seconds…you're not, are you?

SpiralFrog will launch in beta later this year.

Universal, SpiralFrog

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The obligatory notice about the Firefox 2 Beta 2 browser being a developer preview release made available for testing purposes only has been duly noted.

Now start those FTP clients and grab that development milestone, if you're brave enough (and are on your personal system) and give the Bon Echo release a try.

The Spread Firefox website announced the posting of the new beta 2 download, replacing beta 1 of Bon Echo. As noted, this version is for testing, and extensions and themes may not work with it.

The Mozilla team noted some new features that they would like to receive feedback on from users. The theme and user interface have been updated; now buttons "glow" when one does a mouseover on them.

An early version of the phishing protection feature is turned on by default. Right now the dev team only has a limited list of phishing sites in place to detect during the test, and they warn users to be aware of this.

Auto-completion of search terms for Google, Yahoo, and Answers.com searches will appear in the top right search box. Search fans will have a new management tool to add, remove, or reorder the search engines they use in Firefox.

Their update to tabbed browsing behavior looks a lot like what Opera has been doing with tabs for some time. This new version of Firefox opens links in new tabs instead of new windows by default, and places a 'close tab' button on each tab.

Other features and notes may be viewed on the Beta 2 website.

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Tag: Firefox

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There's more confusion over .eu domain assignments than stinkeye at the French Embassy. Lumbering American giants were beat out by smaller, quicker natives for domain dibs, as the same natives are crying foul over American speculators in a domain gold rush.

According to the Wall Street Journal, AT&T screwed up its application and lost out on ATT.eu to a Polish stainless steel product company. The head honcho at the Polish ATT wasn't a bit sympathetic to the behemoth telecom's complaints:

"We didn't have a chance to get ATT.com," he said, and skipped out the door, domain in the bag.

William M. Bulkely reports that American companies are accusing EURid of rigging the system to favor European countries, while Europeans blame Americans for "imbroglio."

We blame Mr. Bulkely for using the word "imbroglio." It sounds like an Italian sandwich toping. I'll have a salami sandwich with lettuce, tomato, some imbroglio, some pepperoncini, mayo…

Other big names that lost out for being too slow on the application draw were Hertz, Eurostar, and EDS. A fifth of applications were rejected because of bureaucratic pedantry.

The U.S. Embassy in Brussels, for example, didn't waffle on getting its application in for USEmbassy.eu and USA.eu, only to have the application rejected because processors viewed it as coming from Belgium rather than America. The Embassy said "fudge ya then," kept usembassy.gov, and went back to eating their Belgian chocolate.

At the end of it all comes the blame game as jilted Europeans blamed American speculators for not being able to get the domains they wanted. American companies bagged on the Europeans, pot and kettle style, for doing the same with dot-com domains and then crying about like-for-like behavior.

From outside, it's all quite funny - like watching kids scramble for the last pop cycle, shouting "no fair!" at every opportunity.

Dot-eu

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Someone in the US Senate put a hold on S.2590, a bill that would compel the government to publish an accessible database of federal spending.

Political pundits on both sides of the blogosphere wanted to know one thing: who put the secret hold on S.2590? CNN.com revealed the mystery Senator's identity today.

Here's a hint: "The internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a truck. It's, it's a series of tubes." Did you guess correctly?

Of course you did.

Ted Stevens (R-AK) has been revealed as the one with his thumb on the throat of S.2590, the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act. Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) and several other co-sponsors supported the Act, which will require full disclosure of all entities and organizations receiving Federal funds.

The CNN report confirmed what many had suspected: Stevens was behind the hold. Senators have long enjoyed the privilege of being able to unilaterally object to a bill and block it. Coburn called out Stevens on the issue a few weeks ago, according to TPMMuckraker.com, but there was no confirmation immediately from Stevens' office.

Meanwhile, political bloggers began weighing in with opinions and calls to action. Daily Kos discussed it, and immediately pointed a finger at Stevens, correctly as it turns out. Also, Porkbusters asked readers to call their Senators and ask them to state, on the record, if they would deny placing a hold on the bill.

When CNN came calling on Stevens, Aaron Saunders, a spokesperson for the Senator, denied any attempt to keep the hold anonymous:

"At the time he placed the hold he notified Sen. [Tom] Coburn and his staff and identified several questions we had with the bill. Two weeks ago Sen. Coburn named Stevens as having a hold on the bill, so we don't consider it a secret."
Notice the choice of phrase: "we don't consider it a secret." More from Saunders:

"This wasn't in any way secretive," Saunders said. "We're baffled as to why it's been called a secret hold."
Which Coburn's office refuted:

"This hold was a secret," Coburn spokesman John Hart said. "His office has ignored media and bloggers' calls about this issue for weeks. We had to ask Stevens if he was the hold. His staff has still not met with us."
Issues like the hold on S.2590 and the imposing and withdrawal of new fees on DSL service by Verizon and BellSouth may have received a little coverage in the days of newspaper and TV-only media. Maybe people are starting to learn the lesson that Flik and company realized in "A Bug's Life" - a lot of little ants can stand up to bigger, meaner grasshoppers and fight back.

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Tags: Senate, Ted Stevens, S.2590

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Users of mobile handsets running the Windows Mobile operating system can now download Yahoo! Go for Mobile to remotely access Yahoo services.

Millions of smartphone users can begin using Yahoo! Go for Mobile applications like Mail and Search wherever they can find a connection. Yahoo announced today that most of the services available previously to mobile users are now offered for the Windows Mobile platform.

In addition to Mail and Search, Yahoo! Go for Mobile users can automatically upload pictures to a Yahoo Photos account. They can manage contacts and events through the Yahoo Address Book and Calendar from the mobile device.

Yahoo also makes its content services, like news, sports, and finance, part of the Go for Mobile experience. However, Yahoo Messenger is not available for Windows Mobile devices.

The company launched Yahoo Go earlier in 2006, for the mobile, PC, and televisions connected to computers.

Mobile devices have tremendous appeal for major Internet players like Yahoo. Since millions of people around the world carry and use mobiles on a daily basis, any initiative that can increase brand awareness for a company and keep people from using competitors like Google or Microsoft.

Although advertising represents the way to make revenue from this kind of service, TheStreet senior writer Jonathan Berr cited some hesitancy on Yahoo's part regarding their entry into pay-per-call ads, which look like a focal point for Google and eBay and their advertising deal:

"As part of this ongoing testing, we are currently evaluating the advertising opportunity that pay-per-call presents," Dina Freeman, a Yahoo! spokeswoman, wrote Tuesday in an email. "Once our tests are complete, we will use the data to determine whether it makes sense to offer a pay-per-call service to our advertisers."
She declined to be more specific. Yahoo!'s stance highlights uncertainties surrounding the level of demand for these types of ads.

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Tag: Yahoo

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Some call them smileys, others refer to them as emoticons, and a lot of people put them in emails, SMS, and instant messages every day; Ask.com can help people figure out what some of the odder ones mean.

Whether they feel :-) or :-( or even >:-( there is probably a combination of characters to express it in text. Instant messaging clients like AIM and Yahoo! Messenger translate those smileys into little bits of artwork, some of which are even animated.

Ask.com has made it a little easier to find the meaning behind the smileys with an update to their Smart Answer feature. The team behind the service described the fun feature in a recent blog post:

For a long time people have wanted the ability to search for terms and phrases on the web using non-letter (A-Z) characters. Put another way, searching using non-alphanumeric characters.
Well the time has come here at Ask.com and we've started to roll-out some what we hope are useful and practical examples.
We now offer a growing list of emoticons (aka smileys) that can be found by simply typing the smiley into the search box. Look for the definition in a Smart Answer box at the top of web results page.
Smileys have been with computer users for at least 24 years. The first recorded smiley on a computer network showed up in 1982, at Carnegie Mellon University.

The introduction of a joke into an otherwise serious online discussion sailed over the virtual heads of participants. After several suggestions for joke markers were bounced around, Scott Fahlman suggested the smiley and the frown. The three-character smiley has endured for almost a generation.

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Tag: Ask.com

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