Cheezman notes that Googlebase now support automatic adwords campaign creation.

If you post a listing on Google Base, Google will semi-automatically create adwords campaigns that point at your  Googlebase posting.

I say “semi-automatically” because while Google automatically chooses the keywords, it’s still up to you to create the ad copy for the campaign, a difficult but important task.  Ad copy can specified either for individual ads or all ads belong to the same category.

Automated AdWords could help Google Base achieve more traction and increase the number of adwords advertisements. 

The big questions are:

(1) How well does their automatic keyword selection work relative to manual keyword selection?  Keywords selection and tuning is a hard problem especially for verticals like jobs.

(2) To get the benefits of the automatic adwords creation, companies have to direct job prospects to the Google Base landing page experience, which is lacking in areas like company branding and usability. It’s clear that this benefits Google by increasing traffic to Google Base, but it’s not clear this is actually in companies best interest.  Wouldn’t both companies and Google be better served by having Google crawl the landing page of the company’s choice, in which the essential facts are embedded as structured metadata?

Up to this point, Google Base is running far behind competitors like Craigslist in terms of establishing a free classifieds community.  Automated AdWords will leverage Google’s strengths in technology and scale. (Community has never been Google’s strong point– they had to buy their way into YouTube, for instance, rather than creating their own community on Google Video.)

I’d be very interested in sharing experiences with anyone who has tried the automated AdWords functionality.

Court3nay has created support for named references in test fixtures in Rails:

I’ve written some fun code to ease the pain of associating between
fixtures.  ’Tis tested and documented!  Essentially it allows you to
replace this syntax

  user_id: 5

with this:

  user: :joe

as long as you have users.yml with

joe:

This is a big time save for anyone creating Rails tests that use associations.

Aaron Hopkins is a software engineer at Google who has a very interesting set of simulations and analysis of improving page load time.

Two of the results in particular arenoteworthy:

By default, IE allows only two outstanding connections per hostname when talking to HTTP/1.1 servers or eight-ish outstanding connections total. Firefox has similar limits. Using up to four hostnames instead of one will give you more connections. (IP addresses don’t matter; the hostnames can all point to the same IP.

If your users regularly load a dozen or more uncached or uncachable objects per page, consider evenly spreading those objects over four hostnames. This usually means your users can have 4x as many outstanding connections to you. Without HTTP pipelining, this results in their average latency dropping to about 1/4 of what it was before.

Most DSL or cable Internet connections have asymmetric bandwidth, at rates like 1.5Mbit down/128Kbit up, 6Mbit down/512Kbit up, etc. Ratios of download to upload bandwidth are commonly in the 5:1 to 20:1 range. This means that for your users, a request takes the same amount of time to send as it takes to receive an object of 5 to 20 times the request size. Requests are commonly around 500 bytes, so this should significantly impact objects that are smaller than maybe 2.5k to 10k. This means that serving small objects might mean the page load is bottlenecked on the users’ upload bandwidth, as strange as that may sound.

I also liked this tip:

Regularly use your site from a realistic net connection. Convincing the web developers on my project to use a “slow proxy” that simulates bad DSL in New Zealand (768Kbit down, 128Kbit up, 250ms RTT, 1% packet loss) rather than the gig ethernet a few milliseconds from the servers in the U.S. was a huge win. We found and fixed a number of usability and functional problems very quickly.

The full article is definitely worth reading.  Note that these results are based on simulations; it would be good to see real world measurements for various sites.

As I’ve said, these graphs are based on a simulation and don’t account for a number of real-world factors. But I’ve unscientifically verified the results with real browsers on real net and believe them to be a useful gauge. I’d like to find the time and resources to reproduce these using real data collected from real browsers over a range of object sizes, access speeds, and latencies.

We’re lucky to have beautifully poured lattes in Seattle; Tonx’s Latte Art Set on Flickr has some exceptional efforts.  Makes me want a coffee!

In a recently blog post, I jokingly suggested a MySpace for Politicians to meet the special networking needs of politicians. I shouldn’t have joked. A week later there were stories in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today on how politicians really are using MySpace as a way to show their hipness and connect with younger voters. Strange times we live in. 

 
Parody

 
Reality

Mobilizr [*] is an improved version of the official Flickr mobile site that I created using flickr.rb and Rails.  

Mobilizr improves on the official mobile site by adding full text searches and larger images that take advantage of the larger screens and faster connections available on modern smartphones like the Blackberry or Treo.   I’ve also added next links which make it easy to skip from picture to picture without scrolling.

To use Mobilzr, point your smartphone at http://thebogles.com/flickr or use Berry411 search keyword “flickr:”

Developers: I made several small improvements to flickr.rb which you can download. The user.photos method now supports search criteria just like the global one and the ownername and title are fetched out of the extras xml if available, avoiding an unnecessary roundtrip.

[*] The name is of course tongue in cheek.  The world really doesn’t need another Flickr themed name which is all the more reason to create on.

Berry411 version 3.50 is now available for free download and over-the-air install. The major new feature in this release is improved handling for addresses, as frequently requested by users. 

• The “Pick from recent addresses” feature allows you to easily manage more than three addresses. 
• The City/State field now accepts zip codes as well.
• The phone numbers of items you click on are now automatically added to search history.
• There have been a few of subtle usability improvements to address editing.

Deskfinder is something I’ve long wished for– a way to rapidly search and view data on my desktop from my phone.  A free beta for Blackberries is currently available.

From the product page:

DeskFinder Mobile Application brings all the power of famous Google Desktop to Windows Mobile Pocket PC and RIM BlackBerry devices.

DeskFinder allows users to search and download text from emails, chats, Microsoft Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, PDF files, Web history and many other files being miles away from their home or office PC.

I haven’t installed it yet but the initial reviews on Blackberryforums look positive.

I have recently shared the sorrow of losing not one but two uncles, both well before their time, and both treasured members of my family. 

Out of loss has come sadness but also a renewal of connections and values. Families and friends have leaned on one other, shared memories and told old stories, not merely to mourn the ones who were lost but as a promise to carry their memories and ideals forward.

I hesitate to draw any broader lessons from our loss, especially since one of those uncles skewered talk with any hint of pretentiousness. On the other hand, my uncle was a lifelong advocate for peace, justice, and simple decency, and for him the personal and the political couldn’t be separated. (He spoke slowly and simply but with tremendous insight and power; my ramblings are a poor substitute but they’ll have to do.)

He might say that loss is inescapable. That everything we have and everything we are will soon disappear- except in the memories and values we leave behind in our circle of loved ones. And finally, that the only unredeemable loss is if we who are left behind react by abandoning those values or breaking our connections with one another. The choice is once again ours to make.

Politicians are some of the most active social networkers out there, but until now they’ve lacked an online social network tailored to their unique needs.  This has exposed politicians to the risk of embarassing news leaks from smoke filled rooms, emails, and instant messaging.

FreedomSpace (see screenshot) is a new social network attacking this huge opportunity just in time for the fall elections, with the tagline “Social - Secure - Profitable.”  Politician’s pages are automatically encrypted, classified, and restricted to their closest political friends and contributors.