Ho John Lee’s Weblog

A few days ago, the first time I saw the television ad for the new Volvo S80’s heartbeat sensor alarm, I thought it was a parody. It shows a woman walking up to her car in a dark parking lot, then turning away after the heartbeat detector shows that someone is hiding in her car. I’m sure they test marketed this before including the feature, but I totally don’t get it.

Here’s what the Volvo site says about the feature:

The Personal Car Communicator (PCC) is your car key’s smart connection with your Volvo S80 applying the latest in two-way radio technology. When in range, you’ll always know the status of your car. Locked or unlocked. Alarm activated or not. If the alarm has been activated, the heart beat sensor will also tell you if there is someone inside the car. The PCC also includes keyless entry and keyless drive.

My 10-year-old daughter and I went to see The Bridge to Terabithia yesterday. She read the book last year and wanted to see the movie, which has been advertised regularly over the past few months.

For movies that are based on a book, my general rule for my daughter is that you should try to read the book before you see the movie. In this case, I didn’t follow my own advice. Although this book is well known in children’s literature (winner of the 1978 Newberry Award), I never got around to reading it, and thus was utterly blindsided by the movie.

The movie advertisements make it look like mostly a fantasy and adventure story, kind of like Chronicles of Narnia or perhaps Neverending Story. It’s not. It’s mostly about friendship and pointless tragedy in middle school. I found it enormously disturbing. It pushed a lot of my emotional buttons, both as a parent today, and in recollection of being an odd kid out in a rural school system in the past.

Some fine weekend reading for search engineers, SEOs, and spam network operators:

A 47-page independent report on Google Adwords / Adsense click fraud, filed yesterday as part of a legal dispute between Lane’s Gifts and Google, provides a great overview of the history and current state of click fraud, invalid clicks of all types, and the four-layered filtering process that Google uses to detect them.

Google has built the following four “lines of defense” against invalid clicks: pre-filtering, online filtering, automated offline detection and manual offline detection, in that order. Google deploys different detection methods in each of these stages: the rule-based and anomaly-based approaches in the pre-filtering and the filtering stages, the combination of all the three approaches in the automated offline detection stage, and the anomaly-based approach in the offline manual inspection stage. This deployment of different methods in different stages gives Google an opportunity to detect invalid clicks using alternative techniques and thus increases their chances of detecting more invalid clicks in one of these stages, preferably proactively in the early stages.

…the business and technology magazines are getting thicker again. The latest issue of Wired magazine is 294 pages, Forbes is 280. Not in the phonebook-sized range yet, but noticeably heavier than they’ve been in a while.

Apparently, Adsense hasn’t sucked up all the advertising money. Plus there’s no way to put cardboard inserts and perfume samples onto a web page yet.

Update 12-03-2005 19:15 PST: This guy plotted Wired page counts vs the Nasdaq index, and some similar comments here as well.

I spent a lot of time digging up new music a couple of months ago during the pre-launch period beta tests of the Pandora music service. I put together a list of interesting music that I found, and ended up purchasing a number of new albums, and put off signing up for their paid subscription service until I finished working through the new music. I thought the fee was OK ($12/quarter or $36/year) but I simply had too much other stuff to listen to, so it would have been wasted money until the backlog cleared a bit (all the CDs I found from listening to Pandora in the first place).

Given my experience (liked the service, liked the music, put off signing up temporarily when the fees started), and the opportunity for affiliate referral fees from Amazon and others, this move to a ad- and affiliate-supported service could end up generating more revenue in the end.

I’m not very good at Photoshop, but this portfolio of photo retouching projects by Glenn Feron nicely illustrates the disconnect between reality and the beautiful Photoshop-enhanced images that fill today’s advertising and print media. You can view his before-and-after images by moving your mouse back and forth, some of the differences are quite striking. These images were all part of various commercial projects, but if you have a favorite photo you can apparently send it to him for the full treatment. I’m not sure how well this works when you start with normal-looking people, though. All of the “before” photos are of professional models who look pretty good to start with.

For those who want to play along at home, you can read more about how to remove wrinkles, and blemishes, plump up lips, whiten teeth, tidy up loose hair, add contours, and generally glamourize your photos in these articles:

Word of Blog:

Word of Blog is a new and free service that helps you spread the word about things you like, events you care about and worthy causes you want to support.

Bloggers: You can pick and choose any of the ads appearing on this site and display them into your blog or website. Simply copy the HTML code appearing below the ad and paste it where you wish it to appear. The ads have been formatted to fit into most blog columns.

Organizations: If you want to post an ad on this site so that bloggers can start spreading the “word of blog” about you, please go to the “Submit Ad” section.

This site provides a clearinghouse for non-profit organizations to post their ads for use by bloggers and web site publishers that would like to contribute their support.

The blog outsourcing topic has rolled along while I’ve been spending the day at the Blog Business Summit, listening to discussions on commercializing blogs. There’s now a post about it (Outsourcing bloggers in China) at CNET, which turned up a few other skeptics, and it’s looking like the Blogoriented guys are probably a hoax.

Despite that, I also think it’s inevitable that we’ll see at least a couple of real projects along these lines within a year, not aimed at simulating teenaged girls, but rather at building blog networks, filled and buzzed by creating inexpensive original content and editing search feeds that target specific niches.

I had been speculating on something like this after reading an article last month about outsourcing personal website maintenance to India.

via Marginal Revolution, Content to Go

As I write this entry my partner Jeff is in the air on the way to our office in Shanghai. What Jeff and I are doing is simple but as far as I know we are the first. We are outsourcing blogs to China.