Louise and I went to St Petersburg. It was pretty interesting to see what Russia is like these days, pounded by Tsars and communists, and finally starting to get some freedom, though of a limited sort. They love Putin, he's increased salaries by 10x on average. I took some pictures.

I've also started using Intense Debate, a 3rd party comment system which allows OpenID and should prevent spam a bit more. I may not stick with it, but I've been trying to find time to build an OpenID-powered comments system for a year now and it doesn't look like it's going to happen any time soon! This is an excellent stop-gap.

So you can embed Google Maps really easily now. I just had to try it. Here's a map of where I work at MyMart.

View Larger Map

Just click "Link to this page" at the top right corner of the map, as well as an url, you'll get some HTML to cut 'n paste.

If you are thinking about your employment status and wondering about the possibility of getting a new job, my advice would be to get started as early as possible. Getting a job on-demand in a hurry sucks and is intensely stressful. I tried this about two years ago and got pretty much nowhere.

Lately though I'm getting stacks of job offers, 1-2 a week and some of them pretty serious. Because of my earlier drive to contact agencies and potential employers, my CV has now done the rounds and got me out there. To paraphrase Goldie Looking Chain:

“On internet sites and computer mainframes,
recruiters obsess about the size of my brains.”

It's kind of nice, even though I have no intention of accepting any of them.

Microsoft to Provide and Sell Ads on Facebook.

Google signs $900m News Corp deal.

Like a lot of people, I've become a heavy Facebook user in the last 3 months. I'm a big one for publishing stuff on the web, photos, links, blog entries, etc, so I have spent quite a bit of time populating my Facebook profile, including adding which films, music, books and TV shows I like. I've entered information about my political and religious views. I've built my friends list to 75 people. I've even imported this blog's feed into my notes. I've gone nowhere near as far on MySpace, I'm just using that for music, so I've added a whole bunch of my favourite artists as friends.

Given the rich pool of data available to them, Microsoft and Google are completely failing the social networks in the advertising they provide. Time and time again I visit pages on these sites and see advertising of the most generic kind.

Sticking with Facebook, they know what products I've bought in the form of the movies and books I like. They know what other people like and can find common connections. Social recommendations have been around for ever, it's not rocket science. Add the idea that I might like stuff my friends like and you have another rich seem of potential products I would buy. My political views can be used to select lobbying ads e.g. for green sites, or left-leaning media outlets (I already read TreeHugger and The Guardian, but I'd love to know about special features they're doing). DVDs, books, films, websites, it's easy to learn a great deal about my preferences for all of them and yet its completely unused. Rumour has it that Facebook have poor clickthrough rates on their ads. No wonder! They should fire Microsoft tomorrow and build their own ad-serving platform. They would have no problem filling inventory, just look at the rush to build applications.

Instead it's guaranteed quick response credit card ads, mobile phone networks selling new handsets, drug companies trying to help me quit smoking. Little more than spam. Advertising revenue is the lifeblood of a social network, despite alternatives being pioneered chiefly by Bebo. There's an untapped pool there for somebody who can mine the profile information and turn into clickable ads for buyable products.

My particular favourite, and the ad that finally got me to write this all up, was an ad for a sexy dating site down the left of my profile page on Facebook. 100 pixels up and 400 pixels over you can read the text "In a relationship." Now who thought that ad was a good match?

Updated: Yahoo!'s new SmartAds system looks interesting.

Facebook detects a user's timezone through JavaScript. A Date object is created, the timezone offset and sent back to the server via an Ajax request. This is done on every home page view, so at least every login and generally much more often. It's a simple technique and reliable, because it uses the value set by the visitor on their current computer, dates and times are consistent with the system clock in the corner.

← previous page, next page →

Choose another page: 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113 or return to the most recent entries.

Last updated at 11:32, Wednesday June 18th, 2008. All times are shown in 24-hour clock format and are BST.

Rate my journal on bloghop.com: