Disqus - Latest Comments for Philipp Lenssen

Re: GMail Ads

Philipp Lenssen — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 12:53:25 -0000

Where did you see that ad?

Re: Will Google Kill the Translation Industry?

Philipp Lenssen — Sat, 28 May 2005 15:28:09 -0000

As for brand names, I suppose they just leave them as they are because they are also translated as such (I suppose "Coca Cola" would stay "Coca Cola" in many languages). But oddball terms and slang is a bit of problem I guess...

Re: Seeing lots of Wikipedia in your Google searches?

Philipp Lenssen — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 06:04:51 -0000

I think to determine "how much Wikipedia people see on top of Google" you'd have to change your methodology -- e.g. use actual AOL query data (and even then you'd have the big constraint that AOL searchers may not be typical, but it would be a start, and as bonus you'd also know where they clicked on).

The fact that searching for Wikipedia titles often brings up Wikipedia doesn't, IMO, yield relevant results, unless you want to show that Wikipedia has lots of pages indexed in search engines (around over 53 million in Google, according to Google's "site" operator). But lots of pages indexed does not mean lots of pages will show up in search results. For Wikipedia, we all *know* that's the case from our searching experience, but to come up with statistically relevant data you'd have to use actual real sample queries for probing.

Re: One place blogosphere is hypocritical: advertising

Philipp Lenssen — Sat, 12 Nov 2005 13:17:53 -0000

I think the only important thing, and one every blogger should respect, is the separation of ads and content and making this *explicit* on the page, e.g. by putting "Sponsored links" or "Advertisement" on top of every ad section. Not doing so is sleazy, be it Marquis -- which would be incredibly sleazy when it's not mentioned to the readers, but IMO is OK and can be easily ignored when every post is clearly tagged (Nathan Weinberg of InsideGoogle put a red border around such posts and said they were sponsored) -- or be it any other kind of ad.

I used to have affiliate links when I was talking about books some time ago in my blog, but I stopped doing that after readers complaint. Now I think they were absolutely right. No matter how good your intentions, it'll just look spammy (and often, is).

That being said there is a shady zone. Let's say there's a niche blogger who writes about a certain topic. Let's say his ads are title "Ads" and his content isn't affiliated. But let's further say that blogger is talking about... viagra. Mortgages. Online gambling. I once interviewed a blogger -- who some might call splogger, spam blogger -- who did just that (Joe Harris, who's very frank about it too). Is that right or not? I would never do such blogs, but this is where the borders are blurred...

Re: #18: Forty faces posting like mad

Philipp Lenssen — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 06:41:28 -0000

As for scaling -- as soon as the site grows to proportions the current one can handle (which is indeed what could happen), I might introduce sub-categories in the form of fortyface.com/microsoft/ , fortyfaces.com/writing/, fortyfaces.com/sports/ and so on. This could then be expanded to work with sub-categories to the sub-categories (sports/basketball/) and so on.

Re: #18: Forty faces posting like mad

Philipp Lenssen — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 06:44:36 -0000

Just a PS: The categories would almost certainly need to be based on a good idea themselves, e.g. something very visual, so that the navigation flow could be maintained.

Re: #29: I gave Douglas Engelbart a mouse and a book

Philipp Lenssen — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 02:32:11 -0000

Will we see the video here?

Re: Forty Faces

Philipp Lenssen — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 11:26:25 -0000

Possibly, when it gets larger, I'll introduce sub-categories. That's just one approach and I'll start thinking about it as soon as it explodes :)