al_james

Agreed. It shows that you can achieve SEO goals whilst providing informative and valuable content. I hope that as google cracks down on 'poor quality content' sites, content rich, but SEO-aware, articles like this will be rewarded.

Impressive they run that site off 6 front-end servers.

Very interesting. Not sure that the browser is the right place for dealing with large amounts of statistical data, but still it may have some uses.

Wow. Very nice example. Works well in Chrome 10 on Mac (about 30fps).

Ok, I think we will have to agree to disagree!

All nice in theory... the real world is very different.

Good for them, however would be better if it was clickable to more information... But I guess that would be different per country.

Good call. No, you have to start again. Oh well, not a big deal.

Note you can only block 500 sites, I should think thats enough though.

Excellent. Thanks Google, you have just saved my sanity.

So can I disable the chrome plugin now? Will it remember the sites I have already blocked?

>Banners hosted locally and not by a third party service probably won't be affected at all.

So you have to install and manage your own local ad server to earn ad revenue from your site? Many publishers large and small use ad servers e.g. doubleclick, adtech to avoid this overhead.

>Why can't the advertisers simply re-evaluate the rates they pay per impression based on the expected cost/benefit under the new model?

Yes, publishers loose out once again.

> and I can't see any site I've visited today that appears to be funded only by the kind of targeted ads we're discussing.

I think thats a key point. ALL banner advertising would be affected by this change. All ad servers use cross domain cookie tracking of some kind. If not to track user behaviour, its (for example) to track impressions to make sure that you dont show the same ad to the same user more than a set number of times. That is also a 3rd party cookie.

Without that ability it will be hard (impossible?) to rate limit campaigns to users, thus increasing the cost effectiveness to the advertiser and eventually hurting publishers as advertising money is diverted elsewhere.

In short, this rule would affect ALL banner adverts on all sites. So 99%, yes (at least the content sites I have read today).

> Just because you fund your content through ads

Me and 99% of the sites I have read today...

> The most lucrative advertising deals I know about are between sites catering to particular interest groups and advertisers

In my experience, the most lucrative advertising campaigns are based on audience tracking and retargeting.

In an ideal world, yes. However, in the real world, most high paying advertising campaigns are retargeting based, thus requiring cross domain tracking. Excluding such tracking limits you to lower paying campaigns and remnant backfill. Most publishers are simply forced to accept such policies otherwise their earnings would reduce significantly.

Yes, this is a far better solution.

It also gives flexibility back to site owners. If you business model depends on tracking (so much that a visitor who opts out of tracking costs you money) they are free to redirect the user away or throw up a paywall.

Be that as it may, most of the sites I (at least) enjoy every day use the free content for advertising model. Very few of the sites would be able to make the transition to another business model that did not rely on advertising.

You don't like websites earning money for providing you with free content?

They will use a combination of user-agent, IP address and other browser profile information. This is surprising good at uniquely identifying most computers.

It only really falls down when there are a large number of totally identical machines in the same IP range, where the machines are locked down so plugins (etc..) cannot be installed. E.g. a large office or university lab.

As a web-publisher, I find the general distaste of (advertising) tracking cookies a little hard to swallow. At the end of the day, tracking cookies exist because they allow the sites you visit (and probably don't pay for directly) to earn more money (on average) across all their visitors.

Advertising is the life-blood of publishers on the Internet. Without advertising (and by extension, tracking) many of the sites you enjoy every day would cease to exist.

At least using cookies you CAN opt out (via browsing settings and plugins). All that will happen is that the tracking networks will switch to browser fingerprinting making tracking harder to control and more opaque.

Discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2300123

I don't see many commends negative to PHP itself. Instead the negative comments about this idea point out that it does not really bring that much to the table, and that the resources given to this could be better spent elsewhere.

Also, just because a feature is offered 'as a gift' does not mean it should automatically be included in a OSS project. Thats how projects become bloated (this is not comment for or against the idea, just a general point).

Normally you just install apache and php and they just work. Macs come with both pre-installed as do most linux distros. Don't see whats so hard!

I don't really see how this would help. Thats what FastCGI is for. You would have to be dumb to expose a php internal HTTP server to the world, and configuring a FastCGI backend is no harder than setting up a HTTP backend in apache/nigix/whatever. If its just for testing, most apache installs come with PHP by default, its just another command to learn.

Running your own mailserver is like your own mini-Vietnam war. Looks straight-forward, but you will soon be bogged down and stuck.

Trust me, use a 3rd party service.

Does not need to be mail chimp though. I am using these guys:

http://www.jangosmtp.com/

Crappy site, but good server. Just a well set up SMTP server, so with a few config lines from your app you can send mails through this instead of your own server.

Yes, it would be cool to link through to the location even if the image is not there...

Yes. That would be awesome indeed.

I think many of them are no longer on google maps, particularly in areas where they retake the photos quite often.

Why does it have to be someone of the opposite gender?

How long before someone starts a start-up that adds open / click tracking to SES for a small fee on top? Given that SES is an order of magnitude cheaper, there is quite a bit of room to play with.

Arh! I see.

So, when if I install this extension, I can hack those files (in the extension's directory I assume) reload the browser and the javascript engine will do whatever I have changed?

Sorry, can someone please give an overview of what this is and how it works (I did not find any detailed examples on the site).

My understanding is that its an alternative javascript engine that can be modified (using javascript itself I assume) and those modifications packaged and shared.

Is that right? I was looking for an example of how you modify the engine and what can be modified. Any ideas?

You can argue all you want! I have just expressed my honest belief that all successful sites use "PR and faffery" in some way or the other, even if its not obvious.