I’m also keen on taking a look at the Speed Tracer…Looks like a winner to me.

If you have tried either of these, I’d love to hear about it.

“Ha!” sayeth the tempter, “Take away his adsense account and he will curse and defame you!” And so Google did, accusing him of click fraud although he had done none. And in his confusion and despair he looked upon the face of Google and appealleth saying – “Why have you forsaken me?” But Google made no reply…

Long bshoemate suffered. And in darkness and despair, he looked at Yahoo, but that strange portal offered no comfort. He looked to MSN but found no solace there. He traveled to the mighty Amazon, but path was not straight, the language unclear, and lost he became.

But then, an email. “Could it be! Cahloo Cahla” he cotorted in his joy and he read the email subject aloud from his open window to the streets below: “[#249567499] Google AdSense Account Reinstated!” Sweet, sweet justice he thought.

So where are the fabled ads of yore? Has he not yet put the code back on his site? Surely he must have only commented it out. “Nah, I’m in no hurry” he said, and wiser and a wearier man he rose the morrow morn.

I’m a big fan of Google (always have been) but I’m staring to worry that maybe I’ve given them a little to much trust and power. I have been a beta tester on almost all of their programs. I’ve played with everything in the Google lab, and been an advocate of all their services. But today I was sent a message telling me that my adsense account was disabled. I understand they have to protect the integrity of the system, but after looking into it, I can not figure out what they think I have done wrong. This is what they wrote:

Hello Ben Shoemate,

While going through our records recently, we found that your AdSense account has posed a significant risk to our AdWords advertisers. Since keeping your account in our publisher network may financially damage our advertisers in the future, we’ve decided to disable your account.

Just how significant a risk am I? I decided to find out.

The email has a link to the “Appeal” form – which when you read it, sounds almost like a guilty plea with questions like: “Provide any relevant information that you believe would explain the invalid click activity we detected“.

Invalid click activity? – ok now I’m really curious, lets go look at the logs – I can’t get into Adsense because, you know, Account Disabled. But I have my logs emailed to me daily, yesterdays log was in my email:

hmmm….no clicks, no earnings…am I not earning enough? So I added up my full 3 months of activity while I have been in the program, (I have never received any checks from Google so it is less than $100) and low and behold the grand total is $18.20.

Technically, as part of the Google Adsense Terms and Conditions I am not allowed to disclose

… click-through rates or other statistics relating to Site performance in the Program provided to You by Google…

But they already cut me off and frankly I don’t care if they turn it back on are not, I just want to know what happened. I mean – if there are “invalid clicks” wouldn’t those show up in my account?

They also ask for my log files, I thought that was a little creepy but complied….you don’t argue with the judge.

Looking a little deeper into the terms and conditions – google has this nice sentence – (try to read it all with one breath, that’s how you know it’s legalese instead of english):

Prohibited Uses. You shall not, and shall not authorize or encourage any third party to: (i) directly or indirectly generate queries, Referral Events, or impressions of or clicks on any Ad, Link, Search Result, or Referral Button through any automated, deceptive, fraudulent or other invalid means, including but not limited to through repeated manual clicks, the use of robots or other automated query tools and/or computer generated search requests, and/or the unauthorized use of other search engine optimization services and/or software;

good so far

(ii) edit, modify, filter or change the order of the information contained in any Ad, Link, Ad Unit, Search Result, or Referral Button, or remove, obscure or minimize any Ad, Link, Ad Unit, Search Result, or Referral Button in any way;

never done any of that but I did make my own search button…

but that is not listed as a no-no…hmm….lets keep reading.

(iii) frame, minimize, remove or otherwise inhibit the full and complete display of any Web page accessed by an end user after clicking on any part of an Ad (“Advertiser Page”), any Search Results Page, or any Referral Page;

I agree, I hate that stuff too and would never do that…

(iv) redirect an end user away from any Advertiser Page, Search Results Page, or Referral Page; provide a version of the Advertiser Page, Search Results Page, or Referral Page that is different from the page an end user would access by going directly to the Advertiser Page, Search Results Page, or Referral Page; intersperse any content between the Ad and the Advertiser Page, between the page containing the Search Box and the Search Results Page, or between the Referral Button and the Referral Page; or otherwise provide anything other than a direct link from an Ad to an Advertiser Page, from the page containing the Search Box to the Search Results Page, or from the Referral Button to the Referral Page;

…never done any of that….

(v) display any Ad(s), Link(s), or Referral Button(s) on any error page, on any registration or “thank you” page (e.g., a page that thanks a user after he/she has registered with the applicable Web site), on any chat page, in any email, or on any Web page or any Web site that contains any pornographic, hate-related, violent, or illegal content;

Is my star wars post too violent? I do have unnatural feelings of malice and hate toward the writers of the dialog in the prequels. Did google’s omniscient spider turn me in? Maybe it was the reference to Herman Goering (Hitler’s right hand man). If so, this is starting to sound very unfair and un-google-like. But they specifically mentioned “invalid clicks” on the appeal form (the email said only “significant risk” but I bet they have a different appeal form for all the haters out there. Let’s keep going…

(vi) directly or indirectly access, launch, and/or activate Ads, Links, Search Results, or Referral Buttons through or from, or otherwise incorporate the Ads, Links, Search Results, or Referral Buttons in, any software application, Web site, or other means other than Your Site(s), and then only to the extent expressly permitted by this Agreement (e.g., while Search Results may be indirectly accessed from Your Site(s), they may only be displayed on the appropriate Google-hosted Web page); (vii) “crawl”, “spider”, index or in any non-transitory manner store or cache information obtained from any Ads, Links, Search Results, or Referral Events, or any part, copy, or derivative thereto;

no, I haven’t done any of this either …

(viii) act in any way that violates any Program Policies posted on the Google Web Site, as may be revised from time to time, or any other agreement between You and Google (including without limitation the Google AdWords program terms), or engage in any action or practice that reflects poorly on Google or otherwise disparages or devalues Google’s reputation or goodwill. You acknowledge that any attempted participation or violation of any of the foregoing is a material breach of this Agreement and that we may pursue any and all applicable legal and equitable remedies against You, including an immediate suspension of Your account or termination of this Agreement, and the pursuit of all available civil or criminal remedies.

Well, I haven’t done any disparaging of google…yet, let’s see how they handle my appeal first.

As far as I know, I have been a perfect Google adsense user and an outstanding and upright citizen of the web. I never clicked my own ads, I never encourage others to click them and I never edited their javascript code. Unless some WordPress plug in is interfering with it that I didn’t notice (and I hate to admit it but I have not examined exactly what these plugins actually do – I kind of take some of them on faith and hope someone else in the community finds the flaw), or maybe someone on my network (thus with my IP) clicked ads (my wife? neighbor on my wi-fi?), but if so, when? I haven’t had any clicks. And as OJ’s lawyer once said – If the clicks don’t fit, you must acquit…or…something like that. Anyway, I do not understand what happened.

So now what? Now I give them 48 hours to review my appeal, and then I try out Amazon’s ad service. I like the idea of advertising books on my site better anyway. Those ads where mostly garbage (oops – hope that wasn’t too disparaging).

]]> http://www.benshoemate.com/2008/01/29/google-adsense-account-disabled/feed/ 83 http://www.benshoemate.com/2008/01/09/where-were-you-during-the-internet-gold-rush/ http://www.benshoemate.com/2008/01/09/where-were-you-during-the-internet-gold-rush/#comments Wed, 09 Jan 2008 23:10:19 +0000 Ben Shoemate http://www.benshoemate.com/2008/01/09/where-were-you-during-the-internet-gold-rush/ I have a birthday that falls within days of the new year. This means I get hit with 2 wake-up calls at once. Another year to look back and reflect on then WHAM! I’m another year older.

Working in the web industry, I am constantly aware of the wealth being generated and the constant, ever increasing change going on. We are truly living in a golden age of wealth and information. I am also aware that I’ve spent my time making other people richer. I missed the first internet bubble, I coasted right through the second web 2.0 rush. And now, in my ear I can hear the distant questions from my future grandchildren who, having read about these golden days in their history book will ask:

“Grandpa, what were you doing when all this was happening? Why didn’t you invent the iPhone?” they’ll ask.
“Well,” I’ll reply, “I guess I was too busy working on other things.”
“Like what?” They’ll ask. They always ask. They are just kids after all. You can not expect them to notice the subtle tension in their grand father’s voice or the the regret in his eyes warning them that some subjects are best not talked about.
“Oh, I don’t remember…some kind of purchasing system for some corporation that threw it away 2 years later.”
“But grandpa, why didn’t you go work at Google!” they say cheerfully flipping back to the colorful page about the search giant. “It says here that even the cleaning staff got stock options and became rich. One of them was even the first man on Mars!”

“Shut up you kids!” I’ll say, “No more books!”

Then when they start to cry I’ll say “Now…who wants ice cream?”

Powered by ScribeFire.

Also, gmail ignores the . in your name. So even if you signed up for FirstLast@gmail.com you can tell people at work its First.Last@gmail.com and set up a filter to auto tag those as work. Also cool.

Google trends has become an valuable tool for me in comparing the popularity of everything from HDTV sets, websites, software, and presidential candidates to vacation spots. I can’t wait to see what kind of mash-ups the web community creates.

This post gets a lot of attention, so I rewrote part of it. It will give you step-by-step instructions to take all your old email (in my case over 10 years worth) and upload it into Gmail. Over the years I have used several different email clients: Pine on Unix, Outlook, Lotus Notes, Yahoo Mail, and Gmail. I am currently pretty comfortable with Gmail and have been using it since it was released. Like many people I am a data pack-rat and have kept all my email files (well, almost all – sadly I discovered a 6 months gap). My vision is to put it all into Gmail so I can leverage the great search and tagging features they provide. So here are the steps.

Overall Strategy – get everything converted and loaded into a local server, then sync it to Google.

Why do it this way? There are many advantages. First, if your just moving 100 to a 1000 messages with no attachments, then you can just skip all this and use the IMAP interface found in Google’s FAQ. That method allows you to “see” you gmail account in outlook (or thunderbird or lotus notes) and then just drag or copy messages from one box to the other.  But if your moving more than 1000 messages (or in my case 20,000 messages) with lots of attachments, that will take you days, and you have to sit there are watch it because you can only move about 200 messages at a time. In this method, we consolidate first to a local email server (I’ll show you how to set it up below) running on pc, then let the two accounts (your local one and gmail) sync on their own. Any other way and you are stuck sitting there, dragging and dropping or copying and pasting 200 messages at a time from one folder to another. Second – this keeps all dates in tact. It is really nice to see message you send in 1995 in your Gmail account. Third, once we do this, we can use it as a local backup of our Gmail – just incase the unthinkable happens to Gmail. (I said don’t think of it!)

Ready? Let’s get started

Here is the over all process – you will notice that I installed a email server on my computer called Mercury. This allows us to set up a IMAP and POP account locally that is much faster and will serve as a local backup of all email. 

Step 1) First find all your email

I dug through all my old hard drives and consolidate my mail into one location. As you can see, I have outlook (pst) files, lotus notes (nsf) files and files from an old Unix (pine) account I had at school. The zip file (all 2.7GB of it) is the finished product – all my email from 1995 though 2005 (2006 and 2007 are in gmail already).

 
If you are looking at my files, you see a lot of overlap, that’s ok, better safe than sorry…we can delete the duplicates once they are in Thunderbird using an extension.

Step 2. Download the Software

• Thunderbird (free email client) – http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/
• Mercury (free email server) – ftp://ftp.usm.maine.edu/pegasus/mercury32/m32-452.exe (read about it)
• Lotus Notes (free trial) – http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/downloads/
• Outlook (free trial) – http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/default.aspx

Why Thunderbird – because it is open source with a large developer base. This means there is a good set of tutorials for writing extensions if I to want later on (for those visualizations). Also, I’m making a long term bet that 50 years from now, there will still be tools that import these files – (since they are just text files with no encoding and no database) – plus Thunderbird is really fast and can read 6gb of email quickly (lotus notes and outlook tend to slow down). So Thunderbird will be the final destination on my computer and I will upload from there.

Step 3. Install the software

• Thunderbird – just default everything
• Mercury – Make sure you set it up for both POP and IMAP when you get those options in the wizard
• Lotus Notes – Default
• Outlook – Default

Step 4. Import Unix files to Thunderbird

These are the easiest because Thunderbird will read these natively. All you have to do is copy the files in to the local folder and reopen Thunderbird.
A) Find out where thunderbird is storing your local files. To do this go to Tools > Account Settings. (note I renamed the local account to Ben Shoemate (all mail) but what your interested in is the "Local Directory" copy that and go there in windows explorer. This is where you need to copy the Unix files (they are files with no extensions). Just copy them to this "local folder", close and restart Thunderbird. Your old mail will be there! That’s it!

Step 5. Set up a local Email account in Mercury.

Open Mercury – if it is all ready running you will see down in the windows toolbar by the clock.

Otherwise , Start > Program Files > etc..

Once Mercury is open, go to Configuration > Manage Local Users > Add User
Because there is so much mail, I am going to set up a different local account per year. Gmail.com can import from 5 accounts at a time, and this will save a lot of time later on. So just make up an account name – I use my initials and the year and a simple password.

It should look like this when your done.

Each of these accounts are real email addresses. When you are local (in lotus notes and outlook) you can map to them with bs1999@localhost
In gmail, you can add them as bs1999@youripaddress (i.e. bs1999@111.111.122.11).

Step 6. Lotus Notes NSF files to your local email with IMAP

Once lotus notes is installed, you can simply double click the nsf files to open them, or you can click File > Database > Open > browse

You should see your old mail now. Ahh the memories….But don’t stop to read everything again or I’ll never finish this tutorial! Now, in lotus notes we are going to map to the local email account you set up in mercury. (Note: Gmail now has IMAP so you could just map directly to gmail if you want using the same procedure – but again, it will take a 100 years if you have this much email).

Go to File > Preferences > Client Reconfiguration Wizard

Check Pop or IMAP and click next.

Select IMAP, enter your new email account you set up in mercury, and type localhost, click next.

enter your account name again, and enter the password you gave yourself.
Click next, enter localhost as the server and your email address again – this doesn’t matter since you will not be using this email address for very long and it won’t show up on any of the mail that goes through it.
next, next, next your done.

To open the view of this in notes, click the "Databases" icon on the left panel and open your new account (this might take 2-3 minutes while notes creates a new nsf file etc.)

Now you should have you local account open. Now simply open the old nsf file, go to the "all documents" folder, select all, copy (I think it will only let you copy 2500 at a time) and then switch to you new email account and paste. Once you have all the messages for that year in the local IMAP account, close the nsf and repeat for all nsf files, and all years.

Step 7 – Outlook to your local email with IMAP

The same as in lotus notes – open your pst, then add the imap account and copy and paste.

• To open the pst go to File > Manage Data files and click Add.
• To open the local IMAP account go to Tools > Account Settings > New email account

Check the box that says "Manually configure server settings".

• Select Internet Mail
• Enter your Name, Email address (bs1999@localhost) and password, select IMAP, the server is localhost for both incoming and outgoing

Once you have mapped to this account, simply copy your old mail from the PST to the new account.

Step 8 – Clean it up in Thunderbird

Connect Thunderbird to you local email server (mercury) and download all your mail. Just like in outlook and lotus notes, we are going to add an account to Thunderbird and let it download all the mail you just put into it from lotus notes, pine and outlook.

• Open Thunderbird
• Click Tools > Account Settings > Add Account
• Enter Account Name (for me its bs1999@localhost), Name, email address (bs1999@localhost)

• Click Server settings

• Click OK.
• The next thing I did was organize copy them down into my local Thunderbird account and used an extension to delete duplicates
• Then I spent some time looking for gaps…oh well

Step 9 – Upload to gmail

By now your local account has a lot of mail. Let’s start pulling it into gmail. I set up a new gmail account to test it first. From there I can pull it into my main account.

• Log in to gmail
• Click Settings > Accounts > Get Mail from other accounts (Pop3) > Add other accounts
• Add your accounts from your local account. Note: you need you IP address. If you have a router you will need to route ports for pop3 (port 110) to your local computer. Log into your router to do this. While your there, get the IP of your router (ITS NOT the one that starts with 192. or 10. those are always local addresses)

(that’s NOT my IP address btw)

Next – gmail gives you some great options to tag the mail as it comes in, do it. Even if your not a tagger – do it.

You might also want to leave the message on the server (your computer) if this is a trial run.
Click Add account. If you get a problem, make sure your firewall is open, you port is mapped, and your password is right.

Next I’ll show you how to upload all those old chats…

If you liked this post, check out my other greatest hits:

• Words Einstein never said (but everyone thinks he did)
• Rewriting the Star Wars Prequels (they need it)
• Pimp your Credit Card
• The story of the bear and the big dipper

So, I am here to tell you, that as of right, now, there is no way to:

• Add yahoo or google users to you Sametime list at work
• Add sametime users to you home google talk of yahoo IM.

Why no one is saying this is a product of the uncertainty caused by being unable to confirm a negative. It’s not just me either, there were at least 2o questions about this in Yahoo Answers. Including the one I added.

So here is my promise – if someone says it can be done, I will document it, and update this post. Also, if you can tell me it can not be done, because IBM has not set it up yet, that is good to. It is the uncertainty that kills us.

People search for terms like “full moon” with the clockwork regularity of celestial events like, well, like full moons.

The holidays also show a steady heartbeat in search. I thought it was strange that “Earth day” would be more popular than Easter.

But then i remembered two things. First people are still working on Earth day, so they are at their computers, and second, google skews the results with those cartoon logos they put on their main search page. When you click it, it searches for that term. So bottom line, this just means more people are using google on Earth day than Easter. It makes sense but also reminds us that we have to take these graphs with a grain of salt.

Other things that follow a pattern: American Idol, which is apparently very popular in the Philippines.
IBM’s star is falling (its as popular now as summer is in the winter) and Lenovo’s is rising.

Point A in the graph is where Lenovo bought IBM’s PC business. One last graph, this one ties into both IBM and portals. Since I spent a lot of time helping clients get value from their portal investments, lets look at where the market interest lies.

This may be apples and oranges since Sharepoint is used for collaboration more than portals (and I’ve always felt it creates silos for information more than it tears them down, but thats the subject of a later blog.) Tell me about the interesting trends you discover in the comments.