Things That Make You Go Hmm...

I found something interesting yesterday while researching something for a column. Search Technorati for "Ford Bold Moves" (without the quotes) and you'll find something very disappointing. You will see a huge number of returns for blogs that carry a Ford Bold Moves comment spam ad.I say it's comment spam because the ads are apparently not related to the content of the posts at all. There are posts about cell phones, computing, news stories, video games and all sorts of other things that are irrelevant to Ford, yet there's this text in comments that reads "FORD BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD. A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time" I notice that at least one auto blog that got picked up by Technorati for this search term has deleted the comment, so it appears people other than me are perceiving it as spam.

Here's the kicker: The ad links are all redirects from DoubleClick. Obviously, that's so that whoever is running this comment spam campaign can track clicks. And guess who shows up on DoubleClick's customer testimonials page? The clickthrough URLs also seem to be carrying some interesting information, consistent with click-tracking applications that run on the advertiser side.

From the outside looking in, this has all the identifying marks of an official Ford comment spam campaign. Yes, it could be a rogue affiliate from some sort of affiliate program, but I doubt it. Ford has some 'splainin' to do.

Revisionist History Dying

Old concept demonstrated with a new example. Check that video out.  Basically, a comic named Joe Rogan calls Carlos Mencia out publicly for stealing material from other comics.

I can't remember where I heard it or read it, but folks have been talking about how it's going to become increasingly difficult for politicians (and public figures in general) to falsely claim they never said something or never did something, since a quick search of YouTube produces instant evidence to the contrary.  In the past, politicians were able to make claims that have no basis in reality and have at least some percentage of the people listening take them at their word.  That's tougher to get away with these days, when people have easy access to searchable video, transcripts and whatnot that can be used to call people on their bullshit.

Unless it's another one of those hoaxes designed to generate publicity, Carlos Mencia is definitely feeling the burn.

It's WHAT you get paid for, not how much

Ross Fadner from Mediapost linked to my latest column in iMedia, but seemed to have glossed over the main point.  It's not that interactive agencies should be getting paid more.  It's that they're getting paid for the wrong thing. While there's a lot of work involved in getting a campaign live and maintaining/optimizing it over time, the most valuable portion of an engagement with a client is the strategy work.  Commission-based compensation models don't pay agencies at all for this work.  They pay a commission when the media runs.  Think about what kind of message that sends to agencies - that strategy ain't worth a damn, while execution is what gets you paid.  This doesn't make sense.  I think this is why many agencies are gravitating toward retainers, hours-based project fees and hybrids (a planning fee that's partially refundable if and when the campaign does run).

Agencies do a lot of great strategy work, and many times an agency compensated on commission doesn't get paid for it when a client decides not to run the accompanying media campaign.  Do this enough times and you'll go out of business.  Plain and simple.

FreeNAS Rules

After spending maybe another half hour with it, and after reading the immensely helpful articles over on Tim Fehlman's site.  Tim stopped by the other day and left a comment in the other FreeNAS thread, and I checked his site out.  Great overviews of all the basic configuration options and some awesome "how to" articles as well. Really, all I wanted was a box I could plug into my router so that other folks on my home workgroup could have a place to back up files.  FreeNAS came through in spades.  I ran out and scooped up a 140GB hard drive at Best Buy (Western Digital stuff was on sale) and threw it into the Compaq as a slave drive.  I backed my laptop up to it yesterday, and it's as fast as the Terastation we have in the office.

The only problem I'm having is with FTP.  I wanted to set up the FreeNAS FTP server so I could snag files from home while I'm at the office.  I followed the directions - no dice.  And yes, I did set up port forwarding on my NetGear router to send FTP requests to the FreeNAS box.

I'm guessing that Optimum Online is probably blocking the requests before they hit my IP.  Unfortunately, I didn't have time to troubleshoot the problem thoroughly - that will likely be a project for next weekend.

If you've got an older machine sitting around and need something for home backups, I'd recommend using FreeNAS.