Nekkid Ninjas

If you are in business, putting your head in the sand doesn't work anymore. You need to be listening and talking to your customers, because if you aren't, they will be doing it with each other, and they won't be happy about it.

As a part of one of my day jobs, I need to read and summarize complaints about a particular automaker that are submitted to the NHTSA website in the US.

Reading a couple of hundred of these a month can be pretty soul destroying for an empathic person like me, as they almost always involve financial hardships, and occasionally injuries and even deaths. On the upside however,the process has opened my eyes to just how much communication goes on between a company's customers and how it impacts their view of the company.

Not satisfied controlling almost every advertisement on almost every website in the world,Google has decided that it's going to cut the middleman out of its advertising revenue, the middleman being the content providers for the sites their advertising is on.

How are they going to do this? It appears to be through a new service under development in the Google Labs, called fast flip. Fast flip takes an image of a particular site, at this stage it appears to be only news, and then posts the image with their own advertising into the fast flip service.

Now, they don't usually show the full article and they are showing an image of the website and not content cut directly from the website, so there is probably just enough protection to be able to claim fair use of your site content while depriving you of any ad revenue for content. This is because a lot of the time you can get enough information from that snippet of your article to not need to actually click through to the full article. In my own browsing for example, I only clicked through to one article of the 20+ that I browsed. In almost every case, I didn't quite get the full article, but I got enough that it wasn't worth the hassle of loading another page to finish reading it.

With a newsfeed page with lots of links, we need to click through one link to get to the full article, but fast flip makes us click through two pages to get to the full article, one of which has half the article and Google's advertising.

So not only is it not faster, but Google is depriving the content producer of all revenue on their articles much, if not most of the time. I am fairly confident that this will do a damn good job of reducing the amount of useful content that is produced, because authors who aren't getting paid tend to stop writing anything that requires a serious investment of time and energy.

Google is really starting to look like one of those vines that strangles the tree that it is living on, killing both of them. Because the more that they try to chase profit at all costs, the more they are damaging the usefulness of the Internet, which in turn can't help but impact negatively on their profits.

Many people have already given their opinion on the latest Nobel Peace Prize so I don't think I need to really say anything that hasn't already been said. However, I still thought it was worth doing a cartoon.

It's amazing how many misunderstandings that can happen when you have to limit your message within 140 characters.

So instead of continuing this on twitter, I'll make my statements on the sprites, placement of Javascript in your document and that, very clear.

For one, all in for sprite sheets. Hell, if you take a look at the front page of this blog and take a closer look at the "Read More" buttons, you'll see that they are in sprite sheets.

Inspired by a retweet[1] I did myself, regarding people that should really NOT write articles[2] about PHP, I began to code a little PHP benchmark. I call it a PHP performance case study[3]. It was inspired by a site that the autor of this 10 points tutorial took reliant as a base for his first paragraph "single quotes - double quotes" and named it "significant gains". I was really shocked while reading that!

My script primarily covers performance aspects in different ways of constructing PHP code. My intension is to show up, that it is not ever possible to state, which PHP function may be the fastest one. It will anytime depend on the whole code design.

Best Regards
Uwe Walter

[1] My ReTweet
[2] tutsplus :: 10 PHP mistakes
[3] PHP performance case study