My stance, overwhelmingly, is that the SOPA bill (and it’s cousin PIPA) are crap: too broad, special interest nightmare, unreasonable burden on free enterprise. My question to the masses is: what did you expect would happen? You have these massive moneymakers of old media in Hollywood and the record industry and you’d expect them to quietly watch a large chunk of their revenue publically disappear into piracy? At some level we must know that measures such as SOPA and DRM etc are reality. I have maybe a different perspective on this as the holder of several copyrights and patents.  Legal ownership to an idea isn’t security in the slightest. The burden is on the holder to protect it…in court, with expensive discovery and attorneys. Intellectual property is something that roots in our most basic of constitutional rights so I am loathe to throw that out the window quickly. When Napster was up part of the rush of downloading was knowing it was about to get shut down. That it wasn’t sustainable and couldn’t be.

An argument can be made both for and against the need for big business in creative arts (software, music, film). Films like The Dark Night could never come from an indie environment. Yet films like Primer couldn’t come from the box office.  Whatever the scale, I believe in the right of profit to be made on ideas. That if you have a good idea and can execute then you should be able to make money on it. And if the amount of money isn’t proportional or bad business practices are involved then that is a separate issue. But the probability of ideas is critical for innovation. Without financial incentive for entrepreneurs there is no motive for change or improvement and the U.S.  stands still as the globe spins.

The system is broke, that much is obvious and we gain nothing by mindlessly chanting the slogan. Furthermore outcry and activism without meaningful reform is actually causing more harm than good. Without solutions the system remains broken and those who are trying to fix it legislatively are only growing more determined and more frustrated. They and the core issue of Intellectual Property are never going away. We can’t ignore it. We need more models like Spotify that satisfy this instant gratification generation but still profit the other interests in the transaction. We must take ownership of the problem and design and build systems that work and are equitable for everyone.

Godaddy PR seems to be stuck in deer/headlights mode; there was no official video response, nor any public facing efforts save a few choice private interviews with folks like Techcrunch.com and the official Goddady blog/press release. A bit anemic considering the amount of activity I have observed on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Youtube etc. A vocal minority? Possibly. Bandwagoners trying to up their page views? Certainly(Us included of course). People actually doing anything? I have seen little news coverage of that. It takes about a week in my experience to transfer a domain between registrars, and this is a cumbersome, technical and frustrating process. There are quite a few problem areas such as lock status, auto-protect, EPP codes, email of record etc and even when it goes smoothly for me it is firmly on the bottom of my “work I dig” list. An uphill battle for the neophyte which, let’s face it most of these Godaddy account holders will be. I would like to see some hard numbers on exactly how many domains have migrated from GoDaddy or to another registrar within the last week.

But soapboxing aside, what does Godaddy owe the public? An explanation certainly from the way they have appeared to flipflop on the issue. Fact #1 According to the original SOPA bill, GoDaddy.com was named as a supporter of the bill- their official testimony. Fact #2 Goddady no longer supports SOPA. This is a 180 which seems to be seceding to pressure- quite distasteful and offensive, little more than a lip service. Better PR would have been to shoot a video… either of the CEO or maybe some top brass, maybe Danica Patrick tackling the bull by the horns, discussing the issue in clarity, apologizing for offending it’s customers, and explaining the company’s stance. Best PR would have been proactively firming up the levee for this exact issue long prior. Other thoughts: Namecheap seems to be the beneficiary of lots of politically motivated transfers… is there a profit motive for corporate to sling mud? Are certain Reddit users getting compensated via Namecheap affiliate links? Who threw Godaddy under the bus and why? (None of the other supporters are getting as much heat).

So what am I doing? Well, I don’t like to make snap decisions. Long ago, I made the original decision to use Godaddy based on the fact that they were well advertised. This meant that every client I dealt with had a 99% chance of knowing who Goddady was, and thus their costs and value were legitimate. Maybe this is not so relevant anymore. The main issue I have with Godaddy is that their software and entire user interface sucks the worst ass out of any provider ever. I could easily write 1000 words on this topic alone but suffice it to say the primary reason my inventory is still with them is that it is time consuming to move it. Likely I will transfer the few personal domains I have renewing soon but I am not under any illusion that it will influence Godaddy in the slightest. Instead my decision will be motivated by price, UX and service. In closing, I will post(or email you) detailed instructions on how to change your registrar. If any past, present or prospective clients would like this service feel free to contact me. I am also happy to explain why SOPA is both a terrible law and an inevitable concept; what is really motivating  Godaddy (Hint: Not the Consumer) and the implications for your online business.

Sources: Reddit | TechCrunch | SOPA Progress

Now why am I going on an on about torrents, when this SOPA bill “would extend the burden of responsibility for copyright violation to the companies that deliver web content to users, as decided and ordered by the Department of Justice.”? [courtesy Yahoo News] Well,  ”Beyond expanding the government’s provisions for enforcing copyright laws, SOPA would also make streaming copyrighted material a Felony under US Law, punishable by up to five years in prison.” Meaning if you seed a torrent, you could go to prison. And far easier than before- when the RIAA was pursuing it’s famous Metallica punitive damage cases this was in civil court and while inane was just financial penalties. This makes it way easier to prosecute.

The core problem of course is that everything is so complicated on the internet that any legislation such as SOPA is written very broadly. And it consolidates the power and burden of this law in the hands of the content gateways:  eBay, Twitter, AOL, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Mozilla, Zynga, and LinkedIn. Unsurprisingly with potential customer nightmare and increased staff every one of these companies has publicly denounced H.R.326 to Congress.

In closing let me refocus this to the small business. Say I own a blog, and copyright protected material comes to be posted on it(perhaps through a remote author, or comment or even spam/hacker). This could be defined as even a few sentences of plain text! The content owner may serve a DMCA takedown (legal procedure under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act) notice to my hosting company, who suspends the site but also provides a renewal process for me to either A) contest the DMCA and reverse the action or B) comply by taking the content down. SOPA replaces this bilateral process with a kind of “forced guardianship” – instead any alleged copy right protected content will need to be removed wherever it appears: twitter feed, google search results, facebook subscribe etc. And since there is no direct relationship between you, the small business owner and these massive corporate companies there will be no review process, no human intervention, no appeals and no investigations. Massive indiscriminate censorship will ensue.

Tell Congress that they don’t understand the internet. That the existing solutions are strong in concept. That it is not the government’s role to protect old media content. To keep the internet laissez faire. http://keepthewebopen.com/sopa

Further Reading

Tech Crunch | Yahoo News | Full Text of Sopa | Digital Millennium Copyright Act 1998 

What goes first is your concentration. It is almost impossible to preserve a work environment for yourself and keep strong focus on tasks. You develop a kind of ADD which is made much worse by the lack of sleep.  You feel as if you are not firing on all cylinders, loping along at 75% of capacity. Creativity and capacitive thinking sapps. You fall instantly asleep when napping or drinking red wine.  A fog of war rolls across your  mental map of your applications and systems. Your patience wears to a thin wire and your temper flares. A old friend was kind enough to lend me use of a desk in his office twice a week… without this luxury, I surely would have gone insane. You really take the ability to focus in a work environment for granted until it is gone. And when restored, you work like a demon straight out of hell.  Because I sure as hell wouldn’t trade my girl for the work she’s doing- and I try to let her know as much a possible I respect and appreciate what she does.

The icing on the cake of course is that it’s finals week. In addition to being a Dad and a fulltime VP of Tech of a major Ad Agency and cofounder of a Startup I am also a student. I have a test worth two letter grades tomorrow morning; the study guide is looming from my other monitor as I write. My plate is good and full and heavy right now. But to cast me as some cork tossed hither and thither in the sea of life is melodramatic and inaccurate. At the end of the day I take responsibility for my actions. I could easily take drop out of school, shutter my startup, cushy up my career and just coast. Take a couple long vacations. But the failed ambition would pickle me inside. Call it pride or arrogance if you want but I want to be remembered for more than my ability to pay bills and raise my children. The bar is much higher than that actually. As they say, aim for the stars, hit the moon. Onwards & Upwards.

One particular IE bug eluded me for a long time. When building PHP web apps that required the user be remembered (anything to do with shopping carts, login systems, etc), IE would loose the session. But only older versions of IE, not 8 or 9. Nor other browsers like Chrome, Opera, Safari or Firefox. Absolutely maddening because it is very difficult to test these issues with a dynamic site- there are plenty of page rendering sites out there, but you really need a native instance.

To understand why the below code works, you have to first understand how Session works. When you open that first session_start() call in PHP, it is going to create a tiny text file called a cookie on the users computer. All this text file will contain is the unique ID of this session, which corresponds to a text file on the server. So if you have a web form that POSTs the user’s email into $_SESSION['email'], this will be physically stored on the server in a directory somewhere, and the user’s machine has a reference to this. HTML is stateless, meaning that each time user requests a page (visits it in their browser), this page is “dumb” and doesn’t know the user from adam. This is where the cookie comes in, identifying the user to the script and allowing it to pull personalized content out.

So where this goes wrong is that while most modern browsers handle the Session Cookie in a predictable and normal way, IE7 and lower versions behave strangely. It is very easy to confuse IE in this case and cause it to drop the cookie, so when session_start() is called the session is blanked out and restarted. When researching it I came across many different explanations for this behavior, from the size of the cookie, to having to call session_write_close() before a redirect, etc. In my experience it is mostly caused by a mismatch between the HTTP header and the cookie. The code linked patches the issue by explicitly setting the session cookie.

The more frustrating part (and the value to me) was trying to figure out how to diagnose. Here’s what I did in order to find and squash the issue:

1. Some form submissions were coming through blank. I first thought it was automated spam triggering the script(which it is in some cases), but I soon learned legitimate users were having problems.
2. I tried to diagnose it by finding a computer still running IE6, but was unable to reproduce the issue. I spent literally days trying different browser rendering solutions without finidng a workable, simple or cost efective diagnostic tool.
3. Instead I set a small php logging script in the include files, which recorded the IP address, User agent, and Session ID. After some data gathering and reverse lookup on the UA, it was clear we had an IE-only problem.
4. I then did echo session_id() and used the 100% free and awesome testing tool IE Netrenderer to verify that indeed a new session ID was being generated on each page load.
5. Finally I implemented this fix, and since have not had a single problem with it since.

Our two softwares could not have been more different. Mine was a inelegant, crudely simple and downright forceful web application, heavily dependent on third party libraries and written solely by me over a handful of sleepless nights. Theirs was a custom MVC built to order by a dev team at a well established Indian development company. My software wasn’t designed to scale under load so, naively, I had no objection to moving to their platform. I thought also that I could help interface with their team there.

The primary problem was communication. The first manifest of trouble was email. I am Pacific time, so I would often send emails first thing in the morning to them, about 7 AM. This about 8PM local time New Delhi, India.  So in other words everyone was already out of the office and into the bar by that time. Conversely, 7AM there is about 6PM PST. So for my application, I only had this short window where I could talk to  them. They were good about providing Skype or IM but again only in this window. Now, there was a US contingent who would always answer regardless of time difference, but to actually talk to the programmer, you had to chase the clock. Unbelievably annoying.

The second manifest is the language barrier. There is just something convoluted and bastardized about our tongue that it is extremely rare to find a decent second language English speaker. Finding people who can communicate programming concepts articulately and eloquently is hard enough. Combine the two and you have heap trouble. Combine these with an hourly rate…Ouch. On the regular, we would spend hours on Skype and email outlining things only to get the polar opposite sent back to us. Worse, the framework the Indian team had chosen was custom and on a labyrinth style level of complication. To my ability and energy level, it was an impenetrable muck.

I felt like my hands were tied. As it turned out, my partners, though charismatic and intelligent, had exactly zero knowledge of programming at all and were banging their heads much harder against the same wall. I was unable to accomplish few if any of my ad publishing or SEO plans, eventually simply exiting the partnership. I was so demoralized that I left my content with them and didn’t even bother working on my original project ever again. Once I asked them why they had made that decision to outsource; they replied that the cost to launch was 1/4th the low average for American quotes. I then asked if we could explore alternatives, and the consensus was that too much time and money had already been invested(there was a great deal of both). While I know there are mediocre programmers of every language and nationality, under conditions such as these faults and problems are amplified: you really do get what you pay for. Writing about that time has brought back a few good memories… We all struggled with building and managing a startup on a limited budget; and we operated in that precious sliver of time that exists between your primary employment and your family’s needs. I’d like to close with that I still have a great deal of respect for my partners- we all make mistakes. Let this be a lesson in how and where you find your programmers.

I used to think coding was special, and coders walked amongst like Jedis. After all, coders are brainy, and  just look at the idolization of the engineer  brains at Google, Facebook or Twitter.  But that’s unfortunately the exception not the rule. Those so unlucky to have ivy league pedigree, or worse, Self Taught University on their diploma are screwed. They are working at small businesses where nobody really understands what they do but passes all technical responsibility upon them. If they are fortunate, their job is challenging in an intellectual way. If they are really lucky, they have one coworker who can actually talk to them about functions and methods.

The only thing keeping most programmers in their chair
is the cost to train them and replace them. What with the techification of the hiring process; the ease of finding well qualified candidates; the rise of outsourcing based on adoption of communication tools such as Skype, Google Apps/Voice, GotoMeeting etc; it’s now never been easier to manage the HR of your programmers. In fact, for the average business owner, programmers are rapidly getting as easy to source and manage as customer service.

The light at the end of the tunnel is the headlamp of SAAS, a freight train demolishing the legion of home brew apps and cobbled together frameworks small businesses depend on. In every possible category, even some unlikely ones like medical, we hear about enterprise class, brilliantly designed, massive scaled (and cost effective) software. I’d have to guess it puts a few programmers out of work for each it hires to maintain the SAAS.

Sure, there are some operational and logistical considerations keeping your cushy php developer job from being outsourced to India for $7/hour (this is a real rate from a real provider), but you are on notice: only a slick bilingual Punjabi/English US based rep having a cocktail with your boss away from the unemployment line. There are now people graduating college who have first experienced the consumer version of the internet at age 8. With education and experience, inevitably, as Daft Punk says, they will Doit Better, Faster Stronger than you, you old fuddy duddy. The age of the programmer being an artist, a craftsman, a witch doctor, is over. You’ll have to be more than the neckbeard hiding in the server closet. I challenge to find other facets to your crystal, other tricks for your pony: people skills, marketing skills, creative thinking, UI skills, business savvy…(gasp) managerial technique.

Authors Note- I wrote this post last week, but it din’t seem to survive the Hosting transfer we just went through. Now restored!

Text PPC ads have always been, and continue to remain, a favorite of mine. There is something magnificent about the format to me. For example, it is much easier (for me at least) to test iterations.  But image ads work well on the content network, having to appear in a variety of locations and content. So we put a lot of time into this batch, and did a lot of testing. This was one of the larger campaigns we had ran in this vertical, and would prove a nice design pattern if successful (we measure success here by  Conversion,  CPA and lead quality).

So imagine my dismay when I am checking the traffic sources and discover about $180 of clearly fraudulent clicks (we are paying about an avg CPC of $3.50 in this area).

I have seen so many statistics and reports over the years that I could not tell you specifically what red flagged about this pattern- I am constantly pruning out traffic sources, keywords and ads that are underperformers, but this stood out. The ad group performance was way off the group, and historical. A little analysis showed it had been sucking almost the entire daily budget for the last few days. Most importantly the traffic wasn’t  converting  at all… and the kicker was the CTR. 30% is unreal. I know from working the publisher side standard Adsense CTR is rockstar at 2-3% and other media m-a-y-b-e  5-10% if you are using matched upsells or behavior targeting. The icing on the cake was visiting the site in question and finding it to be a vanilla wordpress blog with 3 pages of content- in other words incapable of generating any useful traffic, not to mention $180 worth of targeted clicks.

Thus, I fired off the fraudulent click form, and documented the issue as best I could. Having worked quite a bit with Adwords CS, I’ve noted that you need to be super explicit and thoroughly spell things out for them.  Sure enough, today I got a notice that they had indeed confirmed the clicks were invalid and were in the process of crediting back (even more than I had noticed) to our clients account. Win-Win! It’s things like these that give me a good feeling that our investment in their advertising platform, products and API.

In closing though I have clients whose entire monthly budget is $200- these clients cannot afford to lose even a few bucks on bad clicks. And if they are maintaining their own account in their spare time, without the benefit of the training and experience I have… How can they possibly address this? Google has always been the best at combating click fraud but just like any other form of marketing, the small business is getting it in the shorts here. Does this frighten you? Is it old news?? Tell me in the comments.