The point that Seth makes is that for most projects, you have to be able to be able to categorize it. People don't want to know what it is, but what it's like. That gives them a quick, experiential point of reference they can build on. "It's like King Kong, but with a giant bunny" lets the audience's memory/perception quickly fill in a whole bunch of blanks so you don't have to.

On a rare occasion, though, your project is so unique, it defies a simple categorization. You can't get that quick hit of familiarity. You either have to describe it in full, without the aid of familiar references, or you have to say "it's like nothing you've ever had. Just trust me and try it."

People would ask me to describe my novel in just a few words, and I couldn't. It wasn't a "vampire novel" per se. It just happened to have a vampire in it. Some of the story was driven by Alain's vampirism, but a lot of it wasn't. There was a lot of borrowing from Dante, some from Milton... Categorizing it was very difficult for me. I was too close to it to be able to boil it down to a few catchphrases and keywords.

I didn't know if it was that unique, or if I just didn't want to categorize it. To categorize it feels like you've not only limited it, but you've taken away a degree of its uniqueness. So, as the creator of an "artistic" work, it's quite possible I was merely resisting categorizing my story rather than the story itself resisting categorization. Every child is unique, right? Even if they aren't.

But when you're trying to sell a work, saying "just trust me and try it" is not a great approach if you haven't built trust with the person. Furthermore, when you say "this is unlike anything else," you have to be 100% sure it is unlike anything else. If someone gives you the benefit of the doubt, reads it, and says "this is just like...", you're screwed. You asked them to trust you about it's uniqueness and lost.

I'm still on the fence over whether my novel is resisting categorization or I'm resisting categorizing it, but Godin has given me some insight that is helping me look at it more honestly. If I want to sell it, I need the best answer for "what's it like" that I can find.

One part of the project was to add "Tweet This" links to certain items on the site, where clicking on the link would send the user to Twitter and fill in the suggested text of the tweet for them.

It's actually a lot simpler than you think. The format is: http://twitter.com/?status=[URL encoded tweet text].

Now many of you are asking how you "URL encode" the tweet text. Well, if you're using PHP, you use urlencode('text'); where "text" is the text of your tweet. If you want to do it in JavaScript, the PHP.js library has a javascript equivalent for PHP's urlencode.

But here's a little trick I didn't know about until I made this mistake. Make sure your link goes to twitter.com, not www.twitter.com. If it goes to www.twitter.com, the text doesn't get properly decoded. So, trying to tweet Creating a "Tweet This" Link - http://www.brainhandles.com would look like Creating a %22Tweet This%22 link - http%3A%2F%2Fwww.brainhandles.com, and nobody wants that.

FeaturedUsers is a fairly simple concept. It publishes your Twitter profile information with a link over to your Twitter page. They say it helps you get new followers, promote your business, and support apps/sites you enjoy. They make the purchase process fairly simple, allowing you to buy 1,000 impressions for just $10. That means that your profile info will be displayed 1,000 times for $10.

Sounds pretty simple and pretty cool until you start doing the math. Looking at their users page, you can see their top 10 advertisers by CTR (clickthrough rate - the percentage of times a view of an ad resulted in someone clicking on it). Their 10th most popular user, at the time of this writing, had a CTR of 1.081%, which isn't bad for a banner ad in this day and age. But when you do the math...

Let's say that the user with the 1.081% CTR bought the $100 package that throws in a bonus 500 impressions, giving you 10,500 impressions, which is likely because her public dashboard shows she's had 443 clicks. At a 1.081% CTR, that's 113.5 clicks from 10,500 impressions. We'll round up to 114 clicks. So, because she paid $100 for those 10,500 impressions, her net cost was $0.88 per click. Now this wasn't $0.88 per new follower, per new user of her site, or per new purchase at her e-business. This was $0.88 per person curious enough to click on an ad over to her Twitter page.

But that's for one of their top performers. They state their network average CTR (shown on her dashboard) was 0.913% at the time of this writing. If you buy the $10 package and have average performance, you can expect... 9 clicks. That's not 9 new followers on Twitter. That's 9 people curious enough to look at your Twitter page at a cost of $1.11 each.

So, their top performer is paying $0.47 a click, their 10th best performer is paying $0.88 per click, and a user whose ad has average performance is paying $1.11 per click.

So, is FeaturedUsers worth it? Even if you're converting clickers to followers at an amazing 50% rate (and Twitter doesn't offer you tools to gauge such conversions, so you'll have to guess), if you have an average-performing ad, you're paying $2.22 per new follower, and possibly significantly more depending on the conversion rate. I haven't looked into the economic value of Twitter followers, but I'm pretty doubtful they're worth an acquisition cost of $2.22 or more.

Wow, that's awesome. Don't know how it is that an average of 96 subscribers clicked a single link 651 times, but God bless them. And you'd think that number would be reflected in my Google Analytics stats, but Chapter 35 isn't even in the top 5. Google Analytics says it got hit 166 times in that same period, and of that, only 101 came from outside sources (the other 65 coming from other pages on my site).

Now, Google Analytics is JavaScript based and wouldn't count people with JavaScript turned off or a JavaScript defeater turned on, but logfiles don't rely on JavaScript. They also require a good stats program to be able to pick and choose date ranges, but according to AWStats, up until around 9 p.m on the 8th, total traffic to Chapter 35 for the month was 221 pageviews.

So, FeedBurner, either a LOT of those clicks never reached my site, or you're overstating clicks by a factor of at least 6x, maybe more like 10x. I've always thought Feedburner's numbers were a little erratic, but this is ridiculous. WTF Feedburner?

My first thought after reading the ad was: "Stubbly McMonobrow probably has lots of extra money because he doesn't spend it on tweezers or shaving razors."

Considering all the other quirky ads I'd seen through the Project Wonderful network, I figured this might lead to something funny. It was just a "make money by writing articles" e-book (need-extra-cash.net - not linking it or recommending it, but since it's their ad, I figured I needed to credit it). What a bummer. The ad that looked like it was for a "make money now" product really was for one... as opposed to my hope that it was some hip, tongue-in-cheek parody of such ads and led to a treasure trove of cool stuff.

On the other hand, it did get my attention, even if it was just to ridicule it. And with my luck, the guy in the ad's probably one of my few readers and now totally offended at my comment about his grooming.

Even I found the "read more at" links added to any text I copied in to be a pain in the butt after a while. Most of the time I just had to remove it because it wasn't appropriate to the e-mail or document I was composing. So that was the downside.

As for the upside... the very limited reporting and inability to mine the data with any depth limited its utility. The utility was further limited by the severe lack of documentation to help you interpret and understand even the "just scratching the surface" information that Tracer provides. And based on their linkback data for the top 20 pages, the "read more at" addition to the clipboard on copies wasn't providing me with any extra backlinks.

Do I see a potential benefit in it if they were to document it better and beef up the "drill down" functionality of their reporting? Yes. Do I see it getting wider adoption if they make the "read more at" clipboard insert optional based on the site owner's preferences? Yes.

Mainly Tracer just confirmed some suspicions but didn't provide many surprises. Overall, it's promising, but it needs a round or two of upgrades to both its interface and its documentation before it's really a prime time tool for webmasters.

Aside from a test copy on the initial post about Tracer and one on a job scam post, the other 13 copies identified in the top 20 most interacted with pages all came from 2 of my more popular blog posts where I've posted working PHP code snippets. This was pretty much what I expected. I have one page about a PHP routine to detect mobile browsers that is consistently popular. It had 41 visits, 8 selections, and 11 copies, meaning that either 20% of visitors highlighted the code and some copied it twice, or that 25% of visitors copied the code.

Two images were listed as being copied. My "Urkelbama" design (Obama as Television's Urkel) and the browser stats screen cap from my Google Analytics visitor data for the year to date. Each image was listed as being copied once.

Backlinks tracked/traced due to Tracer... nada. But it's been a day and a half.

As for how users are engaging with the content, the list of words was sort of weird. No phrases were listed, just individual words or partial words. These were the top 10 and the number of times users did something with them:

1. Alain (89)
2. not (51)
3. google (45)
4. into (42)
5. didn (40)
6. got (37)
7. going (36)
8. vinnie (35)
9. reese (33)
10. content (31)

For fans of Hell on $5 a Day, you may be interested to know that "kurt" tied for 11th place with "blood" and "around" at 28.

Honestly, I have no idea what those word counts indicate. It could be just copied words or it could be highlighted words. Right now, while in beta, their dashboard doesn't have a lot of help, or any really. They don't actually have a help section. If you want help, it's in their blog (yes, very intuitive placement), and their documentation of the dashboard is pretty much nonexistent.

I'm going to give it a full week before I decide whether or not to keep it. Right now, I'm still on the fence. There's a balance between the value it provides to me and the inconvenience it creates for users, because while that little "read more" link seems neat, most people are going to delete it anyway and all I may be doing is annoying them by forcing them to do that extra work. I've found that once I got past my initial "ooh, neato" phase with it, it began annoying me when I copied text from my blog. And as the only person who benefits from it, I should be the least annoyed by it out of all the people on the planet, right?

On the other hand, I had ~400 interactions with page content out of ~600 page views and no one has e-mailed me to complain. When we first allowed pop-ups on IMDb, we got complaints, but the business manager looked at two elements:

• complaints to users ratio: If we get a million visitors and 50 complain, even though you can feel overwhelmed looking at a customer service queue with 50 complaints, they actually represent 1/200th of 1%. Even if you assume that only 1/2 of 1% of users who dislike it will bother to complain and 99.5% will just quietly leave, you only extrapolate out to 1%.
• are people clicking: People who hate pop-up ads won't click on pop-up ads because they don't want to encourage them. If we're getting a good click-through rate, then that (and the revenue it generates) can be measured against the angry users to determine if this is harming or helping the bottom line.

Don't know if I'd be so clinical when it comes to my blog. This is more of a personal statement than a moneymaking vehicle. Well, I'll look at the numbers again on Friday and we'll see.

The first meme that popped into my mind was "My Tivo Thinks I'm Gay", the title of an article in the Wall Street Journal that garnered a lot of commentary in the blogosphere and elsewhere when it first ran. Basically, the conclusion of the article and my own experience was that trying to identify your interests from the shows you watch, the books you buy, or the sites you visit only works when you're boring, single, and predictable. If you've got more than one person using the tracked account or your viewing/surfing habits are rather whim-based, you'll only confuse the robots into recommending stuff you wouldn't watch/read/click in a zillion years.

I buy books for my whole family via my Amazon account. I used to buy books for my business. I buy gifts with it. And my recommendations are a mess. They don't reflect me or my interests and are generally pretty unhelpful unless I spend a lot of time telling it what recommendations are completely pointless and uninteresting so it can sort out all those purchases that don't actually represent my interests.

Now, I'm of two minds on this. Being someone who runs Google ads on his sites, I think that if Google gets this right, I might get a higher clickthrough rate and possibly get paid more for each click because the ads won't be limited to being relevant to my content, which is not always stocked with high-value keywords. I might get some of those lovely insurance-related ads that can pay $10 a click instead of ringtone and clipart ads that pay a nickel a click. So, as a publisher, I think it might actually make me more money.

As a consumer, I think it's going to create a nightmare. I actually like having Google display ads that are relevant to the page I'm on. In many cases, I'm there because I'm looking for content in that category/topic, and the ads are relevant to my immediate needs. It's why I was more likely to click them than generic run-of-site banner ads, and why a lot of other people were too.

But if I've been looking at a lot of baseball instruction sites to help me teach my son how to play, finished that task, and am moving on to search for information about leasing a web server, Google's going to be wasting its time displaying baseball-related ads. I'm done, moved along. The ads I'd be likely to click now are releated to leasing a web server.

Now, savvy moms and dads have their kids set up with separate accounts on the computer with separate logins and their own browser cookies, but many older systems boot up with an automatic logon so they go straight to the desktop, and everyone uses the same account. In cases where the family is sharing a computer and a logon, you're going to drive the poor preferences robot nuts. It's going to be looking for ads about medications for Bakugan that reduce cramping and promote erections.

Now, I'm sure Google wouldn't have opened this can of worms if they didn't feel they could bait the hook better than previous attempts at behavioral targeting have. But still, a lot of those previous attempts have left a lot of us who were targeted wondering how they could miss by such a wide margin. I've often felt like I'm a bird, they're Dick Cheney, and those ads just hit some poor old guy in the face, because they never came near me.

Either that or the ads are for something I already use/bought and cannot use/buy any more of. For example, it seems like 75% of the ads I see on Yahoo!, for weeks now, are for a medication that's already been prescribed for me. Now I'm pretty sure that this drug company is not just blitzing Yahoo! with these ads. I'm figuring I've been identified as someone with this condition or interested in this condition, but since I'm already taking the medication, I don't need to find out more about how it can help me. My doctor and I have already discussed that extensively.

But here's one more benefit I'm hoping might be part of this behavioral targeting: recording the ads I don't click. I've seen this product's ads on Yahoo! hundreds of times in the past weeks, it seems. At what point do Yahoo!'s algorithms say "looks like he's not interested" and stop showing me those ads? I'm not just letting Yahoo! set cookies. I'm actually coming in through a personalized MyYahoo! page, so that they're easily able to cookie me with a user ID every time. At some point some robot should say "he's seen it 75 times without clicking on it, therefore displaying ads for this product to him is a waste of time."

Nearly two years ago, I complained that the companies promising targeted advertising weren't even bothering to look at the User Agent info being broadcast by my browser, which told them in no uncertain terms that I was on a Mac, and they continued to serve me ads for software to improve or repair Windows. For years, these companies have tried to sell us on "let us strip away a little bit more of your privacy and we promise we'll give you fewer pointless ads and more ads you'll find useful." We did, and they failed to deliver... every single time.

In the end, I have to take the consumer's side. It's not just because I am a consumer, but because I've seen that when you take consumers for granted, eventually they'll find ways to punish you for it. Google better get this right or it could end up costing them not only a lot of money, but a lot of goodwill.

On Wednesday, they twittered: "Pretty darn cool software for anyone wanting to ensure credit is given to your content that is copied http://tcr1.tynt.com/." I went over to the site and discovered the beta version of a funky little javascript tool called Tracer. I just got approved for the beta and installed it here on Brainhandles.

I'll quote their technical FAQ here...

Q. What user actions does Tracer measure?
A. Tracer is designed to measure user engagement in a completely new way. Currently, Tracer measures when a user:
1. Copies text
2. Copies an image
3. Highlights content while reading

Read more: "FAQ - Technical topics « Tynt Blog" - http://blog.tynt.com/?page_id=130#ixzz09f8QfCOp

Notice that "Read More" line at the bottom of the quote. That wasn't on the page. That was added by the Tracer script when I highlighted and copied if from their FAQ. Now, in general, it's really very easy for someone to just delete that line when they paste your content to something, but it also sort of acts as a reminder that they should credit the source and gives them a direct link for doing it.

Overall, though, I'm really interested to see what kind of stats they generate and how those stats break down. Understanding what bits are being highlighted and/or copied on my pages is an interesting insight as to how people are engaging with my content. Are all the highlight/copy actions going to be the bits of PHP code I post occasionally, or am I going to be finding people copying favorite quotes from the novel I've been publishing here?

If you've got a blog and you host it yourself (installing their code in the footer.php file within WordPress was a buh-reeze), you might want to consider signing up for their beta and trying it for yourself.

While IE just edged out Firefox, it was seriously tight. The four Firefox flavors that occupied the top 10 came in at a combined total of 43.82% of traffic, coming in just behind IE's 43.85 percent. But those are rounded percentages. If you add up the visits, out of the 35,000 or so since the beginning of the year, IE leads Firefox by a mere 8 visits. My biggest surprise was how much traction Google's Chrome browser picked up. Of course, Google is providing these stats...

If you have a blog, you may find that you see "pingbacks" coming from sites that are reposting your content and then linking back to you. If these sites are running Google AdSense ads, there are a couple of ways to fight back.

Under one of their Google ad blocks, click on "Ads By Google". That will take you to a page with information about Google's advertising services. At the bottom of that page, you'll see a link with the words: "Send Google your thoughts on the site or the ads you just saw". Click it.

It asks two questions about how relevant the ads were and how useful the site was, then has another link: "Also report a violation?" When you select that the issues were with the web site, they offer you a few bad things the site might be doing. Now "The site is hosting/distributing my copyrighted content" might seem to be the way to go. But if you check that, Google will send you instructions on how to snail mail or fax a DMCA violation notice (they will not accept e-mailed ones). It's a lot of work.

What may be more effective is to select "The site violates AdSense policies in other ways" which gives you a small text box in which to describe the violation. If you click the "AdSense policies" link, you'll go to their policies page. About halfway down that page, they state: "AdSense publishers are required to adhere to the webmaster quality guidelines posted at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html."

Near the bottom of the quality guidelines page, they state: "Avoid 'doorway' pages created just for search engines, or other 'cookie cutter' approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content." And when you follow that "little or no original content" link, you find a page stating...

Google will take action against domains that try to rank more highly by just showing scraped or other auto-generated pages that don't add any value to users.

I just report the violation as "Violates Webmaster Quality Guidelines by using scraped content and provides little or no original content."

It's a lot faster than the many hoops they make you jump through for a copyright violation notice and I know Google takes complaints seriously as I got busted once for a content-related policy violation on another now-defunct site.

If you have the time and desire to fax over a copyright violation notice, don't bother reporting it through the feedback mechanism as they'll just send you the instructions you can find here on their AdSense & the DMCA page. But if you're planning to go this route, make yourself a boilerplate notice and put them on speed dial, because you could be filing a lot of DMCA notices.

Another way is to check the splog's WhoIs information for their domain. This is contact information and some technical information related to their domain (Yahoo's "domain" is yahoo.com). ICANN rules state that providing false or materially incomplete contact information can be grounds for having your domain registration suspended or even cancelled. So if they're giving obviously false contact information (like a 555 phone number), submit an ICANN complaint. A friend of mine had some issues with WhoIs data problems and it temporarily shut down his business.

So if you're fed up with spammers filling their bogus blogs with your content, hopefully these hints will help you toss a little cherry bomb in their trash can. Good luck and God Bless.

HTML entities are special codes for special characters like the copyright symbol (©) and unlike tags, they're not bracketed. If you want to insert a copyright symbol, you use &copy; in your body text. On the other hand, if you wanted to make it bold, you'd have to put bracketed tags around it like so: <b>&copy;</b> (©).

You start your entity codes with an ampersand (&) and then follow it with an abbreviation, decimal code, or hexadecimal code for the special character, and then you end with a semicolon. And because of the ampersand's special role in this, it is supposed to be written in your HTML as &amp;, or under newer recommendations &#038;. And there is good reason for this. I've seen scripts break because an & was misinterpreted. Thus, if you have an ampersand all by its lonesome in a page, some validators are going to tell you that's an error and that your HTML won't validate until you correct it.

So, &amp; or &#038; is better than plain old &. But when someone types in that plain old & in a search query, will Google treat &amp; or &#038; equally? It seems not.

I recently wrote a blog post about a job recruiting letter being sent out by a company that calls itself "Robert D. Sell & Associates". If you Google "Robert D. Sell" at the moment, my page is the #1 result. If you Google "Robert D. Sell &amp; Associates" my page is the number one result again. But if you Google "Robert D. Sell & Associates" with just the plain ampersand, the top result is for a real estate agency by the name of Robert D. Smith & Associates. If you Google ""Robert D. Sell &#038; Associates" the results are the same as if you used a plain old ampersand.

Now, initially, I assumed it was because WordPress, my blogging engine, had replaced my plain old ampersands with &amp; (when I'm typing plain text in the blog editor, I don't usually think to do &amp;, but just do the &) while Robert D. Smith was using plain ampersands, so it actually met the requirements of the search term ("Robert D. [blank] & Associates" with the "sell" later in the page). It didn't. WordPress was using &#038; and Smith was using &amp;.

My page title had a phrase that meets the search term more precisely, but Google is treating the &amp; ampersand and the &#038; ampersand differently, so that when the search term includes a plain & Google favors the page using &amp;, despite it being a less precise match, but favors my page when the search term includes && though I'm using &#038;.

So, if I encode the ampersand to better match how it's appearing on my page (or don't encode it at all), the real estate agent with the different last name ends up as the top search result. But if I encode the ampersand the way the real estate agent uses it, then my page comes up as the top search result.

Odd. It seems that if you're really SEO'ing down to the dots on the I's, you're going to want to use &amp; instead of &#038; because Google seems to prefer the older ampersand... for now.

It's sort of hard to explain, so perhaps demonstrating a few of its facts would work better...

• The interior volume of the Hubert Humphrey Metrodome is equal to 2.33 adult male farts for every man woman and child on the planet.
• The square footage of New York City is equal to 104,621,013,686 squares of Costco toilet paper.
• It would take 23,377,976 pounds of bologna to circle Earth's equator.

And here's the first viral video I created for it...

So check out my new site at rough-equivalents.com and please tell your friends!

"What's helpful is to realize that you have a choice when you communicate. You can design your products to be easy to use. You can write so your audience hears you. You can present in a place and in a way that guarantees that the people you want to listen will hear you. Most of all, you get to choose who will understand (and who won't)."

Now, in a way, it goes back to something I learned when I did stand-up: "Never blame the audience." If you bomb, it's because you didn't get a feel for the audience and hit them right. The same set might not work in the same club on two different nights. That's why you watch the warm-up comic or emcee work the audience, because that club's your coal mine and he's your canary.

But when you're doing stand-up, you have a lot more freedom to improvise and vary your set on the fly than you do when you're an HR trainer and you're giving a presentation on company sexual harrassment guidelines (that Legal has been over with a lawnmower 10 times) to a group of employees who have to attend or be fired.

The way he talks, he seems to assume that you have total control over venue, timing, methodology, and audience.

In an ideal world, you can "present in a place and in a way that guarantees that the people you want to listen will hear you" and "choose who will understand (and who won't)." In the real world, sometimes you have no choice but to play the hand you're dealt. Sometimes, you go where you're told and convey the assigned bullet points to an audience that doesn't want to be there. If you're a good professional communicator, you can shine that big stinky turd of a project so bright that your audience can see themselves in it, but at the end of the day, you're not going to turn that turd into a fairy princess. At the end of the day, it's still just a bright, shiny, turd.

It's not when you're making all the choices that you test your mettle as a communicator. It's when most of them are being made for you and made badly, but you still manage to grind out a win. And sometimes, no matter how good your work, that win is beyond your control.

If we really got to "choose who will understand (and who won't)," you'd be able to discuss religion, sex, and politics at family reunions.