Pencil Dude's Notebook

It’s been an interesting year working on the web. 2009 should be even more so.

Here’s a few news headlines and blog posts that I’ve read recently that I’ve found interesting and to some degree or another relevant for the new year.

Censorship, Filters Etc… — This is going to be a big issue in 2009.

Italian president and media baron Silvio Berlusconi plans to use G8 presidency to ‘regulate the internet’. What he means by that is still unclear.

Over in the UK, the Culture Secretary calls for Internet censorship. One of the things he’s plugging is a film style censorship on internet sites.

In Australia, there’s an uproar over the Australian government’s plan to block Web sites. It’s being dubbed ‘The Great Firewall of Australia’ or something like that.

Taking it’s cue from China probably or maybe Australia, Britain, or Italy…Vietnam tightens rules on blogs

Business Survival Tips for 2009:

Times are tough and money is tight these days so you’re going to have to be even more creative than ever in order to ride things out and succeed in business.

OPEN Forum has an interesting post on 3 Things Every Small Business Owner Needs to Survive and Thrive (Clarity, Certainty and Focus are good ideas anytime but they’re going to be extra important this year.)

Guy Kawasaki has a great post from earlier this month on How to Use Twitter as a Twool

On a related note, Search Engine Watch has this interesting primer: Social Media and SEO — Friends with Benefits?

Free search traffic is always important, but when your ad budget gets slim, well it’s time to take a look at what you’re doing in the way of optimizing your website for organic search traffic. A couple weeks back, the AdSense blog had this post that’s actually good for all year round: Light up your site. They also have a handy Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide (PDF) that’s good if you’re just starting out in that SEO stuff.

And lastly, BusinessWeek Online has an interesting article on blogging and advertising: A Modest Blogging Proposal.

The 12 Days of EFF — Lovely!

Learn more about this video and support EFF!

In our globalized world, consumers are exposed to marketing messages in many languages. But a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research says messages expressed in people’s native languages are most effective at triggering emotional reactions.

Authors Stefano Puntoni, Bart de Langhe, and Stijn van Osselaer (Erasmus University, the Netherlands) studied bilingual and trilingual populations in Europe. They tested different slogans with participants and found differences in how the messages were perceived. “Our findings show that, in general, messages expressed in consumers’ native languages tend to be perceived as more emotional than messages expressed in their second language,” the researchers write.

The authors believe this effect is not due to differences in languages or participants’ difficulty in understanding ad copy written in foreign languages. “We find that the emotional advantage of consumers’ native language depends on personal memories and the language context in which those memories were generated. Thus reading or hearing a word (unconsciously) triggers memories of situations in which that word played a role…Because consumers usually have more personal memories with words in their native language than in their second language, marketing messages in their native language tend to be perceived as more emotional.”

In the course of their study, the researchers found that the effect is more pronounced in women than in men. They believe that women have a stronger memory for emotional events than men.

“We found that, regardless of whether their native language was French or Dutch, native language slogans were perceived as more emotional than second language slogans,” write the authors. “All else being equal, it is generally preferable to communicate with consumers using their own native language, as doing so should result in more emotional messages.”

Sources: Stefano Puntoni, Bart de Langhe, and Stijn M.J. van Osselaer. “Bilingualism and the Emotional Intensity of Advertising Language.” Journal of Consumer Research: April 2009.

University of Chicago Press Journals

When I logged into Google Adsense today I discovered what Inside Adsense Blog watchers already knew: Extending AdSense for domains to all publishers.

It’s a great idea and I was gung-ho to try it out. I’ve got numerous domains that could benefit from Adsense for Domains and I’ve been wanting to do something like this for quite some time. Some of the domains are active and currently I’ve got them hosted and serving up content but I’m not happy with their productivity so I’m looking for other options for those sites. Others re-direct to currently active sites and still others are merely parked.

So, to start off with, I submit 5 domains, and then follow the instructions for pointing them to google’s servers. While I’m updating the zone files I see a few more domains that could benefit from the Adsense for Domains treatment, so I log back into my Adsense account and find that 2 of the domains that I had just submitted were summarily rejected. Ack!

That both puzzled and upset me to say the least. Consider that these two particular domains actually have traffic coming in and that my domain registar was about to change the DNS info to reflect the new info that I had just provided.

So, I hastily shot off a re-submit/query as to why exactly the domains had been rejected and then went to my domain registar and changed back the DNS/Zone info back to the way it was (Hopefully I got that correct). If not…

So, I’m sitting at my computer, staring at my account and wondering what to do. The system reflected that the domains that hadn’t been rejected had the status of: “Verifying Ownership” and one of them as “New” actually. And of course 2 of them rejected…

And I got to thinking, you know, if I go and change the dns/zone info for these other domains and google rejects them too, then in the mean time, I’m going to be throwing away traffic to goodness knows where.

So, I deleted the domains from my Adsense for Domains account. Actually, I wasn’t able to delete the ones that had been rejected as there wasn’t an option to do so.

So, that’s fine. I’ll just do what I’ve always done with my extra domains and the domains that I’m not actively working on. It’s too bad, as I was kind of looking forward to using ‘Adsense for Domains’.

An expensive lesson about not forgetting to renew your domains: Co. buys back Bush library domain name for $35K