As of today I am dedicating 100% of my work time to Hogtown Consulting. For the last months I had been dividing my time between Hogtown work and a contract with the Ontario government. That contract has now come to an end and I am very pleased to say that I am free to concentrate all my effort into growing Hogtown.

One practical hope I have for the change is that I’ll be able to blog a little more frequently, there’s certainly no lack of interesting stuff going on.

This is the second of a two part piece, read part one to find out what click fraud is and what it means to Google and advertisers.

I may be way off base, but I see a link between the recent launch of Google Analytics and an attempt to reduce click fraud (bear with me, it’ll take a bit of explaining). I’m not the first person to come up with this idea, many have written about how the extra insight into your site visitors provided by Google Analytics data would help to sort the fraudulent-chaff from the genuine-wheat in click through visitors. But I think there may be something more…
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The most basic form of click fraud involves a website owner signing up with Google to host AdSense ads on their site, with the site owner getting a commission from Google whenever a visitor clicks on the ads. That’s perfectly legitimate, the fraud, at its simplest, comes in when the site owner clicks the ads themselves, to gain click through fees the advertiser (via Google) for a click that was of zero value to the advertiser.
read more…

I’ve written before about the benefits of blogging (here and here) to professionals and business. One particular benefit of blogging can be building authority and trust (in so far as trust can be built in a non-personal relationship anyway).

Since the holidays (and my way-off-the-early-adopter-curve acquisition of an iPod) I’ve been listening to quite a few podcasts*. One particular thing has struck me about podcasts, and that is how much more personal and ‘real’ it feels to hear someone’s thoughts spoken in their own voice compared to the relatively inexpressive words on a screen method. Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders podcast on productivity is a good example of this, in the past I’ve infrequently visited the 43 Folders blog, but I have now taken to listening to their podcast avidly.

There are several reasons I’m a fan, I like the tone, humour and length of the 43 Folders podcasts. But from the important thing about this from a professional perspective is the boost that podcasting has given the podcast’s producer, Merlin, in my awareness and respect (and I would assume the same has happened for many other listeners too). The point is, he had a good blog but it was the added intimacy (at least apparent intimacy) and novelty of a podcast that really made me take notice. Of course in the world of marketting getting people to take notice is pretty crucial, so this may be worth noting, perhaps I’ll even give it a go myself.

* What’s a podcast? A podcast is technically little more that a chunk of audio (often amateur produced and talk-based) that through some technical stuff (RSS and the like) automagically arrives on your iPod (or other MP3 audio player) as each new ‘episode’ is published. Kind of like radio on demand combined with the ease of publishing approaching that of a blog.