Alex Pooley's Blog

There’s been some interesting developments with Google recently. The privacy advocates would be up in arms if they weren’t already picketing against global warming and Chinese occupation of Tibet.

“Hi Dalaih… yes that’s right, Richard here… good thanks, and you? … Look, I need you to do another world tour. We’re low on funds, and with Global warming, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Tibet we’re running out of funds … ahuh … right … no, they wouldn’t give me a Pretty Woman 2 .. thanks, I’m glad you liked the first one … that’s OK Dalaih, I understand … yes, I miss Seinfeld too … OK … bye”

Demographics

Advertisers are now able to target the Google content network by demographic. The interesting part is in how they are collecting the demographic information.

From the ‘learn more’ link…

Some publishers on the Google content network know certain individual details about their users. Social networking sites, for instance, often ask users to identify themselves by age and gender. On sites that provide this type of information about their users, Google can often display your AdWords ads to members of the groups that you prefer, or prevent your ads from displaying to members of groups you don’t want to reach

Pretty cool stuff. Who needs to buy Facebook when you can just rip the information out of profile pages?

Schmidt (head Googlenaut) has stated that he wants Google to be able to tell you “what you need to do tomorrow”. Once they get their hands on your medical data they’ll better understand your bowl movements and more effectively position those lucrative Metamucil adverts to those aged between 65 - 100.

Analytics

Google Analytics now provides the option to webmasters to “share” data within the Google Analytics system called “Benchmarking”. This service allows you to benchmark your sites with other “similar sized” sites. I’m still trying to work out how this is useful for me but the graphs are real perdy…

Anyway, I’m growing increasingly concerned with Google’s knowledge of my publishing activity. My main concern is that I don’t know how the information is being used. Is it to my advantage or disadvantage to let Google under the hood of my sites?

I was trying to get PHPList to email a large group of people but was having trouble getting it to send a “test email”. A “test email” in PHPList is where you send an email to a special set of people to preview what the email would look like before hammering everyone on the list. Anyway, after coming “this” close to trashing my efforts, I took one last scan through the 660 odd line configuration file when I spotted these lines:

# if test is true (not 0) it will not actually send ANY messages,
# but display what it would have sent
define ("TEST",1);

According to those lines in my configuration file, I won’t actually be able to send emails, but I should know that they would have been sent, err.. right? Well, that wasn’t the case for me because my “test emails” were simply failing with no hints as to why. But as is the case when playing with software I thought I would simply flick the TEST switch to 0 (false) and see what I could blow up.

Yeah you guessed it, defining TEST as 0 fired off my “test emails” no problems.

PHPList looks very promising, and at a bargain price of $free, it’s quite brilliant. Shame about the default TEST safe guard though, I’m sure that’s ruined many a users efforts to get PHPList running.

I hope this saves someone many hours of frustration.