Uncategorized

  From xkcd. How true.

My old friend and co-émigré Bruce Nash has put together a great presentation about how tomorrow’s election will unfold, in terms of when the TV networks will call each of the states. From Bruce’s model, it looks like it’ll be all over bar the shouting by around 8pm Pacific – so if you’re on the … Read more

With Microsoft’s (sort of) biennial PDC on the horizon, my mind (and the minds of many of my colleagues) turns to our cloud computing efforts, which will have their coming-out party in Los Angeles at the end of the month. Like anybody else here at Microsoft, there’s little specific that I can say about these … Read more

Click here if you have IE8

As I write more about the online advertising business, I realize I need a glossary to send people to for certain terms. So here it is. It’s incomplete, of course, but will get better over time. Definitions for terms in italics can be found elsewhere in the glossary. A Advertising Inventory: The supply of opportunities … Read more

Welcome to Fintlewoodlewix. This is in fact a test page for a dummy malvertising campaign. You should assume that the ad creative below is malicious, and escalate this issue as if it were a real malvertising incident.  

This page is an index into my "Online Advertising Business 101" series of posts. Click on the links below to be taken to the relevant installment. Part I – The online advertising value chain Part II – How does adserving actually work? Part III – Ad Networks Part IV – Publishers Part V – Rich … Read more

My colleague Mel Carson e-mailed me today with tales of the debauchery that ensued at the London launch of Brian Clifton’s Google Analytics book (actually, it sounds like it was quite a sedate affair). Mel mentioned that some folk he’d been talking to had asked, “What’s happened to Ian Thomas? He’s disappeared!” Well, of course, … Read more

I kind of have an unwritten rule not to include Dilbert cartoons on this blog, partly because it’s such an appallingly hackneyed thing to do, and partly because it will reveal to my readership that I’m not in fact the debonair man-about-town that the pithy content of my blog would have you believe, but a … Read more

If you read this blog regularly, you may know that my wife runs a online retail business in the UK called mirrormirror (since Valentine’s day is coming up, and I know that the overwhelming majority of my readers are male, this may be a good time to go over there and earn some brownie points … Read more