I run a few websites (lets just say over a dozen) so I generally spend a lot of my time optimizing and tweaking these sites. My first site, a free guitar lesson resource, survives solely off of Adsense. I like Adsense, its easy to use, is extremely popular, and there are is no shortage of willing advertisers.

I receive decent traffic from all three of the big search engines, and while the night may still be quite young, I can already see which site I am leaning towards as my favorite search engine…

A comparison of revenue earning power.

Thanks to Google Analytics’s handy Adsense integration, I can see exactly which keywords will give me better eCPM, or “the estimated revenue from AdSense per thousand ad page views”. Out of my largest referrers, the highest eCPM earners are…

1. Bing with 425% of average eCPM!
2. Yahoo! with 188% of average eCPM.
3. Direct (no referral) at 98% of average eCPM.
4. Google with 71% of average eCPM.

Now these numbers should be taken with a grain of salt, I haven’t controlled for other variables, like landing pages, keywords or traffic numbers. However, a cursory overview tells me that any set of numbers with a extreme deviations from the average warrant further investigation. Discuss this, I will.

What’s going on?

Well, Bing and Yahoo! both rank me much, much higher on my target terms than Google (think top 5 vs. top 50). So right off the bat, I am thinking of this in a couple ways:

1. Bing and Yahoo! are both sending me much more relevant traffic. Therefore the users are more engaged with the site, and are more willing to explore relevant advertising offers.
2. Bing and Yahoo! are both sending me much less relevant traffic. Therefore the users are less engaged with the site, and want to click away from the site through advertisements.
3. Google users are more web savvy, and tend to ignore the branding of the the Google Adsense ads (they do have a distinct look).

Well which is it? Well, let me bring in some more information: bounce rates. Bounce rates are great indicators of whether people stick around on your site or not, the lower the bounce rate, the better. Low bounce rates mean users spend more time on your site, time that is likely to translate to favorable actions (bookmarking, ad clicking, etc.), so there might be a little harmonizing amongst the data… Let us explore:

1. Yahoo! with a BR of 38.06%.
2. Bing with a BR of 39.52%.
3. Direct (no referral) with a BR of 45.37%.
4. Google with a BR of 50.98%.

Anyway you slice it, this doesn’t look good for Google. Google has the highest bounce rate of the bunch, even higher than the site average. Yahoo! and Bing are both neck and neck. And they make me more money per click-through, Win-win! However, in all fairness, they are sending traffic from different search terms. Yahoo! and Bing just seem to be better at choosing relevant search terms at the moment.

The last theory I put forth was one that suggests that Google users are a little less advertisement prone than their counterparts at Bing and Yahoo!. Perhaps this is true since most folks are learning of Bing through Microsoft’s big ad campaign. Sheeple in, sheeple out. Coincidence!? Probably. Who knows.

Why is it so?

Well, in reality, it may not be so. The data isn’t very normalized. In fact, as of right now, both Bing and Yahoo! combined only send about 1/5 of the traffic Google sends. But this number is growing everyday, so we’ll have to come back in a couple months to see if this changes.

But as for now, I am thinking Bing and Yahoo! are both ranking me better for keywords I know my site is good for. Google just seems to be pickier (and a little less efficient in this case). My suggestion would be to get you some Bing traffic and see for yourself.

Whoever is reading this and has a soft spot for statistics of any sort, perhaps you can put forth some clarifications or suggestions. I’d love it.

The times I’ve been caught talking to myself I was saying things like “Bryan, you won’t be doing any of that boring personal life blogging will you?“, to which I would answer: “No, of course not“. Please note, I’ve denounced drinking on more than one occasion/morning, and we all know that wagon skipped town long before I got a chance to hop on (”You’ll get hop-on’s“). So, let me just get the relapse out of the way: I vacationed in Alaska/the Yukon and it was a hoot. Let me tell you about it.

Let’s talk a little about our group (we were in a tour group, just like the original Alaskan explorers!). First off, we had the venerable Scott, the twenty something law student leading the charge. With the single exception of some lovely young ladies from Chattanooga, mostly everyone in the tour was old and boring. No offense to old and/or boring people, of course. Who am I kidding, you don’t use the internet anyways.

Though we did stop at every expansive view, where we would all topple out of the bus, the majority of our time was spent riding a bus. I won’t elaborate.

Because lists are easily digested, let’s just list the things we did by the order of coolness:

1. Plane ride over glaciers. This was just good ol’ fashioned awesome. You really have no idea what you are dealing with when it comes to the great white north until you see it from the sky. Really. Just look.
2. Kyle’s first three (legal?) beers. They seem to grow up so fast! Especially when you cross a border where the drinking age is lower…
3. White water rafting in the Nenana river. This was very cool too. I’m man enough to admit I was the only white water virgin on the raft that day. Good thing the Tennessee family went with my little brother and I, otherwise we’d had been the only two in the raft.
4. Old junk at the gold dredge. I’m a sucker for rustic like junk artifacts (read: not trash). I just love taking photos of old equipment because it’s so freaking cool. It is also easy to do and makes me feel like a big-boy photographer.
5. Panning for gold. Though I didn’t find much, my little brother found a little. So did my parents. About $30’s worth combined.

You can check out our entire Helmig Family Flickr photostream for the photos, we’ll be adding them regularly. Not sure if any of the tour members will ever run across this, but if you do, drop a comment and say hi!

Just this weekend, I launched my take on collaborative music online. I am sure there are already sites out there that do this, but I wanted to focus on the layering concept of creating music with a multitrack editor. Anyone who’s ever recorded with a single microphone knows the process of layering subsequent tracks well. You start with a click track or something similar and build up from that, one layer at a time.

I really think that this process opens up a ton of new possibilities in music creation by allowing people from all musical backgrounds to share and mix increasingly unique songs. We even provide the free drum samples if you can provide the beats.

It’s 100% free and you can check it out at http://letsj.am. I encourage you to log in and post a few tracks or layers yourself. There’s also a tutorial/wiki if you want to learn a little about the process. Feel free to leave a comment or suggestion here, or drop me a message.

So I’m doing homework, and this center of gravity thing is pretty cool. In Location Strategy they use it to find the best location for stores and such on an X-Y plane with points that have certain weights or populations. “Well that’s neat,” I thought to myself. “I’ll make a little calculator using AJAX and PHP.” Because I really have nothing better to do.

It’s a pretty simple center of gravity calculator, just put in the weights first, seperated by comma’s, then the X coordinates and finally the Y coordinates. You should have the same number of each, if not, well, it’s just wrong. You should get two numbers back, these are the (X,Y) coordinates of the perfect center of gravity.

Enjoy my fancy “Center of Gravity Calculator” that I wasted 25 minutes minutes creating.

This has been added in 2.8! Don’t install this if you have 2.8! Read this instead.

This little plug-in adds a fancy little description field to the “Edit Tag” pane in Wordpress. It also adds a function called single_tag_description(); that does just that but only on the tag page. Not really sure why the tag description isn’t available by default, seems like it would be pretty useful. Basically, you can describe your tags and echo that description on each tag page with the above function; pretty simple!

Please enjoy and note that some of the code came from a thread I read on Wordpress.org, but some of it came from extracting similar core code, I just made it into a Wordpress plugin. Download it now.

Well, I just put together a little mini web-app with AJAX jQuery goodiness called Was That Guy In…?. The basic is concept is this:

Sometimes I am watching a movie and I notice an actor or actress that I think was in some other movie I had previously seen. Unfortunately, I rarely know thier name and I don’t feel like searching IMDB for the character name to find out. I want to know if he/she was and who they played.

So, I made this app. You just put in the name of two movies and it will tell you who was in both of them. It does a pretty good job going deep in the cast, but isn’t perfect. Sometimes Car Driver #1 (uncredited) is that guy you thought you saw. In that way, it can be pretty powerful.

Also, it has been brought to my that IMDB has already done this common search thing before me. That’s fine. Mine’s prettier and has AJAX and is much more specialized in finding actors. Their’s kind of sucks, no offense.

I came across this little guy today while I was trying to track down a pesky audio driver for Windows XP. It seems to contain the entire driver profile for the Vostro 1400 so you no longer have to search for each of them individually. Nothing like being punished for not wanting Vista.

By the way, this contains the NVIDIA 8400 driver, and not the integrated Intel video driver. Sorry, that means you have to hunt down *one* driver… (Hint: its right here.)

Why Dell or other manufacturers don’t do this is beyond me. How hard is it to build a system that uses your service tag to zip/bundle the correct drivers on the fly? Maybe I should build something like that, but I’d probably get sued into oblivion by all the overzealous big company lawyers.

Download the driver pack here.

If you’d like some customization done on the theme, I refer you to the stellar Magatheme Pro Package Wordpress Magazine Theme with customization! It’s got all the options you all asked for, built-in! Everything from an awesome tab slider and homepage layout to drop down menus and a couple subtle color schemes are ready out of the box. So check it out!

Well, I just got finished with the brand new Magatheme! Ultimately, I’ll incorporate a full front page outline (Pro Edition), just like your favorite magazine themes have, but until then you’ll just have to enjoy this classy, minimalistic Wordpress theme just like any other Plain Jane theme.

But wait! If you download within the next 15 minutes you get…

• A classy, minimalistic design!
• 3 column, golden ratio deduced layout!
• A cool, slightly blue ice color scheme!
• Six sidebars! Count them, six!
  • Wide Sidebar
  • Left Sidebar
  • Right Sidebar
  • Left Footbar
  • Mid Footbar
  • Right Footbar
• Completely valid XHTML and CSS!
• Wordpress 2.7 compatibility!
• Zebra striped comments!
• Highlighted author comments!
• (Pro) Selectable magazine or blog style homepage.
• (Pro) Over 15 widget ready locations.
• (Pro) 4 color schemes.
• (Pro) No-edit ad and tracking integration.
• (Pro) Feedburner integration.
• (Pro) Drop down menus and fancy homepage tab slider.
• (Pro) Hide/show author, date, categories, tags, and comment sections.

Leave a comment below and let me know what you think of the theme! I’d love to hear it. Perhaps your suggestions will make it into the next version.

PS: I haven’t tested IE6 yet, let me know if it works for you! It works in IE6!

Download it now! or View the Demo! or View the Pro Demo!

Bluesman?

I hear this nonsense a lot, it usually goes like this: John Mayer is awesome at guitar (indisputable), John Mayer plays blues songs and they sound good (also somewhat indisputable), therefore, John Mayer is a bluesman!

Errr, no. At the risk of sounding like a “cut off your nose to spite your face” hard assed purist (which I am really not), you can’t be a bluesman when over 90% of your recorded music is bubblegum poppish acoustic/electric mishmash.

Now don’t you take away from this rant that I dislike Mr. Mayer, I really do like a lot of his stuff. Continuum was pretty good. I’ve even listened to Room for Squares and thought generally positive things. But playing blues live on occasion and on a live album, back to back to Your Body Is a Wonderland (which he wrote) does NOT make you a candidate to share the esteemed title of bluesman with B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Muddy Waters, Lead Belly, and Robert Johnson.

He is a pop-guitarist who can play a mean blues lick and idolizes SRV (you clever bastard!). Well, more power to him. Just expect to see me cringe when you say John Mayer and bluesman in the same sentence (unless there are an odd number of negations in there).

Now, I hate reality television as much as the next guy, I avoid “Big Brother 43″ and “Survivor 37: Urban Style” like the plague. However, there is one show that doesn’t quite deserve being lumped into the same category as the others, although it is definitely real and is on TV. It isn’t the similar but oh-so-tacky “Man VS. Wild”, it is the fascinating “Survivorman” series from Discovery Channel.

Real realism, and no drama for drama’s sake.

This show is all about surviving alone in the wild, and since most people surviving are without the luxury of a camera crew to help or sneak a protein bar, Les Stroud doesn’t bring a camera crew either, just cameras. Now stop and think about this, he does all the filming himself while surviving. That’s pretty intense.

While there is no threat of being kicked out of the game and losing a chance at a million dollars, there is the threat of not eating dinner tonight or drinking safe water. In the end, it’s just a really knowledgeable guy with a couple cameras alone for a week in the Arctic Tundra (or Utah Desert, or somewhere else).

Genuinely useful information, you know, just in case.

This shit could save your life! Especially if you are a big fan of hiking, hunting, camping or you commonly put yourself into situations where you could get lost (but that never happens, right?). Just the knowledge that water can contain harmful bacteria that will put you out of commission, if not kill you, is enough to keep you well until someone notices you didn’t return and a rescue crew is sent.

His method of preaching preparedness can also determine your survival, bringing a simple knife and a few minor food supplies can be the difference between life and death. Knowing how to deal with the psychological aspect of surviving alone is also very important, and something he never fails to mention.

A shot of emotion.

There are very few things more despondent than a man completely alone, draining himself filming whilst still trying to survive. Although you know he’ll be fine (they’ve already shown previews for next week), it still puts a big smile on your face when Les finally snags a big fish after 4 days of eating dandelions. You can feel his happiness, his sense of accomplishment, his satisfaction in himself; and its contagious.

At the end of each day, his lonesome wails on the harp serve as a substitute for the nutrition denied him as he spent a seemingly desperate day searching for a more substantial dinner than a few nuts and berries.

But I guess that tune will do.

Thanks for the great show Les.