I've been playing around with Google Adwords a bit, experimenting with a few basic campaigns to figure out how it all works. I was partly inspired by a friend of mine who drove some traffic to his retail store here in Chilliwack using a Facebook Ad campaign over Christmas. The part that I don't really understand is how Adwords is a good investment at the CPC prices they charge? For example, I was trying to target Vancouver Stock Photography using an adwords campaign. After playing around with a few keyword combinations, it quickly became obvious that the average ...

I've been trying to get more work done during the days lately, mainly so that I have less work to do in the evenings. One thing I've been trying to curb is my Twitter and Facebook usage. Some days I hardly use either, but sometimes when there's a good conversation going on, I find it hard to pull away from. In addition, I do a lot of things on the computer almost instinctively, one of which is saving files after every small edit (at the end of every line of code I usually hammer on command-S, which saves the ...

** I wrote this article last year on another site, but given recent events I wanted to repost it on my site. I'll talk about it more in a future entry ** I came across this article the other day, and found it particularly distressing given the prevalence of online social websites such as Facebook and MySpace these days: Megan Meier thought she had made a new friend in cyberspace when a cute teenage boy named Josh contacted her on MySpace and began exchanging messages with her. Megan, a 13-year-old who suffered from depression and attention deficit disorder, corresponded with Josh for ...

I found this article on Twitter which is by an author who basically thinks the era of blogging is at an end. What do you think? HT, Kris.

A few months ago I talked about Megan Meier, a young girl who encountered abuse from a classmate's mother via MySpace. That abuse eventually led to Megan committing suicide, and sparked a whole series of internet debates about where the fault for something like that lies and how accountable social networks should be for the actions of their users. Today Facebook announced that they will be implementing over 40 safeguards to help protect its users from sexual predators and online cyberbullying: Facebook, the world's second-largest social networking Web site, will add more than 40 safeguards to protect young users from sexual ...

Ok, seriously. The things I would do if I had a few million bucks. I'm amazed to no end how many things about the internet kind of suck. Things that you'd think would be easy to fix, but for whatever reason nobody gets around to fixing them. First company that I need to bash is YouTube. Seriously, Google buys you for 1.6 BILLION dollars and what's the first thing you do? Stick your head in the sand. How come there aren't any cool features, or you know, like standard features coming ...

This is a rather interesting move made by Facebook. Apparently on Friday they announced a new javascript library that would let you put Facebook applications on your own web page. Facebook announced Friday a new JavaScript client library that will allow Facebook apps to be displayed on any website. The client library allows users to make Facebook API calls from any web site and create Ajax Facebook applications on that website. Wei Zhu from Facebook explains the benefits: Since the library does not require any server-side code on your server, you can now create a Facebook application that can be hosted on ...

I'm currently at the internet cafe on Davie street killing some time waiting for a Dr's appointment next door. I've been waiting for some test results from that whole stupid bacterial infection thing I got in the hospital last year. Not really sure what's going to happen there. Tonight I'm also the official photographer for the Facebook Developer Meetup down at the Vancouver Film School. Rebecca (aka Miss604) will be down there doing the official live-blog, so make sure you check it out if you want to follow remotely. I'm looking forward to taking it easy next ...

Tonight I met up with the gang to celebrate Amy's birthday down at Wing's on Granville Street. We had a few pitchers of beer and demolished somewhere on the order of 16 pounds of wings as a group (I'm now officially "winged out", so I probably won't go back there for a while). It was tons of fun, even though I ate that one hot wing that melted my mouth. Afterwards we ended up down at the Bowling Alley on Granville and played a few games. My head was still a tad sore from the night before ...

Well, it's almost the weekend again. I awoke this morning to some major construction going on in one of the units around me, and I sure hope it's done before Saturday morning rolls around. Last night I hit Wings on Granville with Rebecca, Keira and John. For those of you who haven't been, it's a quaint little spot next to the Howard Johnson hotel on Granville Street that has cheap wings from 2-6pm daily. Rebecca and Keira, photo by Keira The girls basically did two pitchers of beer by themselves, so I imagine they were feeling pretty tipsy by ...