OK, I’m in the hacking Google Adwords panel and our speaker, Stankdawg, is

explaining how he spent $20 to setup his Google AdWords account and how he didn’t get what he wanted out of it and that

made him really mad (note: at least 50% of each panels has to be spent talking about how stupid it is to piss off a

hack and/or making fun of people who make insecure products”it’s very annoying. We get it: you rock, they suck”move

on!).

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height=”141″ hspace=”4″ vspace=”4″ width=”200″ /> Stankdawg is upset because they keep canceling his account

for violations and he is really upset that they charge $5 to start up an account that is setup by a machine with

no cost (note to speaker: who cares, it’s five bucks? It’s Google way of making sure people take it

seriously).

He is also mad about how Google AdWords will automatically slow ads that are not working, eventually turning them off

and charging you a $5 re-activation fee it you want to run them again. I agree with him this is a pain in the neck, but

again, who really cares. Google has to put some limits on this product because it’s a business. Turning off ads that

don’t work makes their network of ads more profitable. He reported that Google is moving to a quality score for ad

performance at some point soon. Apparently this would give people making Google Adwords ads an idea of how good they

were doing ahead of time”before they get turned off. OK, I can read this at Jensense”where are the hacks?! The panel is

*hacking* Google Adwords. Give us the good stuff!

Oh boy. Now he’s going off on a total rant about the TOS not allowing people to promote “hacking and cracking.” So, if

you wanted to use Google Adsense to promote, say, HackADay, they wouldn’t let you. Cry me a river man, it’s a business

and they have liability issues.

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height=”129″ hspace=”4″ vspace=”4″ width=”200″ /> Stank points out that Google hosts a hacking event, uses open

source (created by hackers), and has a hacking language translator. Even with all this hacker ethos in their company he

finds it”wait for it”hypocritical that you can’t have the word hacking or hack in your advertisement. This seems to be

the whole point of the panel right now. Google pissed him off and dissed hackers therefore he is going to show them.

Whatever.

The rant continues as he explains how he changed “hacking” in his Google Adwords advertisement to security and they

OKed the advertisement. I’m sorry, is this some major revelation? He explains that he would change it back to hacking

and three days later they would tell him to change it”but he had it up for three days! Yawn. This is beyond childish,

but worse it’s boring! Give us some hacks dude!

25 minutes into the panel and I’ve gotten zero value out of this except maybe losing 5 pounds of water weight on line

before getting in. Ugh.

OK, now he has found one tiny loophole in Google Adwords. If Google bans you from using certain keywords for ads that

it has slowed down or turned off for TOS reasons you can delete the advertisement and keywords then cut and paste them

back in. This is of little value since you’re only going to get caught again in a day or two later. I guess a game of

cat and mouse with the biggest Internet company in the world is fun for this guy, but I don’t think he releases that he

is a fly punching the bottom of the elephants toe. It’s pointless”give us some hacks!

Oh boy, here’s another gem: You can also click you competitors ads to screw them! Well duh?!?! 30 minutes into

this presentation and we’ve learned little. I’m getting frustrated”I could tell you more about Google Adwords.

OK, now we’ve got his first decent tip (not a hack, but a tiny tip): if you misspell keywords you can buy traffic for

a fraction cost. Turns out mesothelioma is a $40 keyword (it’s the cancer you get from asbestos exposure, and the

keyword draws the class actions lawyers are looking for clients). If you misspell the word you can get essentially the

same keyword for five cents (or $39.95 cheaper). Of course, there is a limit to how well this will work since there

might not be that many people who misspell the word. Also, most of the people who misspell a word will click the “Did

you mean this…” link from Google and not even get to the Adwords. So, again, this is not a hack, but a little

tip.

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height=”127″ hspace=”4″ vspace=”4″ width=”200″ /> Now we’re going down the secret double agent rabit hole:

Stankdawg says you could buy a huge keyword search word like “thisisamessagefordefconattendees” and you put a secret

message against the keywords knowing that not many people”if any”would ever put that search term in. He speculated that

some folks might be doing this already”maybe even the “t word” (terrorists).

Uhhh… yeah, right. Osama is passing secret messages by signing up for a Google Adwords account”WITH HIS CREDIT CARD”in

order to pass secret messages. I don’t think so.

He’s droning on that if you use stegnaogrpahy (hiding messages in a package, typically in images) you could put a

hidden message in a banner ad. Again, this is kind of dumb since in order to do this you need to signup for an account

with Google Adsense. You could do this a lot easier”and without giving a credit card”by starting a blogger.com

account!

One exploit that has some merit is the “display URL” field in Google Adwords. When you’re creating an advertisement it

lets you put in a nice clean URL for display (say www.paypal.com) instead of the domain name that you actually link to

(i.e. http://secure.paypal.com/newuseraccount/!@#$^^$%^$#%/). Google does this so you can have a pretty domain name in

the ad as opposed to a really long ugly one designed to do things like track performance. Standdawg explained that you

could do some phishing with this. This is sort of

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height=”142″ hspace=”4″ vspace=”4″ width=”200″ />a big loophole for Google AdWords, for example you could put up an

advertisement for Paypal and put www.paypal.com as your displayed link, but your hidden link would send folks to

www.systempaypal.com (i.e. a honeypot domain) and make it look like the PayPal site in order to capture

passwords.

This could have a been a great panel, but it didn’t include any hacks! It was basically Google AdWords 101 + a couple

of hacker rants. Some hacks I would have like to have seen:

– A tool that checks the cost of a certain set of keywords every day, what they are going for, and who’s buying them.

Then tracks the changes and trends. So, you could track the key word Treo 650 and see which sites came up for that

keyword over 100 days and how much it cost to get each of the different positions.

– A hack/process of buying obscure keywords on Google Adwords that you know will come up on Google AdWords (the

publisher side) and compares what the publisher got paid and what the Google Adwords marketer paid in order to see what

percentage Google is giving to publishers (note: Google does not disclose this number).

– A hack/program that links Google Suggests to the price of keywords on Adwords. So, I could give you 100 words and

then you would pull the top 20 Google Suggest terms and give you an Excel report that shows which of the suggestions is

the best deal.

Judith, Barb, Jade and Jan are at the Blogher conference. I really wanted to attended but had to be at DefCon. You can see all the great things happening at the event on our blog: http://bloggingblogher.com/

This was about 1/3rd of the line to get into the next panel. You can wait in line for 30 minutes and still not get into a panelouch!

Click the photo for the big version to get an idea of exactly how long the line is.

Your standard long range Pringles-can wifi cannon. Can up your Wifi signal by a mile or three.

Locking picking station at Defcon. The lockpicking panels filled up instantly today.

The Wall of Sheep: all the folks who had their passwords and user accounts picked up off the wifi network, projected onto the wall for all to see.

DefCon has some great sessions, and I’m hoping the one I’m about to attend on hacking Google AdWords is one of them.

It is, however, an accepted fact that this is the worst run event in the history of events. Misprinted schedules, no-show speakers, first-time speakers, and general chaos is all part of the charm.

For some background: Defcon is only $80 to attend. You can only buy tickets at the door, and you gotta bring cash because they don’t take credit cards (and frankly you don’t want to bring your credit card to this event for obvious reasons). Due to the tickets at the door only policy the conference producers don’t seem to have any idea of how many people will attend.

Make no mistake, Defcon is sold out to the point of insanity. Every panel I’ve attended is standing room only, and many folks elect to stay in their hotel rooms and watch the panels on their TV. To deal with the fact that people will camp in the rooms where the sessions are held the room is “flushed” after each panel. I got a real chuckle watching ten security folks with all kinds of walkie talkie gear asking who’s got “eyes on Apollo” (the name of the room) and barking “flush the room! flush the room!” as if it were a matter of national security. Give people a walkie talkie and an $8 t-shirt with the word security on it and you’ve got an experiment that would make Milgram proud.

Anyway, the flushing requires that you exit through one set of doors and then get back in line for the next panel. This basically assures you’re never gonna see two panels in a row. You have to select alternating panels: the 10, 12, and 2for exampleskipping the 11AM and 1PM panels in order to wait in line. It really sucks since their is so much good content here.

In order to get into this Google AdWords panelthe one I most wanted to see at the eventI had to wait in line for 30 minutes (time I could have spent in another panel or just catching up on emailor blogging!). However, waiting on line wasn’t the dumbest part. Nope, it was the fact that the line is outside the hotel in the parking lot. Did I mention it’s over 100 degrees here in Vegas, turning Defcon into an urban Burning Man.

Now, the ironic party is that the exit doors go into the air conditioned lobby. So, they could have just had people exit to the 100-degree boiling hot asphalt and chill in the A/C. Of course, this event is as crowded as Live8 so you probably couldn’t fit the line into the lobby of the hotel. The lines here make the ones at Sundance look like a cake walk. Next up inside the hacking Google Adwords talk.

Rule #1: Don’t use the ATM’s at Defcon.

I’ve landed at Defcon 13. 5,000 hackers in Vegas for three days. This is gonna be fun. HackADay will be doing hyper coverage of the event over the next three days, so visit the site early and often!

We’re 10 minutes into the event and the first privacy/freedom of speech debate has started. The topic was, of course, photos. An organizer went off a long tirade about not taking pictures of the speakers or audience without their permission and that the press would have their film taken if they did. They did says that you could take pictures of the backs of people’s heads without permission. So, since many of you have always wanted to see the backs of 500 sweaty nerds in a tent here ya go!

(Side rant: I’m not a big fan of having my photo taken, but if you’re at a major conferenceespecially if you’re on stage as a speakeryou should expect someone might take your photo.)

(Side rant #2: A couple of dozen folks have already pulled out their hidden camera sunglasses and hats in order to “hack” the guidelines.)

Jerry Michalski broke it down for me years ago. I was hosting a brunch for him at my loft in New York after he had moved out West. Over some H&H bagels we talked about happiness, something he always seemed to have in abundance. He told me that we humans were simple creatures at the end of the day: we just wanted to make a living doing something we loved.

Wow. That stuck with me.

WINs outward facing business modelthe one the public experiencesis as a long tail publisher. Weve got a bunch blogs, a bunch of bloggers, and a bunch of advertisers. We surf Chris long tail to profitability. Case closed, you can file us away in your dotcom history books as the latest evolution of the AOL Greenhouse, GeoCities, and About.com breed.

However, the truth is that what we are creating has nothing to do with publishing. What were creating is a lifestyle for passionate people that *results* in our outward facing business model.

These days we dont spend time saying asking ourselves how can we make better blogs, we spend our time saying how can we support our bloggers better?

Our bloggers work for a couple of hours a day and magically a check arrives every month (100+ checks last month). Every couple of months the check gets a little bigger and the bloggers love and knowledge of their topic grows deeper. The blogging becomes easier and more rewarding the more bloggers blog. The community gets more involved and their jobs get even easier and more rewarding. We give them raises when they dont expect it. We send them to trade shows they always wanted to attend, but never had a chance too. We have a total blast when we go to these trade showsits a party!

The dream is to have hundreds of people working for a couple of hours a day about a subject they love without having to answer to a boss. Without being filtered. If someone loses their passion for a subject they cn simple glide over to another subject in the network and become inspired all over again. If they have two or three passions in their life they blog about all of them as muchor as littleas they want. No filters, no politics, no commute, and no office.

Sounds crazy I know. However, weve got over 100 bloggers right now and many of them are experiencing exactly what Im talking about. I get emails and IMs from our bloggers telling me that they decided to take a couple of weeks off and sit by a lake or beach. While there they dont stop working, nope. They blog for a couple of hours a day and since they are sustaining themselves they can take a longer vacation and not feel guilty about it. I ask themand myselfsometimes why they dont trade their normal life for their vacation life. For some of us the line is starting to blur. My partner Brian gets more work done when he is on vacation! Im super productive when I spend 15 days at Sundance. Peter and Ryan from Engadget have a blast when they cover CES, CTIA and all the other shows Engadget covers.

Our bloggers are happy. Theyre spending more time with their kids and more time taking care of themselves. They have the time to cook a healthy meal or go for a long walk with their significant others. When they post to their blog and get comments from their audience they feel a sense of accomplishment, community, and belonging.

Many of our bloggers have full-time jobs and they sneak in posts during lunch, before work, and during their commute home. They ask me all the time let me know when I can quit my full-time job! Some of our bloggers already have, and many more have stopped looking for full-time work. The $1-3k they are making blogging is enough to be their anchor freelance gig. Add some

Looks like Larry Brown is gonna coach the Knicks. I know we’ve got a ton of problems, but I love the idea of a blue collar, defensive minded coach, who isn’t afraid to bench people who don’t work hard taking over the suddenly young Knicks. Sure, it’s gonna take a couple of years to get anywhere with this group, but I think it’s gonna be fun to watch Brown try and mold these young guys.

I watch some of the summer league games and we got some nice pickups (Nate is great). Besides, we can’t do any worse then the last three yearsright?!?

Well, we’ve got a logo and a blog all we need now is a location, agenda, and warm bodies!

We’re going to keep this event small like 100-200 people and very focused. We’re also going to work really hard on the the balance of brand mangers, advertising agencies, publishers, and technologists.

Anyway, it’s an open source event so I’m looking for feedback on who should be there, what format we should use, which hotel we should host it at, etc.

Deets at www.onlineadvertising2005.com