Something important I’m collaborating on with a couple of other tech people is a Facebook page called “Give, Don’t Get”. The idea is that instead of buying something you would like but don’t really need (like an iPad 2 if you already have an iPad for example) – you’ll instead donate that money to a good cause. Hopefully this page will live on and support all kinds of causes: for right now the main one we’re emphasizing is the Save the Children Japan Earthquake Tsunami Children in Emergency Fund.

Anything helps: just identify something you would have otherwise bought and donate that amount to the charity, and post about it in your social media streams.

1) Figure out how much you want to give, then go to Red Cross or Save the Children (http://bit.ly/givenotget)

3) Visit http://on.fb.me/gAVWhA and post your screenshot to the page’s wall

Give, Don’t Get – Gave: $xxx to Save the Children (Japanese Earthquake Fund). Didn’t Get: xxxxxx. Visit: http://on.fb.me/gAVWhA

for example:

Give, Don’t Get – Gave: $10 to Save the Children (Japanese Earthquake Fund). Didn’t Get: 2 Large Starbucks Lattes. Visit: http://on.fb.me/gAVWhA

XA.net will be running optim.al ads on Facebook for this page as well as a donation, so please even if you choose not to donate please go and like the page today if you can. http://on.fb.me/gAVWhA

Mozilla has a lot of interesting information and statistics about installed plug-ins, and one of my personal favorites to examine is AdBlock Plus by Wladimir Palant. Here is the stats page for it. Looking at a chart over the last 12 months, the number of active installs is fairly stable except for times like Christmas when a lot of people are seemingly not at their computers. Weekly ebbs seem pretty reasonable as well:

Right now there are 10.63 million live installs (of 78 million-odd total), with 3.5 million of those in the US, or 33%, followed by Germany at 2.1mm (19%) and Russia at 1.01mm (10%). France trails a bit further behind with 813k or 8%. The most common OS is Windows but Linux is right up there which clearly also adds to the fact of this being Firefox, to make it a far less mainstream crowd that our Internet Explorer group. It’s geeky.

While these numbers are significant they are not huge (about the size of the 400th biggest US website or so at the 3.5mm mark, if you believe the Quantcast figures) and no immediate looming threat to the advertising market. The Adblock product, on Firefox and with some configuration needed, is simply not a mainstream product. Me wonders though what some of the catalysts would/might be to make this a more mainstream phenomenon.

I tried to access Twitter on the Freefi/Jiwire network here at the Oakland Airport, and kept getting weird page refreshes from the bar at the top of the screen that loads banner ads, a small and a 728×90. The thing that sucks though is that at least half the large ads and all the small ads seem to be PSAs or house ads. This is a common issue with high-frequency websites, but then again, this is not an unplanned-for situation with a service like this. Also the PSAs are interspersed with paying ads which leads me to believe that their ad network rotation is horribly misconfigured at best.

Worse – a lot of sites just won’t load – like the twitter problems above – and amazon.com is inaccessible probably because of javascript conflicts with the shitty browser bar. The pop up window for inserting images into wordpress is also broken by it.

I’ve written about this before about this service here. I would much rather pay than deal with this crap, especially for public service ads that are making nobody any money. I wonder how last this company will last with this kind of revenue model. It looks like Collective Media is providing some of the underlying advertising.

I checked out Freefi’s twitter page which hasn’t been updated since November 2009. They are apparently located in “Wooldland Hills, CA” [sic]. I’m going to tweet this post to Freefi.com and their 12 followers, and encourage them to respond , once I can get onto twitter from my blackberry of course.

It’s a sick thing to call a hobby, I guess it’s really more of a pastime that I can’t stop doing even when I’m surfing the Web not for work (online advertising). And that’s to be on the look out for PSA’s, or public service ads, or any other type of advertising anomaly.

For the uninitiated, a PSA is something that is served typically when an adserver has nothing else to show – usually it is a mistake since the person who is called on to serve the ad impression has typically paid for that ad and having to show a PSA means they are wasting money since PSAs are, by definition, free and unpaid.

I saw this on IMDB (owned by Amazon) – it looks like not only are they showing a PSA in this ad spot, but it’s showing the wrong size ad in this spot. Double mistake – and looks like the network serving it is Turn due to the image call being from http://img.turn.com/img/server/ads/ps/300×250.jpg (click to expand)

a.ka. crappy free wifi….

On a trip over the labor day weekend, stuck at the airport a little longer than expected and had the wonderful experience of using some free wi-fi. Now you may ask, how can free be bad. Unfortunately, sometimes a bad ad-supported “free” product is far worse for many users like me who would pay a few dollars for a non-adsupported paid version that:

1. Doesn’t break pages I’m trying to load, unable to deal with ajax, flash etc.
2. Slows down the page via two- or three-hop adserving that ends up in an unpaid PUBLIC-SERVICE AD
3. Have some kind of weird tracking/logging of URLs I’ve visiting

Also, I’ve seen lots of PSAs in my time (occupational hazard in looking at a lot of ads and websites for ads) but at least they could be rotating among different ones instead of the very same one. The service doesn’t let me upload a screenshot right now because it clashes with wordpress here. I blocked the ads but still have to redirect through their proxy to get online.

Ouch – looks like the service is called Freefi, and I can’t link to them either because their system (seems to be iframing the page) and breaks the wordpress links javascript as well. Joys! Hopefully these guys can at least get some paying ads up – don’t annoy people and not even profit yourself!