(Arfandia claims I’m an affiliate. I’m not. They lie.) Events in the publishing industry (newspaper and book) have made me give more thought to web advertising models, and there’s one model I just don’t get. Why would any website operator with two functioning synapses agree to an ad rate based on clicks or click-throughs? It defies common sense by penalizing the website operator for the quality of the marketing campaign.

Stated baldly, payment per click-through says to the site operator, “We think your site is a good venue to advertise our product, so we want to pay to place an ad on it. If we come up with a lousy campaign that makes people stay away, both from our product as well as your site, we won’t pay you anything at all, but if we can come up with a great campaign that attracts customers by the droves, we’ll pay you.”

In what universe does that make sense?
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or, How Google Got It Wrong.

Recently, Google announced how you should speed up your PHP. They got it wrong, virtually on every point. And not just by a little; subsequent testing showed one of their “improvements” actually resulted in code that took twice as long to execute!

How could this happen?

Maybe being a chessplayer gives me an advantage, but it’s obvious to me. It happens all the time in chess books. A grandmaster will analyse a chess position, and declare the best move is x! (The exclamation is required, it indicates an excellent move.) X! is therefore published to the world and Everyone Knows it’s the right move.
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