| LED Digest 1951: How Important is Server Location? |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Reg. from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. March 29, 2005 Issue #1951 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ======= NEW ===================== --== How Important is Server Location? ==-- ~ Richard Stubbings "I have not seen informed discussion on this topic for some while..." ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Blogging ==-- ~ Phil Tanny "...does our audience perceive value in our blog?" ~ Rich Dudley "Two weeks ago, I added a blog to our site..." --== RSS ==-- ~ Ronni Rhodes "An excellent article appeared today in ClickZ on RSS..." ~ Derek Andrews "I use the online service Bloglines..." ~ Tracy Coyle "The desire to have a current feed is admirable, but relevance has to be the filter." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== To Bounce or not To Bounce ==-- ~ Fred Cherney --== Virus Problems and Microsoft ==-- ~ Tom Aman ======= NEW ====================================== From: Richard Stubbings Subject: Location of Server I have not seen informed discussion on this topic for some while and would welcome the informed input from this mail group. I have a UK based shop and site. Now we ship worldwide but about 60-70% of our business is UK (naturally). We use a UK based dedicated server and I wonder if I would benefit from the cheaper deals available in the US. Now I have heard all sorts of opinions regarding location of servers and wonder which are urban legends and which are real considerations. These opinions are - it is better to have a UK located machine for UK site as the majority of your customers are UK based and will have quicker access to your site. - It is better to have a UK location because a UK IP address will improve your rankings on Google.co.uk - It is better to have a UK location as your support will work the same hours as you Are these REAL considerations? Is there a real advantage worth the additional cost? Opinions please. Richard Stubbings Kulture Shock http://www.kultureshock.co.uk ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: Phil Tanny Subject: Blogs As we consider the future of blogging it seems the obvious question is, are blogs useful, do they deliver value? Let's be more precise and reword the question to ask, does our audience perceive value in our blog? It's reasonable to suppose the future of blogging will come down to that perception. To explore perceived value, blogging, and Net content in general, we might look to an example from the "real world". Given that none of us could survive for more than a few minutes without oxygen, it's hard to think of anything that has more value than air. But what is the perceived value of air? Air could be the very most valuable item in our life, but our emotional relationship to air is almost nonexistent. I'm old enough to remember the 50's when everybody sat glued with fascination to 9 inch black and white TV's with one channel. Now we snooze stupor-like through 120 channels of non-stop full color surround sound animated wizardry. Quantity and quality going up, while perceived value goes down. The Internet as a whole has incredible actual value and great historic significance. The cliche of comparing the Net to the invention of the printing press actually understates that value. But now that the exciting process of digitizing and uploading much of western culture is largely complete, including soon all of our personal details, what is the perceived value of Net content? The more we develop the Net, and the easier it becomes to use, the immediate convenient access to almost any conceivable piece of data becomes ever more like the experience of taking that next breath. Important, but unnoticed, unappreciated. You've read this far, so let's do an imaginary field test. If you would, picture a button at the end of each post that will instantly transfer some amount of money from reader to writer. You type in an amount, click the button, and the transaction is complete. Many of us love to write, and would perhaps happily blog for free, so the money isn't necessarily the issue, the hypothetical "money button" is just a tool to measure _real world_ perceived value. If few would send us a nickel to encourage us to post again, does our post have perceived value? If not, can we deliver actual value? If not, the point of writing is, what exactly? That's the calculation that, for the moment, keeps this natural born blogging blowhard from committing to a regular blog. It could be that the media explosion of the last 50 years, including now the mass circulation of everybody's personal story via blogs, is like a teenager discovering alcohol. We may go on some wild info binges for awhile, and then eventually emerge in to a more mature understanding of the limits of human thought. Picture a crowded cocktail party in a locked room where eventually everybody has said everything to everybody. Now what? Maybe what's truly historic about the Net is the way it's accelerating our travels towards that very interesting moment. If we stopped talking, and started listening, what would we hear? Phil Tanny http://keywords-for-you.com ------- new post - same topic -------- From: Richard Dudley Subject: Blogging > I'm still looking for someone to say, "Since I added > a blog to my site, my profits have increased by at > least 50 percent." Or something like that. - Martha Retallick, LED 1950 How's this: Two weeks ago, I added a blog to our site (www.bloomeryweddings.com/blog). On March 20, I posted an article announcing new collections of wedding accessories we added. On March 23, we received our first SE referrals for these new collections, via MSN Search. Depending on how you type in the collection names (try 'Beverly Clark Florenzia' for instance), we rank anywhere from 1 to 10 for these collections. 3 days, top 10 rankings. That's stellar. The landing pages I create for each of these collections barely register in the SEs. The software I used (dasBlog) tracks referrals in, as well as click-throughs from the posts, and our cart tracks referrers. Two weeks is not enough time to dance about increased profits, but the early results are encouraging. One reason why I think SEs like RSS is because they are clean, so to speak. If you think back a few years, AltaVista and Inktomi had "trusted feed" programs, where large sites could upload XML feeds to the engines for direct indexing. The high cost excluded the vast majority of the WWW. Joe Friday would love today's RSS feeds -- they contain "just the facts". There are no CSS games with H1 tags, layers, table positioning, no redirection based on user agent, etc. At their most basic, an RSS feed is a title, a link, and text content. What's not to love if you're an index algorithm? Rich Dudley www.bloomeryweddings.com ------- new post - new topic -------- From: Ronni Rhodes Subject: RSS and more An excellent article appeared today in ClickZ on RSS and its potential impact on e-mail marketing: http://www.clickz.com/experts/brand/capital/article.php/3492936 Just more food for thought for our ongoing discussions! Best regards, Ronni Rhodes http://www.wbcimaging.com Blog: http://www.ronnirhodes.com ------- new post - same topic -------- From: Derek Andrews Subject: RSS > ... 6 of the feeds reported updates every time they > were checked, in spite of the fact that the most recent > update was anywhere from a week to a month old. - Tom Aman, LED 1950 I use the online service Bloglines and that has a feature which allows one to "Ignore Updated Items" on any particular feed. It is accessible from the subscribe window and 'Edit Subscrition'. It seems to work just fine, so I would encourage you to check your reader to see if it does the same. Derek Andrews, woodturner http://chipshop.blogspot.com ------- new post - same topic -------- From: Tracy Coyle Subject: RSS When this thread started, I added an RSS feed to our site but I also added a scrolling box with the "feed" live for those that do not know or want RSS. It is a lot of work doing both and very quickly I found out that it was too much to put related, but non-specific information into the feed. The result is that I agree with Ian Dickenson in LED 1949. The feed will not be updated unless a specific piece of information relevant to readers becomes available. Just because there are hundreds of divorce, bankruptcy and adoption events every day, doesn't mean WE have to put them in our feed. A story about pre-nups in another state is relevant to our readers (geographically limited) because most people don't know that the issue in the story applies to our state also. Stories about adoption services in Georgia, or "anti-gay" adoption bills in Tennessee are not relevant even if they are interesting news. The desire to have a current feed is admirable, but relevance has to be the filter. Our feed and scrolling box both link to relevant parts of the website rather than just the home page - unless that is the best place to start. Offline Mike Martinez has offered excellent suggestions for our site in these and other areas. His contributions here helped to get us started. Tracy Coyle rss feed: http://www.cazelaw.com/cazelaw.xml ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: Fred Cherney Subject: To Bounce or Not To Bounce? I'm a senior trying to learn about these new fangled computer gadgets. Don't think I'm advanced enough for blogs or RSS yet but here's a simple question, I hope. Our business e-mail gets 5000+ spams a day. We wade through the lot with mailwasher and try to filter out the real inquiries. The one thing that takes the most time is having mailwasher bounce the spam messages. I wonder if bouncing actually confirms the address and brings more spam or if it's a complete waste of time because the spammers have shut down those addresses. Would love some input from people with more experience and knowledge than I. Thanks Fred Cherney http://www.thecruisepeople.ca/ ------- new post - new topic -------- From: Tom Aman Subject: Outlook virus > And no, the viruses are not because Windows is more > popular. Apache has three times the market share than > Microsoft Server, but the trouble on the Net lies with the latter. - Michael Linehan, LED 1949 I would have to disagree with that statement. The viruses ARE because Windows is more popular. For a start, most attacks are not directed at servers, they are directed at users. Also, Apache may have 3 times the market share but how many of those Apache servers are actually running on a Windows system? After all, this server is available for Windows, too. A much more significant statistic would be the number of servers that are Windows based as compared to Mac or Unix based. One reason for the predominance of attacks on Windows is that the underlying architecture is much better know to programmers since, by virtue of being the more popular, there are more programmers of all ages programming for Windows and there is a lot of info easily available. Anyone programming in assembler, 'C' or 'C++' has to learn how to call functions in the Windows operating system to program effectively. The same is usually true for most other languages used to create programs for Windows like Visual Basic, Delphi, etc. And it is much easier to find out things about the Windows operating system that to find similar info about the Mac. Usually the 'Help' files with any programming language used for Windows will include whole sections referencing Windows functions and how to use them. It is a relatively small step from there to being able to create malware. And in spite of what people may think, once a 'hole' is identified, creating a virus / worm / whatever is not particularly difficult for any experienced programmer. Of course this may all change as Linux, which includes the newer versions of the Mac OS, continues to increase in popularity. But don't hold your breath on that, Windows has been around for a long time and it will be quite awhile before the same level of knowledge is available and in use in the Linux world. Tom Aman Aman Software http://www.cyberspyder.com ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2005 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "We can let circumstances rule us, or we can take charge and rule our lives from within." - Earl Nightingale |
