Fonero, fonera, olé

I'm sorry for my decreasing posting activities and also sorry for not keeping up my blog relationships that much in the past few weeks. There is just so much going on in my life right now (which I will write about soon) that I barely spend any time on the web. I promise to get better soon, please forgive me for the meantime!

This weekend I did have some time but no Internet connection, because I spent the weekend in the Swiss alps. It was nice - on Sunday we were able to sit in the garden in tank tops and today it was snowing. Is anybody still insisting that no real climate change is happening? Okay, different subject. Back to the Internet connection... I received two comments to my last post from Peluka and Steven regarding my petition for free WLAN all over the world and they both related to FON:

FON is the largest WiFi community in the world. You can become member and share your wireless Internet access at home and, in return, enjoy free WiFi wherever you find another Fon Access Point. Now that's exactly my point! Why should you pay for Internet access on the go when you have already paid for it at home? So FON decided to help create a community of people who get more out of their connection through sharing. They call members of the FON Community "Foneros". To become a Fonero you need to buy "La Fonera". La Fonera is a special kind of WiFi router - a "Social Router". That’s because when you activate your La Fonera, you become part of the FON Community.

FON is creating a bit too many new words at once for my taste, but I guess that's part of a cult they're trying to build up around this service. This is clearly an interesting concept, but of course only works when they manage to build up a huge community. I hope they succeed.
Due to my busy timetable I haven't properly checked the map yet to find out how well "Foneros" are spread over the world and especially whether there are any in the places I often visit (e.g. windsurfing destinations, Swiss alps). But I'll save that task for another day and rather get some sleep now :)
Good night, Dania

Petition for open wireless networks

I'm just sitting in a small café in Utrecht, the Netherlands, waiting for my train back to Zurich, Switzerland. I spent a few days visiting my friend in Den Haag - my computer is with me, as always. Every now and then when I'm visiting a new place I try out whether there is any internet connection available and surprisingly there almost always is! Now, the trouble is that the networks are often secured and not open for anyone to use, which I think sucks.

First of all, in Europe most people pay a flat rate and therefore do not suffer any financial disadvantage when there are some free-riders surfing along. Secondly, people are getting more and more mobile. I don't really have one fix working station, so any nice café or parc can serve as an office as long as my notebook is with me. My WLAN at home is not secured. Anyone visiting my neighbour (or even my neighbour himself) has free access to the Internet. In return I hope that more and more people all over the world open up their connections to me. Thanks again to "Rancho Delfin" that I had Internet connection during my two-weeks holiday in Venezuela!
So, I plead for open free wireless networks. If you have a secured network please rethink and open it up! What goes around comes around.
Dania

Blog meme

I’ve been tagged for the first time by wotZcool who received a blog meme by Christy and passed it on to me.... of course I had no clue what a blog meme is.
Basically a meme is a small task you complete and then pass on to other bloggers to do the same thing. So it requires active participation by the blogger and is often a series of questions that a blogger answers to share some personal thoughts on random topics. When you choose the other bloggers and pass on the meme you are tagging them.

So the meme I received is to give five reasons as to why I blog and tag five other bloggers.

So, why do I blog?

1. First of all, because I want to learn. My blogging activities keep my motivation up to stay informed regarding latest developments in the web world and blogosphere.
2. Because it is a challenge to write. I need to come up with new topics for new posts and really have to be creative.
3. Because it does not have anything to do with my job. I work as an accounting advisor.
4. Because I want to build up a network of people all over the world. I love the global character of blogging: No matter where someone physically is, the blogosphere is a small world after all...
5. Because I'm addicted to acknowledgement. This a quite personal confession I'm making here ;)

And I will pass the meme on to:
1. Louiss
2. Billy Warhol
3. Wayne / Octane
4. Fedele
and
5. Michael Arrington (..rather known as TechCrunch... it's worth a try, isn't it?)

My first guest blog entry - Bloggade therapy

I'm very proud to announce that Steve asked my to write a guest post on his very cool blog wotZcool.com. Today I posted it and it's called Bloggade therapy... So may I please invite you to read my new post here on Steve's blog. I hope you enjoy it :)

Online advertising jungle

I've done some research with respect to online advertising and revenue potential... don't get me wrong: I am not planning on setting up google ads or something like that on my blog because I don't have enough traffic on my blog (yet, I hope). But anyway, I'm interested in what average revenues on blogs or other websites are. There are many different advertising techniques and ways of measuring revenue. Here some explanations of popular abbreviations:

PPC (Pay Per Click) is an advertising technique used on search engines and other websites. Advertisers bid on keywords - for example, if an advertiser sells shoes, he/she would bid on the keyword "shoes", hoping a user would type those words in the search bar, see their text ad, click on it and buy. The advertiser pays only when the user clicks on the ad. The resulting cost for the advertiser is therefore the CPC (Cost Per Click).
The cost of another advertising technique is the CPI (Cost Per Impression). The CPI is often measured using the CPM (Cost Per Mille) metric. A CPM is the cost of 1,000 impressions. The according revenue for the website owner is often related to as RPM (Revenue Per Mille). I haven't really understood how that is measured, because it seems that RPM is an average value of different advertising techniques and doesn't relate to only graphic ads or text ads. So I guess "impressions" is a quite broad term. I have seen ranges for RPM between $0.1 and $50... so here is my big question mark: what is a reasonable average RPM or other revenue key figure for text ads on a not very specified website or blog? Is there another way to track your revenue?
I've often came across the CTR (Click-Through Rate), which is another important ingredient to the advertising term jungle and a way of measuring the success of an online advertising campaign. It is obtained by dividing the number of users who clicked on an ad on a web page by the number of times the ad was delivered (impressions). For example, if your ad was delivered 100 times and 1 person clicked on it, then the resulting CTR would be 1%. The problem is that I still don't know what the earning is because I don't know how much a click costs.
Does anybody have any insights?
Thanks, Dania