Hey everyone,
Hope you’re having a good Thanksgiving! Me, I’m planning on doing absolutely nothing but goof off and watch football for four days. Yeah baby!
Although I suspect my wife may have something else to say about that….
So, today, I picked up a new addition to the Selberg household. Being that the Polar Bear, my ‘71 Plymouth, was more or less in the shop all of October and extended into November, my wife and I decided that it was time to get a new car. So we picked up a black 2006 Saab 9-3 9.0T. It’s a fun ride… and manual!
Did I mention MK doesn’t drive manual and I’ll be teaching her? That’s right ladies… I give us a month.
Anyway, the Saab has what appears to be all the trappings for a great Bluetooth enabled hands-free system. There’s a numeric keypad arranged in phone order, there’s a built-in microphone, and on the steering wheel are two buttons, one with a phone, another with a moving mouth. This just yells “plug a bluetooth phone in and you’re good to go.”
Except of course that this doesn’t work with any US cars. No bluetooth. And even if there was, it’d only work for a phone that Saab puts in… which is pretty stupid. I mean, you want to use YOUR phone, not some other random phone. That’s the point of bluetooth!
Bah. I’ll have to write up grumbly stuff in the survey they send me.
Oh well. I pick the Polar Bear up tomorrow from the mechanic, then I’ll drive the Saab for a bit and break it in. Give the Polar Bear a good rest for a bit… it’s lived outside in Woodinville for too long. Maybe that’s why it’s mad at me.
So the other day I was contacted by Geoff from Word of Blog (not providing a link as I’m not givin’ em my rank… but you can find them via MSN Search!). Because of my link to Habitat for Humanity on my Unlock AudioVox 5600 post, he asked me if I wanted to post an ad in my sidebar for Habitat’s “Give us your car as a donation” campaign. When I asked him why I wouldn’t just link directly to Habitat versus going through him, he replied:
Thanks, that’s a fair question.
There are several important benefits to go through our service:
a) It enables Habitat to track clicks (if you take a look at http://www.wordofblog.net/info.php?id=364 you’ll see on the left side the list of the first few blogs which posted the badge today and how many clicks they generated so far), so that they know who their supporters and well wishers are.
b) As a related matter, it enables Habitat to exercise some control over who posts the badge — the beauty of making a badge available to the public is any blogger can pick and choose it if they want to suppor the organization, which creates a tremendous potential in terms of word of mouth campaign; however, the obvious danger is that the badges get displayed on blogs that the organization wouldn’t want to appear on. So by hosting and serving the Habitat badge, we enable Habitat to potentially take out the badge from any blog or site they don’t want to appear on.
c) Finally, because we host the badges ourselves, we can offer to the bloggers attractive user features such as badge rotation — if you want to support several organizations on your blog but don’t want to sidebar to look like a “christmas tree”, you can have several badges rotate on your page ( i.e., change each time the page is refreshed).
(emphasis mine).
So Habitat can already see who clicks on their site via referrers, and I’m sure they do. But they probably care much more about people donating them their cars. Also, say I was a less than upstanding blog… Habitat couldn’t control whether or not I put up an ad for them or not (well, they could potentially sue me, but their policy of distributing out their message may cause some problems. Regardless, it’d be a messy issue.). Which means we really come down to a rotating ad powered by Word of Blog.
At least the search engines give you a couple of bucks if you show their ads on your site.
Bah.