RKNet Blog... Thing

Because I’ve caught a serious case of Twitter fever, I’ve added the TwitterTools plugin, which will daily dump my meaningless tweets (from my personal twitter, not the RKNet twitter) into a single post. The benefit of this is that you, gentle readers, will be privvy to the exciting (HA) life of yours truly, and get the added benefit of all the neat links that I tweet, but neglect to del.icio.us and totally don’t bother blogging about.

The other plugin is more for me, and doesn’t have nearly as much of a direct effect on the content of this blog (yet). I finally got around to adding the WPStats plugin and I honestly don’t know how I went without it for so long. Granted, the stats provided by FeedBurner are pretty good, but I need something more directly related to my actual site traffic. While additions like Clickheat are fun, they aren’t necessarily the strongest measure of visitors and activity. In a text-based medium, you’ve got to know what text brings people to you, and what text keeps them there.

Pretty excited about the whole thing. You should be too! It ultimately means I can monitor to see what makes you the visitors the most happy, and increase the volume on those subjects to 11.

P.S. How do the google ads look? Obtrusive? Not awesome enough? Discuss. I’m hoping that they will eventually start actually trending towards being “contextual” so there can be some halfway decent sponsors in the mix. I also have designs on cleaning this place up (a lot) and re-appealing to Project Wonderful’s review staff so I can then allow real humans to display fun ads for their neat stuff on my blog.

Today while studiously going through the process of marking all the newsletters I don’t bother with as read, I happened to note the following “Web Clip” above my inbox.

Sort of scant information for someone who paid for an ad. I daresay it looks just like spam. Junk. Fraudulent and whatnot.

I braced myself and made the decision to investigate. I expected lots of “buy _________” etc (item names not included, I get enough spammer attention). Yet here’s what I got:

What in the world is this nonsense? How did it end up as a legitimate paid ad in Gmail’s web clips? I’m starting to feel bad that I hit the submit button as many times as I did, since I’m beginning to suspect that this is some kind of elaborate click fraud. The mindset I can picture at work here is “Hi visitor, we paid 50 cents to get you here, now click the submit button because you know how curious you are to find out what happens. That information in the boxes above? Oh nothing… Just what we plan to charge our client for PPC. But hey, we’ve got this neat button. Isn’t it great? Hit it again!”

Any geniuses out there who could confirm or refute this assumption?