Some time in 1985, my father brought home a Macintosh. While he played with MacPaint, my two-year-old self appeared behind him, commandeered the mouse, and had his little mind blown. (While I seem to have turned out alright, it is a shame about Apple.)

The reason I am writing this is because the source code to the first computer program I ever used is now in a museum.

Thanks, Google

Gizmag breaks a story with 2280 words, 42 images and a video. Engadget covers it and goes straight to #1 in the SERPs. Don’t let anyone tell you that search is solved.

In an attempt to push things in the right direction, you should go check out the Canon Wonder Camera. The future is awesome.

This is the best advice I’ve received in a long time. Thanks Josh!

Found at Startup Quote.

Editor Marni Cordell writes:

“The big media players are struggling to find a workable online business model that allows them to pay their writers and maintain high standards — and so are we. Since we already run a very lean operation, cutting costs is not an option and we are taking the only path available to us at this time.”

As Duncan Riley says, “There’s nothing hard about covering your costs and living within your means.” Gizmag’s modus operandi has always been “do more with less” – and we’ve been profitable for years as a result of our frugality.

I’m really struggling to see how someone could look at this staff list and this contributor list and call it a “very lean operation”. Lean is your core team working 100 hour weeks for little more than they could earn working 40 hour weeks flipping burgers. Lean is most certainly not paying a laundry list of contributors up to $200 per article and giving away an annual $6,000 cash prize for political cartooning.

According to Nielsen NetRatings, New Matilda saw under 30,000 unique visitors in April. To put that into perspective, its competitors Crikey and The Punch were doing 13,000 and 10,000 UVs a day respectively over the same period. Gizmag is set to crack 60,000 Australian uniques in May, and the revenue generated from that traffic won’t even cover the wage of one of our four full timers, let alone our contributors.

While the amount of money going into online advertising is growing, the supply of “me too” sites for those ads to run beside is growing far quicker. You’ll need to have large volumes of traffic, a tight focus on a niche with high advertiser demand, or a killer sales team (or combinations thereof) for advertising to work. New Matilda had none of the above. Here’s some examples of the ads I’ve seen on New Matilda today (apart from the ubiquitous Apple affiliate ads, which might generate a few bucks for MacTalk but I suspect would do effective CPMs of tens of cents, not tens of dollars for New Matilda):

The real shame is that New Matilda have seemingly thrown in the towel without even trialling a revenue share deal with their contributors, or an advertising manager who isn’t embarrassed by the above examples. As Einstein said, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

More coverage at The Australian, Crikey, The Inquisitr and Duncan Riley’s blog, Larvatus Prodeo, Andrew Bartlett’s blog and Renai LeMay’s blog.

…but the coolest thing I wrote about this week wasn’t a smartphone.

It was the Korg monotron analog synthesizer.

My studio already has a few pieces of Korg gear (the Kaoss Pad 2, the Kaoss Pad 3 and the set of three nanoSeries MIDI controllers I picked up for a steal in Tokyo) and the monotron will undoubtedly be the next. It’s a simple, but fully analog synthesizer with the same filter used in the classic Korg MS-10 and MS-20 synths, for an absolute no-brainer price of US$85. As Peter Kirn at the fantastic CreateDigitalMusic blog points out, it’s also likely to be hack/mod/bend-friendly. Totally pumped.

This is what our monthly global audience graph looks like now:

The countries listed represent our top five traffic sources.

I’ve only just started looking at what’s there, and it’s already provided some important insights into Gizmag’s audience that I’ve missed through the countless hours I’ve spent looking at data from services like Google Analytics, Clicky, ChartBeat, Technorati and Alexa. Sure, Google and Clicky can tell me some of this stuff (…and Alexa and Compete.com can guess, but I’m not listening) but Quantcast has managed to produce something that can do it “at a glance”.

I found this really interesting – we’ve been looking at the following graph for our US demographics for years now:

…but now we can see demographics for other countries. Here’s our Australian demographics – the difference in the age brackets shows that the same content attracts a different audience in different countries. (Not that I have a clue why – any ideas?)

There’s also site rankings in specific countries now:

Two days ago I asked why so many sites still aren’t “quantified” with Quantcast, and now that it’s global, the only reason I could see for being a straggler is gone – if you haven’t already, go do it!

via @GreatDismal (aka William Gibson)

Yeah, the last six months have been awesome.

As an aside, I have no idea why so many sites still aren’t running Quantcast tags. Sure, the rankings are US-centric, but look at how wrong their panel-based competition are getting it…

Every time a user experiences this kind of “advertising”, it’s damaging the user’s experience, the site and its relationship with its readers, the advertising network itself and the industry as a whole – no doubt a significant percentage of AdBlock installations have been a result of scareware.

…so it was an unpleasant surprise seeing how some of the networks we deal with responded to the problem once made aware of it. Of course, I’m contractually obliged not to reveal any specific details, but here’s some tips for when you’re thinking about jumping into bed with a new ad network:

• Be wary of networks who don’t give you the ability to see what advertising is running on your site and block specific advertisers or creative from running without their intervention.
• Be wary of networks who don’t give you access to a publisher interface that allows you to change your default tags (tags from another ad network which will be displayed if this network can’t fill the impression) without their intervention.
• Be wary of networks who won’t give you daily reports on creative delivery. Without this, you can’t see if they’re serving ads from a third-party remnant deal without letting you know.
• Do not sign any exclusive ad contracts without having a lawyer (who actually understands online advertising) go through it with you. Consider adding a clause that allows you to pull their tags in the event of inappropriate advertising appearing on your site. (Remember, contracts are negotiations.)

Having said that, don’t take this as me saying “don’t sign up with a network that falls into any of those categories” – the best network we’ve been involved with to date doesn’t have a publisher interface. Just understand the risks involved with not having complete awareness and control of the advertising that is being served onto your site at all times.

In the end, I won the battle by cutting our ten-strong ad waterfall (a chain of ad networks that pass on impressions they can’t fill to the next network) down to two networks. Of course, the hundreds of thousands of impressions that are no longer being filled each day made quite a dent in our revenues, but the trust we’ve built with our 1.1 million readers over the last eight years is far more important.

I signed up at BlackVPN, who have a rock solid and reasonably priced VPN service that allows you to view your site as it would be viewed by a reader in the US, UK, Europe and the Netherlands (incredibly helpful for someone in Melbourne, Australia). This allowed me to experience the issue myself, and verify that we’d got it sorted, rather than relying on our readers for diagnostics.

…and I’ll leave you with another tip. You might run OS X, but always have a Windows machine handy for diagnostics. It appears that this particular attack relied on an Internet Explorer vulnerability. No surprises there, really. (Thanks again for Internet Explorer, Microsoft. You’ve left a stain on the internet that will take decades to clean up.)

	Name	Bio	Followers	URL
	Alex Kidman	Tech journalist. Retro games fan. May or may not be Gonzo in a sophisticated robot costume.	727	Site
	Andrew Davies	Producer (Radio National) Australian Broadcasting Corp. These are my views and not those of the ABC.	1363	Site
	Andrew Landeryou	Journalist	4187	Site
	Andrew Ramadge	Andy writes stuff about technology and pop music.	1144	Site
	Angus Kidman	IT journalist who breaks all he touches, traveller, pop culture tragic	1020	Site
	anne_bain	Love travel, self learning, affiliate marketing,IM,social media & blogging. My new product www.pumpuptraffic.com/TrafficPump	5941	Site
	Anthony Caruana	Tech journo for The Age, Macworld, APC, PC Update and others	687	Site
	Arjun Ramachandran		270	n/a
	Asher Moses	Technology Editor, smh.com.au, theage.com.au, brisbanetimes.com.au, watoday.com.au	1746	Site
	barry	Australia-Pacific editor @engagemedia	1831	Site
	Bec Madden	Deputy editor of magazines, pop culture junky, digital media enthusiast + professional house-sitter. This shiz is crazy! www.isithousesit.com	1094	Site
	Ben Grubb	Tech reporter.	2226	n/a
	Brad Howarth	Writer and speaker on technology, entrepreneurship and communication, and co-author of the forthcoming book www.afasterfuture.com.	1368	Site
	Bronwen Clune	Ex-control media journalist interested in a better media. Wryter, podcaster and new-word inventor. CEO Norg Media, Director @strategeist and life adventurist.	3460	Site
	Caroline Overington	Caroline lives in Bondi; has twins; digs Bob Dylan and has a novel, Ghost Child, on the shelves. Published by Random House.	2773	Site
	charispalmer	Editor, Online Banking Review. I’m a cow ‘cos the SandP ratings people reckon they’d rate a deal structured by a cow	1195	Site
	Chris Berg	Research Fellow, Institute of Public Affairs; Editor, IPA Review; Sunday Age columnist; probably other things as well	722	Site
	Chris Griffith	Journalist, The Australian	213	Site
	danwalsh	Kwoff – Crowdsourced Coverage	293	Site
	danwarne	Online editor at APCmag.com, freelance journo for Sydney Morning Herald & Qantas Mag. In newly married bliss.	768	Site
	Dave Earley	Online News Editor, Seven News Qld. Multimedia journalist – one digital convert at a time. Views expressed here are my own,not my employer.etc etc & all that	3796	Site
	David Higgins	Editor, NEWS.com.au	1167	Site
	David Jackmanson	Arkady Renko fan, Advanced call centre skills. I like to chat, +promote creative commons, adventurous and artistic people in Brisbane, Australia	1922	Site
	Duncan Riley	Editor, The Inquisitr, CEO Nichenet. Defender of the (New Media) Faith, Emperor of my own lunch box, conquerer of luddites.	8283	Site
	Ed Charles	Freelance business and food journalist. Food blogger. Drinks Chablis, rides Xtracycle. Pats small dogs and trills at cats	2980	Site
	Elissa Baxter	journalist, photographer, mother, crafter, ex-lawyer and art history student	374	Site
	engochick	Suzanne Tindal/Wohlthat, journalist at ZDNet.com.au and sci fi fantasy lover	503	n/a
	Entrepreneur Dad	I am a Sydney based SEO consultant & a Dad,I’ll Tweet about Blogs, Twitter, Tech News & Sites. Entrepreneurship & being a startup.I also update @groceryguynews	252	n/a
	Genevieve Robey	The Editor @ Wotnews.com.au partnered with WeAreHunted.com. My art – http://redbubble.com/people/genrobey	1330	Site
	Graham Young	Founder, Chief Editor On Line Opinion. Online pollster, political commentator and occasional strategist, new media enthusiast. Surfer, father and musician.	3176	Site
	Harley Dennett	Australian journalist in Washington DC, covering politics. Air Force husband.	953	Site
	Jason Cartwright	Multimedia dev, tech journalist, gamer.	1687	Site
	Jason Whittaker	Journalist (Deputy Editor at @crikey_news); media junkie; culture vulture (theatre pest/critic); political wonk. Hopeless idealist. New in town…	2093	Site
	Jen Dudley-Nicholson	News Ltd technology editor, gadget lover, martial arts novice, cat slave.	1980	Site
	Jeremy Cabral	Web Entrepreneur, Online Strategist, SEO, SEM, Internet Marketing, Analytics, Personal Finance. Music: Ska, Punk	593	Site
	Jessica Crouch	Editor, lover of @synmedia, interested in what you have to say	507	n/a
	jezford	Wanders a world of music, audio, AV and tech…	191	Site
	John Grey	online editor, the courier-mail. More on http://www.google.com/profiles/john.grey	1822	Site
	John Lacey	Everything you’ve heard about me is pure hearsay…	1529	Site
	Jonathan Green	editor of ABC’s The Drum, nemesis of pirates	2198	Site
	Josh Mehlman	Freelance journo and editor with expertise in SMEs, IT, online tech, social media, telecoms, financial services. Very few strange habits. No hideous scars.	675	Site
	Joshua Gliddon	journalist, surfer, father of two	898	n/a
	julieposetti	Journalist and J-academic interested in people, politics and the future. Researching social media; public broadcasting; reporting race & culture; talk radio etc	3002	Site
	Linda Bennett	Architectural student and blogger interested in Music (Ska, Skacore, Punk), Art, Architecture, Muscle Cars..Oh and world domination!	840	Site
	Lynchy	Ad commentator, news hound, bon vivant. Publisher + Editor of Campaign Brief and bestadsontv.com	6964	Site
	MargaretSimons	Freelance journalist and writer	1259	Site
	Mark Jones	journalist, speaker, digital content producer	1554	Site
	Mark Pesce	Inventor, writer, theorist, panelist on #newinventors, obsessed with language, communication, social networks and politics… ENFJ.	6073	Site
	Michael Eury	Learning designer, consultant and pretty decent cook!	585	Site
	Natasha Lee	English lit nerd and journalist.	305	n/a
	Nate Cochrane	Editor in chief CRN, iTnews, SC Magazine AU; AU’s 1st online journo; Deal or no Deal’s biggest prize winner; AU’s biggest cash prize game show winner	1464	Site
	Nic Healey	Managing Editor at Future Publishing AU. This is my personal Twitter and the opinions don’t reflect those of the company. I like drinking and cowboy hats.	786	Site
	Nick Broughall	World’s luckiest gadget nut	825	Site
	Paul Colgan	Online journalist. Managing editor of thepunch.com.au. I tweet about news, music, sport and other regular fun stuff.	2375	Site
	Paul Wiggins	Print and online (sub)editor, designer, news writer Australia lat. and long. above	1531	Site
	Peace Mitchell	Australian publisher + editor of online magazine Connect2mums.com.au + Author of ‘What I wish I knew before I became a mother.’ + Board member Playgroup Qld	4171	Site
	Possum Comitatus	The snarky polling marsupial and Crikey blogger	2439	Site
	Renai LeMay	Australian technology journalist, publisher of Delimiter.com.au. I also run sci-fi/fantasy book site KeepingTheDoor.com. And I’m a Zen Buddhist.	3409	Site
	Rod McGuinness	Managing Editor of newmatilda.com plus two kids, cats and chooks	1622	Site
	Rosanna Ryan	online journo, new media tutor, internet addict.	720	Site
	Ross Monaghan	An academic, and former journalist and CEO, from Melbourne, Victoria. Social Media rules!	1544	Site
	Ruth Brown	Journalist, geek, Thai boxer, bass player.	911	n/a
	Samela Harris	Newspaper journalist. Critic. Blogger. Early adopter – whatever it is. Lover of pelicans, dogs, spiders and truth.	1111	Site
	Sarah Blinco	I’m a magazine editor, journalist with PR skills on the side; and I love the internet…	139	Site
	Seamus Byrne	Writer for Atomic, Nett#, news.com.au, Asylum and MactheMag. Host of Midnight Update. Guy who thought up Byteside.	1326	Site
	Simon Sharwood	Parent, husband, writer, cyclist	1315	Site
	smallkathryn	Super-intelligent hero	199	Site
	Stilgherrian	Opinionated writer, broadcaster, consultant about digitalness for Crikey, ZDNet, others. All hail Eris! Vive les poissons rouges sauvages!	4064	Site
	Tim Hanlon	I work/write for Gizmag, make music, and drink tea.	353	Site
	Tony Bain	Tony Bain is an expat Kiwi, Father, Entrepreneur, Angel Investor, Blogger, and occasional Writer	480	Site
	Trevor Young	THE PR WARRIOR – battle-hardened public relations and marketing communications consultant, blogger, speaker and trainer. My day gig is at www.parkyoung.com.au	5265	Site
	valeriekhoo	I’m a journalist and entrepreneur. I run the Sydney Writers Centre – online and face-to-face writing courses. Enterprise blogger for smh.com.au.	2034	Site
	Warlach	Level 80 Cultural Investigator, dual classing in community management and social media. Currently the Social Media Manager at @EarthHour Global.	3536	Site

I last updated the list on the 14th March, fixing the broken images. If you’re after something more complete, Dave Earley has put together a much larger (and much uglier) list.