BDlot DVD Clone Ultimate

A lesson I learned as a new parent is that there are great uses for a DVD ripper/cloning application that does not include piracy...that lesson is, kids wreck stuff. So, when I buy my kids DVD's of their favorite movies, I have copied them, and given the copies to the kids, when it's wrecked, create another, and repeat as necessary.

Years ago this was much easier to do, but over the years, there has been an onslaught of new protection schemes, bloated or "corrupt" files that wreck a burn and various other issues. DVD Clone Ultimate is a new software I stumbled across and figured I'd give it a go.

Overall it was a pretty impressive experience, it has quiet a few options to facilitate most anyone with a PC and a burner.

The obvious tools involve the ripping of a DVD. It can be ripped to a second DVD, just doing a sector by sector duplication of the DVD, but, in addition to that one can rip the VIDEO_TS right to the hard drive or USB drive, In addition you can back up just the main movie to an MPEG2 file, which often uses about half the space of a full DVD. If you choose to rip the DVD to your hard drive or USB, there is also a burning utility to burn it to an empty DVD, which allows people with only a single DVD drive to be able to do a duplication as well. 

They advertise the fact it will remove all known protections, and, while I can not verify that, I can say it hasn't choked on a DVD I have thrown at it yet.

The interface is very slick, easy to use and logical. Anyone that has used any DVD ripping or backup application will be able to figure this application out. That said, there were some things that I wondered "huh, what's that". A little in application help would be kind of nice, though it wouldn't need to be much. It's likely something as simple as thorough tool tip descriptions by each option/form field would be of use.

I did, however, have a couple issues. One, was during the VIDEO_TS rip, the application builds a weird directory structure, and it will never go into the folder you tell it to, but, it's easily copied into the folder you wanted originally. Additionally, I had some problems with the MPEG2 encoder on one DVD where it would rip the wrong language audio.

I did report both of those bugs to BDlot, and they responded within a couple days that they did verify the bugs existed, and the VIDEO_TS path bug was fixed, and they will be fixing the wrong language issue during the next development cycle as it's a bigger issue that requires some resources. So, while not particularly happy about the delay of such a critical fix for what I see as a serious bug, the personal response that wasn't a simple form email was certainly nice...much better than you get from many software makers.

Google Panda Trickledown Effects

Much talk has been floating around the net for a while now regarding the Google Panda update. I've seen many ripple effects from it trickling through AdSense as well. I figured it's about time to cover the topic a little bit.

Google has massive impact on the search engine landscape, and every update they make to their systems is always big news, because it affects everyone online. By and large, their updates affect web sites that should be affected, as they target sites that use so-called "black hat" methods to get higher rankings, or, at the very least, push the envelope of "white hat" techniques.

That being said, good sites are always caught in the fray, I know a couple of sites I manage have been caught in some Google dances over the years, and it's frustrating to deal with. Panda has been no different.

Google Panda has been described as an algorithm update, I am not exactly sure that is how I'd describe it, as it seems to be more of a ranking criteria change. Google put people and artificial intelligence to work in unison to develop a better way of ranking web sites by quality, in addition to the long standing technologies of simple keyword density and incoming link ratings. They used humans to rank a large selection of web sites on quality, originality, or lack there of, and with that determined how best to use artificial intelligence to determine such ratings themselves.

The goal of this project was simply to help weed out spammy web sites, or, blogs and sites that exist only on duplicated, unoriginal content, as a way to improve rankings of honest, original, higher quality web sites.

The trickle down effect is these same low quality sites being banned from services like Google AdSense in an effort to increase the quality of the publisher base behind the AdWords program and increase the value of the ads. It would seem, based on what I have seen, many of the affected web sites seem to be in a select few countries, now these countries are crying foul.

If you produce your own content, and have a high quality, unique web site, don't worry about Panda, it will do nothing to you but help, in theory. As Google further and further refines it's system, it should only make results better and better.

An Apparent Mass Extermination of Google AdSense "Publishers" is in Play

It seems from AdSense's support forum and various other sources around the intertubes that there has been a serious housecleaning to the AdSense publishers list. There are a lot of angry publishers in various places crying everything from "but I didn't do anything wrong" to "it's racism, because I am from an Asian country".

A very few of these claims, from what I have seen and tried to help with are somewhat difficult to nail down exactly why they were banned, but, as a whole, it's really not too difficult. Most publishers that are kicking and screaming, that actually leave their URL for investigation have proven to be web sites and blogs consisting of copied content, illegal downloads or other types of copyright infringements that were more than deserving of their ban. The others, I suspect have something to do with click fraud or policy infractions.

People need to understand one thing, AdSense is not in the practice of banning publishers for no reason, they lose money on the deal just like the publisher does, and when someone is banned, unlike some claim, Google does not "steal your money", it is returned to the publishers that have paid to have ads on the account that was banned. How do I know this? Well, I have used AdWords and I have had money returned to my account, that's how.

There are too many people out there that think they are smarter than AdSense, continually trying to formulate ways to game the system. Let me assure you, you are not smarter than the system. Their click analysis systems are incredibly sophisticated, and track much more than simple IP, User Agent, OS and any Google authentication information that may or may not be available. They track a lot beyond that, including behavior profiling, clicking patterns, patterns between other known users, clicker locations, bounce rate from advertisers sites and dozens of other items and behaviors. This is not a trivial system.

That also explains why, at times, your "estimated earnings" go down a bit here and there after being finalized, as after clicks are made and credit is given, they are sometimes later proven to be part of a click fraud scheme in which the click was likely an early participant in and it was pulled after the fraud was detected.

Some have suggested, the very rightly so, that the sudden increase in banned AdSense accounts could be attributed back to Google's Panda Update. Since the whole point of the Google Panda update, which I perhaps will cover in the future in more details, was to flag and lower rankings of web sites determined to be more spammy, whether it be lame advertising, copied content or any number of other reasons. It is easy to see how that same information could easily be trickled back to the AdSense publisher system for cleaning house there.

Google has as it's very first obligation, protecting it's advertisers, they are the paying customers, publishers are necessary part of the system, but publishers will be let go to defend their paying customers. Google has a massive group of publishers, with thousands coming all the time, so publishers are not rare and are expendable, and Google is perfectly within their policies to ban any publisher, at any time, for any reason. It's part of the policies publisher agree to when signing up.

SEO Reports from Google Webmaster Tools now available in Google Analytics

This is a kind of neat little addition to Google Analytics. I am enjoying the integration of AdWords, AdSense, and now, Webmaster Tools, into Analytics. It make a single stop shop for a lot of reports and information that otherwise requires visits to multiple places.

Google's big thing of late, seems to be the sharing of data between their applications, and I very much welcome the effort. Everyone gets tired of going from application to application to get the information they need. This update, depending on how you work, and what you care about, could be a big time saver.

Under the "Traffic Sources" menu item is now  a "Search Engine Optimization" is now three sub items, including "Queries", "Landing Pages" and "Geographical Summaries". These three reports pull information from your Webmaster Tools data to inform you of the results of these.

• "Queries" is pretty much what you would assume, shows a list of the words and phrases searches have used to find you, ordered by the most popular to the least popular.
• "Landing Pages" shows the pages of entry for your visitors, the first page they are landing on when coming to your site.
• "Geographical Summaries" shows the countries from which you are getting traffic.

With these you can gain a little bit of insight into where you are strong, and more importantly, perhaps, where you are lacking and need to increase your efforts in performance.