Being as I am a publisher on the web (http://www.hearth.com), I also use many google services and am a publishing partner of theirs on Adsense.

I recently attended a seminar put on by google in their Boston HQ – which was put on by the Google Adsense team. It was my first chance to actually hobnob in person with Google Employees – most of them flew in from the Mt. View HQ. I was, as expected, impressed by their “on the ball” quotient, however as a stockholder, observer and otherwise interested party I did look for chinks in their armor – or, more accurately, to determine if they were missing large opportunities to improve their services and revenues.

No business is perfect. It is impossible for any corporation to execute perfectly and take advantage of all the possible opportunities. I’m certain google is very aware of this – in the real world you don’t have to be perfect, you just have to be MUCH better than the other guy!

OK, so onto one or two of my suggestions and observations! I think google is leaving a LOT of money on the table when it comes to their advertising programs. For those who don’t know how all this works, googles business is basically as an advertising agency. They match buyers of advertising (adwords) to sellers of advertising (publishers, their own ads shown on google.com, etc.), and pocket a percentage of the take.

In order to make certain that relevant ads are shown on a partner site, google looks closely at the content of that site. For instance, my site covers wood stoves, pellet stoves and other energy and hearth related issues. As you might expect, google would show ads on my site relating to these products and to those which it determines are related – an example might be trucks (yes, truck ads show up on my site).

Yet, there are MANY categories of ads which googles system (the computer programs) do not show on my site, and yet I KNOW are relevant to our users. An example might be many products which are building materials or tools. Our site readers are fiercely independent and tend to make a lot of their own buying decisions -as well as being big in the DIY market.

It also turns out that many of my site readers own a motorcycle!

Given googles current system, they only relate words based on a very finite set of rules – there is no human being looking at hearth.com or at the wood stove market and saying “hey, these customers also tend to build log houses”. The best – and possibly only – way to get that information would be for someone like me (the site provider) to actually TELL them that these things might be related.

So, without further adieu, here is my suggestion which might end up making billions for google!

Let certain trusted publishers have access to a control panel where they can specify a set of product categories or keywords which THEY CLAIM apply to their readership. These could be limited in both scope and in the amount of exceptions which each publisher could claim per year (perhaps one trial per month).

Google would then place those ads onto the partner site for a long enough trial period (one week?) in order to prove or to disprove the claim of the publisher. Stats could be kept so that a publisher who proved their mettle could have more options in specifications, while a published who constantly struck out would loose access to the feature.

Such a feature, done right, would almost surely drive up revenues for both publishers and google, while giving advertisers access to new markets that google keyword relationships were not finding. As this program was proven, google would have more and more word relationships to work with, thereby enhancing the efficiency of the entire system.

Ok, goog, you can thank me later!

One caller to the NPR show asked why he only felt good when he was hiking in completely natural surroundings, natural in this case being wild – such as old growth forest, marshlands, etc.

This got me thinking about what pleases my own visual senses. I have to admit that I may have a preference for man-made landscapes.
These views speak to me as if to say “here’s what we can do (nature and man) when we work together”.

I think it must be my practicality showing through! These landscapes speak to me of function – growing food, large trees for shade, grass for recreation and enjoyment and waterways for pleasure and navigation.

He then mentioned picking up another fare after a Red Sox game at Fenway. This fella was 25 years old and immediately started telling the driver “you people come here for money and know nothing about America….you are not in the military fighting for us…blah, blah, blah”. The driver calmly informed the young man that he was 55 years old and had bad joints, so could not fight in the military. He also told the dude “Son, I’ve been here 35 years as a adult. You’ve only been here 25 years, many of those in diapers and relatively few as a adult – so I would say I know more about America than you do”. The guy listened carefully and they became good friends during the long cab ride.

It makes my heart glad to know that folks like this cabbie are driving around every day and fearlessly injecting a little truth into the lives of random people. He really is a special person, and I am proud….as is he…to be fellow Americans.

Podcasts: I really enjoy listening to certain episodes of NPR’s Fresh Air. Even then the particular subject is not something which seems of interest, listening through can be very educational. One recent episode detailed how one of the leaders of the Skinhead movement become “converted” back to a normal and sane member of society – fascinating!

Another interest of my is innovation and entrepreneurship, especially in the fields of technology (google, etc.) and energy (anything from clean water to clean energy).
I highly recommend a podcast series put out by Stanford University called Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders. This series features some of the top minds in the world giving talks to Stanford students. Listening to these audio programs will immediately increase both your IQ and your optimism!

maurice making dinner for all of us

Further and further into the hills we climbed – the volcanic rock made for slow going, and shoes were easily torn. Finally we got to the top of a rock outcropping a couple miles inland from the ocean. On the top of this outcropping was a small lean-to with open sides and a steel bed frame – and there sat our soon to be good friend, Maurice! Lest you think Maurice is a fictional character, let me counter that with a picture and description of the great man himself.

OK, so you see, Maurice was very real as was his little lean-to as well as his bed which consisted of a metal frame with cardboard on the top.

We quickly became good friends with Maurice as well as with the rest of the younger Rasta gang, many of whom turned out to be related to each other! Upon further examination of the various relationships, I came to the conclusion that many of these Rastas were the Jamaican equivalent of US “Hippies”. They were tired of living the “straight” life of hard work and servitude on the farms and scraping out an existence. Their parents were very religious and hard working Christians, which seemed in the case of these people NOT to be an empowering religion, but one where one accepts their place in life – in this case a HARD place! So the teenagers, like teens everywhere, rebelled. However, instead of running away to San Francisco or NYC, they simply walked 1/4 mile behind their homes and set up camp under an overhanging rock or in a small cardboard sided shack. Instead of going to work each day, they simply enjoyed life – which is possible without too much work in a climate where fruit hangs from many trees and no heat or AC is needed. Rastas are vegetarian, and they prefer to eat quite low on the food chain, so meals are not expensive for them.

We soon developed a mutual aid deal. Martha and I would walk into town each day and pick up a few staples – maybe some sugar and some flour, etc. – along with the large white bakery bags which Rastas use to roll their spliffs. We would bring these goodies up to Maurices shack and then spend a couple hours making these great dinners – all the while chatting about the state of the world. Sunset would mark the end of our visits, and we would walk back to our rented room, which was in the house of their Christian parents up by the road.

To be continued in a 4th and final part!

One of my Brethren cuts wood - no protection, of course!

How to get clean in the middle of WV with no running water.

Yes, there were times in my past life when I could be considered a hippie – and a wood burning hippie at that, since that was the only possible source of heat out in the boonies of Lewis County, WV.

We found plenty of wood, sawed it with two-man saws and chainsaws…never learned much about seasoning, as our needs were immediate, so into the stoves it went.

Being hippies meant that about 40 people were living on the mountain along with us – housing consisting of one main house (see pic) as well as corn cribs, barns, old schoolbuses and some bread vans…one of which my wife and I called home. Those $20 tin stoves from the hardware store were just right for making the inside of a metal box truck quite cozy!

A bath in the woods!

The House and Shed (to right) in WV

Finally, we decided to take the bull by the horns and build a Sauna which would hold 20 or 30 of us at one time. If you look close at the picture of the house, you will see a tool shed with wood siding to the right of the it. It was in the basement of this shed – the old root cellar – where the Sauna started to take shape.

The anticipation was high – soon we would all be able to bake the impurities out of our systems, and also hang out naked with our fellow “farmies”…no hanky panky planned, just a nice innocent sweat lodge…..

We cleaned the place out and paneled it with wood…..found an old wood stove and installed it against an exterior wall. At the time (early 70’s), we didn’t know about such things as insulated chimney or stove clearances, so we placed the stove about a foot away from the wall and ran the stovepipe up a few feet and our through the wall using single wall pipe. We were a little concerned at how close the stovepipe was to the wood beams above, but one fella said we could simply nail some asbestos to the bottom of the wood to solve that problem.

Finally, the Sauna is finished and we are about to get clean and happy for the first time in months. The stove was fired up and we all piled into the hot room – WOW – it was everything we thought it would be! The dirt poured out of our pores, and after roasting for about an hour, we ran outside and poured some water over ourselves. I had not felt so clean in ages.

That night Martha and I slept in the house next to the shed, and it was a great nights rest……until our dog started barking at about 3 in the morning. Turns out the toolshed was totally engulfed in flames! We quickly woke up everyone nearby and started a bucket brigade from the creek which was a couple hundred feet away. The local fire dept came and watched since there was no chance of their fire engine getting up our muddy road.

The Sauna and Tool Shed burned to the ground, and would have taken the house with it had we not continued to throw wet blankets over the gable end of the house which faced the shed. Not only was our Sauna gone, but also our chain saws, tools and virtually everything else we needed to hack a living out of the tough WV countryside.

An inspection of the aftermath determined that the stove pipe going through the wall was the culprit. Although we had left the Sauna at about 11PM, the fire had started within the wall and within a few hours had found enough air and additional fuel (wood) for it to grow.

Note: Human Pictures here are taken by David Frohman and or The Foundation and The Farm – house pic is public domain.

But the far right Texas School book people just decided to write him OUT of history as far as his importance….
Their reasoning? Obviously that he was a Deist and a man of the Enlightenment – in other words, he failed their religious test!

“Board member Cynthia Dunbar wants to change a standard having students study the impact of Enlightenment ideas on political revolutions from 1750 to the present. She wants to drop the reference to Enlightenment ideas….
The board approves the amendment, taking Thomas Jefferson OUT of the world history standards. We’re just picking ourselves up off the floor. The board’s far-right faction has spent months now proclaiming the importance of emphasizing America’s exceptionalism in social studies classrooms. But today they voted to remove one of the greatest of America’s Founders, Thomas Jefferson, from a standard about the influence of great political philosophers on political revolutions from 1750 to today.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/13/texas-textbook-massacre-u_n_498003.html

Why does it seem that Texas, a state which 1/2 the folks want to leave the Union anyway, has such an outsized (See: GW, etc.) effect on this country?

They are also removing stuff about civil rights and lots of other things the far right doesn’t like to think about.
Sorry, my conservative friends, but I don’t want to hear you tell me in the future how we are falling further and further behind the rest of the world…when we can’t even teach our kids about honest history.

The chart below really says is all…or at least most of it!

What it says to me, though, might be even worse. It says we so believe in the “religion” of unfettered corporate access to our money – that we will sacrifice our country and fellow citizens to the on the Corporate Profits Altar. And while I know the Business of America has always been business, it was my hope that we would one day understand that business and commerce is designed is supposed to enhance our way of life, not enslave us to it.

Click for larger image

For the uninitiated, the closest thing might be the 1963 Movie Classic “The Man with the X-Ray Eyes“. This is the story of a normal man who started to see through things. At first, he only saw through the first layer…such as clothes or a wall. But as his powers increased, he started to see the breakdown of EVERYTHING to the extent that it all eventually became molecular!

Another movie with a somewhat related plot is Lawnmower Man, in which the subject of the film becomes so knowledgeable that he eventually turns into pure energy (digital bits) and implants himself into cyberspace.

But you don’t have to worry, we are not going that far!

My own youth provided relatively little in the way of mechanical experiences. I do remember enjoying overnight camp at a very early age (6), especially because of shooting rifles, riding sailboats, pottery and other such arts. Luckily, I had an older brother with a scientific interest, and when I was a pre-teen he showed me the wonder of chemistry sets and model rockets. Along with the usual childhood fascination with explosives and fireworks, this gave me what might be termed a minimum mechanical education.

Yet I still made it to 18 years old incapable of running a saw, drill or just about any other tool. In fact, I was probably not too handy with a screwdriver or hammer! This all changed when I moved to rural WV in the early 1970′s. I had to learn to use and maintain a chain saw as well as how to keep the car from going over the bank into the river. This road, cut into the side of a steep hill rising up from the Gauley River, would get very muddy and difficult to travel with our Chevy Nova. Often we would end up with the drivers side wheels going over the bank and “beaching” the car. This may have provided me with my first real experience of thinking on my feet. I figured out that jacking up the rear of the car….and then pushing the car off the jack…..would do the job of moving the car back into the road. Problem solved…

Soon after we moved to rural Tennessee where I had the chance to meet a lot of people who actually knew how to do things! Amazing! Some folks could weld, others could lay masonry and yet others could fix or rebuild any sort of vehicle. I got a job with a Demolition team led by my friend Andrew.
If you want to learn how ANYTHING is put together, my advice is to TAKE IT APART….and so under Andrews tutelage I helped take apart everything from factory buildings to bowling alleys. Andrew is one of those guys who does not know the meaning of “We can’t do this”. Even if he never did it before! Such an attitude can help with the School of Mechanics Mind.

Rural Tennessee also exposed us to multitudes of teachers in the art of mechanics. I remember one Hardware Supply house where we would buy our chains and shackles (for pulling buildings down, etc.) – and the owner took Andrew under his wing. He would joke with Andrew every time we came in….like this “Hey, a man went to the well AND DREW out a pail of water” – yeah, pretty dry humor, but I do remember his saying to Andrew “Son, I’ll make a Mechanic out of you yet”. Truer words were never spoken, as Andrew has spent the following 35 years doing high end remodeling of stone houses and artful tile, kitchen and bath work.

With demolition under my belt, I took on a job as a carpenter and framed houses and apartment buildings. Following that, I started my own business as a remodeling contractor, which gave me some experience in most of the trades involved in construction.

About that time I started understanding the Mind of the Mechanic. When I was in demolition, I noticed that I tended to look at EVERY building as if I was hired to take it apart. Then, when I was in construction, I looked at everything as if I had to BUILD it. Looking back, I can see that this was a small portion of the physical world unfolding before my eyes. Layer by layer my eyes, hands and mind would deconstruct things until I had a basic understanding of them.All this deconstruction and construction has helped me greatly in my enjoyment of work and life. Although my capabilities to actually DO things are limited, my understanding of How Things Work is not. I like to think I am a Jack of All Trades and perhaps a master of one or two!For those who wish to develop this sense, my suggestion is to garner an appreciation for technology and the accomplishments of those who have come before us. Look at every item, element, process and try to understand what makes it work. Much of this information can be found online as well as on the new crop of TV shows such as “How it’s made”, “Megafactories” and others. Shows like Mythbusters will show you how a team of Mechanics take a problem and work out the solution.

There is one down side to  X-rays eyes – that of losing a bit of the childhood wonder that all these mechanical things are magic. On the other hand, my quest has given me MORE appreciation for the technologies which our amazing species have put to work.