“Does your friend need an ayi”, the woman cleaning the floor in the China Mobile store asked our Chinese colleague. “I can be their ayi.”

We don’t. We’ve already hired one.

An ayi is a housekeeper, common among expats (and more affluent Chinese families, I guess).

The job market seems very informal here.

Came to Beijing a week ago, and have just started to find my way around the area where I live (Seasons Park, in the Dongcheng District).

I’ll stay here for nine months. Will write about what I see and experience.

The view from our living room: A mix of skyscraper skyline and abandoned buildings.

• Gadgets’ new label: Made for China. No more dumping last year’s devices on the Chinese market.
• The Plot To Hijack Your Computer. About the $2 billion disrespect-for-users spyware business.
• How your product can inspire The Nod.

Click fraud cost internet advertisers $800 million last year, according to a study by Outsell Inc. Around 15% of all clicks on click-through ads were bogus (or rather, according to the article 14.6% of clicks were “believed by advertisers to be fraudulent”). As a consequence, advertisers are cutting back on spending, causing lost business of about $500 million for Google and Yahoo in the US.

Some bloggers now spell the end of pay-per-click advertising. I think that might be a false conclusion.

First, 15% bad clicks mean there are still 85% good ones. As long as you know that, it’s easy to calculate your real cost for click-through advertising. Just add to your cost per click to compensate for the bad ones. It might still be a good deal.

Second, what Yahoo, Google and others need to continue to do is to admit there is a problem and to develop effective means of detecting fraud. And compensate advertisers that have become victims of click fraud.

It’s reasonable to assume the 15% is caused by just a few publishers – not evenly spread over all publishers. Those few bad apples are probably quite easy to find. Not every system with security problems has to go down, as long as you manage the risk. Just ask the credit card companies.

Third and last; there might be other reasons to suspect programs like Google’s Adsense are dying. Publishers report decreased earnings from contextual pay-per-click programs, making them less attractive than other types of advertising.

One reason for this is that a lot of clicks coming from publishers are out of curiosity, whereas searchers click out of genuine interest. That would lead advertisers to opt out of having their ads on third party sites, as some have noted. In the end, publishers get paid less because there’s less competition for their clicks.

So, pay-per-click contextual advertising on publisher sites might be dying – slowly. But not primarily from click fraud.

• The difference between monitoring and synthesizing BBS and blog conversations. On the problem of monitoring - and deciding what to do with - all the online conversations about your product, issue or brand.
• Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way? Mack Collier writes an excellent article on why Mentos is a winner, while Coke and the geyser-video guys are losers. Lots to learn for marketing people everywhere.

This is what you get when you apply “paid media” thinking to building relationships with bloggers:

Murphy is launching PayPerPost.com, which will automate such hookups between advertisers and bloggers and thus codify a new frontier of product placement. Advertisers pay to post details about their “opportunity,” specifying, among other things, how they want bloggers to write about, say, a new shoe, if they want photos to be included, and whether they’ll pay only for positive mentions.

…

It’s better for a brand to get into a blog than to surround it as a banner or text ad, says Murphy.

(From BusinessWeek: Polluting the Blogosphere)

This is stupid in a number of ways:

1. It will make your customers disappointed. They’ll expect a great product but will receive something mediocre that wasn’t able to get a positive buzz by itself.
2. You’ll target the wrong blogs. The high-credibility blogs about your kind of product wouldn’t touch this for fear of losing their readers. Your product will end up being mentioned on smaller blogs without a specific focus. It will be search engine fodder at best.
3. Bloggers will talk bad about your products “off the record”; telling their friend the only reason they wrote positively about your product was to earn $5.

Your positive word-of-mouth will end up being negative word-of-mouth in the places where it matters; where friends talk to friends.

Now, did I say this was stupid?

• Virtual China: more online revenge. A daughter puts an “anti-mistress” web site online, with details about her father’s affair.
• China’s African affair. Excerpt from a Financial Times article. “Many African nations now pin hopes on the fulfilment of promises by a nation they view as a model of rapid development.”
• China cracks down on blogs, search engines. Again? I thought they always were.
• Media Culpa: When your internal video leaks to YouTube. Autodesk mocks SolidWorks.
• Some EU countries may charge VAT on AdSense & affiliate earnings. Here comes the business-killers/politicians.

Microsoft is offering an Office 2007 Beta 2 test drive web site, where you can take the new Office, now in beta 2, for a spin inside your web browser. You need to install a plugin, but that doesn’t take long.

You may or may not like the product (my personal opinion: awfully cluttered!) but getting the opportunity to test them like this, without downloading the full thing, is great!

More software companies should do this.

• From the July, 2006 issue of Business 2.0, a list of 50 people who matter now. Cool to see David Allen on the list.
• Internet partly to blame for your lack of close friends. I knew this thing was bad for us.
• Boeing Connexion may be shut down. Too bad, the service is great. Back to watching movies on an envelope-size screen?
• The Chinese tourists are coming! But they spend nothing on hotels and food, apparently saving up for the Hugo Boss discount store (?).

I just returned from a trip to China. In Shanghai I took the opportunity to visit the Xiangyang market. I had been there once before, and to a couple of Beijing markets a few years ago. One thing really struck me at these last two visits; how much better the copies have become!

Now, there is still a lot of crap on offer. But there are also bags, belts and clothes that at least to my untrained eye look fairly high-quality.

There’s just this thing; they insist on slapping ridiculously unrealistic, and sometimes just plain wrong, logos on them. “Gucci” written in the wrong typeface, a Polo horse that looks nothing like the real thing, or “Boss” on the back of a tie, written on a kind of cheap plastic label I doubt they would ever use.

Why?

Fact is, a lot of these product would fare pretty well on their own merits. Just invent your own brand name. Sales, at least to foreigners, would increase.