I came across a text ad served by Google today that I just had to share. Google didn’t invent but they have almost perfected the field of PPC (Pay Per Click) text ads. Ad groups, ad copy, split testing, quality score are what you will hear the experts talk about. But what’s also interesting about Google Adwords is that almost anyone can sign up and have their own ads being served in just a few minutes.

Whats remarkable is that you can even create a PPC ad saying that PPC ads don’t work!

I laughed out loud when I saw this PPC ad for Trusted Testimonials, a company that verifies and certifies customer testimonials.

click to see the full-size image

HP crafted a clever attention-getting for its current marketing campaign: they basically blew up a small datacenter. Why? Well actually it wasn’t just to start an arms race with Mythbusters. They suggest that if your company uses HP networking and server products, you will also magically be able to withstand having a bomb hit your datacenter. If you plan for it, of course.

Link to video from HP

What else can we take away from this?

• HP’s new spin on going Green: fight energy-users with explosives
• If you use HP products, you may want to blow them up too!
• HP has a lot of extra money that they would rather not invest in R&D and driving sales (this could be argued either way, but as a stockholder I don’t think I would be happy with a company that wastes its own products).

Regardless, HP did have some success because tech bloggers and writers around the world are talking about it. From a logical perspective, I don’t see this being a very effective marketing pitch. Any network, regardless of specific manufacturer, can be made redundant. Especially if you are carefully planning for an exact failure at an exact time. The challenge in the real world is to build redundancy on multiple layers, while weighing costs and benefits to create a network setup that is as redundant as possible from human error, geographical locations, complexity problems and hardware failures.

I read about The BGP Movie in the Internet Protocol Journal. Geekly intrigued, I had to watch just to say I have seen the geekiest “movie” ever. It is actually informative, giving a visual overview of the IP address usage on the Internet from 1980-2004. The movie also tracks ASNs (Autonomous System Numbers) which are mainly used by Internet Service Providers and large networks.

http://www.apnic.net/news/hot-topics/docs/bgp-movie.mpg

Despite the best of intentions … Beware of who is working on your server