When I became a self-employed consultant at the beginning of 2008, it gave me the wonderful opportunity to work from the convenience of my home office. It also allows me to bake my own bread every day.

I know you can buy bread in bakeries, shops and supermarkets, and there are household appliancies that will make the bread for you, but I bake it from start to finish. There is a mill close to where I buy the flower. I have little packets of yeast. And every morning before starting to work, I make a dough, wait for it to rise and then put it in the oven. The result is that at lunch time I have a very fresh bread, still a bit warm. The satisfaction from eating your own bread is a great feeling, both physically and psychologically.

Today I watched a video that explains what happens when baking bread. The metaphors are truly awesome.  Bread is the staff of life, but in order to make it you first kill it (harvesting the wheat), then you bring it back to life (adding the yeast) and then you kill it again (the backing process).

Peter Reinhart is a master bread maker. He can present this tale with much more passion than I ever can. Enjoy the video, and your daily bread!

It’s often said that site visitors are developing something called ‘banner blindness’. After a while, it’s said, you just don’t see the ads anymore. Perhaps that’s the reason why banners are not always getting the creative attention they deserve

Researchers at market research firm MetrixLab have studied what influences the effectiveness of banner ads, looking at aspects like size, timing of showing the logo and brand name, and interaction. They also investigated how site visitors respond in terms of attention, memorization and attitude.

The study reveals eight tips for effective banner ads:

1. Show the logo or brand name at the end of an animated banner, because otherwise it will be too much of a distraction.
2. The message that needs to get across must also be at the end, that will demand the most attention from the viewer.
3. The bigger the better: people will notice large ads more often and look at them for a longer period of time.
4. Fast moving text will be memorized better, but slow moving text results in a more intention to buy.
5. Continuously repeating the same message does not have any additional effect. Once is enough, but make sure that the final image is right, because that’s going to stick.
6. Showing images of people has a positive result and will increase click through ratios.
7. By explicitly asking to click the ad, the click through ratio decreases. People don’t want to be bullied, they want to make their own decisions.
8. Interaction doesn’t lead to better memorization, but it does help attract attention.

OpenX: impressive growth, new software version

A press releases and a software upgrade from OpenX were published almost at the same time yesterday. Almost 1 year after joining OpenX as CEO, Tim Cadogan picked April fool’s day to make some very serious announcements.

The first story was a press release about the phenomenal growth in the usage of the OpenX Ad Server product and the accompanying OpenX Market. A few highlights:

• More than 8,000 publishers have opened accounts on OpenX Hosted, together serving about 5 billion ads per month.
• OpenX Ad Server has been downloaded and installed by more than 35,000 publishers, and together they serve a huge number of ads, estimated at 300 billion per month.
• OpenX.org Ltd is doing very well in the transition from being a developer of open source software into a commercial company offering software, services and monetization opportunities. In spite of the economic climate, revenues are increasing. Even more important in my opinion: the potential for OpenX Market is not just a concept anymore, because participating publishers can tell from their revenues that OpenX is also generating revenues.

Just a few hours later, a major new software release was announced on the OpenX company blog: OpenX Ad Server version 2.8 is now available to anyone. It has some exciting new features and benefits, including the new plugin framework, general availability of OpenX Market, and improvements in the user interface, scabability and performance. More about the new software in my earlier blog post.