Dangerous Thinking

I don’t think I’ve said much on Dangerous Thinking about my Diabetes – I was diagnosed as Type 2 just before Christmas 2010.

After more than a year working with my diabetes nurse and GP to get my medication right, I ended up on one Gliclazide tablet a day and three Metformins. That’s not far off needing to inject Insulin, some have said.

One of my goals for 2012 was to become purely diet-controlled, that is, come off all diabetes medication.

Some form of low carbohydrate diet makes a lot of sense for diabetics, and being a borderline geek, I decided to give Tim Ferriss’ Slow Carb diet in his book The Four-Hour Body a go.

In less than three weeks, I’ve been able to come off all my diabetes medication, after my blood sugar levels have plummeted.

Time for celebration, I think. Thanks Tim!

It’s easy to see where the two mega corps’ revenue comes from. Amazon shifting from online retail to cloud storage provider, and Google dependent on advertising. Can you figure out which of the two’s ad schemes impresses most when I tried them on Audio Chews?

It’s some time since I worked out how to display ads on Vanilla, but although we’ve tried different types of Amazon ads in different places on the site, we’ve seen little click-through and no sales. I think there are some reasons why this is the case.

On the face of it, there’s a great synergy between some of Amazon’s product ranges and what we as hi-fi and music enthusiasts buy – CDs, records and data storage, for a start.

Wouldn’t it be great if Amazon’s ads reflected the music we’ve mentioned in our discussions? If we discuss a Van Morrison album, for example, why can’t Amazon show ads for the specific album we’ve mentioned and/or a link to the artist’s page where all available albums in different formats are listed?

No such thing happened.

The special offers being shown yesterday were about half the same as were being shown at the start. You’d think they only stocked about 50 CDs, with about 10 on special!

So earlier today, I installed AdSense. Over just a few hours, Google seems to have figured out what the site is about, and is successfully showing different ads on different pages. And, most critically, the ads seem relevant and are changing.

You can see which of the two has invested in their ad platform.

I don’t know yet if we’ll make any money from AdSense – I know Audio Chews won’t get rich – but the aim is only to move to better hosting, in the first place.