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Ok so it's Monday and I've been up and doing since before 4am. It's now 10am and in those six hours I've launched a new site for a client ... fixed a couple of minor omissions in the site ... seeded a few worthwhile links to that new site ... written my Porn Resource column (about futile attempts to make money on Twitter) ... had a meeting with a client about keywords ... done some shopping for dinner tonight and even managed to have some breakfast.

Now I'm on to my first coffee of the day and I'd love to be able to curl up and go to sleep but that's just not going to happen. Instead I've got this column to complete ... another e-commerce site to start and I have to head out to another meeting with yet another client.

Thankfully Steve will cook dinner tonight so by the time I do get home all I have to do is sit back and take it easy ... or maybe do some more work before I fall asleep. Yes, that really is my crazy Monday.

So what are we going to talk about today?

Cyber-espionage
Well let's start with the world capital of cyber-espionage. Surprise surprise ... it's in China according to Symantec an American internet security company that traced the origin of 12 billion emails they described as "malicious".

It seems that Symantec succeeded in tracing individual IP addresses ... not the IP addresses of servers but the ones associated with individual computers ... and now we know that China is the source of over 28 per cent of targeted attacks aimed at gathering intelligence. Romania is in second place with over 21 per cent of targeted attacks ... but those Romanian attacks are aimed at commercial fraud.

In third place was the United States and Britain was in fifth place.

Google Adwords
The way Google targets sites and search terms for relevant Adwords advertising has always interested me. Like many people I presumed that it was all about key words that appeared in the text on the site where the Adwords ad appeared or with the words that were searched for.

But today I found that maybe Google uses other ways to target some users with specific ads. Yesterday a friend actually clicked on an Adwords ad and ended up making a purchase. Since then, it doesn't seem to matter what site she goes to ... as long as there's Adwords advertising on the site the ad that she originally clicked on appears.

The same goes for any searches she might make. It doesn't matter what term she searches for, the ad that she clicked on yesterday continues to appear at the top of the Adwords column whether it's relevant to her search or not.

Now if you were the advertiser and someone in the same position as my friend clicked on your ad, even though it was totally irrelevant to the term she searched for, wouldn't you be a little annoyed that Google had just spent your money on a click that was never going to result in a sale?

Advertising on your car
Yesterday I was trawling through some of my unread email and came across a newsletter that I regularly get from a mainstream webmaster's site. They're always full of interesting and useful information and the one I was reading was no different, it had some great information about advertising your business on your car.

It's definitely a great idea and something that we always recommend to our mainstream clients but if you're running an adult-related business online I really wouldn't recommend it. While you will undoubtedly get your name and/or your URL in front of a lot of people you may well end up talking to people who can make life-changing decisions for you ... and without your consent.

A few years ago now there was a couple in the United States who ran a typical amateur site ... the one where the girl is the center of all the attention and where the site and content are all produced from the girl's home.

As I recall their site was doing ok and they were getting some nice join and retention figures but they wanted more so they painted their site name and URL on the side of their vehicle and that's when things really began to go wrong.

You see, the couple who ran the site had children and the kids rode in the family vehicle so you can imagine what the sight of small kids in a car covered in advertising for a porn site did for their reputation and their family. As I recall there was some talk of the authorities removing their kids being to foster care and the law enforcement was very interested in what went on in their house too.

Mainstream marketers have a lot of great ideas for attracting people to websites and most of them work really well. In fact you will notice that I often encourage people here in adult to learn the lessons that mainstream have to teach us ... but advertising on your car is one lesson that is best ignored.