Planet Insight 10

ThirstyAffiliates Review – Managing affiliate links may not be easy in your blog, especially if you are recommending tons of products on a weekly basis (or even daily – hopefully they are genuine recommendations). You either have to log in to an individual affiliate program to grab your link over and over, or you can create a shortcut that is easy to remember on top of your head.

ThirstyAffiliates is a WordPress plug-in that does just that and more. Rather than having to remember the shortened links, ThirstyAffiliates also adds an extra icon on your WordPress text editor so you can simply do a click and search for all of your current affiliate links. Whether your intention is to hide or cloak your affiliate links, to make it easier to remember, or even to find out which affiliate products work well for you through looking at the stats, ThirstyAffiliates is worth having a look.

ThirstyAffiliates Review – Hide/Cloak Affiliate Links

Some people have a mentality not to click on an affiliate link or to strip out any affiliate information from a link. I don’t know why, but it must be this mentality “I’m not going to make this guy any richer” even if you don’t actually lose anything, and even if you are actually going to buy the product. It may be a different story if you know the blogger or the one who gives the recommendation. But still, we are living in a weird society.

To protect your commission from this, even from your genuine recommendation, ThirstyAffiliates can cloak an affiliate link by having a shortened URL that you set-up through its easy to use control panel.

You can pick from a different recommended keyword such as “/go/” or “/recommends/” or even pick your own. This way, your link looks less spammy too. But of course, most bloggers already know this “trick”.

ThirstyAffiliates Review- Time Saver

ThirstyAffiliates adds an extra button on your WordPress text editor.

It works similarly to the default WordPress’ insert/edit link button. Highlight on a sentence (or words) and press the button. Search for your affiliate links from the pop-up window and select one to insert. Nice and easy! You don’t have to remember what links you set-up before as you can just search them easily through the interface.

When an affiliate link is changed, you can simply edit the link through the control panel and it will be reflected to all of your posts. This way, you don’t have to edit your posts one by one and update your affiliate links.

ThirstyAffiliates Review – Stats, stats, stats

Stats are important – they measure how successful you are and which products (and posts) work best on your blog. With ThirstyAffiliates plug-in, you can view the number of hits of every affiliate link you’ve set-up: this week, last week, this month, and last month.

With these, you can find out which links are successful so you might want to promote that even more with new posts. Or with the unsuccessful ones, you might want to think of a different strategy to promote them further.

ThirstyAffiliates Review- Other goodies

• On the affiliate link picker, you can also choose to insert a block of code for your affiliate links. This way, you can create a nicer looking product image + description to be placed on your posts. Or you can just use the regular good-old text links. Choice is yours.
• It uses the default WordPress’ database tables and structures – less clutter
• Options to set all affiliate links to nofollow.
• If an affiliate link changes (happens from time to time), you can just replace it once.

ThirstyAffiliates Review- The Bad/Wish lists

• It doesn’t have an option to auto replace keywords with your affiliate links (no automation)
• Once you set the link prefix (go, recommends, etc), that’s it. You cannot mass-change unless if you go to your posts manually and change the links one by one.

ThirstyAffiliates vs Pretty Link Lite/Pro

I was using Pretty Link Lite (and then upgraded to Pro) before, but I have ditched it for ThirstyAffiliates. It may not have the auto keywords replacement feature like Pretty Link Pro, but I find that inserting links and managing them are snappier in ThirstyAffiliates.

And if you read my previous post on the P3 Performance plug-in, I found that Pretty Link was quite heavy on resources somehow. ThirstyAffiliates looks to be more optimised and lighter, which is necessary if you are running a medium-large blog.

There may be updates in the future for more features (only time will tell) but managing plenty of affiliate links are easy, as well as searching and inserting them into your posts with ThirstyAffiliate.

ThirstyAffiliate (affiliate link, cloaked with ThirstyAffliate)

This pointless brouhaha over the Kevin Rudd video has once and for all decided the fact that political reporting, and those that do it, in this country are incapable of what should be political reporting’s very core – objective policy and program analysis of all sides.

It is indicative of two things, I think; the fact that the traditional media have abrogated their responsibility for their actual job, the reporting of actual news, and the fact that the politicians are so governed by spin and manufactured news and absent of actual policy aimed at social betterness that constant leadership speculation can become the news.

A pox on your collective houses!

Media commentator, Stilgherrian, waxes lyrical (and justifiably potty-mouthed) on the same subject in his The 9PM Edict. If only the Press Gallery took notice.

I’m not holding my breath.

Creativity, innovation and inspiration comes in many forms. It doesn’t require a scientist or an inventor or an ethicist. Sometime, the sheer pleasure of being present to the thing you love doing most makes for the most transcendent of moments.

Here, Galen Hooks of The LXD, one of my favorite dance crews, speaks of dancing at TED 2010. She’s obviously deeply moved, even a year after the experience. She understands the power of the thing she does and how it can affect people.

Watch. Enjoy.

Sociological Images has an interesting article about the attempts to apply the word “Camping” to OWS and framing the issues [1].

Lester Macgurdy wrote an insightful article about “the snake”, a new technique for OWS protesters to beat riot police [2].

Ron Barassi suggests that “Australia Day” be celebrated on the 27th of May to commemorate the day in 1967 when the Australian constitution was amended to not be racist [3]. The current “Australia Day” is often referred to as “Invasion Day”. IMHO Ron deserves another “Best and Fairest” award.

Stefon Harris gave an entertaining TED talk about improv Jazz music titled “There Are No Mistakes on the Bandstand” [4]. It seems that his concepts can apply to some extent to many collaborative projects.

John Robb wrote an interesting article about the future of drone (UAV) warfare [5]. He suggests that having one person control each drone is a temporary thing and that the future is to have a cloud of cheap autonomous drones taking strategic control from one person. His comparison of Starcraft players to future drone fighters is interesting.

The OWS movement is branching out into other related areas, OccupyYourHomes.org is one of the latest ones [6]. When banks try to forclose on homes without good cause the OWS people are protesting.

Cory Doctorow wrote an important article for The Guardian about corporations using the Youtube ContentID system to pirate works that other people have uploaded [7].

Matt Taibbi’s description of Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money” will never die [8]. It has spawned many other creative descriptions of the evil and greed of Goldman Sachs and even Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs describes his company as having “burned down the Reichstag, shot the Archduke Ferdinand and fired on Fort Sumter” – he was trying to use satire, but I don’t think that Goldman Sachs people would act differently to Fritz Thyssen.

Keith Packard wrote an interesting article about the Calypso CalDAV system which he uses with Android [9]. He makes lots of good points about how to improve calendaring and contacts on Android, unfortunately I lack time to fiddle with such things at the moment so I’ll stick with Google in spite of the risks.

Asheesh Laroia wrote a great article about the problems with short (32bit) GPG keys [10]. It seems that creating keys with matching ID numbers isn’t particularly difficult and that GPG doesn’t handle them as well as we would like giving the possibility of at best annoying DoS attacks and at worse security problems due to using the wrong key.

Sociological Images has an interesting article about when game show audiences are trustworthy [11]. It seems that French people don’t want an undeserving person to win so they will intentionally advocate the wrong answer if the contestant should know it.

Paul Wayper gave a great lecture titled “SE Linux for Everyone” [12]. He covers the basics of SE Linux in a user-friendly way and explains some simple solutions to common problems which don’t involve compromising system security.

Paul Tassi wrote an insightful article for Forbes about piracy [13]. His conclusion is that the media companies should make it cheaper and easier to be a customer and not spend insane amounts of money on low quality products.

The Reid Report has an interesting article about Ron Paul’s racism [14]. Ron Paul is generally well regarded outside the US because he wants the US government to stop meddling in the affairs of other countries, but while he’s less bad than other US politicians in terms of foreign policy that doesn’t make him a good person.

Anonymous hacked some mailboxes belonging to a neo-Nazi group and found links to Ron Paul [15]. I’ve always been suspicious of the way Ron Paul wanted to avoid anti-racism legislation on supposed Libertarian principles.

The Reid Report has an interesting summary of Ron Paul news plus some criticism of Glenn Greenwald and others who associate with him [16].

• [1] http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/12/06/on-camping-and-the-framing-of-occupy-movement-strategies/
• [2] http://www.portlandoccupier.org/2011/12/15/occupy-portland-outsmarts-police-creating-blueprint-for-other-occupations/
• [3] http://tinyurl.com/6mr95hu
• [4] http://www.ted.com/talks/stefon_harris_there_are_no_mistakes_on_the_bandstand.html
• [5] http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2011/12/drone-bonjwas.html
• [6] http://occupyourhomes.org/
• [7] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/dec/12/pirates-of-youtube-cory-doctorow
• [8] http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/12/13/the-long-life-of-the-vampire-squid-metaphor/
• [9] http://keithp.com/blogs/calypso/
• [10] http://www.asheesh.org/note/debian/short-key-ids-are-bad-news.html
• [11] http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/12/26/are-game-show-audiences-trustworthy/
• [12] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZThVfm3JXdM
• [13] http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2012/02/03/you-will-never-kill-piracy-and-piracy-will-never-kill-you/
• [14] http://blog.reidreport.com/2011/12/the-real-bottom-line-on-the-paul-newsletters-race-baiting-for-power-and-profit/
• [15] http://www.care2.com/causes/anonymous-hacks-neo-nazis-finds-ron-paul.html
• [16] http://blog.reidreport.com/2011/12/should-glenn-greenwald-have-to-own-the-ron-paul-blue-plate-special/

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Late last year I wrote about the way that modern laptops suck [1]. One of the problems that inspired that post was the excessive heat generated by my Thinkpad T61.

There is a partial solution to this, Fool Control explains how the kernel option pcie_aspm=force can be used on kernels from 2.6.38 onwards to solve a heat regression problem [2]. I applied this to my Thinkpad T61 and the result was that on a cool evening (ambient temperature about 24C) the temperature changed from 85C to 66C on the NVidia video card, and for the “virtual devices” it changed from 80C and 78C to 60C and 61C. I’m not sure exactly what each of those measurements refers to, but it seems that the change was somewhere between 17C and 20C.

This changes the system from being almost unbearable to use to being merely annoyingly warm.

I’m not going to make my laptop be my primary computing device again though, the combination of a desktop system with a 27″ monitor and an Android phone is working quite well for me [3]. But I haven’t yet got version control systems working for all my software. Also Wouter suggested using NBD which is something I haven’t got working yet and probably won’t until I can swap on it and therefore have a diskless workstation. Finally I still haven’t got the “Chrome to Phone” browser extension working such that a page I’m viewing at home can be loaded on my phone.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/09/09/modern-laptops-suck/
• [2] http://foolcontrol.org/?p=1511
• [3] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/09/08/laptop-to-cloud-lifestyle/

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I’ve just discovered that the magic database for the file(1) command in Debian/Unstable has no support for Linux Software RAID and that it’s support for BTRFS is lacking (no reporting of space used, number of devices, or the UUID). Below is my first draft of a change to fix these problems. I would appreciate it if someone with a big-endian system could test these out and let me know how they go, I suspect that I will have to change the “lelong” types to “long” but I’m not sure.

4096 lelong 0xa92b4efc Linux Software RAID
>4100 lelong x version 1.2 (%d)
>4112 belong x UUID=%8x:
>4116 belong x \b%8x:
>4120 belong x \b%8x:
>4124 belong x \b%8x
>4128 string x name=%s
>4168 lelong x level=%d
>4188 lelong x disks=%d

0 lelong 0xa92b4efc Linux Software RAID
>4 lelong x version 1.1 (%d)
>16 belong x UUID=%8x:
>20 belong x \b%8x:
>24 belong x \b%8x:
>28 belong x \b%8x
>32 string x name=%s
>72 lelong x level=%d
>92 lelong x disks=%d

# BTRFS
0×10040 string _BHRfS_M BTRFS Filesystem
>0x1012b string >\0 label "%s",
>0×10090 lelong x sectorsize %d,
>0×10094 lelong x nodesize %d,
>0×10098 lelong x leafsize %d,
>0×10020 belong x UUID=%8x-
>0×10024 beshort x \b%4x-
>0×10026 beshort x \b%4x-
>0×10028 beshort x \b%4x-
>0x1002a beshort x \b%4x
>0x1002c belong x \b%8x,
>0×10078 lequad x %lld/
>0×10070 lequad x \b%lld bytes used,
>0×10088 lequad x %lld devices

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2. Starting with BTRFS Based on my investigation of RAID reliability [1] I have...
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Based on my investigation of RAID reliability [1] I have determined that BTRFS [2] is the Linux storage technology that has the best potential to increase data integrity without costing a lot of money. Basically a BTRFS internal RAID-1 should offer equal or greater data protection than RAID-6.

As BTRFS is so important and so very different to any prior technology for Linux it’s not something that can be easily deployed in the same way as other filesystems. It is possible to easily switch between filesystems such as Ext4 and XFS because they work in much the same way, you have a single block device which the filesystem uses to create a single mount-point. While BTRFS supports internal RAID so it may have multiple block devices and it may offer multiple mountable filesystems and snapshots. Much of the functionality of Linux Software RAID and LVM is covered by BTRFS. So the sensible way to deploy BTRFS is to give it all your storage and not make use of any other RAID or LVM.

So I decided to do a test installation. I started with a Debian install CD that was made shortly before the release of Squeeze (it was first to hand) and installed with BTRFS for the root filesystem, I then upgraded to Debian/Unstable to get the latest kernel as BTRFS is developing rapidly. The system failed on the first boot after upgrading to Unstable because the /etc/fstab entry for the root filesystem had the FSCK pass number set to 1 – which wasn’t going to work as no FSCK program has been written. I changed that number to 0 and it then worked.

The initial install was on a desktop system that had a single IDE drive and a CD-ROM drive. For /boot I used a degraded RAID-1 and then after completing the installation I removed the CD-ROM drive and installed a second hard drive, after that it was easy to add the other device to the RAID-1. Then I tried to add a new device to the BTRFS group with the command “btrfs device add /dev/sdb2 /dev/sda2” and was informed that it can’t do that to a mounted filesystem! That will decrease the possibilities for using BTRFS on systems with hot-swap drives, I hope that the developers regard it as a bug.

Then I booted with an ext3 filesystem for root and tried the “btrfs device add /dev/sdb2 /dev/sda2” again but got the error message “btrfs: sending ioctl 5000940a to a partition!” which is not even found by Google.

The next thing that I wanted to do was to put a swap file on BTRFS, the benefits for having redundancy and checksums on swap space seem obvious – and other BTRFS features such as compression might give a benefit too. So I created a file by using dd to take take from /dev/zero, ran mkswap on it and then tried to run swapon. But I was told that the file has holes and can’t be used. Automatically making zero blocks into holes is a useful feature in many situations, but not in this case.

So far my experience with BTRFS is that all the basic things work (IE storing files, directories, etc). But the advanced functions I wanted from BTRFS (mirroring and making a reliable swap space) failed. This is a bit disappointing, but BTRFS isn’t described as being ready for production yet.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/02/06/reliability-raid/
• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs

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Fuck the low-hanging fruit. Aim for the top. Forget quick wins; go straight for the long-term. Screw office politics & mow down the ignorant

From my friend, Nathanael.

I could not agree more.

I’ve previously written Some Notes on DRBD [1] and a post about DRBD Benchmarking [2].

Previously I had determined that replication protocol C gives the best performance for DRBD, that the batch-time parameters for Ext4 aren’t worth touching for a single IDE disk, that barrier=0 gives a massive performance boost, and that DRBD gives a significant performance hit even when the secondary is not connected. Below are the results of some more tests of delivering mail from my Postal benchmark to my LMTP server which uses the Dovecot delivery agent to write it to disk, the rates are in messages per minute where each message is an average of 70K in size. The ext4 filesystem is used for all tests and the filesystem features list is “has_journal ext_attr resize_inode dir_index filetype extent flex_bg sparse_super large_file huge_file uninit_bg dir_nlink extra_isize“.

The al-extents option determines the size of the dirty areas that need to be resynced when a failed node rejoins the cluster. The default is 127 extents of 4M each for a block size of 508MB to be synchronised. The maximum is 3389 for a synchronisation block size of just over 13G. Even with fast disks and gigabit Ethernet it’s going to take a while to synchronise things if dirty zones are 13GB in size. In my tests using the maximum size of al-extents gives a 10% performance benefit in disconnected mode while a size of 1024 gives a 4% performance boost. Changing the al-extents size seems to make no significant difference for a connected DRBD device.

All the tests on connected DRBD devices were done with 100baseT apart from the last one which was a separate Gigabit Ethernet cable connecting the two systems.

Conclusions

For the level of traffic that I’m using it seems that Gigabit Ethernet provides no performance benefit, the fact that it gave a slightly lower result is not relevant as the difference is within the margin of error.

Increasing the al-extents value helps with disconnected performance, a value of 1024 gives a 4% performance boost. I’m not sure that a value of 3389 is a good idea though.

The ext4 barriers are disabled by DRBD so a disconnected DRBD device gives performance that is closer to a barrier=0 mount than a regular ext4 mount. With the significant performance difference between connected and disconnected modes it seems possible that for some usage scenarios it could be useful to disable the DRBD secondary at times of peak load – it depends on whether DRBD is used as a really current backup or a strict mirror.

Future Tests

I plan to do some tests of DRBD over Linux software RAID-1 and tests to compare RAID-1 with and without bitmap support. I also plan to do some tests with the BTRFS filesystem, I know it’s not ready for production but it would still be nice to know what the performance is like.

But I won’t use the same systems, they don’t have enough CPU power. In my previous tests I established that a 1.5GHz P4 isn’t capable of driving the 20G IDE disk to it’s maximum capacity and I’m not sure that the 2.8GHz P4 is capable of running a RAID to it’s capacity. So I will use a dual-core 64bit system with a pair of SATA disks for future tests. The difference in performance between 20G IDE disks and 160G SATA disks should be a lot less than the performance difference between a 2.8GHz P4 and a dual-core 64bit CPU.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/12/17/drbd-notes/
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/01/05/drbd-benchmarking/

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Everyone agrees that backups are generally a good thing. But it seems that there is a lot less agreement about how backups should work. Here is a list of 5 principles of backup software that seem to get ignored most of the time:

(1/5) Backups should not be Application Specific

It’s quite reasonable for people to want to extract data from a backup on a different platform. Maybe someone will want to extract data a few decades after the platform becomes obsolete. I believe that vendors of backup software have an ethical obligation to make it possible for customers to get their data out with minimal effort regardless of the circumstances.

Often when writing a backup application there will be good reasons for not using the existing formats for data storage (tar, cpio, zip, etc). But ideally any data store which involves something conceptually similar to a collection of files in one larger file will use one of those formats. There have been backward compatible extensions to tar and zip for SE Linux contexts and for OS/2 EAs – the possibility of extending archive file formats with no consequence other than warnings on extraction with an unpatched utility has been demonstrated.

For a backup which doesn’t involve source files (EG the contents of some sort of database) then it should be in a format that can be easily understood and parsed. Well designed XML is generally a reasonable option. Generally the format should involve plain text that is readable and easy to understand which is optionally compressed with a common compression utility (pkzip is a reasonable choice).

(2/5) Data Store Formats should be Published

For every data store there should be public documentation about it’s format to allow future developers to write support for it. It really isn’t difficult to release some commented header files so that people can easily determine the data structures. This includes all data stores including databases and filesystems. If I suddenly find myself with a 15yo image of a NTFS filesystem containing a proprietary database I should be able to find official header files for the version of NTFS and the database server in question so I can decode the data if it’s important enough.

When an application vendor hides the data formats it gives the risk of substantial data loss at some future time. Imposing such risk on customers to try and prevent them from migrating to a rival product is unethical.

(3/5) Backups should be forward and backward compatible

It is entirely unreasonable for a vendor to demand that all their users install the latest versions of their software. There are lots of good reasons for not upgrading which includes hardware not supporting new versions of the OS, lack of Internet access to perform the upgrade, application compatibility, and just liking the way the old version works. Even for the case of a critical security fix it should be possible to restore data without applying the fix.

For any pair of versions of software that are only separated by a few versions it should be possible to backup data from one and restore to the other. Even if the data can’t be used directly (EG a backup of AMD64 programs that is restored on an i386 system) it should still be accessible. If a new version of the software doesn’t support the ancient file formats then it should be possible for the users to get a slightly older version which talks to both the old and new versions.

Backups made on 64bit systems running the latest development version of Linux and on 10yo 32bit proprietary Unix systems are interchangeable. Admittedly Unix is really good at preserving file format compatibility, but there is no technical reason why other systems can’t do the same. Source code to cpio, tar, and gnuzip, is freely available!

Apple TimeMachine fails badly in this regard, even a slightly older version of Mac OS can’t do a restore. It is however nice that most of the TimeMachine data is a tree of files which could be just copied to another system.

(4/5) Backup Software should not be Dropped

Sony Ericsson has made me hate them even more by putting the following message on their update web site:

The Backup and Restore app will be overwritten and cannot be used to restore data. Check out Android Market for alternative apps to back up and restore your data, such as MyBackup.

So if you own a Sony Ericsson phone and it is lost, stolen, or completely destroyed and all you have is a backup made by the Sony Ericsson tool then the one thing you absolutely can’t do is to buy a new Sony Ericsson phone to restore the data.

I believe that anyone who releases backup software has an ethical obligation to support restoring to all equivalent systems. How difficult would it be to put a new free app in the Google Market that has as it’s sole purpose recovering old Sony Ericsson backups onto newer phones? It really can’t be that difficult, so even if they don’t want to waste critical ROM space by putting the feature in all new phones they can make it available to everyone who needs it. When compared to the cost of developing a new Android release for a series of phones the cost of writing such a restore program would be almost nothing.

It is simply mind-boggling that Sony Ericsson go against their own commercial interests in this regard. Surely it would make good business sense to be able to sell replacements for all the lost and broken Sony Ericsson phones, but instead customers who get burned by broken backups are given an incentive to buy a product from any other vendor.

(5/5) The greater the control over data the greater the obligation for protecting it

If you have data stored in a simple and standard manner (EG the /DCIM directory containing MP4 and JPEG files that is on the USB accessible storage in every modern phone) then IMHO it’s quite OK to leave customers to their own devices in terms of backups. Typical users can work out that if they don’t backup their pictures then they risk losing them, and they can work out how to do it.

My Sony Ericsson phones have data stored under /data (settings for Android applications) which is apparently only accessible as root. Sony Ericsson have denied me root access which prevents me running backup programs such as Titanium Backup, therefore I believe that they have a great obligation to provide a way of making a backup of this data and restoring it on a new phone or a phone that has been updated. To just provide phone upgrade instructions which tell me that my phone will be entirely wiped and that I should search the App Market for backup programs is unacceptable.

I believe that there are two ethical options available to Sony Ericsson at this time, one is to make it easy to root phones so that Titanium Backup and similar programs can be used, and the other option is to release a suitable backup program for older phones. Based on experience I don’t expect Sony Ericsson to choose either option.

Now it is also a bad thing for the Android application developers to make it difficult or impossible to backup their data. For example the Wiki for one Android game gives instructions for moving the saved game files to a new phone which starts with “root your phone”. The developers of that game should have read the Wiki, realised that rooting a phone for the mundane task of transferring saved game files is totally unreasonable, and developed a better alternative.

The best thing for developers to do is to allow the users to access their own data in the most convenient manner. Then it becomes the user’s responsibility to manage it and they can concentrate on improving their application.

Why Freedom is Important

Installing CyanogenMod on my Galaxy S was painful, but having root access so I can do anything I want is a great benefit. If phone vendors would do the right thing then I could recommend that other people use the vendor release, but it seems that vendors can be expected to act unethically. So I can’t recommend that anyone use an un-modded Android phone at any time. I also can’t recommend ever buying a Sony Ericsson product, not even when it’s really cheap.

Google have done a great thing with their Data Liberation Front [1]. Not only are they providing access to the data they store on our behalf (which is a good thing) but they have a mission statement that demands the same behavior from other companies – they make it an issue of competitive advantage! So while Sony Ericsson and other companies might not see a benefit in making people like me stop hating them, failing to be as effective in marketing as Google is a real issue. Data Liberation is something that should be discussed at board elections of IT companies.

Keep in mind the fact that ethics are not just about doing nice things, they are about establishing expectations of conduct that will be used by people who deal with you in future. Sony Ericsson has shown that I should expect that they will treat the integrity of my data with contempt and I will keep this in mind every time I decline an opportunity to purchase their products. Google has shown that they consider the protection of my data as an important issue and therefore I can be confident when using and recommending their services that I won’t get stuck with data that is locked away.

While Google has demonstrated that corporations can do the right thing, the vast majority of evidence suggests that we should never trust a corporation with anything that we might want to retrieve when it’s not immediately profitable for the corporation. Therefore avoiding commercial services for storing important data is the sensible thing to do.

• [1] http://www.dataliberation.org/

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No matter how small the problem, the potential for complexity can make it something else altogether. Watch!

Here’s how it works. Flexible Purpose Corporations can write one or more special missions into their articles of incorporation. They can be as ambitious as fighting climate change or as modest as maintaining a park near the company’s office. The law instructs directors to consider the special aims in their decision-making, even when it could mean lower returns for investors. To make the appeal as broad as possible, the law’s authors avoided setting a minimum standard for what a “special purpose” could be.

So you’ve got everything prepared to write that request to ask products to review? This is the time to write that email. This is part 4 of “Why becoming a product reviewer is not as easy as you thought” series (which you can read at my Blogging Guides section).

How are you supposed to write that email? What are the things you are supposed to say (and what are not)?

How to ask products to review (via email or online form)

Note: There is no magic formula or the perfect email, so you may find different opinions about this one. This is from my personal experience at least and so far it works well (as you can tell from my hundreds of review posts).

(1) How to ask products to review: Introduce yourself and your blog

There isn’t a need for a long introductory paragraph. Just tell them who you are and what your blog’s URL is. A nice, simple, and straight sentence like “Hi, My name is John Smith, a technology/fashion/food/anything blogger from www.mysupercoolblog.com” should suffice.

Let your About page and your blog do the talking afterwards (therefore, it’s important to touch up your About page if they want to know more about you and your blog).

(2) How to ask products to review: Declare your intention and pick one of their latest products to review

Don’t be shy. Tell them that you are wondering whether they can sponsor you a product sample in exchange for a review at your blog. Some companies offer loan product samples only (they send a sample to you to be reviewed and expect it to be returned after 1-2 weeks) and some allow you to keep the samples after you review them. It’s up to you whether you want to accept loan products to review or not (based on your circumstances) but it’s important to at least get a reply about your offer. Whenever possible, pick their latest product when you pitch for a sample. When companies release a new product, they normally want to market it right away. A method is by sending them to reviewers to be reviewed in magazines, newspaper, or online publications (sites, blogs, etc). It is therefore easier for them to send you a sample of their latest product to market it across.

It is also easier for them to say “yes” if you pick a product with $30 RRP compared to a $400 RRP product, especially if this is your first time. If they are happy with your review, you should be able to get higher value review units (I was sent a product sample by Dyson last time which had an $899 RRP value at that time!)

(3) How to ask products to review: Tell them why you are interested to review that particular product

I hope there is a clear reason for you to review the product you picked. Tell them why you like the product or why you want to review that product. If you are here just to get free stuff, get out of here – it won’t be that easy. It’s important to see the good values of a product by looking at the product spec sheet/page before you ask to review it.

(4) How to ask products to review: Showcase your past reviews

It is good if you can put a link or two of your best past review posts in the email. It is even better if you have a product review of that particular brand you are going to email. Try to show them reviews that are related to the product you are asking. If you want to review an MP3 player, there is not much point showing your review of that hotel you were staying overseas. If you really have nothing else, that is fine (though not recommended) since they can at least have a look at your writing style and how thorough you are in the reviews to decide.

(5) How to ask products to review: Brag about your blog

Basically tell them why they should be bothered sending you a sample. Whether you can keep the samples or not, they still have to pay for the marketing expense. You need to show them that it’s worth the money. Tell them about your traffic, your blog awards, or other achievements you’ve made. When I first started to send an email like this (it was to Microsoft, asking to review the Microsoft SideWinder X6 keyboard back in 2009), I bragged about my blog being chosen as one of the finalists to the Best Geek Blog in Asia Pacific and that my blog was ranked #20 in a Top 100 Australian blogs list. If you have a good traffic and ranking, it will certainly help too! Don’t be shy but don’t overdo it.

(6) How to ask products to review: Say thank you (doh?)

Of course, don’t forget to say thank you for their time and that you are looking forward for a reply. Sometimes it’s good to also say that you are looking forward for their reply, even when they are not interested. Should you fail to impress, at least you know why.

(7) How to ask products to review: Keep the email short and to the point

Remember that the PR people are very busy people. They probably have to answer hundreds of emails like this and have to communicate to lots of other journalists and reviewers. So keep it to a few paragraphs if you can.

If you have any other questions about writing the email to ask products to review, let me know below!