Teorem's Blog

The current issue of BusinessWeek (October 2006) has a cover story about "Click Fraud" that will surely put more pressure on the major Search Engines, Google first and naturally Yahoo.

If you don't know what is click fraud, please take a look at what Wikipedia is saying about it. They already have the link to the businessweek article.

There is not much more in that BW article than what was described in the last january issue of Wired. Stories showing the problem for small to medium companies, description of the future threats and confirmation that we (Yahoo) take the problem very seriously and invest to implement solutions.

There is at least two interesting information item anyway. First, the announce that most of the click fraud comes from affiliates and not our network, and that a very good percentage is coming from "parking web sites". Those are web sites hosting thousands of domain names their owner don't want to use for the moment and making them serve ads from Yahoo or Google as a way to benefit from the free hosting. Second, the importance of groups of people clicking on ads for payment, those people being a lot more difficult to discover than an automatic fraud click system.

It is natural, like any other successful new business, that the CPC model haves its predators profiting from the system without providing any value to anyone outside themselves. We will do whatever we can to stop them, but I hope anyone will remember how many wonderful and useful services the CPC system is funding before saying that it should be stopped because of fraudulent clicks.

Pascal Borghino, working in my team, is posting about Modeling, UML, databases and the apropriate tools to use. He is mostly ranting that MagicDraw UML is not providing him the extended functions he needs in a Database Modeling tool.

While I understand his frustration, I think he is mispelling the problem: MagicDraw is not a DB Development Tool !

For the realization of a software or a db scheme, there is always a moment when you have to stop modeling and start developing the stuff you want to deliver. At that moment, you also change the tool you are using in order to have the appropriate features for the development activity. While working with Java, I will stop using MagicDraw and start using Eclipse JDT. For a DB Scheme, you will start to use the development tools provided by the database vendor or any other third party (preferably open-source, naturally). Usually, those tools have bridges allowing to translate a UML model into the corresponding elements in the target environment.

To know when to stop modeling and start developing is difficult. It's common to see software developers stoping too soon and then having a model without sufficient information to understand their software. The opposite trap is also common : stopping modeling too late and then having a model so complex that it's sometimes easier to read the code directly. To avoid that second trap, changing the tool you are using in your work is then an advantage because it ensures that you will update the model with only the necessary information. Moreover, it ensures that you will use a tool that is perfectly suited to the task in each step of the realization.

I think that when you reach the point where the target database becomes a very important question to continue your work, you already are past that moment.