It’s been a while since my last blog post on making money online but it doesn’t mean I’ve not been thinking about how to do it. Past blog articles have indicated some ways to make money online but never really talked about how effective the various methods are. Well this blog article talks about one method that apparently most people who try and make money online use initially. That is Google Adsense.

Why is it the first method people use? Word of mouth seems to be the main reason – after all that’s the reason I decided to try it. So what is Google adsense? It’s simply a means provided by Google to allow them to advertise on your website. If you look at this website you’ll see a number of Adverts. At the time of writing most of these are provided by Google Adsense.

Adsense provides a nice friendly interface to being able to setup and configure how and what type of advert you can see on a website. It allows you to chose the size colours and a few other things about the adverts. Once you’ve selected what you want you get provided with some special html code that must be put on any web page you want adverts to display on. Below is a sample of the code provided by Google:

<script type="text/javascript"><!--
google_ad_client = "pub-8063328086245449";
google_ad_slot = "2786071329";
google_ad_width = 728;
google_ad_height = 90;
//-->

The result of this code is something like the below image (which is the top advert on this website)

Once adverts start appearing on your website, you slowly start to earn money. What adverts get shown I hear you asking. Well Google scans your website and picks adverts which are relevant to your site’s content. They even target the ads on a per-page setting. Which is really quite good as adverts relevant to a page are more likely to get people to click on them.

You see Google pays for two things:

• PPC – Pay per Click
• PPV – Pay per view / PPI Pay per impression

Pay per view or pay per impression means you get paid to have the advert simply shown on the website. Pay Per Click means you get paid if someone clicks on the advert. Pay per click is by far the more profitable of the two. However depending on your website audience, pay per view is more likely than pay per click.

At this point you might be thinking – wow I get about 300 visitors a day to my website, if they each view a page that’s say 300cents. If only that was the case! The reality is PPC and PPV don’t pay much. You generally only get fractions of a cent for each. Clearchain for instance has been runing these adverts almost since it was setup. The results – well as you learn more about how things work, you setup more and you also make more web pages hence earn more. Below you can see a snapshot of the income from Clearchain.com using Adsense.

As you can see the income certainly isn’t staggering but small amounts all add up. The April figure is based on 3302 impressions and 13 clicks. Clearchain also doesn’t get a lot of traffic hence if you had a website which got lots of traffic then you could potentially get quit a nice income.

So Adsense is certainly one way to make money on the web. If you have a website with lots of content, and lots of visitors – try Adsense as it does work, just not as fast as you’ld expect. It won’t make you a millionaire over night, well at least not in my experience. Though if you checkout some blogs there is certainly some big money earners in Adsense.

Background

With the growing amount of personal data every person is starting to accumulate, one of the biggest problems lies in how to back the data up. The introduction of cheap broadband has made network bandwidth relatively quick, and also affordable. However, despite this, backups require disk space in alternative locations. With Google ^[1] now offering 3GB gmail^[2] email accounts, one possibility is to backup your data in your email.

However emailing files to yourself in not only cumberson but also very error prone. Also with a maximum size limit ^[3] smaller than a number of files you may want to backup, things become even more complex. As a user you would have to send multiple emails, all containing sections of a file

Introducing the Backup Gmail FS

Early on after the creation of gmail based filesystem^[4] using a fuse ^[5], I got to thinking gmail could be used to backup data via a file system.

The problem with the existing GMail FS is doesn’t deal with redundancy, has issues with large files, puts all the data content in one place and is limited to the size of 1 gmail account.

Backup Gmail FS (BGMailFS for short) is the next step up. The aim of it is to feature:

• data redundancy
• data security
• self sizing filesystem
• no limit on file size

Each of these are detailed below.

Data Redundancy

Considering this is aimed at storing backups, Data Redundancy is of prime consideration. As such taking some sort of approach where CRC’s of data is stored is important. Ideally spreading the data across multiple accounts in some time of mirror, or striped set.

Data Security

The one problem to backup up to Google, is how much do you trust them? Whilst I know there motto is: Don’t Be Evil ^[6] I can’t help thinking that a giant company might take a sneak peak at my data. Since the data is backups, it could very well be IP sensitive.

Hence to combat this, using a method like the one describe in the Information Dispersal Algorithm (IDA) ^{[7] [8]} proposed by Micheal Rabin in 1989, would enable us to distribute the data and also keep it secure. Though it does rely on the fact that various bits of data stored in different accounts are never pieced together (though encryption could help out there).

Self Sizing Filesystem

One thing that would be great is to have the filesystem automatically grow when it’s size reaches a certain point. This is quite possible using gmail accounts. All you have to do is register another account and add it to the file system.

No Limit on File Size

The one thing you don’t want is to only be able to have 20M max files in the file system. Hence the implementation must accommodate files of any size.

Possible Implementation

With the idea embedded, it now comes down to how would you go about implementing something like this.

With the advent of ZFS^[9] under FreeBSD things suddenly became much more possible.

ZFS, FreeBSD & Geom

ZFS is a great filesystem / logical volume manager. It supports resizing of the file system on the fly, software based parity & double parity, read checksums, caching and compression. This makes it perfect for use as the frontend to the BGmailFS.

FreeBSD has had the ZFS fs ported to it by pjd. It’ll be an experimental feature in FreeBSD 7.0 and hopefully a fully fledged FS in 7.1. ZFS on FreeBSD to make use of the Geom storage system.

Geom is abstraction of the block devices available to the operating system. It consists of consumers and producers. A consumer makes use of a geom device. Ie a filesystem consumes a geom device. A producer provides the infrastructure for a consumer to write blocks.

Now under FreeBSD a zpool (the lvm size of zfs) is both a geom producer and a geom consumer. It consumes disks. It produces a storage pool.

Putting Things together

So the question becomes how can we make use of zfs to provide the file system front end and somehow provide the backend which talks to gmail. The diagram below gives some insight to how this could fit together.

The key behind the design is the the use of geom to map a gmail account to a geom producer. This can then be used with a ZFS ZPool to let zfs do most of the work.

The concept is simple. Someone implements

• The BGFSDeamon
• The BGFSDriver
• The BGFSCommand

These all work together to end up giving the user a redunant file system.

BGFSDeamon

This Daemon is responsible for mapping low level disk requests in to the relevant gmail account commands. For instance, when a write is done to a ‘disk’ the relevant block is considered an email in a gmail account. It can be written either via SMTP or now gmail supports imap ^[10], via imap. For security of data. This block may be spread between multiple gmail account using the IDA algorithm. Like wise a read obtains all the relevant pieces of the data block from the known accounts and presents the disk block back to the BGFSDriver.

Communication between the driver and the Daemon happen vio ioctls, preferably creating a mmaped region that both can read for efficiency.

BGFS Driver

The driver is actually fairly simple. It works similar to how the fuse driver works but at a block level rather than a file system level. Ie every block request the driver gets to read/write a block, it passes via the device file back to the BGmailDeamon. The driver is really just a translation layer!

BGFSCommand

This BGFSCommand is a command line tool that can be used for adding more space (ie more accounts), checking network communications or retiring accounts. It talks to the BGFSDeamon which actually does the work. Consider it like what apachectl is to apache.

After thoughts / Conclusion

It’s ironic that after writing this page, there is many other possibilities that exist for BGmailFS. With most of the work done in the daemon, it’s entirely plausable that this same system could work with hotmail, yahoo or for that matter a separate daemon that listens on another machine somewhere. This may make even more sense as many people now run servers 24×7 behind their broadband connection. Many of them have the same problem of how to backup their data securely.

Perhaps they could run one daemon, one kernel module and then it just works!

References

1. ↑ http://google.com
2. ↑ http://www.gmail.com
3. ↑ http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6589
4. ↑ http://richard.jones.name/google-hacks/gmail-filesystem/gmail-filesystem.html
5. ↑ http://fuse.sourceforge.net/
6. ↑ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don’t_Be_Evil
7. ↑ http://www.answers.com/topic/information-dispersal-algorithm
8. ↑ http://bryanmills.net/archives/2007/09/information-dispersal-algorithms/
9. ↑ http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/
10. ↑ http://mail.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=12760