This blog post is completely and severely off-topic, so feel free to skip it if you’re looking for my usual AdSense and Internet marketing commentary.

St. Jerome’s University

I live in Waterloo, Ontario. I arrived here in 1985 to attend the University of Waterloo (UW) and study computer science. For some reason, I never left and in fact I live very close to the university.

UW shares its campus with four religious educational institutions, one of which is St. Jerome’s University (SJU), a Catholic university founded in 1865 by a religious order known as the Congregation of the Resurrection (CR). Although legally a separate entity, SJU has been federated with UW since 1960, which means that SJU students are granted degrees from UW, not SJU. SJU students can take UW courses and vice-versa.

Although I’m Catholic, I was never registered at SJU and in fact my church attendance lapsed while I was in university, which is not unusual from what I’ve seen. I’m not an alumnus of SJU and I really don’t have any links with the university — UW was my alma mater.

There’s been some controversy at SJU lately. The majority of SJU faculty members have lost confidence in their new president and a number of staff members have been fired and/or quit and/or gone on sick leave. In particular, the entire chaplaincy team quit. Which is why I’m writing about this.

The University Catholic Community

Every Catholic university I’ve visited has regular church services that anyone can attend, but of course are really geared towards the needs of the students, faculty and staff of that university. However, the situation at St. Jerome’s is somewhat unique because of the sheer number of non-SJU people that attend church there and form what is known as the University Catholic Community (UCC). About 1000 people consider UCC to be their church, enough to support four Masses per weekend.

Although not a formal parish, UCC offers many of the same services as a parish. My wife and I were married there. Our daughter was baptized and had her first communion at UCC. There are choirs and musicians for each Mass (I play piano and lead the choir for the 11:30 am Mass on Sunday). The setting is a bit different, because UCC long ago outgrew the confines of the Notre Dame Chapel and Mass is now said in a lecture hall, the only place at SJU that can hold the 300-400 people that might show up at each of the two Sunday morning services.

I discovered UCC shortly after I graduated from UW, when I guess I was looking to get back to my religious roots. If you’re used to traditional Catholic churches, UCC is certainly different. It’s the same Mass, of course, but the community is different — younger (in attitude, if not in age), more open, more casual. It’s very welcoming. There are people who travel from all over the Kitchener-Waterloo area to attend Mass at UCC, so obviously the community has a strong pull and fulfills an unspoken need among area Catholics.

The Chaplaincy Team

Core to the success of UCC was its chaplaincy team, who had dual roles as chaplains for SJU students, staff and faculty and as leaders of UCC. The team consisted of three members: Father Jim Link, the ordained chaplain, a Resurrectionist priest gifted in homiletics; Melinda Szilva, the lay chaplain, who is now using her skills and compassion as executive director of HopeSpring Cancer Support Centre; and Carol Persin, the secretary who kept everything running smoothly and was always available to listen.

UCC is more than these three persons, of course, as the community existed before them and continues on (somewhat) without them. Father Jim could have been posted anywhere at anytime by his religious order, of course, and Melinda and Carol could have found other jobs at any time. To have all three leave at the same time, though, indicates that something is wrong at SJU, because their departures certainly had nothing to do with UCC.

Has the Board of Governors Made a Mistake?

The Board of Governors at St. Jerome’s University clearly made a mistake when it hired the current president of SJU. While university administrators are never universally loved by their constituents, it seems that what was once a happy and collegial place of work for faculty and staff is now a place where people are afraid to speak their mind (anathema for any academic) and are afraid of losing their jobs.

How else can we explain the results of the no-confidence vote report in the article above and the departure of the chaplaincy team? We never saw anything like this with the previous deans and presidents of SJU. The very fact that the faculty association felt it necessary to even hold such a vote is extremely telling.

Since many SJU staff and faculty are UCC members, even those of us who are not directly associated with SJU have heard stories (often directly from the people involved) of SJU employees being forced out of their jobs, going out on extended sick leave, and/or seeking counseling for stress and depression. This has caused great concern among members of UCC. After all, these are our friends, our fellow community members. How can we not be concerned? Losing the entire chaplaincy team as a result of these issues was perhaps the last straw for many of us.

Most of us are outsiders to SJU and thus have no say in how it runs its affairs. We can still make our voices heard, however, and perhaps influence the SJU Board of Governors to do something concrete about what’s been happening. I do hope some of them read this.

UCC’s Uncertain Future

UCC is clearly a wounded faith community at this point. I know some members have expressed an interest in leaving UCC to attend another church. I wonder how many will simply turn into lapsed Catholics, unable to find elsewhere the spiritual sustenance they found at UCC?

I’m sure that there are some in the university administration that would rather see UCC wither and die, returning to its roots as a student-only community. If we all disappear, that’s clearly what will happen, and I think it will be a tremendous loss to the greater community and to Catholicism in general. Let’s hope it doesn’t get to that point.

If you’re subscribed to an Internet marketer’s mailing list, you’re probably getting told today about a new product coming on Tuesday called Google Shadow. Google Shadow is from the same guy who brought us Affiliate Project X and other products, all of which focus on making money with affiliate marketing and Google AdWords. Those products like to show you images like this one:

Looks impressive. Does Google Shadow actually work? Who knows? I don’t have any special insight into it. (If you want, I can send you the same promotional emails everyone else is sending…)

However, there’s one thing I can talk about which is at the heart of Google Shadow and that’s something called direct linking.

Direct Linking Explained

Direct linking is a funny term, because in this context it’s an oxymoron. Direct linking is an AdWords technique where you send traffic directly to a merchant’s website via your affiliate linking. You’re not actually “directly linking” to the merchant’s website, but anyone who clicks the ad eventually does get there. This is as opposed to “indirect linking” where anyone clicking the ad ends up on a landing page you control, such as a review page or a squeeze page.

Some examples here might help. Here’s an example of indirect linking:

                Google Shadow Review
                Don't Buy Google Shadow
                Until You Read This
                GoogShadow.com

It’s indirect because the destination URL — the URL the user sees in his or her browser’s address bar — is not the official Google Shadow website.

And here’s an example of direct linking:

                Buy Google Shadow
                Learn Direct Linking Secrets
                Google Doesn't Want You To Know
                DJKShadow.com

This is direct linking because the destination URL is the merchant’s site. If you click my affiliate link, http://egiguere.djkshadow.hop.clickbank.net, you’ll see that’s where you eventually end up. (And if you buy the product from there, I get a commission, so thanks in advance!)

Problems With Direct Linking

Direct linking was a quick way to make a few bucks in the early days of Google. In fact, the “original” AdWords infoproduct called Google Cash is all about making money with direct linking.

Google’s quality control folks didn’t like all these affiliate ads showing up, though, and so eventually they instituted a rule that made affiliates work harder to get their ads to show on Google. The rule is quite simple: only ONE ad for any given domain gets shown at a time for a given keyword.

Say there are 10 affiliates all using direct linking to promote a product. Only one affiliate’s ad is going to be shown. Which one? Either the one that has the highest bid or the highest clickthrough ratio — probably a combination of both. In other words, Google forces all the affiliates who are trying to make money with direct linking to compete directly with each other. Only the strongest survive this virtual bidding war.

The result was that most advertisers abandoned direct linking and switched to using landing pages on their own sites.

Direct Linking Today

Note that Google didn’t ban direct linking. They just made it harder to do. In some ways, it’s too bad, because direct linking was an easy way to get an AdWords campaign going… you just concentrated on getting the ad clicks and let the merchant worry about converting the traffic into sales. You can setup direct linking campaigns very quickly. (That said, if the merchant’s landing pages sucked then you wouldn’t want to necessarily use direct linking.)

What have the Google Shadow people figured out? I don’t know, to be honest. Probably a way to find keywords with traffic but little or no direct linking competition, which would let you use direct linking without getting into an expensive bidding war with other affiliates.

I guess we’ll see what’s what on Tuesday.

I published a couple of new articles on EzineArticles that might interest some of my readers:

• How to Avoid Initial AdSense Ad Mistargeting discusses the simple steps you take to make sure the AdSense ads that show up on a new page aren’t all wrong, and
• Why Develop Mobile Database Applications? is a techie article about the difference between a true mobile database application versus an online database application usable from a mobile device

I plan on publishing more articles on EzineArticles, both on Internet marketing and technical topics, stay tuned here for updates or subscribe directly to Eric Giguere’s EzineArticles RSS feed.