Placing lots of bids in Project Wonderful is a tedious and repetitive job. And, like any tedious and repetitive job, it's natural to try to find faster ways of doing it. Even if you only end up saving a couple of seconds per bid, multiply that by a couple of hundred bids and it all adds up.
About a week ago, I placed four hundred one-penny bids for a seperate endeavour of mine, using my Nostromo and a pair of macros I'd created for Project Wonderful. I then (yes, after the fact, because that's just the way I roll) E-mailed Ryan to ask him if doing this sort of thing (and talking about it on PWT) was acceptable under Project Wonderful's TOS.
He replied back in the affirmative (and said he was nearly done with the interview questions, but that's a story for another time), so I share my keyboard macros with you here today.
These macros were created for use with a Belkin Nostromo, which is kind of like a little baby keyboard, programmable and application-sensitive. It's mostly used for gaming, but I've used mine more for work stuff - things like showing and hiding menus in Flash, PhotoShop and DreamWeaver, typing a specific signature into GMail and the like. The commands should be similar in any macro program, such as RemoteKeys or AutoHotKey.

Matthew Skala has an interesting post on Project Wonderful on his blog. Inside, he talks about the economy of Project Wonderful, addresses the concerns we've all had about the widening gap between big-time and small-time publishers, and suggests some options for remedy:

If you've been following my adventures trying to advertise my Web comic, you'll have heard about my misadventures with Google, and more recently the collapse of my Project Wonderful ad box bids. My thinking is that this may be a structural problem with Project Wonderful - it's set up in such a way that when someone like me starts lowering bids, that causes other people's income to drop and then they lower bids too and the whole thing can spiral out of control, leading to ridiculously low bids and a non-awesome situation all around.

For the full article, head over to mskala's blog.

It looks like Project Wonderful has been updated again, possibly taking baby steps towards a mass-bidding system. Thanks to the eagle-eyed forum member spikydragon for noticing this.

You can now extend the lifetime of your bids after they've been placed, through the "Edit Bid" page. Remember, in the case of a draw, the older bid wins - this way you can refresh an old bid without having the risk of someone else getting in at your bid level, and the minimum bid increasing.

You can now update your expense limit on-the-fly, from the same page. Your ad boxes can feature a header, rather than a footer. If you click on any "View Performance" link on the "My Bids" page, you'll find a new option to view historical data of any given bid; the new historical view breaks down data by day and shows average bid value, displays and clicks. And is it just me, or does the Project Wonderful website seem to be responding a little faster than usual?

Perhaps the most curious change today is the "Duplicate Bid" option now available on the "My Bids" page. Right now it looks as though it simply fills in the bidding page with values taken from the original bid, and the time expressed as length rather than a set ending date - for example, say I had a bid running on this very website, which I placed a month ago and told to run for one year, expiring February 2008. If I duplicated that bid, it would create the same bid again, but running for a year from today by default and expiring in March 2008.

It seems the only thing you can't change in the new Duplicate option is the site or ad box you're bidding on - so I'm not sure how useful it'll be. What do you think? Is this a move towards mass bidding, and will it help to close the widening gap between big- and small-time publishers?

In other news, it's come to my attention that the CAPTCHA system here is acting up, and some people have had problems signing in or leaving comments. If you've been affected, please mail me at admin@projectwonderfultalk.com and let me know what browser and platform you're using, along with any error messages.

If you log in to Project Wonderful and have a look at the "My Money" page, you'll notice an update - the page now shows, near the top, how much your ads are earning you on a daily basis, compared with how much your bids are costing you.
There's also a new way of looking at your funds page, showing an aggregate of all your transactions over a period which you specify. It's kind of like a statement, showing how much came in and went out each month.
Obviously the majority of us would like more detailed reporting, but this and the recent update to the bidding page are both good signs for the future.

Project Wonderful now has slightly more in-depth reporting on its "performance" pages. It looks like Ryan sneaked it in quite recently, and never told anybody about it!
By going through "My Bids" to "View Performance," you can see the CPC and CPM values of all of your bids - and all of the bids on your own ad boxes, too.
Interestingly, there's a little notice at the bottom of each page:
"Page view and click data can be gamed in any system: you should not base your bidding decisions on display and click data alone."
A step in the right direction?
(edit - whoops! As spikydragon noticed, that little warning at the bottom of the page was there all along, and is not a new thing at all. Sorry for the mixup!)