Google gets upclose and personal
December 21st, 2005 by Sarah KingOne of the key problems with the internet is the fact that you never get to really interact with the people whose services you are using. This might mean a company or person is misrepresented, either to their benefit or detriment. Chat rooms amplify the problem on a personal level but all “clicks only” present an image that may, or may not, represent reality.
Google is trying to overcome that problem within it’s own company with their Google Space initiative – a retail type stand at major UK airports. They’ve rightly noticed that at airports you have “dead time” with little to do. Shopping isn’t always a great idea but surfing, checking email and forums just might be. Read the rest of this entry »
Making Adsense Ads relevant on a blog
December 7th, 2005 by Sarah KingI received this email today from a blogspot user
Sarah, I’m hoping you have advice for me about my Blog. On my “homepage” Business & Technology Reinvention the adsense ads have low relevance to the content on the page. But when I open an individual post the adsense relevance is excellent (for example Winning Against Big R&D Spenders)
Given that most of my traffic comes to my home page I’m concerned that the low relevance ads dilute the focus of my Blog. Do you have any advice or suggestions to improve?
David
Google, via it’s MediaPartners bot and Googlebot, are very effective at reading a page, nutting out the essence of it and returning the correct ads.
They seem to have a blindspot, though, when it comes to blogs which use Blogger or Blogspot blogs – as these seem to attract more than their fair share of ads for other blogging systems. Read the rest of this entry »
Google gets Analytical
November 16th, 2005 by Sarah KingIf you’ve read this blog before you’ll know that I’ve just launched RealState and am building up the functionality. It’s early days, and the domain is sandboxed so I’m not terribly anxious about how much traffic it gets – not yet anyway!
But I was thinking that I should put WebAnalyse onto it so that I have some tracking and I stumbled over another blog talking about Google Analytics. I shuddered at the thought of Google getting into the hitcounter game, it seemed like such a backward step. And I usually like to control my data but Google is trusted, surely they won’t shut up shop and leave me statistics-less? Read the rest of this entry »
What If? Wot If? Misspelt Domain Names
November 1st, 2005 by Sarah KingWe don’t get out of town terribly often due to sports and family commitments. When we do we often just catch up with friends at the Pauanui holiday home.
However this weekend we’re headed up north and needed to find somewhere to stay. Friends had talked enthusiastically about a site called “What If” so I thought I’d take a look. Hunts around on Google failed to turn the site up! Read the rest of this entry »
Adsense Module for Mambo / Joomla
October 12th, 2005 by Sarah KingI decided it was about time I added Adsense to the BMX site. I’d written a custom module for my kiwi blogs site and just had to change the script. I decided this could lead to a maintenance headache for me so I’ve turned it into a “proper” module.
In this version you add Google’s script as a parameter, set the alignment (ie center, left, right) and the number of pixels above and below – this is top stop crowding and accidental clicks, et voila!
This module could be used to put any text into the modules section, not just Adsense.
Download mod_g_ads.zip
Direct links to AFS search results
October 9th, 2005 by Sarah KingAdsense for Search (AFS) is the system where you have a Google search box on your site to present targetted ads. Personally I don’t see the attraction but plenty do.
I’ve become aware of an interesting scenario this week exploiting Adsense for Search, one way was smart and I liked it. The other was pure spam. Read the rest of this entry »
Redirects have no place in a Directory
September 21st, 2005 by Sarah KingRedirects are where a link to a site looks like http://www.mysite.com/go/143/ or http://www.mysite.com/goto.php?site=143
These are great for the directory owner because they can track the popularity of a link and capture other statistics. They are, however, almost worthless for the site owner. Read the rest of this entry »
Google’s Blog Search loves me!
September 15th, 2005 by Sarah KingGoogle has launched a new type of search called Blog Search (no points for obscurity!). With people using blog software as an alternative to a proper CMS it’ll be interesting to see how Google works out what’s a blog and what’s a site. Read the rest of this entry »
