Just a quick note to update any subscribers to my RSS feed that I’ve moved the main source for my site syndication over to Feeburner. The new address for my feed (although the existing one will still work for the time being) is:
Please update your feed aggregators accordingly!
Cheers.
It was interesting (if not a little uncharacterisitic) to watch the Money Programme on BBC2 the other night, which was all about the meteoric rise of Facebook.
I like Facebook as much as (if not more than) the next guy. I log on nearly everyday to check out my friends, update my status, and see if there are any upcoming birthdays I’ve forgotten about. Even my dog is on Facebook. But one of the things that seemed pretty obvious to me from the get-go was to limit the amount of personal information you put on the site.
It will be interesting to see what 2008 brings for Facebook, and whether there are any new internet superstars waiting in the wings to steal Facebook’s crown (and users).
Some of you may of noticed that I have started to display a couple of adverts from Google Adsense in my sidebar. Before anyone accuses me of a. selling out; or b. having the audacity to think that I have enough readers to generate a substantial income from click-throughs; just let me explain why…
It’s very simple really - I have a potential client who would like to have a little advertising on their website (I’m also considering featuring the occasional advertising slot over at Digital Collective) and wanted to know how it all works. So where better to experiment than on my own website? I have no illusions that it will generate much income (but if it were able to cover even part of my hosting and bandwidth costs, all the better), and I think that two adverts in my sidebar are pretty unobtrusive.
All in all, implementing Google Adsense is pretty straightforward - just signup for it from inside your Google account, wait for Google to approve your application (they just want to make sure your website isn’t doing anything illegal before allowing you to use their name), and away you go. The step-by-step ad creation wizard is pretty basic (but, then, so are the output options - limited too), and then you just drop a custom-generated piece of Javascript into your site.
The fun begins when you start to display ads on your site. Google pride themselves on providing targeted adverts that are relevant to the content of your site, but I have to say that this is not exactly an exact science, and they way in which the Adsense crawler interprets your site can sometimes lead to unexpected results.
Initially, anyone who visited my site say adverts for baths and bathroom fittings. It took me a while to deduce that Adsense was heavily weighting the output of my Facebook status (at the top of my sidebar), which was displaying comments about my latest plumbing project at home. It seemed to be largely ignoring the meta keywords and description in the <HEAD> of my website. It seems to have calmed down a bit now (although it is a little fixated with adverts for Mac OSX 10.5 at the moment), but a cautionary tale nonetheless.
I’ve yet to play with some of the other Adsense features (including Google Search), and I’d like to see what the advert-to-income conversion rate is (Google keep the exact details of how much you will make per click-through a closely guarded secret), but so far it has been a pretty positive experience.
Does anyone have any views on Adsense and what sort of message it gives about websites that use it? If so, please share below…
Just thought I’d take advantage of the free WiFi on my train and do a quick blog from my iPod Touch. Don’t expect many of these, though - I’m still trying to get my head (and fingers!) around the keyboard!
That is all (since I am at my destination already). Goodbye!
I’m not usually one harp on about clever little applications for the Mac, but I’ve come across one that I feel genuinely deserves a bit of praise.
Because of the diverse types of work that I do, I tend to regularly use a lot of different applications on my Mac. I’m pretty lazy, and like to have them all at my fingertips - generally meaning that I have links to them on my Dock. Unfortunately I don’t own a 24inch widescreen monitor, screen space was beginning to run out, and I was beginning to have to choose which applications deserved a hallowed space on my Dock. Until I came across Sapiens, and now my Dock looks like this:
Sapiens is a new type of application launcher that monitors how you use your Mac and attempts to learn your habits so that it can predict the application that you most likely want to open. The interface is pretty neat, and is opened by a simple circular motion of the mouse.
Apparently it takes 2-3 days of watching your habits to become ‘clever’ enough to predict you next move - I’ve only had it installed a day and already it’s starting to be surprisingly accurate (considering that, on average, I use about 30-35 different apps daily!).
There are, of course, other options available (other than the Dock), including good old Spotlight - but I like the completely keyboard-less approach of Sapiens. It just remains to be seen whether or not I get RSI from constantly launching applications!
