AdesBlog.com

Google Ad Manager is now open to public. Anyone who has Google Account can login and start managing their advertisements.

Google Ad Manager is a hosted ad management solution that can help you sell, schedule, deliver, and measure all of your directly-sold and network-based inventory.

I have always used phpAdsNew (now OpenX) for managing my ads. Compared to Google Ad Manager, I found OpenX to be much more user friendly (or is it just because I have been using it for a long long time?).

Again Google wins…

Basically besides being the No.1 search engine on the net, Google is an ad-network too — with its Google AdSense on one side and Google AdWords on the other. So, what does that say about this new ad-network platform — Google Ad Manager — that Google introduced?

OpenX has a good answer to that on their blog, below is the excerpt from their article:

Google is Your Biggest Competitor
By allowing Google Ad Manager to serve all ads on your site, you are reducing your ability to get advertising elsewhere. Because Google could ‘cherry pick’ users that are the most lucrative for Ad Sense, they will leave the other users for your remaining advertisers. Therefore, your advertisers will not get as much ROI, and leave you for another website.

The same theory goes for ad networks. If ad networks do not have access to your most lucrative users, then they will not pay you as much for them.

Google’s Margins will Increase, Not Yours
By allowing Google to serve your ads, you allow your biggest competitor for ad revenue to know how much you make from ALL advertising on your website.

Therefore, if your average CPM from Google is $0.75, and your average CPM from other ad networks is $0.50, there is no reason that Google should give you more than $0.51! Remember, it is up to Google to determine what revenue share that they will pass back to websites. source

I think that’s a huge plus for Google and very very big minus for all the other ad-networks.

You probably wouldn’t understand what the title of this post meant, if you didn’t see the screenshot below right!? (picture says a thousands words!)

As you can see Google has been playing around with its search results. Now you can search “some” sites directly in the Google results. I liked it! Because when you go to the site, you will end up searching the site anyway :) So, why not directly search it from the Google results, right? So the Google team think, and I agree. I think it saves us at least one step.

P.S It only appears for some keywords and sites, searching for adesblog didn’t return such a result for my blog :( How about you, any of your sites has a search field on Google results?

Google Docs now allows you to create polls. But it’s not so easy or shall I say obvious to create polls in Google Docs. It’s one of those applications that are done from the programmers’ point of view and not the end-users’.

You will have to follow this tutorial to create your first poll. I hope you can remember the steps for your second poll.

I am wondering how difficult would it be to put “Create a poll” link directly in the menu and do the spreadsheet related programming at the backend? Anyway, here is the sample poll I have created below:

This is a great, small and free application (standalone exe file) that can check your entire website and show corresponding PageRank for every page. It was developed by SEOJunkie on the request of one of his blog readers.

Recommendations:

I wish the application had a “pause” button. Currently there are only “start” and “quit” buttons on the toolbar (see screenshot above). The problem arises when the website has too many pages, when this happens, there is no way of pausing the program. It goes and goes… only thing is to quit the program.

Also, “export to text file” feature would be great idea. (just a thought SEOJunkie ;) )

P.S Yes AdesBlog is now PR3, *sigh* big-G is really determined to crush me. But my other new project has a PR5 now, it was launched just 4 months ago. So, at least that’s something to be happy about.

via www.riceblogger.com

You can keep track of discussions about your blog on the web through your blog’s dashboard (incoming links) or through trackbacks. But both of these options only show up when there is a link to your blog from other blogs or sites. They won’t show up if someone just mentions your blog’s name and does not link to it.

However there is a way to track those conversations as well, it’s through Google Alerts. Unlike incoming links and trackbacks, Google Alerts can track words that are not linked to your blog. For example, if I track the word “AdesBlog” I would be sent websites that talk about AdesBlog whether the word “AdesBlog” is linked to my blog or not.

Here is how the Google Alerts page looks:

You have the options to be notified “once a day”, “as it happens” and “once a week”. It can search News, Blogs, Videos, Groups and the Web. I personally keep it to Comprehensive.

I also use it to track my other projects and products. As far as the products are concerned, it can really help you to improve your product. Because you will get a lot of information from the discussions about your product. Based on the discussions and suggestions you can improve and develop new features that meets the expectations of your customers. It will also allow you to be closer to your customers, replying to them personally is another good thing you can do with the help of Google Alerts.

Do you use Google Alerts?

If you are like me, have hundreds of filters in your gmail. Then you must be having this usability problem too.

I have lots of filters, some are important and some are just for organizational purposes. Some of the important ones, just because they start with a letter that are at the end of the alphabet (eg. T,S,W etc), they end up being placed at the end of the list.

And every time you want to check your gmail, you need to scroll down, if there is any email inside that filter. I usually apply “skip inbox” feature for all the emails that are placed in special filters.

Current Solution

Currently you can add symbols or numbers before your filter names and they will show up on top of the list. For example if you have Web2.0 as the filter name, normally it will show up at the end of the list, but if you add * Web2.0 or $ Web2.0 then it will climb to the top of the list. Similarly if you can add numbers like 1 Web2.0 to make it appear on top of the list.

Suggested New Feature

Why not introduce small arrows for pushing up and pushing down the filters? You click once on up arrow and the filter goes up by one position, you click once on down arrow and it goes down by one position. Simple yet effective. And most importantly it would make gmail much more usable - user friendly.

Your opinion

Do you have similar problem? If yes, how do you manage it? And in your opinion how best to solve this usability problem?

Ping: gmailblog.blogspot.com (I am gonna ping gmail blog, so that they will take note of this post, hopefully).