Monthly Archive for November, 2008

In-text or In-line Advertising.

Published on November 24, 2008 in General Geek. 0 Comments

I decided to start playing around with some in text or in line advertising on some of the sites I manage. So I did a couple of quick searches to see what exists.  There are actually several different options out there, so I am going to have to start digging through them one at a time.

If you are looking for a list of in-text advertising options or a list of in-line advertising options, here you go.

Triggit - In-text ads that work.

Miva – Inline ads within your content.

Adbrite – Embed interactive text ads in your site content.

Vibrant – The in-text advertising leaders.

Infolinks – Linking text to Revenue.

Kontera – Creating in-text relevance.

Chitka – Turning Page views into profits – Search Targeted Advertising.

Jargonfish – Your Words. Deeper Meaning.

As I go through them, I’ll try and throw out some reviews and feature lists.

Google Blogs.

Published on November 24, 2008 in General Geek. 0 Comments

If you want to get the official word from Google about any of it’s offerings just check out the list of Google Blogs. They have a blog for all of their products, and several others.

Click here to check them out.

Free Keyword Suggestion Tool.

Published on November 20, 2008 in General Geek. 0 Comments

Maybe you remember the days of the “Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool.” It was a slick little tool that you could enter a keyword into and get a list of other keyword variations. It also gave you an estimated number of searches for each keyword. It wasn’t perfect, but it definitely pointed the way to your strongest keyword options.

Well, Yahoo shut the tool down sometime over a year ago, and I miss it.

A couple weeks ago I was searching for information to see if maybe they had started it back up (I check every so often) and of course, it’s still down, but I did find a decent replacement, the “Free keyword suggestion tool from WordTracker.“

You can check it out here.

USB 3.0 Sweet

Published on November 14, 2008 in General Geek. 0 Comments Tags: .

USB 3.0 will be unveiled next Monday, and so far the new specs for the protocol look incredible, promising 25GB transfers in a mere 70 seconds. To put that in perspective, the same transfer would take 13.9 minutes with the current USB 2.0 protocol and 9.3 hours on USB 1.0. Looks like the future of wired syncs and backups is bright and blazing.

It looks like moving my movies from my computer to my movie drive just got quicker.

Sweet…

Google Introduces GMAIL Voice and Video Chat.

Published on November 13, 2008 in Gmail. 0 Comments Tags: , .

I’ve never been a big fan of the “Video Phone” concept, so I doubt I’ll be using this new feature when I’m chit-chatting with friends and co-workers.

However, I can see how this might be a useful business tool, so I am going to pick up a couple of new web cams and give the new GMAIL Video Chat a try this month. I can see how I might want to jump from a chat session with a colleague from another office to a video chat session to show off an “Important Visual”.

Important Visual

Important Visual

Sometimes playing a little “show and tell” can be useful during a business meeting.

Here’s a video Google posted on YouTube.com showing a little more detail:

Google Analytics adds New Features!

Published on November 13, 2008 in Adsense, Analytics and Google. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

On October 22nd, Google announced that they would begin rolling out new features for Google Analytics.

They are:
Advanced Segmentation
Custom Reports
Data export API (private beta)
Integrated reporting for AdSense publishers (private beta)
Multi-dimensional data visualizations called “Motion Charts”
Updated user and administrative interface.

The feature I’ve been most anticipating is the addition of the Integrated reporting for Adsense. Unfortunately this is an invite only feature at this time and Google hasn’t deemed me worthy yet. (Google, if you’re reading this, hook me up!)

If you have an AdSense account, eventually you should receive the option to “integrate your AdSense account with Google Analytics”. The option will appear at the top of the Overview page once you login to Adsense.

Watch for your Invitation

Watch for your Invitation

AdSense Overview Screenshot

AdSense Overview Screenshot

Here is the video that Google posted on YouTube giving a peek behind the curtain:

Google Chrome Plugin – Download You Tube Videos.

Published on November 11, 2008 in Browser, Chrome and Google. 0 Comments Tags: , .

This is actually a bookmarklet.

“A bookmarklet is an applet, a small computer application, stored as the URL of a bookmark in a web browser or as a hyperlink on a web page.” – Bookmarklet as definded by Wikipedia.org.

1. In order to use the bookmarklet you will want to make sure that your “bookmarks bar” is tured on. This can do this in the “Customize and Control Google Chrome Menu”. That’s the long name for the little wrench icon in the upper right hand corner of the Chrome browser. Once you click on the little wrench, theres an option to “always show bookmarks bar”. Turn it on.

2. Now right click somewhere on the bookmarks bar and select “Add Page” from the download menu that appears.

3. The “Edit Bookmark” window will appear. In the “Name” field, write a descriptive name for the bookmarklet. I named mine “You-NOW-BE-My-Tube”.

4. Here’s the magic part. In the “URL” field, paste the following code:

javascript:window.location.href = ‘http://youtube.com/get_video?video_id=’ + swfArgs['video_id']+ “&l=” + swfArgs['l'] + “&sk=” + swfArgs['sk'] + ‘&fmt_map’ + swfArgs['fmt_map'] + ‘&t=’ + swfArgs['t'];

5. Click “OK”. There should now be a link in your “Bookmark Toolbar”.

6. Visit YouTube.com and find a target. My first download was the Obama Victory Speech.

7. Once the video starts playing, click the bookmarklet. At this point you should notice the download starting in Google Chrome’s download status bar at the bottom the the Chrome Browser window.

8. If you haven’t changed the Google Chrome download location, once the download is complete, you will find the video in your “MyDocuments\Downloads” folder.

9. The format of the file is “.flv” (Flash Video File), so you will need a viewer capable of playing .flv files to watch your new acquisition. One of my favorite FREE players out there is the “VLC Media Player“. It plays the .flv extension along with just about anything else. Another option is “PlayFLV” that enables Windows Media Player to playback FLV files.