Category Archives: Internet

Google Adsense Fluffer

Blogging, Internet, Websites

Google Adsense payment after running Adsense for approximately 75 daysIn the middle of July, I thought it seemed like a good idea to see what all the fuss was about regarding Google Adsense.

After adding the simple snippets of JavaScript into my WordPress templates, I immediately started to earn through it. The first few days were very sketchy, earning me under USD$0.50 per day and then it slowly picked up. Roughly two months later and Google Adsense is consistently earning over USD$1.00 per day and I currently have an average earning of, wait for it – USD$1.58 per day!

Though the numbers are no where near as impressive as some of the internets biggest Google Adsense whores, it makes a difference. My web host charges me AUD$15.00/month, so in approximately two and a half months – Google Adsense has essentially paid for an entire years worth of hosting!

A thank you must go out to Google for providing such a simple advertising medium for content publishers and the sites readers for clicking an advertisement as they passed through the site.

Why I Love YouTube

Internet, Websites

I’ll be the first to say that I’m not a YouTube user, however YouTube really does offer a fantastic service to the community.

On Tuesday night I play squash and as such, I missed the Up Close & Personal instalment of Australian Idol. I was really looking forward to it; Bobby Flynn, Lisa Mitchell and Jessica Mauboy were bound to put on a good show.

Thankfully, some kind YouTube user has been encoding all of the performances of Australian Idol 2006 and uploading them onto YouTube.

Below are a couple of my favourite Bobby Flynn performances:

Google & Pingomatic Sitting In A Tree

Blogging, Internet, Search, Software, Websites

Following on from my previous post about Google Blog Search accepting pings, it appears that Pingomatic is already sending ping messages into the Google Blog Search service.

By default, WordPress only sends pings into Pingomatic, which then distributes them to a lot of other services. To verify that Pingomatic has already been updated, the previous post title and URL were amended. A few minutes later, you could do a search using the Google Blog Search and the newly amended title and URL were visible in the results.

I love a good service.

Google Blog Search Accepting Pings

Blogging, Internet, Websites

Google have recently announced that their Blog Search service is now capable of accepting ‘pings’.

For those that aren’t aware, the ping I’m referring isn’t the first half of the game or the network utility; its a notification message. Traditionally indexing services such as Google or Technorati periodically scour the internet looking for changed content. Due to the ever increasing size of the internet, it is taking longer and longer for these services to complete each run. The knock on effect to publishers, is that it’s taking longer and longer for newly published content to show up in the search indexes.

To try and reduce that problem, the search engines have been introducing more features and services to the community. As an example, some time ago Google released a simple service known as Google Sitemaps. The idea behind the Google Sitemap is that the website owner provides Google with an XML file of their sites content and what they consider to be important within it. This then allows the Googlebot to pick up the Google Sitemap on its scheduled run and only retrieve content which is new or changed since its last visit; drastically reducing the number of pages that the Googlebot needs to reindex per website.

Following on from that, Google are now allowing website owners to proactively tell Google when they have added or changed content. Google accepting a ping when publishers add/modify content, means that the Googlebot can come back to your site more frequently, knowing that there will be new or updated content to index. Having the Googlebot revisit your site should also mean that your newly added or modified content should show up within the search index much sooner than the scheduled indexing cycle.

I wonder how long it will be before Google allows a ping for normal content and not just blog style content.

Australian News Websites Are Web 2.0 Compliant

Internet, Websites

I was browsing through news.com.au and abc.net.au/news/, only to notice that they are Web 2.0 Compliant!

For those that aren’t aware what Web 2.0 is and how you can be compliant with it, I actually have my tongue firmly planted in my cheek. In the last two years or so, there has been a huge push for web applications, which act in a similar way to the traditional desktop application. One of the techniques which greatly helped kick start the web application phenomenon was a technology coined AJAX. Since that point in time, there has also been massive surge of community driven sites. If you could throw those two ingredients and a few other little things into a mixing bowl, you’d have what I roughly consider Web 2.0.

To keep this brief, I’ll give you a short list of some of the Web 2.0 and other hip and happening features they have:

In years gone past, news sites were very rigid and out dated compared to the current trends flashing around the internet. I’m glad to see the news sites are keeping up with the Jones; if they get lucky, providing some of the newer items such as podcasts might help them capture a market segment that they’ve never had before.