Year: 2006

Conspiracy of context sensitive advertising

I think I’ve uncovered another conspiracy by Google, particularly with their context sensitive advertising service AdSense. It’s not a bad conspiracy – as far as I am concerned, they are trying to do a good thing. But still, it’s a mean way to go about it.

A reader of this blog left a comment to one of my earlier posts about media brain wash, a story about Dell notebook exploding at some conference. Jon agreed with me that this story was a pure media hype. In his comment he said exactly this:

Now it won’t be long before some terrorist hops on a plane with Dell laptop batteries strapped all over his body. I agree, this story is media hype.

In order for me not to miss any comments, and to respond faster to my readers, the moment any of your post a comment, I get an email notification. As you know, recently I moved all my email affairs to Google’s mail service GMail. Now, Google uses its own AdSense service to show ads to people while they are reading their emails. The content of the email is used to determine which related ads should be shown.

GMail adsense When I openned a notification email with Jon’s comment I was shown four ads on the right. All four ad links were about notebooks. Two links were generic, but two others featured a brand. And although the brand in the content of the email was Dell, both branded ads were about IBM.

Now, you might think that this is just a coinsidence. But for two links out of four? I don’t think so. What is more probable is that Google undestood that Dell brand was used in connection with terrorism and tried to substitute that for IBM. Probably that was an attempt to sell non-explosive items to terrorists. Thanks Google, but no thanks.

NOTE (this note should have been written a very small font, but since noone will read so far down, I’ll leave it as it is): please, don’t take this entry seriously. I’m just messing with you.

Web standards are important. The Google example.

It’s been said over and over again that everyone should pay close attention to web standards, when developing websites. Benefits are way too many – from decreased size and complexity of the website to better parsing with all sort of devices. All we need now is a bunch of examples. Examples, that use big names and are easy to understand.

Imagine how much bandwidth can be saved by chopping off a kilobyte or two from the Google’s main page. Here’s why and how post by Philipp Lenssen.

I end up with a Strict page (HTML + CSS, no JS) of 2.85 K. I end up with Google’s deprecated page (just the HTML, no JS) of 3.08 K. (Furthermore, when we save the logo as PNG instead of GIF and crop it from unnecessary white space, we end up with a 7.87 K image instead of a 8.35 K one.)

Via Photo Mutt.

Sharing reports in Google Analytics

One of the features of Google Analytics that I wanted, had, but noticed only recently is sharing of reports. It turns out:

Google Analytics provides the ability to add any number of users to your account, and to grant varying levels of access to your reports. You may grant access to the reports of particular profiles when adding a new user, or modify access for existing users.

Granted access can be either read-only per report or a full administrative access to the account. This last one is useful for transfering ownership, for example. If the website is sold or maintainers change for some other reason, the new owner or maintainer can be given full administrative access to the account, and then the old one can be revoked access.

In other news, the profile limit has been raised from 5 to 10. Yup, now I can monitor twice as many websites. Sweet!