Google Official Blog deleted by accident… by Google!

The results of my BlogAds experiment

Just over a week ago I started experimenting with paid advertisements using BlogAds to promote two of my blogs; Sabahan.com and OffbeatEnough.com.

I purchased two ads at LiewCF.com and Kahsoon.com and paid $20 and $50 respectively for a week of exposure on their adstrips. The price was reasonable enough considering each of these blogs is getting an average of 4K and 15K daily visitors respectively (and even higher in page impressions).

The final click thru rates are 0.082% for LiewCF.com and 2.241% for Kahsoon.com. Such a big different and one of them is quite disappointing. But I think I know what causing the low CTR which I’ll write more about this in my next post.

Anyway, someone commented my earlier post and brought up a good point about the ability for new blogs to convert traffic to repeat visitors from these campaigns. Surely, the content, or rather the lack of it, won’t be enough to entice the traffic to convert to repeat visitors right?
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Yahoo Toolbar adds tabbed browsing for IE

For those who are using Internet Explorer 5 and 6, now you can add tab browsing ability into your browser using the latest Yahoo toolbar.

In adding the feature to version 6.3 of the IE toolbar, Yahoo hopes to attract IE 5 and 6 users before Microsoft ships the final version of IE7.

Yahoo has also recently released a button that can be added to your IE or Firefox toolbar to take you directly to Yahoo’s del.icio.us service.

For my purpose though, I am using the Firefox del.icio.us extension which is available here.

Check out Google’s new interface

Here’s a trick if you want a sneak peak at Google’s new interface.

1. Go to google.com (or whatever Google server you use such as Google.com.my)
2. Enter the following Java script into your address bar. It has to be in one single line

   javascript:alert(document.cookie="PREF=ID=fb7740f107311e46:
TM=1142683332:LM=1142683332:S=fNSw6ljXTzvL3dWu;path=/;domain=.google.com")

3. Press enter. Ignore the popup message
4. Perform a search. You should see how the new interface on the result page.

Click to view larger image.

What do you think?

[via threadwatch.org]

Dual Processor vs Dual Core

If you are a computer buff you might find the dual processor vs dual core article an interesting read.

Dual core processors setup has been gathering momentum with the introduction of such processors by Intel and AMD. But you may be wondering which setup is more beneficial, multiple processors or a dual processor and what are the differences between them.

This article will attempt to answer your question. From the article:

A major question for some people getting ready to buy a high-end system is whether they want or need to have two processors available to them. For anyone doing video editing, multi-threaded applications, or a lot of multitasking the answer is a very clear ‘yes’. Then the question becomes whether two separate processors (as in a dual Xeon or Opteron system) is the way to go, or whether a single dual-core CPU (like a Pentium D or Athlon64 X2) will do just as well. Dual CPU vs dual core — which is better?!
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$10,000 Dell PC sold out

I wrote about the blazing fast XPS 600 limited edition Dell PC with a $10,000 price tag.

Apparently it has sold out recently even though the monster rig has lost a bit of its ultimate status due to now wide availably of NVIDIA’s quad-SLI technology and the 5.46 GHz over-clocked machine displayed at CeBIT.

From the article:

Whether Dell plans to make a second offering of XPS 600 limited edition PCs remains unknown. What impact Dell’s acquisition of Alienware will have upon Dell’s interest in ultra-premium PC gaming is also open to speculation, though if the XPS Renegade is a true success, at least in limited quantities, we may begin to see equivalent or better entries coming soon from many manufacturers.

Google AdSense Black List Revisted

I wrote about Adsense Black List a few days ago. Since then, this service has been attracting attention, good and bad. But reading the following post has made me question more about the integrity of this service and the real benefit it brings, if any, by filtering the highest paying ads on your site even though they appear to have low cost per click.

A post over at SERoundTable points out a blog entry named Adsense Blacklist which shows some history about the person who created the list. From the post:

The point that needs to be understood is that blacklists have a checkered history of hurting many innocent people, and it has occurred in the past that the people behind blacklists do not have the moral or technical authority to administer a blacklist. Whether AdSenseBlacklist.com is run by an opportunistic MFA publisher is up to you to decide.
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Eyetracking Study Considers AdSense Blindness

The MIT Advertising Lab has written about Jakob Nielsen upcoming seminar where they’ll share results from their latest eyetracking study. Is “text-box blindness” getting to be as bad as “banner blindness”? We don’t know yet, but in their eyetracking study, users didn’t look at the Google ads in the right-hand margin of this page any more than they did banner ads. I think the recent Adsense tips for bloggers by Google would definitely helps in reducing this so called text-box blindness. They suggest rather than using the traditional Skyscraper in your sidebar, consider using a link unit. Other ways to improve your CTR is by moving ads closer to your content and using the same background of your blog and link colour.

Who’s Building the Next Web?

There’s an interesting article from Newsweek about what’s hot in Web 2.0 universe. The list includes Digg, a techie news site that asks its users to be editors, Plum – an online tool that let you grab information from any available source and several others.

From the article:

Deciphering the exact meaning of the phrase Web 2.0 is a popular parlor game in Silicon Valley. The expression can stand for many things—the kind of start-up that forges new connections among Web users, lets them share their tastes in music and video or simply exploits their creativity and participation in new ways.

If you have been wondering what’s the fuss is all about, or want to know the up and coming web properties to spend your time while online, then you might want to check this one out.

Interview with a guy who makes US10,000 daily via Adsense.

A few days ago I wrote about one guy who has made a million in three months from Adsense.

That guy was Markus Frind the owner of the free dating site PlentyOfFish.com who has been making $10,000 a day from Adsense. Markus had agreed to be interviewed by Andrew Johnson, the owner of The Web Publishing blog.

Andrew writes:

You appear to be an advocate of simple, quick loading designs. Do you think that there are any other elements of web site development that developers are looking at wrong and may be counter-productive to their success?

Function over form to build an emotional connection with the user.  Blend ads into content,  No flashing crap,  make the site  useful.  Basically all those things that everyone knows you are supposed to do, but very few people actually do.    There is no magic  bullet,  but you should always test new designs or new text etc to get the result that you want.   You will never have the worst design and never the best,  but through testing you can always improve.
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