Google Adsense Check

Today, at the Content Revenue Strategies conference in New York City, we announced that a small group of publishers will begin testing a new AdSense interface in limited beta.  Inspired by the feedback we’ve heard directly from you, the new interface includes features designed around your top three requests:

Provide insights to help you make more informed decisions about your sites.

The new AdSense interface includes more detailed performance reports and enables you to view daily stats in graphical formats. It also will provide you with additional metrics such as the amount you’ve earned from various ad, targeting and bid types. Here’s a glimpse at what the new reports currently look like in our beta:

A new AdSense interface: now in beta

Offer you more control over the ads that appear on your sites.

We’re also continuing to make improvements to the Ad Review Center. Upcoming enhancements will give you more options to manage the ads that appear on your site, as well as a cleaner interface that makes it easier to find and review them within the Ad Review Center.

Help you manage your account more efficiently.

We’ve streamlined the AdSense interface to simplify common tasks, such as making a change to several ad units simultaneously. Additionally, to help you get the most out of AdSense, we’ve added more relevant help on every page, a message inbox for tips from our team, and alerts with important account related notices.

In order to collect feedback on these enhancements from publishers in multiple countries, we’re rolling out the beta test of the new interface today in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Japanese.  Although we aren’t able to extend invitations to additional publishers yet, we’re planning to roll this test out to thousands of publishers over the coming weeks. We’ll be sending email notifications to the beta test participants to let them know.

Thanks again for all of your feedback so far, and we’ll be sure to let you know when we’re able to offer the new interface more widely.

Source: Google AdSense Blog

Google, which previously had a fixed and limited set of typefaces for text ads, now lets publishers and bloggers choose their own.

AdSense tested the concept of customizable typefaces in 2008, and in 2006 the font size became changeable, with a little help from Firefox Browser Text Size, Search Engine Journal reported.

Now, publishers and bloggers can choose from three different typefaces: Arial, Times and Verdana.

To do so, log in to the AdSense account, select the My Account Tab, then Account Settings –> Ad Display Preference. A dropdown for selecting a preferred Google Adsense typeface will appear.

AdSense also allows setting typefaces per Ad type created with the Manage Ads feature. When creating new ad units, there is a prompt to select between the default “Standard AdSense font family” and new account-wide font face (if you’ve selected one), or another font face.

You can also change the appearance of existing ad units by visiting the Manage Ads page and updating font choices for specific ad units. Once changed, the selections will be maintained even if account-wide settings are later altered.

In Dec. ’08, Google began selling its AdSense for Domains product to US-based publishers, enabling advertisers to embed ads on “parked domains,” that is, URLs that have been purchased but for which a website hasn’t yet been made.

Source: Marketing VOX

To this point, I have avoided getting into the conversations weighing the value and future of Twitter, FriendFeed, and the latest generation of community communications services. They clearly represent an evolution of instant messaging and the triumph of the feed.

Twitter is an early adopter service (see Kara Swisher’s post) and hasn’t yet caught on with mainstream Web users. The Twitter population is a rounding error compared with Web mail or Yahoo Messenger, AIM, MSN Messenger

But Twitter adds a new dimension to instant messaging beyond its SMS-like 140-character constraint with the concepts of following and followers, enabling a kind of broadcast model.

In July 2007, Dave Winer described Twitter as “a network of users, with one kind of relationship: following.” He also called it a micro-blogging system with a “relatively open identity system.”

Steve Gillmor describes Twitter as creating a social graph of who you follow that intersects with the social graph of who follows you.

“The asynchronous nature of follows creates both a star system and an equal opportunity for anyone to get involved,” Gillmor said. “You can build your own sphere of influence. You can create a microcommunity that links up with other microcommunities that forms an expanding circle of influence. If I say something and Scoble replies, his complete orbit doesn’t follow but they see we are talking [Tweeting], so I get a bunch more follows. The net result is my sphere is increased by the addition of more strong followers.” The APIs have made Twitter more extensible and viral, such as flowing Twitter into Facebook status pages or FriendFeed.

Winer just posted some data, taking into account the number of followers and number of posts, and coming up with an indicator of what he dubbed the amount of noise or “spew” issued by a person using the Twitter transport.

It’s not exactly a measure of influence (more an indicator of overall reach), but it can be a huge number. In Winer’s calculation, Robert Scoble has the most followers on Twitter, with 21,310, and 10,713 Tweets, which multiplied together yields 228,294,030 potential impressions. (It would be less given the ramp up in followers and Tweets but still a big number.)

In this context, Twitter is a highly efficient way to share, discover, and market ideas. My journalist/blogger friends have taken to Twitter broadcasts of their posts, and on occasion I have Twittered live events, broadcasting my notes and observations to followers, who receive it in real time or for later consumption. You can also “Track” keywords to follow people or concepts without signing up to follow them. “It creates a public/private scenario where discoverability and special social interactions can happen,” Gillmor said.

Where is Twitter heading? First it has to get a more stable infrastructure. The company is taking on additional funding of $15 million to $20 million which should help in the scaling up department. With the new funding, Twitter will likely start adding new features. The danger is in messing with the simplicity of the service, but it seems inevitable if you look at how instant-messaging applications evolved. Below is a look at where Twitter came from and where it might end up in the next year or so.

Jeff Clavier (an investor in Seesmic which recently acquired the Twitter app Twhirl) views Twitter as a “quick return on the attention investment”:

This micro-chunking of the information – the arbitrary limitation to a few tens or hundreds of characters in a world of Gigabit networks – drops the time commitment barrier to a couple of minutes tops. Most people can’t commit large chunks of time to read/write/comment on blogs, but everyone has a couple minutes to spare a few times a day… not too far away from a phone or a computer. Offering broad access on the web, on the phone, one message at a time or through applications, in real time (even if you are not pushing it like Scoble does) or in batch mode, allows time (and CPA ?) challenged users to get a quick return on the attention investment they choose to make at any point during the day.

Twitter adds to the overflow of information, but if you find the right people to follow, or lead, it does offer a good ROI for the time spent consuming 140 characters at a time.

CNET News.com