google

I am experimenting with Google AdSense adverts in the bottom right corner of the screen to explore for myself how effective and inappropriate they can be. So far the setup has been painless and only the occasional random advert has appeared out of the blue. This is not intended to be a big money earner but I am curious as to the income rates that are achieved.

I have been having a bit of an aesthetic cleanup of the website for the New Year. Part of this has involved the inclusion of the Google Search box rather than a Joomla search tool. This was for two reasons, firstly the Joomla search functionality is only slightly better than useless and secondly I wanted to experiment with Google AdSense after reading the Google book.

Setting up AdSense as with Paypal has been surprisingly easy, it is no wonder the company is worth so much when they can provide simple yet effective advertising space with almost zero configuration. I know I will not earn any money from the search tool but even then the statistics on the Google AdSense site are useful by themselves. I am still not sold on the Google text/image ads on the website however just because they are so busy. They could easily fit down the side of the screen but a nice bit of whitespace is a relief for the eyes especially after visiting many sites which are literally covered in text adverts and images.

A couple of promising applications have been brought to my attention recently. Both are tied closely to the Web and have great collaboration potential. These applications are Writely and AllPeers.

Writely is an AJAX enabled web-browser based word processor. It has some very tidy formatting tools and supports the loading and saving of Microsoft Word compatable .doc files. Whilst its operating system neutral design is very encouraging what is even more interesting is its in built collaboration tools. As it is founded on the Web it has the inherit capability of allowing more than one person to actively edit a document at the same time without any security implications (try doing that in Microsoft Word). I only wish they provided a downloadable version of the software so that local versions of the applications could be used and developed upon.

I checked my GMail account today and I have 100 invites available to anyone who would like one. If you are interested please get in contact. Don't forget to provide your email address as this is needed to send you a GMail invite.