Privacy Concerns for Google Targeted Ads

Two online privacy groups have slammed Google for launching a behavioral advertising program, with one of them calling the plan a privacy "disaster."

Google's proposal would bring user tracking to the world's largest ad network, said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "It's a disaster," he said. "It's about whether the most dominant Internet media firm should be able to exploit its access to Internet user data for advertising purposes. Google long maintained it would not do this type of advertising. Indeed, they claimed they didn't need to and they went after others who did."

More at PC World

Google Ads - Opt Out - Targeted ads

You can opt out of Google Ads which may be targeted based on your internet behaviour.

Here is a video from Google



Opt out of the Google Targeted Behaviour here

Google Friend Connect now on Blogger

Google has integrateed the Followers gadget with Friend Connect. Here is a video on how you would be able to use your Google, Yahoo, AIM or any other OpenId to follow a blog

Microsoft Office Live Workspace - Google can smile!

If this is competition, Google can keep smiling!

The great Microsoft Office online is .. well , read for yourself


How much does Microsoft Office Live Workspace cost?

It’s free. No purchase or credit card information is required. Microsoft Office Live Workspace may eventually include advertising, but we’re still testing different designs. At some point, we may also offer additional features or services at a charge.


What is a workspace?

A workspace is an online place where you can store, access, and share documents and files. Use it to group related information for work, school, or personal projects. Sharing is easy – all you need is a person’s e-mail address and you can invite them to your workspace. You decide if they can edit or simply review. You can access your workspace from any computer with an Internet connection and a Web browser.


Who is it for?

Anyone who uses Microsoft Office can benefit from this service. If you answer ‘yes’ to any of the following questions, this service is for you:

* Do you store information on a flash drive or send yourself documents via e-mail to work on later?
* Do you need to access work files when away from your office?
* Do you need to access school documents when away from your desk (at the library, home on break, etc.)?
* Do you share documents via e-mail and then manually merge all the comments later?
* Do you use e-mail to coordinate and share information with your sports clubs, PTA, study group, etc?
* Are you planning an event and coordinating with multiple people or vendors?

So, much for Online Office Suite!

Google - the king of search

Hitwise, the leading online competitive intelligence service, today announced that Google accounted for 63.98 percent of all US searches in the four weeks ending September 1, 2007. Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask.com each received 22.87, 7.98 and 3.41 percent respectively. The remaining 48 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.68 percent of U.S. searches.

More here

What is Google trying to do ?

What is Google trying to do here ? Suggesting a search somewhere else ?

Trying to help competitors ?

See the Try your search on Yahoo, Ask ...

Cellular - why are you here ?

Why are you searching for Cellular ?

Are you looking for the Movie ?

or Cell Phone Providers ?

Leave a comment - This is a survey blog post to see how Google fares

Chade-Meng - the Google Engineer

Chade-Meng is a engineer at Google who likes to be photographed with Celebrities

So, whenever someone visits Googleplex, he is there with them for a Photo :)

Check his other photos

Google Error - computer virus or spyware application

If you happen to see a page like above, when you visit a Google page, you need not panic.

According to Viruslist, Google might have just blacklisted some of the IPs which might have sent automatic queries to its search engine and you might have just picked that IP address when you renewed your Internet connection.

So, next time you get this, you should probably just ignore the message, enter the Captcha or try to renew your Internet Connection again

Gmail POP: Username password not accepted

Another Gmail quirk - I don't know why it happened to me, but if you get this error

This is what their official help suggests

"We suggest making some adjustments in your mail client's settings so you aren't always prompted to enter your username and password. Please check the following settings in your mail client:

• Make sure that you entered @gmail.com after your username. For example: john.doe@gmail.com
• Re-enter your password to ensure that it's correct. Keep in mind that passwords are case-sensitive.
• Make sure your mail client isn't set to check for new mail too often. If your mail client checks for new messages more than once every 10 minutes, your client might repeatedly request your username and password.

Now, please follow the steps below to resolve the problem:

1. Disable all POP clients you're using to read Gmail messages. (If you use one at work and one at home, please disable both.)
2. From the computer on which your POP logins are failing, visit http://www.google.com/accounts/DisplayUnlockCaptcha
3. Enter your Gmail username and password, and the letters in the distorted picture.
4. Once you have successfully logged in, restart your mail client and try to download your mail."

Worked for me :)

How to NOT use an online ad

I happened to see a Google Ad for a job portal which interested me - So I click on it and to my horror I see the above screen which has that many 'mandatory' fields. How the hell do you expect someone to copy paste their resume the first thing you land on a page.

At the most you could get the user to signup with a basic password and send reminder mails if they don't fill the required fields soon enough.

The New Google Analytics !

Google released a new version of their Google Analytics product and the first impression is that its a huge makeover from the earlier version.

There are some nifty features such as exporting your analytics report to PDF or send the reports by email. You now operate through a Dashboard similar to Blogger, things can be customized in the dashboard.

The graph visualization is much better and usable, ranges work much better. Overall, a good improvement!

Google - BROKEN

Google seems to have just too many problems these days. One service seems to broken almost every day. Of the three services that I use, Gmail, Blogger and Groups, one of them is broken almost so very often

Google Groups seems to be down for over 5 hours now, there is no official communication on what's going on - there is almost no help if you want to from Google. You had Gmail users complaining that their messages and accounts were disabled for days together.

As someone puts it "Asking Google for help and getting it is like asking President Bush to speak intelligently .. aint gonna happen ."

Google isn't going anywhere with so many bad services. They have revolutionized the web like no one, unfortunately, its crumbling right now.

Which ads are blocked most often?

My normal internet activity involves visiting Technology, Finance sites, use gmail, Google search, once in a while visit sites where I can download stuff.

While I predominantly use Google products, its interesting to see how many ads were blocked in my ad blocking program. See the number of times ads were blocked over a period of 6 months. This site is supported by ads as well - so I woudn't really recommend it - I know there is a contradiction there :(

Just click on the above image, its self-explanatory.

Google Adsense Aribitrage

I've been always fascinated with Arbitrage - it exists in Stock Markets where you try to find price differences in stocks in different exchanges or between 2 merging companies.

There is one other kind of arbitrage which has become fairly popular - the Google Adsense Arbitrage - its where you bid $1 for a keyword, direct the traffic to a landing page with ads that pay $2 and get the profits.

Michael Gray in his 3 part article explains how Arbitrage works, the things you need to watch when you arbitrage.

Read here

Masterplan - About the Power of Google

Google's brilliant Transliteration Feature

Google has introduced a transliteration feature that automatically converts english/roman letters to your local language's script. Neat! Very useful for people who know how to speak the language but don't know how to write it

It's currently enabled for Blogger, but should be available on other Google Products very soon


Go to Blogger Setttings, Enable Transliteration

Create a New post, you should see something like above

Type in the english version of your local language and see it automatically transliterate


And you see something like below

गूगल का नया ट्रांस्लितेरेशन फेतुरे

Making your Code pretty on a browser

google-code-prettify is a Javascript module that makes your code look Pretty on a browser.

You include a CSS file and a prettify.js script and there you have syntactically highlighted code.

It works for a number of languages including C and friends, Java, Python, Bash, SQL, HTML, XML, CSS, Javascript, and Makefiles. It works passably on Ruby, PHP and Awk and a decent subset of Perl, but, because of commenting conventions, doesn't work on Smalltalk, Lisp-like, or CAML-like languages.

Get it here

Track the Cricket Worldcup through Google Calendar

If you use Google Calendar, you could probably track the Cricket World cup schedule a little easier than the rest of the crowd

1. Go to http://calendar.google.com
2. Search for "Cricket World Cup" in the Other Calendars

3. You will probably get a screen like below

4. Click on Add Calendar of the one of them which you think is correct and you should be able to track the World Cup on your Google Calendar :)

Ofcourse, you could probably track other events through public event calendars - maybe events in your city, etc.

Google Adsense Bonanza

You don't see any adsense referrals on this site - the reason ofcourse is that Adsense referrals hardly generate any revenue.

Google has changed that now,

For Adsense

• When a publisher who signed up for Google AdSense through your referral earns their first $5 within 180 days of sign-up, you will be credited with $5.
  
• When that same publisher earns $100 within 180 days of sign-up and is eligible for payment, you will be credited with an additional $250.
  
• If, in any 180-day period, you refer 25 publishers who each earn more than $100 within 180 days of their respective sign-ups and are all eligible for payout, you will be awarded a $2,000 bonus (bonus payouts are limited to 1 per year).

AdWords Referrals:

• When an advertiser you refer spends $5 within 90 days of sign-up (in addition to the $5 sign-up fee) you will be credited with $5.
  
• When that same advertiser spends $100 within 90 days of sign-up, you will be credited with an additional $40.
  
• If, in any 180 day period, you refer 20 advertisers who each spend more than $100 within 90 days of their respective sign-ups, you will be awarded a $600 bonus (bonus payments are limited to 1 per year).

Via Adsense Blog