Change AdSense Layouts Without Changing Snippet

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Google just announced that over the next weeks they’ll be rolling out a change to AdSense which lets you change the ad layout without adjusting your included HTML/ JavaScript snippet. Google writes:

<<This new ad management feature means that your ad unit settings (such as colors and channels) for new AdSense for content ad units will be saved in your AdSense account every time you generate ad code. Then, if you’d like to change any of these settings in the future, all you do is make the update within your account – you’ll no longer need to manually replace the ad code on all of your pages. For instance, you can quickly change the borders of all your 300×250 medium rectangles from red to blue with just a few mouse clicks.>>

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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Fun With Google’s New In-House Translator

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Just enter “sarkozy sarkozy sarkozy” (no quotes) into Google’s new translator (Sarkozy is the French president). Then pick the French to English translation. [Thanks TomHTML!]

Comments…

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post]

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A Football Club’s Google Poster (Photo)

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The fans in the stadium are holding up a large print out showing a Google search for “Juventus” (Juventus is an Italian football/ soccer club). The search results asks Forse cercavi: merda, which translates to – pardon the vocabulary – “Did you mean: Shit”. [Thanks Paul!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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Gmail IMAP Support

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Gmail seems to be rolling out IMAP support. IMAP is short for Internet Message Access Protocol and allows you to access your Gmail emails from other clients, like Outlook or Thunderbird. Wait, wasn’t that already possible for some time using POP (Post Office Protocol)? Yes, but IMAP is superior, as Google explains in their help entry:

<<Unlike POP, IMAP offers two-way communication between your web Gmail and your email client(s). This means when you log in to Gmail using a web browser, actions you perform on email clients and mobile devices (ex: putting mail in a ’work’ folder) will instantly and automatically appear in Gmail (ex: it will already have a ’work’ label on that email).

In addition, IMAP provides a better method to access your mail from multiple devices. If you check your email at work, on your mobile phone, and again at home, IMAP ensures that new mail is accessible from any device at any given time.>>

Google also state that IMAP offers a more stable overall experience, less prone to losing messages or downloading them several times.

Here’s how you can check if IMAP is already available for your Gmail account; click Settings, and check if the fifth tab is named “Forwarding and POP” or if it’s already named “Forwarding and POP/IMAP”. If the latter is the case – DownloadSquad has a screenshot showing this – you are lucky and can start configuring your IMAP client if you wish to. (If you don’t see IMAP in Gmail yet you might also want to try logging out of Gmail and logging back in, though that didn’t help here and may just have worked coincidentally for some of you.)

[Thanks Or, Jon Henshaw and Chris Gilmer.]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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11 Link Usability Tips

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Who ever said that underlining a part of sentence is the best way to reference information? Hyperlinks just happen to work like this, and the fact that they’ve taken off may be an indicator of their usefulness in itself, but one could imagine other ways to reference information. The browser may display a “context” menu for instance so you can navigate sites. Or there may be a side-bar which show thumbnails of relevant articles & sites. In any case, as long as we have links, we better make sure we create them in their most useful ways. Here are some (subjective) tips for doing so:

  1. Make sure there’s enough space to click on for a given link. Do you know those A-Z link lists? They’re a common navigation element on top of some directory-style pages, going like this: “A | B | C | D | …” etc., where each letter is linked. In this case, some letters – especially the “I” – become much too small to comfortably click on. Use a non-breaking space around each letter (”…&nbsp;I&nbsp;…”) to increase the clickable area, allowing for easier navigation. You might also want to use this approach for link text like numbers (e.g. “1”) or symbols (e.g. “#”).
  2. The first link should be the most important. As a rule of thumb – and there may be exceptions – the first link in a blog post or article will gain the most attention, and the highest click rates. So make sure it’s also the most relevant one for your article. If you are discussing new website XYZ, then make a link to XYZ the first link in your article – not necessarily within the first sentence, but just the first link – and put links to related material over subsequent words. This allows visitors to be guided best.
  3. Select which links are important, and don’t link to everything. If you write an article you are often filtering for your audience. One such filter is to only link to pages that are truly relevant to get your point across (or to allow readers to cross-check it for validation). If you include a link in every second word of a sentence, then it will hurt readability as people don’t always know which links are worth to follow. (One noteworthy exception are those “train links” which, on purpose, link e.g. half a dozen words to different reference sites. It can be a style element to indicate for instance “a lot of people discussed this issue before.”)
  4. Don’t add gadgets to links. Have you seen those links which open an info box when you hover over them? Snap.com, for instance, offers such a service. I suggest not to use it; it might be fun once, but it gets very annoying very quickly for your audience.
    People use links for all kinds of purposes; they might right-click them to open them in a new window, they may copy them for their own post, they may click on them to quickly follow to a site. Such an info box on the other hand only helps with one use-case – wanting to know more about a site without actually visiting it – while putting the burden of clutter & micro-lags to almost all other use cases. (A more subtle way to give more information for a link is to use the “title” attribute on the anchor tag. Any kind of JavaScript links on the other hand can create accessibility problems, so they are better used only sparsely and only when really justified.)
  5. Make links scannable. You might have heard of microcontent, as the Nielsen concept is pretty old in web years. When link text becomes microcontent, it means it can be understood out of context. Thus, avoid link text like “here” or “click” and try, if at all possible (and it’s not always possible – again, there are exceptions to most rules) to use a link text that can be considered the title of the document you are referring to.
  6. Creating a link out of something users might want to copy can be a hindrance. Some text, like a phone number, your readers/ users may want to copy from their browser to the clipboard and back into some address book or other application. There are many, many other instance of where this is useful. However by creating a link out of something it becomes a bit harder in typical browsers to copy the actual text, at least when you try selecting it in normal ways by dragging your mouse over the text.
    For instance, very often in Gmail I try to copy the name of a sender of an email, but Gmail won’t let me – because the name is a link (a non-underlined link too, so there’s some additional surprise when you try to mark it, and it won’t let you but expands something instead; only after you clicked “show details” will you be able to comfortably select & copy a name).
  7. Don’t include icons for almost every link. Some news sites or wikis use a special icon for all outgoing links. This may be a nice feature in theory, but in practice it disturbs the reading flow when it shows for almost every link. On the other hand, sometimes using icons (or “ASCII icons” like “>>”) can aid to get the meaning of the link across, so it should be a case-by-case decision.
  8. Make link text flexible enough so that it “survives” even the removal of the link. This is more an issue of readability than usability, actually. In some cases, people may read your content in places where they can’t follow up through to your link. For instance, they may have printed out your article. Or they may have saved your article on their laptop but they don’t have an internet connection at the time. Or they may click on your link but the page in question has been removed, or is down, or has been changed dramatically.
    In these cases, a good link will a) contain enough information on its own so that the article doesn’t fully depend on the external source, and b) is phrased in such a way that its link can be ignored.
    A link text like e.g. “click here” both disturbs the reading flow – no one would write “click here” on paper, yet your article may be printed out (or be navigated without a mouse, e.g. the keyboard) – and also may lack crucial information to continue reading your article.
  9. Underline links you consider important enough for people to click on. This one is kind of obvious. Most links are most usable when they are not only indicated by color, but also by an underline (certain rare exceptions may exist).
    But the reverse is true as well: if you find yourself including a lot of links in your articles which don’t look like links at all (but rather like normal text), and which you don’t expect people to click on – I’ve seen some popular blogs do this, perhaps to boost the ranking of their archive in Google – then don’t include them. It can be confusing to “stumble” over a link when you don’t expect one.
    (Also, on that note, it’s usually bad style to use underlines on anything that is not a link… importance is better indicated by font-size, or using a different background-color – like yellow – or using bold or italics.)
  10. Don’t expect your readers to fully understand (and appreciate) when you use special advertising links mixed with your normal content and links. Have you seen those double-underlined links which are thrown over random words within normal articles, and which show advertisement when you hover over them? Besides violating the “don’t gadgetize your link” I find they are a somewhat dubious way to advertise for two reasons; first, your readers may expect you to link only what you consider relevant. By auto-linking in this way, you’re diluting the value of your normal links. And second, these links can skew your voice in weird directions, as they give a commercial undertone to the topics you discuss. Perhaps you are making a point about politics, but when you use the word “democracy” it will be linked to a commercial offering, which can hardly be your point as an author (I’ve seen this kind of thing happen before at some blogs, and it can really devalue the point of an article).
  11. Don’t “obfuscate” the URL. There are certain mechanisms which help a site owner track outgoing links, with the trade-off that they will channel the URL through another domain. Also, there are certain services which “compress” the link length, like TinyUrl. While there are exceptions, this is bad style for linking in articles or other posts because it removes all contextual information when you look at the link URL, e.g. by hovering over it. It may also destroy the read vs unread browser history, as you might already have visited the page in question (only you didn’t visit its TinyURL’ed variant). Last not least, it may introduce lags when people follow the link, and potentially it also puts your links at risk – what if e.g. TinyUrl goes down, or introduces interstitionals interstitials?

What do you think, and do you have more tips?

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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Google/ Nielsen Partnership

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Data-hungry-by-nature Google Inc. just announced they’re partnering with the Nielsen Company in a “a multi-year, strategic relationship.” For starters, Google says they now want to utilize Nielsen’s demographic data – like aggregated set-top box data – for the Google TV Ads platform to help advertisers better target their campaigns. [Thanks Search-Engines-Web.com and Manoj!]

 

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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PageRank Drops for Many Sites

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Reports are coming in that several usually well-ranked sites have seen a loss in PageRank. Sites being downranked include SearchEngineJournal.com (from PR7 – for several years – to PR4, though these values may vary depending when you check), Forbes.com (from PR7 to PR5), StatCounter.com (from PR10 PR9* to PR6), as well as WashingtonPost, SERoundtable.com, and many others. Some of these sites sell or at one point sold PageRank by accepting non-nofollowed text ad links – I wonder if there is a connection, but don’t have anything close to proof so far. Please join the discussion to help dig into this.

Interestingly enough, the last time I checked, Google’s own AdWords still allowed text link brokers to advertise their systems… not sure if that’s still the case.

Now if this is indeed related to Google battling paid links to battle search engine spam – and Google officially stated they will penalize text link space sellers – then it’s already working for Google. Downranked sites are risking to lose visitors arriving from Google web search, which might be lowering the value of their ad space, and thus their revenues. For instance, Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal in response to his site’s downranking removed his paid links, saying “I made some changes to my template to eliminate the 3 links under Supporters”. Other webmasters may now also get much more wary to accept paid, non-nofollowed text links.

[Thanks Alek and Ionut!]

*Update: Others in the comments say StatCounter’s PR might have already down at 8 before. [Thanks Gerald!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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Tech Company Censorship Penalties Coming Up?

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Forbes reports:

<<The House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs voted Tuesday to pass the Global Online Freedom Act, a bill designed to penalize U.S. companies up to $2 million if they cooperate with the technological surveillance of political dissidents or share technology and information used for “Internet-restricting” purposes.

“Dictatorships need two pillars to survive: propaganda and secret police. The Internet, if misused, gives them both in spades,” said Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey. “Both wittingly and unwittingly, companies operating in places like China have discovered they’re a part of these regimes.”

Tuesday’s bill must still pass several hurdles before reaching the House or Senate floor.>>

$2 million? Somehow I can’t imagine Google loses any sleep over such sums (even when it may hurt their image to be punished in such ways). Though why not directly convert this into prize money handed out as “best censorship circumvention tool or service” award for smaller start-ups (the kind of company to which that sum is meaningful)? The “Chinese knowledge workers, fighting with one hand tied behind their back” – to quote Tim Bray, and to name just one group – might appreciate it.

[Via Search Engine Land.]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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Mozilla’s Top Revenue Is From Google

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Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker in a blog post writes:

<<Mozilla’s revenues (including both Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation) for 2006 were $66,840,850, up approximately 26% from 2005 revenue of $52,906,602. As in 2005 the vast majority of this revenue is associated with the search functionality in Mozilla Firefox, and the majority of that is from Google.>>

I pinged Peter Dawson (/pd in the forum) to ask just what that revenue is about and he dug out the info nugget from Internet News: “Mozilla gets paid a publicly undisclosed amount for each Google search query made from Firefox by a user.” (Google also puts some of its AdSense weight behind Firefox by offering webmasters pay-per-action banners to advertise for Firefox + Google Toolbar; plus, Google employs some Firefox developers.) ZDnet’s Larry Dignan has an interesting comment on this: “Mozilla’s financial statement really puts the browser battle into perspective. It’s not Firefox vs. IE as much as it is Google vs. Microsoft.”

In the meantime today at the Google Analyst Day, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt and George Reyes were on stage and emphasized that nowadays there’s real competition again in the browser market, which is speeding up browser evolution – to the benefit of web developers (including web developers at Google).

[Via Digg.]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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Language, Google and Translation Difficulties

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This is just a small test to see whether the new Google translation program really is good enough to make sense of an article rüberzubringen. I write these words on German lines to them through the translator to infiltrate. Sometimes I go expecting that the basic phrases like “The tree has three apples” better translated as metaphors such as “The apple does not fall far from the tree.”

The Forum said one of you – his name is “informant” – the Google specifically with the German sentence structure problems. Why? Because the German keywords of a sentence often appear only at the end, so informant. Ich hab ’which has often heard for example Abroad … The German “horse from behind aufzäunen”, so complex grammar and build sets, as it is the complexity of the issue would require. I got no idea whether the Vote – each of us is actually almost caught in its language, and it has a lot simpler, the languages of other analysis.

To me someone who is learning German just wondering why this or that word now so altered or so in this or that context ( “he went, he goes, it was gone, they will go, go ’no, we geh’n ? “), I can often find no direct answer. We know it’s intuitive, because it is so small child, has learned.

Because you can almost be happy if in a complicated language grammatically born, as it were, because it gets done. Children synapses build up so much faster (I once heard that the brain only two or dramatic change in the life of learning, etc.; Even during the early-age child, and a second time during puberty; That would mean that much of what we later in life such provision, also of the two phases is characterized). However, is there really different degrees of difficulty in languages? Many people say: “My language has a much higher fine nuanced vocabulary!” (For example French, or Chinese). But I have already people with different mother tongues rises say – perhaps may be one of its language say!

The German can be practical about any two words aneindersetzen to Wortz a new one. It looks often complicated – “World Health Organization” – but it is not. Take for example, the previous example to stay the tree with apples. Plus apple tree shows together apple tree, and already we have a new word. That can now expand with “Pflücker” to the word Apfelbaumpflücker. Every German will immediately understand this word (with the trend in German rather dahingeht such words to “atomize”, she also referred to the English model in its individual parts to dismantle – out of Apfelbaum-Pflücker zim “Apfelbaum Pflücker” which language Interested then often with “Depp’s blanks” to dub). In China, there are very similar phenomena – the computer in China is the “electric brain” ( “dian nao” in Pinyin-transcription), to name just one example.

Google, and all other automatic translation programs are also interesting still in progress at the beginning of the usefulness scale. This test may reinforce the impression or not (the result still yes, I know not). If one day translation programs, however, are so good that they are in almost all cases, the sense – and the grammar, etc. – across perfectly, the question remains open whether cultural misunderstandings about this rather small … , Or greater.

To explain: If I hand plane to Tokyo and then to take a business hereingehe and speak broken English, the Japanese realized that I probably from the local culture did not understand. He also would like to see one or the other faux pas. But when I enter the same business, and speak perfect Japanese? The Japanese would therefore now assume that the culture I also know well – how else could I use the language! The apology “ignorant foreigners” can no longer be applied, and one or the other thing I would say, would perhaps as an insult (with possible further consequences) so.

In the future, however, may be exactly what will happen – we take ourselves a translation program to for example An e-mail or a blog commentary to write in the hope that our intention will be heard. But behind every language is just a little more than grammar and vocabulary; A culture. When the Google translation program in 2025 show a warning message when we are in just such a faux pas to celebrate? A warning for the purposes of; “Attention – although it is hereby sentence correctly translated, but he could be the one or other unwanted side effect, though it directly in this form of use!”

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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