Last month I (finally) switched from NetNewsWire to Google Reader. It works great from the desktop or the phone, but the feature that really motivated me to switch is sharing articles that are particularly entertaining or enlightening.
Here’s Peat’s shared items. You’ll probably notice I’m a fan of Boing Boing, Make Magazine, and a heap of odd nerdly things.
Feedburner says most of the people who read my blog are also using Google Reader, so if you’re sharing articles, I’d love to read ‘em!
This is encouraging — Google’s energy consumption will be “carbon neutral” by the end of this year. I’m keen to see what else they can do with the world’s largest collection of information about green practices at their finger tips.
They have a Clean Energy page on their site now that details some of their efforts, but it’s a little thin on details. If they want to own up to the efforts they’re making, maybe they can publish some impressive figures about how much they’re spending, and how much they’re saving? It’s an issue that everyone in the computing industry is aware of, so a vague brochure site about Priuses and solar panels isn’t particularly interesting …
Update: So, there is one fun little page that details how much energy the solar panels are generating: http://www.google.com/corporate/solarpanels/home … turns out it accommodates about 30% of their energy usage on campus.
Google has announced that “Froogle” has been renamed “Google Product Search” … which makes sense, but dangit, now I have a heap of marketing material and synaptic connections to update. Oh well.
The Google blog has an announcement — they’ve acquired Tonic Systems, and are adding a presentation tool to the Google suite of online apps. It’s due this summer. I look forward to it!
Google Maps has some great advice for traveling from Boston to Paris.
I like the “Grrr!”
It’s the little things that make applications like GMail such a pleasure to use. There are very few excuses for authoritarian messages and obscure error codes in software.
Internet does not enjoy being anthropomorphised — but people sure do like the human touch.
Alright! Looks like Google is beta testing a pay-per-action advertising system. This is a good thing for online businesses that generate money through visitors actions on their website — checking out a shopping cart, signing up for a mailing list, that sort of thing.
This is the logical next step in online advertising.
We started with pay-per-impression, where an advertiser pays every time their ad is displayed on someone’s web page. This isn’t particularly favorable for advertisers, because they’re paying whether or not someone is paying attention to their ads.
The solution to that problem was pay-per-click, where an advertiser pays every time their ad is clicked on. That pretty much guarantees that the person who clicked found something compelling in the advertisement, which provides advertisers a really great way to figure out what ads were most effective, and ties the cost of their advertising directly to the public’s interest. The downside for advertisers is that click through doesn’t guarantee a conversion, and so a really great ad would end up costing a heap of money if the website didn’t fulfill the user’s hopes and dreams.
Which brings us to pay-per-action, where an advertiser only pays when someone clicks an advertisement AND follows through with a particular action — like checking out a shopping cart, or signing up for a mailing list.
I dig it. Right now is a probably a great time to get into pay-per-action, because there aren’t many businesses competing for keywords and placement, so there’s probably some good deals to be had.
