lokety

Google Adsense has started putting rotating text ads for the 728×90 leaderboard format. For visitors, they will see two small arrow buttons on the bottom left of the ad space, as shown below. This was captured from my Malaysia Crime Watch Forum site.

Clicking on the right arrow button causes the current ads to slide and fade off to the right, and a new set of ads appear in their place. Note the mouse icon on the next screenshot.

The feature allows visitors to browse five sets of ads, so on the fifth click, only the right arrow button can be clicked, as shown below.

The loading of the next set of ads is quite fast and unobtrusive. When a set has been loaded before, it is cached and loads faster subsequently. It is very convenient to use, but perhaps more can be done to attract visitors to the buttons. Maybe Google Adsense should allow us publishers to specify the onbutton and offbutton colors.

This new feature gives publishers’ sites more ad value as visitors get to see more ads without the site being cluttered up by numerous ad spaces. Perhaps the click value is less for the sets of ads other than the initially displayed one. Another suggestion for the Google Adsense team is to give publishers the option to automatically rotate the ads so that visitors can be easily attracted to the ad space.

I have also initiated my first payout instructions for Google Adsense and Nuffnang Malaysia yesterday. I’ll be sharing the exciting news on my revenue gained from these advertising platforms when I receive the money over the next few weeks.

Technorati Tags: google, google adsense, leaderboard ad, rotating ad, arrow button, nuffnang, make money

Over ten years ago when Netscape was the de facto standard and finger was not a rude thing to do, I got started in the news and discussion addiction using nntp, or Network News Transfer Protocol.

Think of nntp as the ancestor of rss, or Really Simple Syndication (really). A network of nntp servers would be available for you to access and browse the discussion channels available. The number of channels during those days were in tens of thousands, from Apple to camping, Star Trek to Microsoft. Each channel has a thread of replies to one another with each message looking very much like an e-mail. The messages are just text-based, with the occasional text-encoding of binaries such as warez and pictures.

Those were the humble and sometimes underground days when news and data were quietly exchanged between people all over the world. Browsers were not favoured yet, and ftp was like the Internet jet engine of file sharing. I remember this was the way we used to get antivirus and browser updates from McAfee and Netscape respectively.

The program which I used to talk nntp was from Forte, called Free Agent for Windows 95. It was a simple three-frame Windows interface that worked well to deliver news. However, just like the news of today, I easily got flooded with news. Now, Forte seems to only have Agent commercially and it supports e-mail as well.

In 2007, we have Google Reader, which combines fancy http push (AJAX) and good ‘ol frames. It can automatically update the news as they are published from blogs, newspapers and corporations. You can tag and categorize news. Best of all, it uses the familiar vi command set (e.g. j for down, k for up). Just like other Google apps, it is very accessible since it is web-based.

Just like a decade ago, look at the volume of news I go through… it’s crazy in this information age.

Links:

Wikipedia – Network News Transfer Protocol
<URL:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nntp>

Forte
<URL:http://www.forteinc.com/main/homepage.php>

Google Reader
<URL:http://www.google.com/reader/>

Technorati Tags: review, software, nntp, news, forte, free agent, rss, google reader

In the years before Google was anything but a simple colourful page, there were several legacy search engines still crawling the young and delicate Internet (or ARPANET). For those of you who first got online with a dial-up modem more than ten years ago, you should know these five common search engines back then.

1. Altavista

Has always been so minimalistic in design and returns useful results consistently. One nifty app that I still use for fun and research is the Babelfish (a nod to Douglas Adams fans).

2. WebCrawler

My second favourite search engine after Altavista. Its results are presented in a pleasant format.

3. Lycos

Lycos was probably the first search engine with lots of news links and little applications that Google is so well known for now.

4. Excite

Excite’s design hasn’t changed much since the beginning: just as messy. The results are quite accurate though.

5. Netscape

The darling of the early Web. Old timers were surfing using Netscape betas, cool! Back then, nobody heard of Internet Explorer, just Mozilla and mostly lynx (ahh beauty).

In another year, Google would be ten years old anyway.

Links:

Wikipedia – Advanced Research Projects Agency Network
<URL:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET>

Search Engine Watch – Where Are They Now? Search Engines We’ve Known & Loved
<URL:http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2175241>

Technorati Tags: search engine, altavista, webcrawler, lycos, excite, netscape