Gadgetopia

About Google's AdSense: A little thin on content yet. "Welcome to About-AdSense.com the first website totally dedicated to helping you get the most out of Google's new AdSense program."

Google Testing True User-Specified Ads: This is an interesting angle. Google is testing a feature whereby you can swap out the Adsense ads supplied to the page you're viewing for another, related set, or enter a search term. With this, Google has essentially put a search box on every Adsense ...

Google AdSense for RSS running at Weblogs, Inc.: This is gonna be big. With screencap. In case you didn’t notice, some of your favorite Weblogs, Inc. blogs now have Google AdSense in the RSS feeds. Of course, I'm just trying to trick people anyway.

Here's something that may not be common knowledge to a lot of people: having Google Adsense ads on your page gets you indexed faster. Here's why: I made a post the other night about the PHP templating language Smarty. I published it in Movable Type, then viewed the permalink page. ...

MTAdSenseStats: John developed a plugin to display AdSense stats on your site, but from both his experience and mine you're gonna get an email from Google if you use it. After some gentle prodding I've decided to release MTAdSenseStats after all. Please read my previous entry to understand ...

Making Sense of AdSense: Don't feel bad, Anil, Gadgetopia was rejected too. We still can't figure out why. "There's a far more serious problem with AdSense, though. The approval system is capricious, even arbitrary. It's understandable that Google wants to make sure sites aren't just ad farms, and it's in ...

Google AdSense for domains: Domain squatters, your AdSense program has arrived. Apparently it keys off the domain name itself, since there's nothing else on the page. AdSense for domains allows domain name registrars and large domain name holders to unlock the value in their parked page inventory. AdSense for domains ...

I just noticed something about Google Adsense. First, there are suddenly more "o"'s in "Google." Look to the right. It used to be spelled normally. [Note: it's gone back to normal since I wrote this.] Second, click on the "Ads by Goooooogle" link and you'll be taken to a page ...

PHPAdsNew and Google Adsense Integration: This guys used the great phpAdsNew to rotate ad generation code throughout his site. So phpAdsNew serves up the code that pulls in AdSense and YPN ads. Am I a complete idiot because this never, ever occured to me? It seems so utterly obvious now... ...

Google's AdSense a bonanza for some Web sites: An article about AdSense that states numbers, which is rare: Tales of AdSense riches range from a few hundred dollars a month to $50,000 or more a year, though high-dollar paydays are rare. They require a Web site with tons of traffic ...

What is AdSense for feeds?: Google has released this for open beta. We're currently beta testing AdSense for feeds, a program that allows you to monetize your feeds through contextually targeted advertising. I have applied.

The house that helped build Google: Fascinating story about the woman who owned the actual garage where Google was started. After earning her MBA in 1998, Wojcicki bought 232 Santa Margarita Ave. for about $600,000. She rented the garage to two Stanford students for $1,700 a month to help with ...

The Great Adsense Hypocrisy Part 2: Interesting read about how to really make money with AdSense. I quickly learned that I was most successful when people saw my snippet in Google and thought my content would provide what they were looking for but really didn't. Visitors arriving at the sites ...

AdSense Influenced By Domain Names: Does AdSense failover to domain names when it can't figure out the content of a page? Could be I never get PSAs on the front page, and perhaps it's because the "gadget" in "gadgetopia" is ensuring we get in a certain ad group. ...

PageRank is Dead: Is it actually dead? I don't know, but he makes a good point here: "Google has a really hard problem to solve. It's not unlike the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. PageRank stopped working really well when people began to understand how PageRank worked. The act of Google trying ...

Recently, I've noticed that AdSense has a tendency to get fixated. It will key off a single post on the front page of this site, and deliver ads related to that post for days and days, even after the post has fallen off the front page. First, it was this ...

If you have Google Adsense on your site, here is the best piece of advice I can give you: don't put borders around your ads. I had a border around my skyscraper banner on the right here, so it sat in its own little box. A friend told me to ...

Google Spam Filtering Gone Bad: Funny things going on with Google. Seth Finkelstein has identified what he calls a "GoogleNack" when a Google results page trips over a spam site and removes a big chunk of the results. "The suppressed sites should be quietly removed from the items returned. ...

About seven weeks ago, we had a significant server outage. We were down for about 12 hours, then up and down for 24 hours after that. For some reason, this outage seems to affected my Adsense click-through rate (CTR). Adsense revenue dropped considerably after this outage -- from $23 or ...

Google's new ToS: Now you can say how much you make: Gadgetopia made $460 from Google in its best month. We probably average a little less than that. I like to see about $14 a day. Glenn sez, "Google updated its AdSense TOS and now lets its affiliates discuss what ...

Well, this will probably be the last entry of 2004. This year we posted 1,530 entries and you posted 2,962 (!) comments. As the comment count should verify, Gadgetopia went buckwild this year. According to Google Adsense, we push about 100,000 page views a month to the HTML version (and ...

I know what I'll be doing tonight. NOVA: The Great Robot Race The mettle of the world's most sophisticated thinking machines is tested in a contest that pits artificial intelligence against unpredictable terrain. Link. And if you miss it tonight, you can see it online tomorrow. Another point of interest ...

How To Reset A Verizon Wireless PDA: Probably the most targeted, focused site ever. This is one page under the domain name "reset-verizonpda.com" that gives you instructions for doing hard and soft resets on every Verizon PDA, like, ever. I assume the guy is hoping to making money off the ...

Sometime today, the main RSS feed will be redirected into a byzantive series of channels and will pop out at Feedburner. We're using their MyBrand service, so the actual feed address now is: http://rss.gadgetopia.com/gadgetopia Through MyBrand, they will actually enter you in their DNS, so that URL actually points to ...

BoingBoing tribe on Tribe.net turns 300: It's kind of serendipitous that I found this posting, because I signed up for Tribe.net a few days ago. I don't know why, but it's kind of growing on me. "A few weeks back, BoingBoing reader Pauly M. and friends created a 'BoingBoing tribe' ...

Some exciting news for the site -- Later today, Gadgetopia will be joining the FM Publishing network of sites. This group is run by Jon Battelle and Bill Brazell -- Jon founded Wired magazine, and Bill was in the group that started The Industry Standard. These guys have been around ...

About four months ago, I asked you all to send me a screencap of the Gadgetopia home page sitting in your browser window. I promised to do some analysis of the results, and I kept meaning to get to it, but never got to it. Tonight, I finally sat down ...

We've talked before about some of the crazy search engine positioning we get on this site. The GoogleBot loves us. In particular, this page is second on Google for the term "bitlord," behind only BitLord's own site. I don't know how it happened, it just did. This weekend, we got ...

Well, here we are at #4,000. This puts us just 1,000 posts away from our stated goal of 5,000. Along with the 4,000 posts, we have 6,050 comments as of this writing, and that's very cool. We appreciate all the interaction everyone has with the site. Interestingly, we hit 2,500 ...