Smart Pricing and Multiple AdSense Accounts With Different Names But Same Address

I had an interesting conversation today with the Adsense support team regarding Smart Pricing and opening multiple Adsense accounts. Here's a summary:

One Adsense Account Per Physical Address

AdSense publishers in certain countries (like India) can have only one Adsense account per physical address. For instance, if any of your family member creates a new website, they will have to use your existing Adsense account to monetize the site - Google will not accept Adsense applications from individual who have the same postal address as yours.

Maybe this rule is not applicable in all countries but if you're based in India, never create multiple Adsense accounts for the same postal address. Here's an excerpt from the Adsense rule book:

Multiple accounts held by the same individual or entity are subject to immediate termination unless expressly authorized in writing by Google (including by electronic mail).

I was searching a popular Adsense forum and saw the following questions which probably hint why Google has such a rule in place:

Q1: Can I open second account in GOOGLE ADSENSE after being banned?

Q2: I'm Legitimate and Google Banned my Adsense Account- So how can i create another Adsense account.

Smart Pricing Remains a Concern

If you share your Adsense account with your family member who has just launched a new website, there are chances of of getting smart priced. Here's a reply from the Adsense representative when I raised some concerns related to smart pricing:

I'm sure you know that Smart Pricing affects on an account level rather than affecting a particular website, based on it's performance.

Your website is an established blog, with quality traffic, and the chance of it getting Smart Priced is very low.

However, if you associate a new blog with your account, there is no guarantee on how it is going to perform, and based on that your account may or may not get Smart Priced.

Please factor in both these points, before you make a decision. If you are confident that the new blog will be akin to yours i.e. it will have great content, have quality traffic, and as a web property, it will be beneficial to our advertisers, then chances of it being threatened by Smart Pricing are very low.

As an Adsense publisher, you'll never know if the Adwords advertiser is getting the expected ROI for ads that show up on your site. Adsense numbers like eCPM, CTR or CPC are no indicators of Ad performance. So it's kind of a gamble but a consoling factor is that smart pricing is re-evaluated every week or so.

Would you comment about your experiences on sharing the same Adsense account across multiple web properties ? Did you ever feel the Adsense Smart Pricing effect ?

Related: Google Adsense Sandbox Tool (Web based)

The picture shows the Google Adsense team with the Long Tail dragon costume for Halloween - Google's AdSense team honors its advertisers and the publishers who host its ads; they are the epitome of the long tail - Credit

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Internet Typewriter - Write Distraction-Free in your Browser

WriteRoom is a popular writing software that provides a full screen writing environment so you can write or blog without any visual distractions. All you see on the computer screen is plain green text (that you have typed) on black background, there are no icons, tool bars or menu bars to distract your attention.

Related: Turn Microsoft Word into WriteRoom

Inspired by WriteRoom, John Watson has created an online version of WriteRoom that works solely inside the web browser - cross platform and requires no downloads or installation. Just write.

Press the F11 key to enter the full screen mode and start typing. Internet Typewriter will auto-save your work every few minutes. The font settings, colors and line-heights can be customized from the Preferences.

Update: You can also use Google Docs for distraction free writing.

There's a neat option to publish the text to your blog without leaving the Writer interface. Or you can save that as a text file to your hard drive. bighugelabs.com [Internet Typewriter] 

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LiveSearch from Yahoo! Better Than Google Suggest for SEO

AllTheWeb LiveSearch is a smart search service from Yahoo! that saves you a few clicks and shows relevant search results while you are still typing the query. There's no need to press the "Enter" key for executing the search query.

For every keyword that you type in the search box, LiveSearch will show (in real-time) related queries and spelling suggestions which may be very useful information from the SEO perspective.

For instance, type "iphone" and you'll immediately know that people on the web are searching for iPhone prices, reviews, accessories, launch date, unlocking iPhone, troubleshooting iPhone problems and places/stores where they buy the iPhone - this is so useful information especially when you have a blog website that covers all things about the iPhone.

While Google Suggest can also show similar information, there are two advantages with Livesearch. First, LiveSearch displays search results without you having to leave the current view so the suggestions are not lost even while you navigate the search results.

The second advantage is that while Google Suggest will only show alternative spellings that begin with the letters you already typed, LiveSearch suggestions may also include queries where the word you just typed could be anywhere. For our iPhone example, LiveSearch suggested phrases like "apple iphone" and "buy iphone" whereas all the phrases recommended by Google Suggest began with the word iPhone.

AllTheWeb LiveSearch | Google Suggest [Thank Nirav Bhaskar]

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Screen Sharing with File Transfer Inside CrossLoop

Crossloop, an extremely simple yet powerful software for sharing desktop screens, just got better. [If you ever wanted to fix mom's computer over the internet, all you need is CrossLoop.]

The new release of CrossLoop 1.10 has added a file / folder transfer feature allowing participants to transfer multiple files (and folders) of any size across computers via the CrossLoop interface.

[Say some issue on mom's computer is related to corrupt or missing .dll files, just transfer them through CrossLoop - no need to wait for email attachments or third-party sites like YouSendit.]

If the connection breaks during the file transfer, CrossLoop will remember files that have already been transferred and skip them when the connection is re-established.

The new CrossLoop has a view mode that will disallow the participant computer from gaining control over the keyboard / mouse of the host computer. Alternatively, the host can swap roles and become the attendee himself in one click.

CrossLoop is only available for Windows. Though the new  Crossloop release will work with the previous version, both parties need the latest version 1.10 is in order to use the above features.

Related Screen Sharing Apps: Yuuguu, MarraTech, Microsoft SharedView

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PageViews are History, Engagement Level is the New Mantra for Ranking Websites

Nielsen/NetRatings has decided to drop page views as a measure of site traffic and site popularity - they will now report the average time spent by a visitor and average number of sessions per visitor for each site.

Currently page views, a figure that reflects the number of Web pages a visitor pulls from a site, are an important metrics for attracting advertisers to a websites.

Nielsen will still provide page view figures but won't formally rank them.

This maybe bad news for Google Search as their main task is to "send visitors away" but should further boost the rankings of YouTube and other video websites. According to AP:

Yahoo has more than twice the time spent as Fox, but has less than a 10 percent edge in page views. That is because MySpace requires users to pull up a new page anytime they make a change or view a new profile, while Yahoo increasingly uses Ajax to continually pull new data, even if a user stays on the same page all day.

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Game On! TechCrunch Ex-Editor Launches BlogNation to Rival TechCrunch International ?

Sam Sethi, who departed ways with Michael Arrington following the Loic Le Meur (Le Web 3) controversy, has launched a new blog called BlogNation that will cover Web 2.0 technology startups from across the globe particularly Asia and Europe.

Understandably, BlogNation will not cover any startups based in Silicon Valley but they do have an army of technology bloggers to cover the start-up scene in most other non-US regions including China, Japan, Australia and Brazil. [content will be in English]

The TechCrunch UK site has been lying defunct ever since the departure of Sam though Mike did promise a June 1 relaunch which never happened. Ironic but maybe TC UK is headed to the deadpool and Sam has big plans to fill that void - he also has VC's to back the venture.

In related reading, Michael Parsons at Times Online has a good analysis of challenges faced by bloggers when they try to expand from being a one-man army to a media empire managing several writers bloggers.

Blogging is a performance art, like juggling. Some people can do it very well, but have you ever tried to manage a troop of jugglers? If the bloggers Arrington attracts are as good as him, they can quite easily set up on their own and tell him to go swivel. If they're not as good, we'll just keep reading Arrington.

And when Arrington is in meetings to discuss the page layouts for additional blogs and settling the awkward personality conflict between two people in his team, he won't be writing great stuff or networking with people to inform that writing.

This is probably applicable to all bloggers including Arrington, Om Malik, Pete Cashmore, Richard MacManus, Rafat Ali and now Sam Sethi who are expanding their blogging empires by adding more heads.

Related:  Former TechCrunch Writer Natali Del Conte

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African Elephants Spotted on Google Earth

This group of ten African elephants was spotted inside Google Earth.  In another satellite shot of Australia's Bondi Beach, they say the Google Earth pictures are so clear that you can almost read the designer labels on the bikinis.

Also see: God Sighted on Google Maps?

Related: Apple iPod Mine in Australia

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Save Any Blogger Blog as a PDF Document

There are several advantages of saving a blog website as a PDF file - you can read the blog posts offline, text search in PDF is very fast when compared with web search and above all, PDF will act as backup copy of your Blogger blog posts preserving even the blog images.

Related: Blogger Backup Software

To publish any blogspot blog into a PDF document (for free), we'll use a service called Blog2Print which is actually meant for converting blogger blogs into printed books - type the blog address, select all blog posts or the dates of the entries that you would like to include in the book, and choose whether the posts should appear in reverse-chronological or chronological order.

Though Blog2Print is a paid service, it generates a PDF preview copy of the selected blog entries that opens up inside the web browser - you just have to save this PDF file from the browser's cache to your hard drive. 

Internally, the Blog2Print services using the Blogger Data API requesting blog posts created or updated in a given date range. Blogger feeds are generally public so querying them does not require authentication.

Related: Print Blog as PDF with HP Printing Widget

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Find Why Your Website Slow to Load

"4 seconds" - remember that magical number ? If a web page doesn't load within 4 seconds, lot of visitors are likely to leave the website.

Related: Tricks to Make Your Webpages Load Faster

Now several elements of a web page (like CSS, Iframes, Flash, Javascript, graphics) can increase the page loading time but how do you pinpoint the exact culprit that slowing the site?

A normal HTML web page may have ad scripts being served from Google Adsense servers, Flash video player from YouTube, images from Blogger Photos and so on.

WebPageTest is a useful tool that mimics a web browser and generates a nice interactive graph detailing the load time of different objects (like CSS Files, Javascript, etc) which are included in the web page.

You can view the list of objects either in load order or as a hierarchy. The hierarchy view allows you to see which objects are linked to in for example a CSS file. Objects that fail to load are highlighted in red.

See: Test the Speed and Performance of your Website

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Clean your Mouse with Paper for Smooth Cursor Movements

This guide explains how to clean a slow and sluggish mouse in 2 seconds with just a piece of white paper.

If you are using a laser or optical mouse with your laptop or desktop computer, you probably know the problems that surface after using the mouse for couple of weeks - the mouse feels sticky and is hard to move especially when you are using it without the mouse pad. Also, the pointer on the screen may not move smoothly with the mouse or jump erratically.

See more gadget cleaning guides.

Most of these mouse problem are because of the dust that sticks to the bottom of the mouse surface at points that are in constant touch with the table or the mouse pad.

To solve this problem, hold the mouse over a piece of white paper and gently (but firmly) drag the mouse from the top edge of the paper to the bottom.

You will see a trail of grease like substance on the paper - you can also repeat the process sideways - just move the mouse on paper from left to right. That's it. You will enjoy using mouse once again as all the wax is transferred from the bottom of the mouse to the paper.

It is advisable that you also clean the grease or wax sticking to your mouse pad or table surface (when not using a pad) at least once a week. Dip a piece of cloth in mild soap water solution and gently rub - wipe with a clean dry cloth or tissue paper.

Related: How to Clean Laptop LCD Screen

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Vizu Answers Maybe Running Public Service Ads That Are Unpaid

Vizu Answers [detailed review] is an advertising network that helps you monetize blog content by running interactive polls.

Unlike the standard text link ads or banner advertising where visitors click the advertiser's URL and leave your website, Vizu Polls are in-place meaning visitors continue to stay on your web page even after participating in the poll.

But before you jump the bandwagon, there's one important thing you should know - if Vizu cannot find advertisers to run paid polls on your website, they will run in-house demographic polls (like what's your household income) and content polls (like would you buy an iPhone ?) that are unpaid very similar to the Public service ads of Google Adsense.

This news might surprise some of the existing Vizu Answers' Publishers who thought every research poll served by Vizu is generating revenue. These unpaid polls, which act as a filler when paid ad inventory is unavailable, were recently introduced by Vizu and are turned on by default for all publishers.

The not so exciting part is that you cannot turn off or disable serving of the demographic polls. Am not sure if Vizu publishers were separately informed of this policy change via email.

Vizu takes fifty percent (50%) of the net revenue generated from the polls. You are likely to find paying advertisers only when you set the CPM rates extremely low. In any case, I would recommend disabling Content polls by editing your individual zone settings else you'ld be wasting precious screen estate on your website for largely irrelevant polls.

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The Perfect Handheld Photo Printer - No Computer Needed

Canon today introduced a new light-weight printer for your digital photographs that is very compact and prints photos directly from the memory card without requiring a computer.

Called the Canon Selphy CP740, this photo printer prints borderless photos from credit-card size to 4" x 8".

Plugin the camera card in the available memory card slots, select the pictures that you want to print using the LCD screen at the top and press the Print button. Canon Selphy also works with USB compatible cameras and Bluetooth enabled camera phones. 

Selphy CP740 [Official Canon Website] 

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Why Are Blogs, Wikis Not Popular Than Email for Getting Things Done: Google Tech Talk

Social software expert Suw Charman recently gave a talk at Google on the use of blogs and wikis in corporate world.

Suw analyzed reasons that stop the employees from adopting blogs and wikis as a way of getting things done and what can be done to improve the adoption rate of these "social software tools" in organizations.

The biggest problem is about changing habits of employees as they are too happy and content with the old-school way of doing things (aka email). Stephanie has a good summary of Suw's talk at Google. Why are employees not writing blogs and wikis:

Low-level fear of social humiliation. How are they going to come across to their peers and bosses? Fear of making mistake. People don’t realize they’re afraid, they just feel a bit uncomfortable talking /publicly/ to their colleagues. E-mail is different because it feels private, it’s 1-1 communication. You’re not exposing yourself as much. People become "shy" when you give them a very public place to work.

Also, some people aren’t comfortable in writing. Some are better talkers than writers, and are not comfortable writing in a semi-formal environment. E-mail is more informal. Blogs and wikis are perceived as requiring a higher level of writing skill. Again, people don’t admit to this.

Suw's suggestion is to get the managers to use blogs and wikis in order to increase adoption rate among employees. "Use the tools regularly if possible. Easy to slip back into the old ways, but go back to using the tools."

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How to Find the Name of Web Hosting Company of a Website

Ever wondered who is hosting those high-traffic websites like BoingBoing, TechCrunch or the Drudge Report ? Enter a website address here and the tool will return name of the web host provider that's hosting that website or blog. You can then use Bing to determine other sites hosted on a server.

Also see: Know Everything about a Website

You may be also interested in the following domain name and DNS information tools:

Netcraft Web Server Query - Type a website URL and Netcraft will tell you the site's operating system, web server, and a graphical view of the time since last reboot for each of the computers serving the site.

DomJax [review] - Checks domain name availability and also runs an automatic whois report for any domain that's taken - hover the mouse over the domain name and DomJax pops up a neat "thought bubble" which has all the information about that domain like who owns it, when it will expire and how to contact the owner.

AJAX DNS - An excellent set of common DNS commands and tools packed in a non-geeky interface. See all DNS records and Reverse DNS records for a domain, HTTP headers, ping a domain or view the whois details for a domain.

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Thank You GMail Team for Reading Us

The GMail team at Google today launched their Official GMail Blog where they'll "post feature updates, productivity tips, and some insights into the people and the technology behind Gmail."

It's so exciting to see that this blog is in the reading list of the GMail team. Thank you.

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Create Web Forms with Zoho Creator - WYSIWYG Form Designer

If you are looking to add professional looking contact email forms or feedback forms to your web pages, consider using Zoho Creator - this web based form builder offers some very unique and useful features that aren't available in any of the other HTML form builders.

First, Zoho Creator has a very simple drag-n-drop interface to help you design online forms in minutes - they have a set of readymade templates for commonly used forms like "Contact Us", "Feedback", "Online Surveys" and so on.

Zoho imposes absolutely no limits on number of form transactions, the service is free of advertising and best of all, advanced users get more control as they can modify the underlying form logic with simple easy-to-understand scripts (like you have VB in Microsoft Access).

Also see: Using Forms in Google Docs

If you are using Zoho Creator to build bug submission forms or for online contests or for accepting job resumes, there's a special field for you called - "File Upload" where users/candidates can upload their resumes, pictures, documents, etc.

The other big advantage of using Zoho Creator for building online forms is that your entire database is available to you as a web spreadsheet where the form fields become the spreadsheet column names - that makes managing data a whole lot simple as you can sort, bulk delete or even search across old entries.

You can track form activity using RSS feeds, download the form records as a PDF file or read them online as an HTML web page.

creator.zoho.com [Make sure create forms in Public mode for embedding them in web pages]

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DNS Settings for Hosting Web Domains Bought via Google Apps

Back in December, Google partnered with domain registrars like eNom and GoDaddy to offer web domain names and Google Apps combo for $10 per year.

While Google Apps offers free email, calendar, spreadsheet and a word-processor, you probably have to buy third-party hosting from companies like MediaTemple or Dreamhost to setup professional websites and blogs on domains purchased through Google Apps - Google Page Creator is just too limited.

You then have to modify the DNS settings so that your web domain points to the domain nameservers of your domain host that provide the website hosting service - this is one area where you're likely to face issues.

That's because if you have purchased a domain through eNom, the "Advanced DNS Setting" will be missing from your Google Apps control panel. You'll have to visit the site at access.enom.com using your domain name as the login, and your domain password as the password. 

Alternatively, you can directly send an email to eNom support for Google Apps at GoogleClients@enom.com - they respond pretty fast.

For GoDaddy, the DNS settings for Google Apps can be configured at securepaynet.net - This isn't documented anywhere in the Google Apps support website though it's one of the most frequently asked question in the Google Apps group.

The same URLs should also work if you want to transfer domains from one registrar to another or move your site to another hosting company. Google need not be involved in the transfer process though you'll also have to reconfigure the MX record with your new host.

This applies to Google Apps standard as well as Premier edition.

Related: Server Errors with Google Apps

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:-) The Popular Text Smiley is Now 25 years Old

Scott Fahlman of Carnegie Mellon University is the man who created the famous :-) text smiley face that expresses a happy mood and has always been a part of our emails and chat messages.

Yahoo! recently conducted a survey related to the use of Emoticons in IM conversations. Some interesting picks [For full reports available as PDF file, email me for a copy]

· It’s a Girl Thing: 82% of respondents think that women are more likely to use emoticons than men.

· Happiness is most often using emoticon followed by Flirting.

· Most people think that feelings of love are easier to convey using emoticons than in person – 57% of respondents would rather tell a "crush" their true feelings using an emoticon. 10% of respondents would go as far as proposing marriage to their loved one via IM.

· The majority of survey respondents say they best express themselves in IM using emoticons. Nearly two-thirds (61%) rely on emoticons to best express their feelings, while 17% rely on Internet slang (i.e. LOL, GR8) and 13% rely on photo sharing.

In related news, Yahoo is inviting everyone to submit pictures of their favorite face expressions - it could be converted into a smiley and become a part of the Yahoo! Messenger. The contest is running in the U.S., India and Vietnam until July 31, 2007. Enter here.

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Open Document Format add-in for Microsoft Office from Sun

For obvious reasons, Microsoft is not very keen on adding native Open Document Format support in Microsoft Office so rival Sun released a free ODF Plug-in that makes your Office programs ODF friendly. 

Using the ODF Plug-in from Sun, Microsoft Office users can create, read or save documents, spreadsheets and presentations in Open Document Format (ODF) using the stand Microsoft Office programs.

The plug-in therefore offers two-way conversion of Microsoft Office documents to and from Open Document. Unfortunately, it doesn't support Office 2007 yet though the previous versions of Office are well-supported.

Download Sun ODF Plugin | Sun StartOffice [Thanks Malte]

Earlier, a similar plug-in was tested by the ODF Foundation. Microsoft is pushing it's own Open XML document format but a Garner report find it unlikely that ISO will ever adopt Microsoft's Open XML document format.

Here's how to use the ODF format in various Office programs:

In Word, choose  File - Save As and select the file format "ODF Text Document (*.odt)"

In Excel, choose File - Export ODF Spreadsheet.

In PowerPoint, choose File - Export ODF Presentation

Related: Microsoft XPS vs Adobe PDF

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Free PDF Writer Software with Creative Commons Support

CC PDF Converter is a free desktop based PDF printer software that helps you create PDF files from any windows application including Microsoft Office, web pages and so on.

Why another PDF writer when there exist tons of good alternatives like doPDF, Scribd, etc? There are two advantage with CC PDF Converter - first, it is open source and second, it has an inbuilt Creative Commons License generator so you can suggest how the PDF file should be used/shared by others.

You can embed any Creative Commons license into a PDF document easily or even put that as a stamp at the bottom of every page (watch this screencast demo).

This PDF converter is much similar to the Creative Commons Add-in for Microsoft Office that enables you to embed Creative Commons licenses directly into Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents - the only difference is that you are not limited to MS Office and the CC license is added to the PDF file while the source document remains untouched.

CC PDF Converter [From Cogniview, the same developer that makes the PDF to Excel conversion software.]

For converting pictures or documents to PDF without installing any software on your desktop, try KoolWire - an email based PDF conversion engine.

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