It is important that you integrate Google AdSense with your Google Analytics account as you will then be able track the ad performance (CTR, CPM, revenue, etc.) of individual pages of your site without having to create AdSense channels.
Linking AdSense with Analytics is fairly easy (see video) but consider a slightly different scenario:
You are maintaining two separate Google Accounts – your first Google Account (say adsense@gmail.com) is configured with AdSense while the other account (say analytics@gmail.com) is associated with Google Analytics.
How do you then link these two accounts so that you can track AdSense and Analytics data from the same dashboard?
If are facing a similar issue, here’s a simple solution courtesy Akanksha Shukla:
Step 1. Login to your Google Analytics dashboard using your existing Google Account (analytics@gmail.com).
Step 2. Create a new user in Google Analytics from the User Manager. Set this user’s email address the same as your existing AdSense account (adsense@gmail.com) and select the Access type as “Account Administrator.”
That’s it! You will now be able to login into Google Analytics using your Google AdSense Account and can also track the performance of ads from the same dashboard. You can only link one AdSense account to one Google Analytics account.
It is not uncommon to find hundreds of reader comments on any TechCrunch story – some of these comments are genuine, some are trolls while some comments are made just for the purpose of getting eyeballs.
If you are a frequent commenter on TechCrunch blog, here’s a slightly disheartening news for you – TechCrunch has stopped displaying user comments on all stories that are older than 10 days. Your comments have not been deleted from the actual WordPress database but they aren’t putting them on the site anymore.
For instance, this TechCrunch post on Nexus One by MG Seigler has 104 comments but if you look at the actual page, you’ll find none. The same is true for all the other blog posts in their archives that are older than 10 days.
Why Blogs Remove Comments
Some blogs automatically turn-off the commenting feature from posts that are older than ‘n’ days to avoid spam but they rarely hide existing comments from their old posts. I can think of two reasons why TechCrunch may have taken this step:
1. When you have hundreds of comments on a page, it increase the size (bytes) of the page thus increasing the load-time. Matt Cutts from Google earlier hinted (see video) that site speed may be factor in page rankings and that partially explains why TechCrunch wants to limit the size of their pages.
2. Comments always have rel=nofollow so they don’t pass any link-juice to the commenter’s website but the problem is that they still dilute the amount to Google Juice that gets passed to other “dofollow” links. By removing comments, you are passing more concentrated juice to editorial links.
Popular gadget blog Engadget recently had to shut down comments because of anonymous trolls but they at least informed their readers before implementing the change.
It would be great if Arrington too, who is rightly getting all the good press for his handling of the TechCrunch bribery scandal, could share a few details about their new comments policy with his loyal readership.
[*] In the following video, Matt Cutts told WebProNews that page speed may soon be a factor in Google Search.
..a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast. It should be a good experience, and so it’s sort of fair to say that if you’re a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don’t want that as much.
Google keeps talking about the real-time web and that how quickly it can respond to “real-time” events. The moment Google algorithms discover breaking news (like the earthquake in Haiti or the Toyota brakes issue), it triggers real-time search and starts pulling tweets, news stories and even blog posts into the main search results.
This works nicely but there’s one area where Google is still lacking – image search.
Steve Jobs introduced the much-awaited Apple iPad to the world on January 27, 2010. The news was covered by almost every blog and news website, millions of tweets were written for the iPad and thousands of images and videos from that Apple event were shared on sites like Flickr and YouTube.
With so much excitement around the device, the disappointing part is that though a week has passed since we saw the first iPad unit, Google Images still has no clue about the existence of this Apple device.
Try a simple search for “iPad” on Google Image search and you’ll only see mockups but none of these images represent the official Apple gadget. Move to page 2 and you’ll find that the story is no different.
In this quick test, Bing did manage to find some images of the Apple iPad on the first page of search results but the top slots were still occupied by mockups.
The surprise winner here was Yahoo. It not only returned the best results for “iPad” but also had a section called “Recent Images” that pulled the very latest photographs of iPad from news stories. Google seriously needs to implement something similar for their “real-time search” as well.
Whether you are preparing to deliver a lengthy presentation in your company or need to memorize a long speech for an elocution contest in school, meet a useful web app that can possibly help you memorize long passages of text quickly.
The app, aptly named as Memorize Now, works something like this.
You copy-paste the text passages that you want to remember in the space provided and then hit the “memorize” button. The app will then replace certain words from the passage with blank spaces and you are required to recall the hidden words. You can always hover your mouse over a black space to reveal the hidden word.
If it sounds a little confusing, watch this quick screencast from Molly that explains all the good features of Memorize Now visually.
The Memorize Now app was initially created to help people memorize Bible verses but you can use it to memorize virtually any kind of information (including the plays of William Shakespeare).
On a related note, here’s another excellent video that shares some very practical tips to help you memorize lines. My favorite tip is the one that says -- “Memorize your lines on an empty stomach; that’s when the hormone dealing with memory is most active!”
Nokia Diagnostics is a free utility that can help you troubleshoot and resolve common problems with your Nokia phones.
For instance, when you need to configure your Nokia device on a different Internet Connection (like moving from one Wi-Fi network to another), Nokia Diagnostics can automatically identify the right Internet settings for you.
The utility can also help you test the phone’s battery charger, the loudspeaker and even the earpiece.
Nokia Diagnostics works with all S60 5th edition devices (like the N-series, Nokia 5800, etc.) while support for 3rd edition devices is expected soon.
Google has added an interesting face morphing app in Orkut. The app takes your profile image from Orkut and smoothly morphs it into your friend’s profile image while filling the path with public images of other Orkut users who have matching faces.
The application, known as People Hopper, is part of Google Labs but for some reason, it didn’t work with my Orkut account. Contrary to what you may think, face morphing in Orkut doesn’t due “face recognition” and is just a simple matching to find similar pictures.
First, faces are automatically detected in public profile images and normalized for improved contrast and size. Then, for each image, we find other publicly available profile images that are similar to one another. Then, when you pick a friend you want to be your end match, we just hop along similar public images, step-by-step, until the connection is made!
If you don’t want your Orkut images to show up in another person’s morph, you can click here to exclude your Orkut profile from the Google experiment. For extra fun, you can extract the individual images from the morph sequence and turn them into an animated gif.
At CES 2010, Intel introduced a new range of processors for laptops and desktop computers. These processors aren’t just fast but also include a new Turbo Boost feature that will automatically speed up the processor when you are running some resource-intensive applications (like burning a DVD or editing video).
To celebrate the launch of their 2010 Core Processor Family featuring Turbo Boost technology, Intel India is running a “Turbo Tips” contest here on Digital Inspiration for the entire month of February.
Intel Turbo Tips Contest
The Digital Inspiration blog, as most old-timers would agree, is all about using software tools, gadgets and web applications in a smarter and more productive manner. The contest is around the same theme.
To participate in the Turbo Tips contest, all you have to do is submit one smart tip on just about any topic – it could be about computers, healthy living, saving money or time, improving digital lifestyle, going greet or anything that will help people get smarter and productive.
You can choose any platform for sharing your turbo tip – you could write the tip in text, send us photographs (say, you have a very smart workspace), upload a video or even create a presentation – it’s your choice.
You are free to submit as many tips as you like using the above form. We’ll pick one winner every week and one grand winner at the end of the contest.
The weekly winners will receive some cool digital music players from Sony while the grand winner will get a brand new laptop with 2010 Intel Core i5 processor (with Turbo Boost of course).
This contest is open to all Indian residents who are above 18 years of age except the state of Tamil Nadu. All prize schemes as defined under The Tamil Nadu Prize Schemes (Prohibition) Act, are prohibited in the state of Tamil Nadu. This is the only reason why Intel India had to exclude TN from the contest.
For detailed terms and conditions, please click here. Should you have any queries, please send me an email at amit@labnol.org.
Flickr offers a very useful camera finder tool to help you choose the right digital camera or a camera phone.
With the Flickr Camera tool, you can not only see the quality of shots captured by actual consumers in real-world situations but you may also compare the relative popularity of various camera models over time.
With Picasa (the online version, not the desktop software), you can either search for public photos that have been shot by any particular brand of cameras (say Nokia or Nikon) or you can limit your search to photos that have been taking using a specific camera model (say Nokia N95 or Canon Power Shot A3100IS).
Like Flickr, Picasa Camera Search works with camera phones as well as regular digital cameras. The feature is available under search options in the sidebar.
WeFollow, as you probably know, is a public directory of Twitter users. The site, a brainchild of Digg founder Kevin Rose, was launched nearly an year ago and is still quite an hit among Twitter users.
To add your own Twitter profile in the WeFollow directory, you just need to grant certain read & write permissions to WeFollow, choose a city and any five tags, and you are done. Your profile will get listed under the relevant tags and you’ll also get own profile page on WeFollow – see example.
What’s the problem then?
When you add (or update) your Twitter profile to WeFollow, there’s a default setting that says “Update my twitter URL to be my WeFollow profile.” If you are in a hurry and don’t read the fine-print, the URL in your Twitter profile will automatically be replaced with your WeFollow profile.
There are quite a few Twitter profiles now that are pointing to WeFollow though I doubt if the profile owners are aware of the fact that their blog URLs have been replaced in Twitter just because they failed to uncheck a default setting.
It just doesn’t make sense to point your Twitter followers to a directory listing when you have your own website.
The initial reviews of the Nexus One device were largely positive but one area where Google certainly faced issues was customer support.
Unlike most other companies in the hardware business, Google doesn’t offer any phone support for Android / Nexus One. Customers can either report problems on public forums or, for more specific issues, they can reach Android support via email but the response can take up to 3 days.
Well all that could soon change as a new requirement posted on Google’s Job portal strongly suggests that Google is working hard to bring direct phone support for Android / Nexus One Customers.
As Phone Support Program Manager for Android and the Nexus One, you are responsible for ramping up and managing operations of Google’s telephone support for our direct-to-consumer Android/Nexus One customers.
The optimal candidate will have direct experience in call center and partner management to drive customer satisfaction around their support experience.
The person will be based in Mountain View but Google will probably outsource the actual phone support job to another vendor.