My New Toy - HTC Touch Diamond
The latest toy thats keeping me busy: HTC Touch Diamond
It Rocks!
2 comments | August 17th, 2008 at 09:24am
Eight signs that Microsoft dead in the water
Check out this article by John Dvorak on Microsoft. 100% true. Great read.
I am fully convinced that Microsoft is loosing focus on its bread and butter business - i.e., developing good software. Instead its spending most of its energy in territories like advertising and search. Leave those things alone! Yes, agreed that there is lot money involved in advertising, but that does not mean that you should jump into the other territories without having the capabilities.
Microsoft is too occupied and obsessed with what Google is doing and that’s gonna cost Microsoft a lot!. Where as, Google doesn’t bother about what Microsoft does!!.. The day it does, Google too would be in big trouble!
One of the points from the above article…
8. Preoccupation with Google. Microsoft is too easily distracted by successful companies who are not competitors. There is a deep-rooted belief that if a company like Google is successful, then they are an enemy per se. So the company obsesses on what Google is doing rather than concentrating on important Microsoft projects. Now Microsoft is about to do a deal with Yahoo to flank Google. This old-lady-like skittishness is unbecoming for a company this size.
Check this: Possible Microsoft & Yahoo merger article on slashdot.
More: Mr. Ballmer’s mail to Micro$oft folks.
I feel that the next couple of years would really decide Microsoft’s future!
3 comments | May 3rd, 2006 at 04:41pm
Making sense out of AdSense
Talking about AdSense, i am wondering how it actually works!. Yes., its contextual advertising. i.e, the Ad’s that are displayed are purely based on the contents that are present on the page. And context is the King!
AdSense works like a charm for some. For others, AdSense doesn’t just work. The rest are not at all bothered about it!.
So, what is this post all about ?
For some of my pages, the Ads that are displayed are not relevant at all! No matter what the content is, the Ad’s displayed are about ‘blogging’ etc, which are not at all relevant to the topic or the content of the page. That too after filtering lot of blog related site!
Let me explain with and example.
Say URL #1:
http://www.arjunprabhu.com/blog/archives/2005/03/09/
virus-hits-instant-messengers/
URL #2:
http://www.arjunprabhu.com/blog/archives/2005/03/09/
Basically both #1 and #2 have the same content.
#1 is the permalink to the posting, and #2 is the archive for the day.
If you notice, the Ads for URL #2 are very relevant but not for URL #1. The content is pretty old, and the google-bot has visited it for sometime now. I also did a google search, and URL #1 has a PR 2, and URL #2 has a PR 0. So, that would mean that #1 is known by google much better then #2.
I was wondering about this, and posted this question on one of the forums, but still haven’t got a satisfactory answer. Further, from one of the replies that i got on the forum, I figured out that the Ad’s would be relevant if we append a querystring to the URL as shown below
http://www.arjunprabhu.com/blog/archives/2005/03/09/
virus-hits-instant-messengers/?t=1
Isn’t it strange ? Its clear that google mediabot indexes the page based on the URL. But what about the content?
So, what I am wondering is..
1. If the page is brand new (or the URL at-least is new), then the Ads displayed are very relevant
2. After media bot visits this new URL … the relevancy goes for a toss!!!
Isn’t it supposed to be the other way round ?
So, does that mean that the algorithm to display Ads for the first few times (realtime), is much better then the algorithm used later-on ?
Just curious!
Other Examples:
#1 http://www.arjunprabhu.com/blog/archives/2004/06/24/
microsoft-hotmail-joins-the-storage-club/
#2 http://www.arjunprabhu.com/blog/archives/2004/06/24/
8 comments | June 21st, 2005 at 07:42pm
Google Introduces Site Targeting to AdWords
Came across this : Google Introduces Site Targeting to Google AdWords on Search Engine Journal
Its good news and bad news!. Good news for advertisers and the entire internet community! bcoz now advertisers can target specific sites, and avoid link farms or pages/sites that are specifically designed to game google.
On the other hand, this may be a bad news for lot of bloggers on a long run. Interesting. Will have to keep a watch! Offcourse, advertisers would like put up their ads on popular blogs, but not sure what happens to the smaller not so known blogs, which manage their yearly hosting fees!
More info about the program can be found here.
BTW, for the past couple of days, i am seeing more and more Yahoo ads! too!
You can see them occasionally over Russell’s blog (yahoo employee) and flickr (owned by yahoo, flickr shows both google/yahoo ads randomly!) too!
1 comment | June 17th, 2005 at 10:24pm