I just applied to be accepted into the Google Adsense program. This is a program from Google to put targeted ads on your web pages. While there are a lot of ad providers out there, I liked to non-intrusive, super targeted nature of the Adsense ads. They are text based ads, so no annoying flash animations or even eye-popping graphics. You fully control the color scheme of your ads. And Google uses their Search Engine power to provide super targeted ads. Write about Dance Dance Revolution, you will get ads about Japanese Music and DDR pads. In short, they don’t annoy the users and may actually be very useful.

But the first rule of Adsense is “Don’t talk about Adsense”. Try and find some information on how much money you can make using Adsense. You can’t. Their TOS has a gag rule in it that keeps you from talking about specifics about how the program works. For me, that means I just have to try it and see. But on the high end, WebLogsInc claims to have made $1M in year, and have peeked at $2,335 in one day. Of course, they employ 103 bloggers so they have a lot of content to serve ad impressions on. And also some the most popular blogs out there (Engadget, Autoblog, etc.). So that number is probably the pinnacle of what you can get. Reading some of the comments on that post, it seems that for a smaller blog like mine more reasonable numbers may be $0.20 a month.

So (if accepted into their program), I’m going to give it a try. But if it takes me a year to make enough money for them to actually cut a check, I don’t think I’ll be staying with them for long. We will see…

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I was doing some googling looking for a way to have some US Airways flight status information messaged (SMS) out to my phone like United offers. Short answer: I couldn’t find one, but United service rocks.

But more importantly, I stumbled across this thread from Treo Central where the were talking about an application for your SMS enabled Treo phone to request SMS information from Voicestream (T-Mobile). Doing some further looking reveals that the app they are talking about is one that I wrote! Clicking on the VS Alerts link lead me to the palmgear.com page I setup for the program. Talk about a little bit of serendipitous nostalgia…

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Their new sports drink: Google Gulp.

An addition to their mapping service that shows you the location of cabs in your area: Ride Finder.

I also heard that Gmail is updating their storage amounts to infinity + 1. Now you will never have to delete mail…

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Forgot to send this out last week….

Kevin showed me how you can Google the Closed Caption feed from certain TV shows:

http://video.google.com/

And some interesting search terms:

napier
alias

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This link comes from Kevin at work.

http://labs.google.com/googlex/

Google, looking like it was designed by Apple…

UPDATE: 6:01 - Looks like google has pulled it. It was basically a google screen that looked like the Mac “Dock” application for choosing which google feature you wanted to search. It looked cool, too bad they pulled it…

UPDATE2: Looks like I still had a copy of it open in Firefox, so I took a screen grab.

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I don’t know when the GMail team slipped this feature, but GMail has an RSS feed for what looks to be the unopened mail items in your inbox. Of course it is an authenticated feed (you don’t want everyone to read about your penis enlargement order), so make sure your News Aggregator supports it.

I stumbled upon this because Firefox put up the “RSS enabled” icon in the lower right hand corner of the status bar, but it looks like GMail even has a help topic for it.

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