google

I’ve just noticed that my last 4 posts (well, five if you count this one!) have been about Google products!

It’s not deliberate, I promise

Google has just announced that Google Sites has now gone public.

I’ve had a quick play, and it actually looks pretty good. It’s basically a Wiki system, but with nice user friendly editing capabilities.

I’ve knocked up a very quick site here - basic stuff at the moment, but it did indicate how very easy it was to create something from scratch with no real effort.

I can see this being pretty popular. Wiki’s are everywhere, but they’ve (on the whole) never been that easy for non-techies to update. Google Sites makes it easy for everyone. If you’ve ever used Microsoft Word, or Google Docs, you’ll be right at home here.

I have to admit, I’ve recently been in the process of removing a lot of the “social” plug-ins from many of my sites (from the likes of MyBlogLog) as they slow the sites down, and I get little by way of return from them. However, I may re-think this with the launch of Google Friend Connect.

As usual for Google, this looks like a pretty slick effort. As they say, a picture’s worth a thousand words, so I guess a video must be worth a few million at least!

Given that it’s Google, I would imagine it’s not going to slow down the sites its used on significantly. The number of networks it hooks in to is relatively limited right now, but that’s sure to grow. I’ve signed up for an account, so I’ll let you know what it’s like when I get to try it.

Your thoughts? Will you be trying this out on your sites?

Google have today announced the launch of their Web Security for Enterprise package. The official Google Blog reports:

The product enables organizations to control how employees use the Internet, and provides easy-to-use tools to create, enforce, and monitor the right web policy for your organization. Now, through a new add-on feature, we’re extending that security to users wherever they may be working.

I’m not sure what the pricing model will be, as the site says “Contact Sales to Purchase”. It’s probably a case of “If you need to ask, you can’t afford it”.

It’ll be interesting to see how this one pans out.

I’ve been after a good Ad Server for my FlightSimX blog for some time. I’d been using OpenX (or whatever their name is this week) for a while, but my old hosts asked me to stop using it as it was killing their server. I’ve explored some other options, but none seemed to offer what I was after, so I was pleased to be advised by Google that my Ad Manager account had been set up and was ready to use.

When first trying to access my account, I was asked to select my time zone. I only had a choice of US zones, so I dropped an email to Google and they kindly set my account to the correct UK zone. For some reason, you can’t do this from your account yourself. Not to worry. A quick acceptance of the T’s & C’s and I was in.

My first thoughts were “where do I start?”. Fortunately, there’s a bunch of tutorials and the usual extensive Help system provided that soon got me moving.

I did get a little confused over some of the terms, but I guess that’s only because they’re different to other packages I’ve used.

Here’s how I went about creating my first ad:

1. Go the the Inventory tab and create a new Ad Slot. Think of this as the physical space on your site where an ad will appear. You specify the size of the ad, and you can also opt for Google AdSense ads to be displayed under certain conditions. More on this later.
2. Go to Placements and create a new one. This one threw me until I read through the Help. A placement is really (potentially) a group of ads on your site. I say potentially, as it can be just one ad if you like, as was the case for my first ad.
3. Assign an Ad Slot to your placement.
4. You can specify targeting at this point if you wish, but I just left it at the default no targeting setting.
5. Now, what I wanted to do was insert an affiliate ad to use in the slot. To do so, I created a new “Order” by clicking on the (not surprisingly) Orders tab. I then clicked on New Order and added the details of my ad. Watch out here, as mine defaulted to start tomorrow. This confused me initially when I couldn’t see any ads. You can also set pricing here, but for this ad, there was no price (it was my ad I was placing).  There’s one setting on this page to really pay attention to, labelled “Value CPM”. Think of this as “Fake Value”! What it does is “pretend” that the ad is set to, say, $3 CPM, even though it’s real cost is, in this case, zero. This also works in association with AdSense. If you’re getting $2.50 CPM on AdSense and you want your own ad to take precedence, simply enter the “Value CPM” as some higher value. Neat.
6. That’s just about it. Grab the code it generates for you - there’s a chunk to place between the <head> tags and some more to ad for each ad “placement” and you’re set.

This is not meant to be an extensive tutorial, but will hopefully get your started. There’s a huge amount of functionality that I haven’t even touched upon yet, like reporting, checking for free ad slots etc. I’ll save those for another day.

Anyone else using the Ad Manager? What do you think of it?