Spring 2010 - Week 1: Google Adwords

Last semester I blogged a bit about Google: Google Docs and Automatic Captions.

This week's post is about Google Adwords and I'll be laying out the steps for how to create an Adwords account and begin a campaign.

Google Adwords is the service that allows people to have their ads appear in Google search, partner networks, etc. when certain keywords are used. Unless you block ads on every site you go to you've probably seen them before.

Someone who wants to use this service would go to the Google Adwords home page and click Start.

They will then be asked to create a user name. At this point the user may use an existing Google Account or create a new one. Then they will choose a currency. If the user selected an existing Google Account to use with Adwords they will be able to log into their Adwords account immediately after creation. If the user created a new Google Account then Google will send the user an e-mail and the user will have to follow the directions in it to verify the account.

Now the user can create an ad campaign.

First the following settings for the campaign must be set: the language, the geographical location(s) the ad should appear in, the networks it should appear in (i.e. Google Search, Google's search partners, and/or Google's content partners), the devices it should appear on, the amount the user wants to spend per day on the ad, and the maximum amount the user wants to pay per click on the ad (abbreviated by Google as CPC, cost per click).

Then the user will enter the content for the ad itself. A Google Adwords Ad consists of a headline, two lines of descriptive text, the URL to be show in the ad, and the URL the ad will actually go to when clicked. The ad must comply with the Advertising Policies** set by Google.

**I highly recommend that anyone who wants to use Google Adwords read this since there are a few rules you might not expect.

The user can now choose which keywords to associate with the ad campaign. They can also choose negative keywords: keywords that will prevent their ad from being displayed if they are used.

But before the campaign can begin billing information must be entered.

The user will enter the following information in Billing preferences: Country/territory and time zone, payment method, and billing information. (Yes, that's how Google described it: enter your billing information in Billing preferences. I'm guessing that they mean a billing address but what they need may differ depending on the payment method.)

The user will then be prompted to accept the Terms and Conditions. They will then be able to save and activate the campaign. The amount of time it takes Google to activate a campaign depends on the payment option selected. (The option to prepay via bank transfer was the only method that specifically states that there will be a delay on the page about payment options.)

Now the user has a Google Adwords campaign. There are tools to help you choose which keywords to buy and how much to bid. How often the ad appears depends on your CPC bid for the keywords, the daily budget for the campaign, and the quality of the ad as determined by Google.

There is a flowchart of the process below. It's rather wide so you'll have to click on the image to see the whole thing.

Spring 2010 - A Brief Introduction

We are a full week into the second semester of the Master of Internet Technology program.

A new semester means new classes: MIST 7530 Object Oriented Systems Analysis (with some Project Management thrown in) and MIST 7570 Internet Programming. I'll be blogging for 7530 though it's possible I'll discuss something relevant to the other class as well.

I hope the new semester finds everyone well after the Winter break. As for myself I did a lot more traveling and a lot less knitting than expected.

ETA: Oh, I finally switched this thing back to a template though I need to adjust the spacing in this thing. It's all scrunched; the posts are too close together.

Week 14: Writing on the Web

Our class is now using Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and Javascript by Jonathan Stark from O'Reilly Books. The book has not been printed yet. It's online on what's called The Open Feedback Publishing System. O'Reilly Books is experimenting with allowing people to comment on several titles before they're printed.

I hadn't heard of this before finding that iPhone title but several companies and sites are doing this (a few are listed at the second link). I find it amazing that at a time when companies are aggressively trying to stop pirating some are actually putting work out there were people can get to it without paying or even having to login. The other surprising part is that companies and authors are usually telling people that they can't take their ideas for legal reasons. I'd guess that they just make people agree that they can use their ideas when they login (you have to login to leave comments).

But perhaps none of this should be surprising. Perhaps it is simply the natural result of companies using social media.

What's not surprising are the number of sites for individual writers. National Novel Writing Month is a well known example. Each November writers from all over the world attempt to write a novel, at least 50,000 words, before the end of the month. NaNoWriMo participants can offer each other support, advice, and the site helps them connect to other participants who may be in their area or writing in similar genres. Critique Circle is a site where authors can put up parts of their stories to be reviewed by other authors. You get points by reviewing the work of others and get reviews by using those points.

Advances in technology have made on demand printing/publishing possible. Sites like Cafe Press allow people to have their books printed as they are ordered. Authors who self publish no longer have to pay a printer for many books they may not be able to sell. Any place with Espresso Book machine can print a book in minutes. Bookstores can use it to print out-of-print books.

Some people will find all of that a moot point with the advent of electronic books. I personally think that as long as people enjoy reading from physical material then there will be print media. I also wouldn't want to use an electronic book format for manuals like cooking or automotive books. Can you imagine taking a Kindle or Sony Reader with you underneath your car?

So there are several options for electronic books. In addition to the dedicated devices above anything that supports a program that can read pdfs can be a book reader (if the file is in that format). Sites like Lulu offer support for publishing a publication as an electronic book while sites like Scribd allow you to post material to the site itself (I only found out recently you can put a price on what's posted there).

Week 13: Accessibility News

Google has added Automatic Captions, Automatic Timing to YouTube

This is too cool and I want to make a video just to try it out.

The automatic speech recognition technology being used in Google Voice was combined with the existing captioning technology used by YouTube to create automatic captioning. The captions are created without any extra input or effort on the part of the person who created the video. It does it for you. It's not perfect so they're not making it available to everyone yet but there's a list of channels at the end of the article above that have it available.

The automatic timing is also cool and it is available to all YouTube users. It makes it easier to add captions to videos by figuring out when the words are said for you. All you have to do is upload a text file containing all the words in the video. If it's a video that you wrote a script to create you have that anyway.

My only question at this point is how do you add non-verbal captioning with these tools. Sometimes captions will explain off screen sounds and describe the music being played. Perhaps that's to be left to the annotation tool.

Cushing Academy's Library Goes Digital

I first heard about this story on NPR. Cushing Academy not only added a huge database of books to their library but they removed most of the physical books. The latter had some people upset: The president of the American Library Association said that it will hurt the students who don't take to the technology; they'll learn better if they can handle the material. The Dean says that students weren't using paper sources for research anymore.

It's an interesting argument from the president of the ALA. Some people are visual learners. Are some people tactile learners? Or perhaps she simply meant that frustrations with an electronic device would be a barrier to learning.

Electronic sources have the potential of making the material more accessible to the disabled but the text-to-speech capability only works in the Kindle if the author and/or publisher allows it.

More on Accessibilty: Introduction to Web Accessibility from the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative

Week 12: Energetic Thinking

Part of this week's lecture in MIST 7510 was a presentation on Energy Informatics.

I found this very interesting and exciting because we're often told to use less energy, but less than what? Our only measure of our impact is the monthly energy bill and if you are on an energy plan in an apartment building you won't even get that. It doesn't tell you what time of day you're using the most energy, whether your energy use is normal or not for your area and household size, and it certainly doesn't tell you which devices are draining the most energy. It’s hard to know if you’re doing enough when you don’t have any numbers to go by.

The presentation showed some examples of technology being used and in the works to collect and present that type of information so that people can use it, although in some cases it was simply a matter of getting the existing information to the right people. One thing I hadn’t heard of before was a refrigerator that operates based on the type of energy coming into the home. If the energy is coming from wind sources it runs but if it’s coming from coal it stops (it has more insulation to make up for running less often). Another thing I didn’t know about was all the technology that went into the I-35 Saint Anthony Bridge (photos) which replaced the I-35W Mississippi River Bridge after its collapse. It has 320 sensors monitoring traffic and environmental conditions and can even de-ice itself. No more sending out trucks to remove ice from the bridge.

Towards the end of the presentation a study was quoted that found that the best motivator for getting people to go green was peer pressure. Trying to get people to do it for their own good or for the good of the planet didn't work as well as pointing out that everyone else was doing it. It's the opposite of what they tell you to do in school but it makes sense: if you knew you were using twice as much energy as everyone else, wouldn't you do something about it?

But I think it also needs to be easy which is what all this new technology does as well. The technology is either allowing the devices to use less energy or giving people enough information to make better decisions about their energy use.

Week 11: How Hard Was It To Find This Post*

Findability

It is defined by Peter Morville in Ambient Findability (on page four) as "a) the quality of being locatable or navigable. b) The degree to which a particular object is easy to discover or locate. c) The degree to which a system or environment supports navigation and retrieval. "

So the findability of any object in my purse hovers around zero percent.

Findability could be confused with search engine optimization. While search engine optimization can help people find a site via Google or Bing, that's not all there is to findability. The contents within a site should be findable too. The first step to make that happen is to make the site usable. If the architecture of the site is confusing, e.g. unclear navigation, then the usability of the site suffers. You can not expect people to find anything if they can't figure out how to use the site.

The more people who can find the site and it's content the better. It doesn't do much good if a web site is highly findable for only 5 people. Not only can you build a site so that it is accessible for people with disabilities but also accessible for machines.


More on Findability
Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry -an article by Aarron Walter who has taught at both Templar University and the University of Georgia

The 10 Worst Findability Crimes Committed by Web Designers and Developers - I'm not sure what the beef is with Verdana but I agree with the pagination thing. (It is MADDENING.)

*Well, Week 11 posts were late so it probably was hard to find this.

Week 11: Semantics Matter

Guest speaker Robin Fay gave a lecture on the Semantic Web in Week 10. Semantics is the study of meaning, usually the meaning of language. The idea behind the Semantic Web is to have machines understand what we mean. For example, doing an image search for socks. What you want is to only see images that have socks in them but what you might get are images from any page with the word socks in it. If we can add code describing our images to search engines then we could get only images with socks and even specify socks for feet (as opposed to wind socks).

We didn't have time to get too deep into it (Robin said it gets technical and a quick search proves her right) so here are three sites that have more information.

Semantic Overflow: This site's sole purpose is to answer questions about the Semantic Web. Some are technical questions like "Is it possible to list the named graphs using a SPARQL query?" and some are non-technical like "Isn’t the “Semantic Web” overrated?" Unfortunately 'technical' and 'non-technical' aren't tags that anyone is using to describe their questions (or something similar) so you can't just browse questions just about programming or questions just about the Semantic Web itself. (It may or may not be irony but it does highlight one of the criticisms of the Semantic Web: it requires people to tag or mark up the data in a useful way.)

It's only a few days old so there aren't a lot of questions yet.

Semantic Web: A wiki for Semantic Web topics. The Getting Started page has links for books, tutorials, and videos. If you drill down to specific languages and tools you can get to the official site for the individual or organization that created it.

Semantic Web - The Voice of Semantic Web Business: This site has articles about businesses and web sites using technologies for the Semantic Web. I think this is a good resource for someone who's just curious about this topic because sites don't necessarily say on their site, "Hey, this is a semantic-powered site!". There's also articles about business trends and news related to the Semantic Web.

For example, there's an article about hiring trends for semantic-related jobs and an article about a site called Book of Odds.

The Semantic Web Gang - Prefer to get your news in an audible format? The Semantic Web Gang produce podcasts of their monthly round-table discussions. The site has links to all the resources they refer to in each podcast.