Steve Rubel has also found that del.icio.us has started serving Yahoo’s contextual advertisements on it’s search page. When making a search, you will see the results on the left as normal and sponsored results on the right. As Steve has said, what makes this change so important is that del.icio.us has never served advertisements before and that it’s only time until Yahoo tagets individual tag pages.

You can see Related Links in action at the bottom of the right sidebar on my site. If I happen to remove it by the time you read this, below is the basic appearance of it.

(Note: Graphic of Google Related Links)

The way it works is similar to Google Adsense and for multiple reasons. Publishers go to Related Links and select a size and color for a unit and are given a few lines of code to include on their websites. Context related links then appear on the site with each link directing to googlesyndication.com including your address and related link details. Much like the output of Adsense except you get more links to choose from with Related Links. Will you get paid by Google for including related links on your website? No, although according to the FAQ section, Google states, “Not at this time.” If I were to guess though, Google may eventually pay publishers for including Related Links on their sites because of high demand. For some, adding related information to a site is great and adds certain value to your site. But on the other hand, publishers may not find a point for including related links for their visitors unless they benefit from doing so.

I feel that Google Related Links is a nice offering and does help publishers provide related material for their visitors, although it feels much like I am just sticking another ad on my blog. I have it running in my sidebar right now and results are relevant for the most part, but I don’t feel they fit the topic of my site as well as I hoped. I will give it some more time to test and see how things go.

View Google Related Links. (via ResearchBuzz)

Additional Reading: 9 Notes on Google Related Links

Once you setup a blog with Metrics and insert the given code into your site, you can then view the dashboard, Metrics start page. You may have to wait a bit for the data to start coming in though. The dashboard will give you an overview of statistics being collected from your blog covering visitors, comments, search engine traffic, popular pages and more. What I like most about the dashboard though are how the top three containers have small sliders below each bar chart that you can drag left to right for selecting set date ranges from the current week to four weeks. Each container has its own slider to show seperate statistics for different date ranges, making it very easy for you to get an overall view of your traffic.

What I like about Metrics, and I mentioned before, is that the data is split into three main sections. Each section also has its own dashboard page like the main start page so you can get a quick overall view of stats. You get a section for Visitor statistics covering basic numbers of visitors, browsers, screen resolutions, geography, etc.. An Activity section providing blog related stats with individual post views, comments, and categories. And lastly, a section for Marketing statistics covering referrers, search engines, outbound links, and even AdSense clicks. The above screenshot is of the Marketing Dashboard. I can quickly see how my blog is doing on one page, although I can’t tell how the AdSense click tracking performs yet because I haven’t received any since installing Metrics. But, each of the main three sections have similar dashboards that include three head containers with sliders and additional information below them. You can then drill down into each individual subsections of data in a section to get more detailed statistics.

Drilling down into a subsection will show you more detailed statistics in tables and graphs to give a visual on the data. Nothing too different from your usual statistics script, but one feature that stands out it the date range options. On the top left of a graph, you will see “today” with a downward arrow next to it. Hover your mouse over it and you can then select a set date range of data to be shown on the graph. Quick and easy. Also, if you are viewing a bar graph, some sections also have tables below the graphs that show the results with the associated color from the bar graph so you can match the data easily.

Overall, Performancing Metrics seems to work great and has some great features. One of the drawbacks is that it seems to update statistics once every hour, but still is better then some stat packages out there (such as Google Analytics). I love the way the dashboard views, and what I think would be really neat was if we could make our own personalized dashboard. For example, a personalized page that will let me see see visitors, search engines, comments, adsense clicks, all on one page in the little containers with the sliders. I also would like to see RSS feed tracking with FeedBurner integration so I can view feed statistics as well without leaving Metrics. Other then that, everything is great and the multiple blog functionality is excellent how anyone can track multiple blogs for free under one package. Metrics also has an API available for programmers if anyone was interested.

View Blog Statistics with Performancing Metrics.

Update: Darren Rowse has a more in-depth review.

One of the main frustrations of reading normal news sites for me is how they all have cluttered sites with advertisements everywhere, news mixed around, and when I find a story of interest, I can’t even comment about it. Newsvine is the complete opposite and I immediately felt at home with their beautiful interface that allowed me to easily find and read what I am interested in. The design consists of a style that I feel has the unique style of its founder, Mike Davidson. The main page gives a clear overview of all the news submitted from the Associated Press and the Newsvine users, along with buttons to vote and comment on stories (more on this below).” The Wire” being news from sources like the Associated Press, ESPN, and other services. “The Vine” being user submitted content. The main page shows the featured article, top wire news, top vine news, featured writers (users of Newsvine), and then more wire and vine news split into two columns towards the bottom. At the top is the navigation, showing the top categories, and the search form, allowing you to search by tag or full article search. On the left is your accounts menu giving you quick access to write, view your history, or even view a list of saved tags and topics that you wish to keep up to date on (the Watchlist). Now, lets take a closer look at the articles themselves.

I was very impressed with how feature rich every news page is in Newsvine. Unlike normal news sites that just show an article with a few images (and advertisement), Newsvine steps it up with interaction allowing members to vote and comment on any news item. There are also two types of news items at Newsvine, but both have the same functionality. You have normal news and you have seeds. Seeds are links that users submit that will direct you to an external site. Each article has its own seperate chatroom (flash-based) that allows members to discuss the article in real-time. I was also surprised to see that some articles consist of audio that you can actually listen to using a built in flash media player. You will find at the top of every article a set of small buttons (that don’t stand out too well, in my opinion). These buttons are for (in order) chatting, voting, commenting, and lastly, reporting if an article is inappropriate. The vote button uses Ajax to easily add 1 to the articles vote count and has a nice little upward movement animation when clicking on it. Above these buttons you will see the tags. You can tag any article you read or write and add more at any time. Also remember that when you vote or comment on an article, you will be able to go back to it again by viewing your accounts history.

Every user also gets their own profile and column. The profile allows you to fill in basic information for your visitors to see and the column is actually like your own blog that you even get your own address for (you.newsvine.com). The profile is where you go to write, manage articles and comments, edit your user information, and also to view your history of article activity (what you see above). The columns that users get are really neat. Every article your write and every link that you seed can be seen through your column. It is like a blog for your Newsvine activity. Viewers can get an overview of your submitted content, view your profile, and even contact you through a contact form. They can also subscribe to your column with the provided RSS Feeds.

When submitting an article to Newsvine, you have two options. You can create a post or a seed (what you see above). Writing a post is just like you would write on a normal content management system or blog. You fill in the title and the body of the post along with option fields for tags, location, and category. You can then decide to submit the article or save it as a draft to continue working on later. One thing that I didn’t see though were instructions for formatting content because a WYSIWYG Editor is not used. I mentioned that you can also seed a link. You have two methods of doing this. You can get an address for the site you want to link and manually paste it into the “Seed a Link” section, or you can add the Newsvine bookmarklet to your favorites so you can easily seed a site that you are currently viewing. Submitted content can then be commented and voted on and if you receive enough votes, hopefully will make it to the front page or make you a featured writer of Newsvine.

You may be thinking, a large percentage of articles submitted are going to be user generated. What is in it for you? For one, getting your writing viewed by thousands, and secondly, money. Newsvine is stepping things up a bit by actually allowing their users to generate revenue by writing and submitting seeds. How is this done? Newsvine will soon have some advertisements throughout the site and will be visible on your user column (your Newsvine sub-domain) and ad earnings are based on based on traffic to your articles and seeds. So how much do you get out of it? Surprisingly 90% of the earnings! Where does the other 10% go? To the user that referred you to signup to Newsvine and if no one referred you, then the 10% will go to Newsvine to support bandwidth and site improvements. Maybe it would be a good idea to promote your columns to drive more traffic to it! During the beta, no revenue can be made by the users as ads are not active yet. It is unknown on how much one could earn from Newsvine, but either way it is definitely great to see a service paying their users for user-generated content.

As I have said, Newsvine has a large amount of functionality. One of my favorite features is the Watchlist. When viewing any tag, category, location, or member column, you will see a button at the top left that says, “Watch.” Clicking this button will add that source to the left navigation’s Watchlist giving you easy access to it at any time. What is even better about it though is that when a new item has been added to the source, you will see the amount of new articles next to the name on the watchlist, so it acts like a mini aggregator. And speaking of aggregation, Newsvine also provides RSS Feeds on what seems like every page. You can subscribe to tags, columns, and categories. You can also decide if you want the feed to include Wire and Vine articles or just one of them individually. Feeds for user columns include feeds for posts and links. Another feature worth mentioning are the user-friendly URL’s. For example, if you are interested in Google or Ajax, you can simply browse to newsvine.com/ajax and it will bring up all articles under that tag. Even permanent links to news items have clean addresses that have the date and title in them. The last feature I want to mention is the location setting. At the top right of Newsvine is a dropdown box that lets you select a region, like San Francisco. Selecting a region will then filter all news throughout Newsvine to only be related to that region. If I am interested in seeing news on Technology in the San Francisco area, I can easily do so.

Newsvine is going to change the way we read news on the web. As I said earlier, I have never enjoyed reading the news as much as I do now using Newsvine. The environment, community, and interaction makes it unlike any other news site. I have been stuck in the zone of reading about news through services like Digg, Memeorandum, and Blogs, but I never make time to read the actual news online, but not anymore. To sum it all up, Newsvine allows you to read news by sources like the Associated Press and user submitted news. You can vote, comment, tag, and even chat to interact with the news and users of Newsvine. You are also given your own news column (along with sub-domain) that you can write to and hopefully will make it as a story on the front page if enough visitors vote for it. Even more, you can also earn revenue by Newsvine advertisements placed on your column.

Just one last note that Newsvine is currently in Private Beta and invites are now available to be sent out by Newsvine users. Hope you will enjoy it as much as I am!

Excellent work to the Newsvine Team and best of luck!

View Newsvine – Get Smarter Here. – Like this post? Digg it!

J-Learning’s articles are very detailed and explain every spec of information that you may need to know about what you are reading. For example, lets look at the Audio category inside of “Present It!” Right when you enter the category you are presented with headlines that get straight to the point. You can see that they have articles to help you learn about recording the audio for the web, digitizing the audio, editing, and even an article on how to get it online. Now, lets see whats going on in the Digitizing Audio section. The article covers everything from defining digital audio, what qualities can be achieved, compressions, file types, even what software they suggest you use for editing audio. Their articles cover everything.

Everytime I go to the J-Learning website and open an article, I learn something new. As of this moment, I am reading the article, Forums and Feedback, and am finding it very helpful as a blogger because it is helping me find the best methods for communicating with my visitors. I am very interested in what my visitors want to see more on Solution Watch and as I am reading the article, I am jotting notes as to what could be some good features to add to the site.

Take a look at J-Learning, hope you learn something.

View J-Learning: How-to site for community journalism.

“SysSense is your personal desktop Google AdSense monitor. It keeps your current Google AdSense information in the Windows system tray. You can monitor an unlimited number of Google AdSense accounts. A sound and/or system tray icon balloon can be configured to alert you when your statistics have changed.”

View more information about SysSense from Solution Watch or go to the products website, Singer’s Creations: SysSense. [via]

SysSense is a great product that I have been using lately to track my earnings. I don’t get much from adsense as of yet, but it is nice to click on it and see some money in there :) This application is very easy to setup in use and just takes a matter of a few clicks. You can have the icon set to a refresh rate or to refresh when you click it. It gives information for Impressions, Clicks, CTR, CPM, Earnings, and even Predicted Earnings. Great for anyone that uses Googles Adsense.

Go to SysSense Page – Created by, Singers Creation. This site also has a lot of other great free software aswell.

• Clicksor
• TargetPoint
• MarketBanker
• BidClix
• Chitika
• AllFeeds
• Adhearus
• AffiliateSensor
• Bidvertiser
• Veoda
• Revenue Pilot
• Kanoodle Bright Ads
• Enhance Interactive
• Quigo AdSonar
• Searchfeed

Excellent article, Internet Search Engines FAQ.

Nice work Ryan. Now only if my CTR wasn’t 0%, I can actually use it, that would be nice! Also, I just noticed the use of Remote Scripting with SAJAX. Very nice.

The solution will store the data it retrieves into a MySQL database using PHP as the programming language. Dave gave a description of how it works: “Once the Adsense ad is clicked, the IFRAME that it has been embedded within will ‘focus,’ thus calling the Javascript function logClick. This function will then call trackerScript.php and pass to it the current page’s title, as well as the current window status message (Note: The URL of the clicked ad is displayed in the window status message. Eureka!).”

This seems like an interesting method and may be very helpful for some of you Adsense users. I’m going to wait on it and see if anything happens with this first, even if it says that it doesn’t break any terms. Overall, good work Dave, looks like a nice solution.

Track Google Adsense Clicks