After Google’s DoubleClick acquisition and the recent announcement of the Google Affiliate Network program, it was generally expected that there would be some major shakeup in search giant’s cashcow AdWords/AdSense duet.

Well, the first (with possible more to come) is here already. Today AdSense publishers received a “mandatory” mail from Google, announcing the retirement of their AdSense Referrals program.

For those not familiar with Google’s advertising programs for publishers, the AdSense Referrals Program allows website publishers to earn money by referring users to advertisers’ products and services.

But unlike the traditional AdSense Pay Per Click program which pays for each single (valid) click, with Referrals publishers earn only when visitors they refer perform some specific action pre-determined by the advertiser… such as making a purchase, completing a form to receive more information, entering a sweepstakes, etc.

Below is a copy of the mail. Time to hunt and remove all those adds

Hello,

Thank you for participating in the AdSense Referrals program. We’re writing to let you know that we will be retiring the AdSense Referrals program during the last week of August. We appreciate your patience during this transition and here are some alternative options to consider:

• Google Affiliate Network: As part of the integration of DoubleClick, the DoubleClick Performics Affiliate Network will now operate as the Google Affiliate Network for advertisers targeting users located in the United States. Similar to the AdSense Referrals program, the Google Affiliate Network enables publishers to apply for advertiser programs and get paid based on advertiser-defined actions instead of clicks or impressions. For further details, please visit: www.google.com/ads/affiliatenetwork.
• AdSense for content ads: If you have less than three AdSense for content ad units on a page, you may wish to replace the referral ad units with standard AFC ad units.

If you currently use referral ads, either to promote Google products or offerings from AdWords advertisers, AdSense Referrals code will no longer display ads beginning the last week of August. We encourage you to take the following steps before the product is retired:

• Remove the referral code from your site(s): Please take a moment to remove all referral code from your sites before the last week of August, so you can continue to effectively monetize your
  ad space.
• Run and save all referrals reports on your desktop: Create and save all reports related to the referrals program on your desktop, so you continue to have access to your valuable campaign information

Why is this happening?
We’re constantly looking for ways to improve AdSense by developing and supporting features which drive the best monetization results for our publishers. Sometimes, this requires retiring existing features so we can focus our efforts on the ones that will be most effective in the long term. For this reason, we will be retiring the AdSense Referrals program. If you have any additional questions, please visit our Help Center:
http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=14882

Sincerely.

The Google AdSense Team

When my sister was returning to her books and husband (in that order ) in the United States after coming down home to pass a kid down the factory line (don’t tell her I said that!), she left a PC here with lots of her personal data on it.

After promising and procrastinating for well over a year, I decided, today, to upload her stuff to an online storage account for her — so she could download them to her computer (I know she’s not the “hang all your panties online” sort of person.)

So I went over to Mediamax (which I must confess, I’ve not used for quite some time), pulled out my account details from Gmail … and see what I found (all emphasis mine):

So I clicked over to The Linkup, and of course, I couldn’t log in. The password retrieval tool even told me my email address is not in their system.

Sure, my account was a free account. And there maybe a clause buried somewhere in their TOS that says that all free users who don’t log into their account after x number of days would be kicked out (which like you, I never bothered to read).

Who knows? That’s why I really want to give them the benefit of my doubt — and just make believe that the issue with my account may be a random one… some bug or something that occurred during the transition.

But with statements like what’s above, I’m left with no choice but to conclude that they kicked out all free users during the transition from Mediamax to The Screwup Linkup.

Have I contacted them? Nope. And I’m not going to. I really didn’t have anything I couldn’t afford to lose in there. So no back-and-forth communication is worth my while. And oh, I do multiple backups with different online services.

I’m still waiting for GDrive to arrive, if it ever will. For now I’ve created a new Mozy account that I’m using to backup the girl’s data so she can grab them.

I just installed Picasa on a machine. But I’m in a hurry… I just want to add a few quick touches to just one photo. Don’t want to scan the the computer. Not now. But I can’t find the “Scan Nothing” or “Skip This” radio button. Where is this hidden?

After the recent upgrade to Google Maps for mobile, Google is quietly continuing to add more features and enhancements to many of its online products.

Users of Google Reader now have their very own personal recommendation engine. Visit your discovery page to find a list of “interesting” recommendations from Google… based on other feeds you subscribe to, as well as your Web History data.

Google Reader also now supports drag-and drop subscription management. With this, you can now easily move feeds between folders, as well as reorder things up and down within the list. This is something desktop aggregators, and even other online feed readers like Bloglines and NewsGator, have had for a while. Better late than never.

Other Google properties have also seen some enhancements. Group chat in Gmail/Gtalk allows you to chat with multiple people in one single window. Along with group chat comes a new set of emoticons for your chatting pleasure.

Google is also flirting with some interesting digg-like experiments. The objective here is to empower you to influence your search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results. When you search for the same keywords again, you’ll continue to see those changes. If you later want to revert your changes, you can undo any modifications you’ve made.

While Google explains this experiment in detail here, I couldn’t find any link to try this. Hmmm. Looks like only a select few have been invited to play with it.

Have you tried any of these new features from Google? What’s your experience?

There’s never been a greater need for those devices we carry around to be location-aware. Location information not only helps us determine where we are, but location-aware mobile services also use this information to make mobile mapping and search faster and more convenient.

But the most common source of location information to date, which is GPS technology, is only supported on some of the bleeding edge mobile devices. In fact, fewer than 15 percent of the mobile phones to be sold in 2007 are expected to support GPS.

Now Google to the rescue! The latest update to Google Maps for mobile comes with a new technology they’re calling My Location, which enables users who don’t have GPS-enabled mobile phones to get location information.

But even for those gadgeteers with GPS-enabled devices, the My Location technology actually complements the GPS technology they already have, as it delivers a location estimate faster than GPS, provides coverage inside buildings (where GPS signals can be unreliable), and doesn’t drain phone batteries as quickly as GPS.

How Does It Work?

The video embeded below shows the simple magic Google uses to determine your location. In a nutshell, the My Location technology takes information broadcast from cellphone operators’ towers (Cell IDs) and sifts it through Google’s triangulation algorithms to approximate a user’s current location on the map.

But is it accurate? That’s the question. Now I don’t live in the US or any other country where Google has any siginificant geo-data, and I can only speculate from the technology angle.

Triangulation uses the Signal TOA (time of arrival), to estimate distances. In environments such as the inner city, with lots of structures, the signal bounces off here and there, which causes multipath effect, and this degrades accuracy - significantly.

In open areas free from reflected signal paths, TOA systems can be as accurate as GPS, depending on how the system is architected.

But, if your phone doesn’t have GPS, this service is surely better than nothing. Go download Google Maps for mobile with My Location, here »» www.google.com/mobile/gmm/index.html.

All I wanted to do was import my registered Webinars from the On24.com online events platform into Google Calendar.

But no matter how hard I tried, Google Calendar kept shying away from these iCal calendars that Outlook gladly accepts. Hmmm.

So I decided to do what any mentally retarded ape would do: add one calendar– any calendar at all– that Google deems valid, export it, and then find out what’s under the hood.

I searched the public calendars for “Ghana”, and look what fresh apple I found: Apple User Group Ghana! From their website:

People who use Apple technologies have joined together in user groups all around the world. Hundreds of groups offer members the chance to become friends with other Mac users, get questions answered, and have a lot of fun. Groups are for everyone from first-time computer users to experts — from every profession, background, and age. Want technology to do more for you?

So check us out to see what you think. You can get help and offer help, you can make new friends and contacts, and you’ll have fun. If you’ve got a Mac, you’ll want to join the Apple User Group Ghana (AUGG).

The group meets on the first Tuesday of every month, and membership is open to… who would have guessed… users of Apple products. Remember it’s Apple Users, not just Mac users. So even if you own an iPod, they’ll welcome you.

And no, this post was NOT written on a Mac. I don’t have a computer of my own now. But when I do, it’s sure going to be a MacBook Pro!

For some reason, Google has been showing “terrorism” on my blog, even though until this post, I’d never used that keyword in any post. The only reason I can think of now is that I share first name with Bush, America’s President.

How now, mate?

I’m not a programmer. Far from it. But I hang around with so many programmer friends (mostly online) that sometimes people (including myself) mistake me for one.

And I’m often amazed when I hear folks talk about the amount code out there already in the open source community for practically any project one can think of. But the problem, they’d usually add, is finding what’s already out there for your specific project.

That’s where code search engines come in. These are a new generation of search engines that allow you to search for source code from various projects and in various programming languages. Here’s a short overview of 4 of the more popular ones.

Google Code Search: As can be seen from the logo, this is still a Google Labs project, not quite ready for prime time. Google extends it’s simple and intuitive search interface to Code Search as well. On the “Advanced Code Search” page, you can opt to limit search results to a particular programming language or a particular license.

Google aside, there are a few startups who are also working to make code readily avaible to programmers. One of such startups is Krugle, which is built on Lucene, the open source search software. Krugle provides both code and project search, as well as links to related technical papers.

Koders is another startup in the code search arena. Koders has a simple search interface not too different from Google. They also have a nifty Firefox search plugin for all supported languages and for individual languages.

All The Code is another code search engine that was launched recently. Presently, All The Code only returns results for the Java language, so unless you’re a java juggernaut, this one will not be useful to you. Expect more languages to be added soon!

NO matter what search engine you use, I think an important issue you should not overlook is the type of license under which the code is released, if you’re going to re-use specific code in your projects (why re-invent the wheel?). While, I believe, all code returned in query results are free to use, some of the licenses might require that you also give away or make open whatever you do with that piece of code.

Sure, copyright laws are dead in Ghana … but you never know when someone will knock at your door to buy or invest in your project, product, or company (that’s what I’m here for ). If this were to happen, whether or not you have absolute right to the code behind your software will surely play a role in the valuation.

Have you used any of these code search engines before? Do you know of any other? Please share in the comments below.