Reaction to Google Adsense for Mobile

On September 17, Google announced the release of Adsense Mobile. Adsense Mobile is an expansion of Google’s cash cow, Adsense, which dynamically inserts contextually relevant advertisements into webpages. With Adsense Mobile, webmasters can now serve up ads from the Google Network onto websites designed for viewing by handheld devices.

ROI Versus User Experience

My question is - and I think it’s a fair one - does this new technology really enhance the website experience for users of mobile platforms? Undoubtedly, it spells out more revenue for Google and webmasters and an expansion in the number of channels for ad buyers, but are the interests of handhelds users being served? From a ROI sense, Google has invested heavily in industry-leading technology and widgets to make mobile web browsing readily assessable, largely in the form of Google Mobile, Google SMS, and other free services. And let’s not forget about the shiny new iPhone that includes built-in search on Google.com and Google Maps - so I understand the business intention of Adsense Mobile.

In Google’s guidelines for advertisers who buy onto the Google network, as well as in the policies for webmasters that publish ads, there is an overarching theme of avoiding things that dampen the user experience. To Google’s credit, no more than 2 ads can be displayed on any mobile page and for now the ads appear to be only available in text, which hopefully will be effective in reducing the obtrusiveness factor often associated with internet advertising. Even with this precaution, I predict the ad annoyance will be 10x greater in a miniaturized mobile browser, than on a laptop screen or PC sized monitor.

Let’s Avoid “Spobile Sites” (spam + mobile website)

My fear is that given the dominance of Google’s advertising network, mobile users will be deterred as site after site deploys Adsense Mobile until there is simply too much ad congestion to make using portable devices efficient, resulting in a smaller mobile web user population. Or even worse, Adsense Mobile blasts the door wide open for less user-minded advertising networks to enter into the mobile advertising space. Think giant image ads and annoying multimedia banners dominating your tiny PDA screen. Although the number of mobile Internet users is escalating rapidly, handheld computing is still in its infancy, and I am weary that the aggressive tactics of less scrupulous ad networks will easily out pace the technological capabilities of most devices currently in use, thereby slowing the mobile web to a crawl.

Real Estate On A PDA Screen Is Scarce

My PDA has a diagonal screen size of 3.5 inches and is on the larger side for the new breed of intelligent Internet-enabled phones. However, too often, I can barely read the content on a website specifically designed for a mobile browser – don’t fault me for not wanting to see an ad in there when I finally do all my squinting. Navigation on any smart phone, including the iPhone, can be arduous and tedious - do I really want to waste precious load time by clicking on a Google ad by mistake? Suppose I genuinely clicked on a mobile ad, will the conversion form be specifically optimized for users on a mobile device? Keystrokes on a tiny keyboard are as valuable as screen space - will advertisers create little short cuts to help me complete the form quickly?

Last Words

I have my concerns, but for right now I just want to sit back and see how this plays out until I get an idea of the consensuses from the perspectives of advertisers, webmasters, and site visitors.

How to Configure a Hori Xbox 360 Fighting Stick EX2 for use in Windows

I purchased an Xbox 360 in August, and it’s been a fantastic system, and I’ve had a lot of fun with it. One of the things I’ve really been looking forward to on the 360 has been Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD - although I’ve never been great at Capcom fighters, especially SF2, it looks absolutely amazing and I think will be a must play for all fighting game fans. However, as any fighting game enthusiast knows, good controls are critical to fighting games. The Xbox 360 pad simply does not cut it. While it’s a good controller for most games, neither the D-pad nor the thumbsticks have the precision and ease of use necessary to properly play a fighter.

Enter Hori, almost indisputably the finest manufacturer of fighting game sticks in Japan (and by extension, the world). A lot of American players prefer the classic American style bat top sticks, such as the great MAS Systems sticks that many top ranked fighting game players use. However, many other players including myself prefer Japanese ball top sticks - which are also used by the best players in the world, since the best players are generally Japanese. Personally, I just find Japanese style sticks more responsive and precise. While Hori’s top of the line Real Arcade Pro (or HRAP) series sticks are only available in Japan or through import stores and are expensive and hard to find, they do release cheaper sticks in the US, mainly its “Fighting Stick” line. While these aren’t quite as good as the HRAPs, they still use high quality parts and are in general the best Japanese style arcade game controllers you can get in the US, short of ordering parts and constructing a custom stick or paying out the nose to import a HRAP.

Hori has come out with a stick for 360 - its Xbox 360 Fighting Stick EX2. This stick works on 360, and all 360 controllers also work on PC - meaning that for $60, any fighting game enthusiast can have a great Japanese style arcade controller that works on 360 and PC!

The Fighting Stick EX2 works flawlessly on the 360. You just plug it into one of the USB controller ports on the front of the console, and boom, you’re all set to go. It even has the special jack on the bottom for a 360 Headset so you can trash talk while you play online. However, when you plug it into your PC, things get a little trickier. Windows will recognize it as an Xbox 360 controller, and will in fact download specific Microsoft drivers for the Fighting Stick EX2. Herein lies the problem: for some reason, the drivers specify the Joystick as controlling the “Hat Switch” rather than a joystick.

Because of this, the Fighting Stick EX2 will not work properly with most arcade emulators (including MAME) or fighting games for PC (these are mostly Japanese and include games such as Melty Blood, Big Bang Beat, Akatsuki Blitzkampf, etc). Searching the internet will turn up plenty of forum threads, generally either advising you use Joy2Key (which will work for MAME, but not most fighters), buy a different stick, or to use XBCD, a custom driver written to solve this problem. The regular instructions for installing XBCD will not work, however! Even if you do manage to install XBCD, you may run into further problems - for example, the 2nd and 3rd button on the bottom row of the Fighting Stick EX2 are configured to Left and Right trigger - which input Z-Axis+ and Z-Axis- by default, meaning it is impossible to press both of them at once - a huge annoyance in many games, such as Capcom’s vs Series.

After combing the internet for instructions and some experimentation on my part, I did manage to properly configure my stick, and now it works great for both MAME and Melty Blood ReACT. I’m sure there’s plenty of other gamers out there who would love to use this great and affordable stick for PC gaming, so in order to help I’ve put together this little guide to installing and configuring XBCD for the Hori Xbox 360 Fighting Stick EX2, based on the guide I found at http://xbcd360guide.50webs.com/guide.html, with some modifications specific to the Fighting Stick EX2 controller. Hope it helps somebody out!

1. Plug in the Hori Xbox 360 Fighting Stick EX2, and install it with the default Microsoft Drivers (which your computer should find automatically through Windows Update).
2. Download the All in One installer provided by XBCD360Guide from http://xbcd360guide.50webs.com/download.html. Pick the driver that applies to you from the first half of the downloads listed. Then, download this XBCD profile that I created (use Right Click -> Save As), which reassigns the L and R trigger buttons to digital buttons rather than the Z-axis, and reconfigures the Stick to control the X and Y axes rather than a Hat Switch.
3. Run the “All in One Installer” you downloaded.
4. Edit the XBCD driver’s .inf file. This file dictates what devices the XBCD driver supports. The latest version does not specify the Fighting Stick EX2, which means you will be unable to install the XBCD driver for the Fighting Stick. Typically, the .inf file will be found at C:\WINDOWS\inf\XBCD.inf. In order to add the Fighting Stick EX2 to the supported device list for the driver, add the following line to the inf file:%XBCD_360.DeviceDesc% =Install, USB\VID_0F0D&PID_000D
5. Continue starting with Step 3 of the XBCD driver installation guide at http://xbcd360guide.50webs.com/guide.html, using the XBCD profile I provided instead one of the ones on that page.

Once you finish the installation process as normal, your Hori Xbox 360 Fighting Stick EX2 will be configured properly and should work both with any arcade emulators you’re using and with fighting games that use X/Y axis by default!

If anyone has any further questions, leave a comment and I’ll try to help. Have fun with your stick!

Google Docs and Spreadsheets

Google Docs and Spreadsheets is an interesting service that Google has been offering for some time now. It’s a combination of purchased and in-house technology to provide a document editor similar to Microsoft Word and a spreadsheet program similar to Microsoft Excel, free, online, and with some unique web-based functionality, especially the ability for multiple editors to be working on one document at the same time. I can create a spreadsheet and share it with you, and we can simultaneously edit it and see each other’s changes - which is pretty great.

They aren’t quite as fully functional as a non-web based solution, and can be kind of laggy and have server issues, but they are still useful tools. At work, we use Google Spreadsheets to help keep track of jobs and information, since it’s something everybody can edit, and edit simultaneously as necessary. You can even publish a document or spreadsheet to an RSS feed so you can stay fully on top of any edits.

There’s a couple of instigating factors for this post. First, Google has announced that they have acquired Tonic Systems, who have created online presentation software - so in addition to documents and spreadsheets, Google will now have presentations. This is pretty cool, and I’m looking forward to exactly what they come up with for the product when they release it.

The other news item - Google Spreadsheets now includes charts! This is a really awesome new feature that moves Google Spreadsheets a LOT further down the path toward becoming a really useful tool, and not just a novelty.Here’s a spreadsheet with chart that I made and published with Google Spreadsheets:

It’s published to this URL:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pJIDC70_NJCpUz1u7xqoBPQ

Pretty nifty stuff.

How to Estimate The Organic CTR for Your Website

Unlike pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, obtaining a click-through rate (CTR) for organic search engine listings can be a difficult task, if not completely impossible. An organic CTR refers to the percentage of people who clicked on a search engine listing for your website as a result of submitting a query to a search engine. CTR is a basic SEM metric computed by dividing the number of user clicks by the number of ad impressions - the number of times your listing is displayed.

As you can imagine, garnering accurate impression data for a natural search engine listings is extremely difficult because none of the major search engines publish how many times a listing for your website is actually served. Yahoo does allow webmasters to get a look at the next best thing - an estimation of how many times its users searched for a keyword phrase during the previous months* (see note). I will explain how to use this to approximate your CTR in just a moment, but first a note about the Yahoo Keyword Selector Tool.

The Yahoo Keyword Selection Tool has been going through some hard times lately. *Yahoo stopped updating impressions for keywords circa March 2007, so any numbers you get are several months stale and impressions estimations for seasonal terms (such as “Christmas shopping”) aren’t dependable at all. Also, the Keyword Tool is prone to unannounced outages and slow response times due to high trafficking. Another downside is that you have to enter each term individually into the tool in order to get frequencies. Despite the fickle personality of the gadget, it remains one of the best means of acquiring keyword impression data.

Estimating Natural CTR

Now you’re ready to estimate your organic CTR. It helps to do this using a spreadsheet application like Excel. Here are the steps:

1. Examine the metrics for your natural search engine web traffic only. Find your “referring keywords” and the number of visits attributed to each term for the previous month. These are the terms your site visitors entered into the search engines to find your website. Most web metric systems allow the user to export the data to a spreadsheet.
2. Look-up and record the search frequency for each keyword using the Keyword Tool. Now here comes a bit of arithmetic. Because the impression data from the Keyword Tool reports the number of searches by Yahoo users exclusively, you must factor Yahoo’s market share into the the equation. Depending on who you ask, Yahoo’s market share for searches bounces between 25% and 30% for any given month. For these calculations, I will use 28% as Yahoo’s share of total Internet searches. Using this ratio, we can scale up the tally of Yahoo searches to interpolate total Internet searches across all search engines by dividing the estimated search frequencies from the Keyword Tool for each term by .28. This gives us estimated impression levels for each referring keywords
3. Finally, take the number of referrals for each keyword (clicks) from your web traffic data and divide by estimated impressions. Click on the thumbnail to view an example of calculating CTR for organic listings.

Occasionally, some oddities may arise from using this technique. In some cases the number of clicks may be greater than the number of impressions, or the amount of impressions may simply be zero or not applicable according to the Keyword Tool. But it’s still a good exercise to see if your search engine listing are attracting clicks. There are other variations to this method - for instances you can calculate organic CTR for Google listings only.

Tip for Finding Domain Names

All the good domain names are already taken - or so I thought - up until a month ago. Since then I’ve been using a web tool called Bust-A-Name to aid me in my hunt for the perfect website name. The tool allows users to enter keywords into the interface and set custom options. The program then recombines the terms based on the specified settings and returns suggestions for unregistered domains.

I used to literately spend hours pondering up domain names only to find that they had already been reserved. No longer. This is by far the best, fastest, and easiest tool I’ve seen for domain research.