Nano2Sol by Marc Boucher

Today on the Official Google Blog, Google announced the soft launch of Ad Manager an online service that will host and manage your online ad sales. And it’s free.

The service is in Beta mode right now and open by invitation only. The service provides publishers the ability sell, schedule, deliver and measure their directly-sold and network-based ad inventor. You can integrate Google AdSense and other ad networks as well.

From a small business perspective this offers a hassle free quick way to start selling your own inventory at the rates you want and maximizing your ad profits. If you have unsold inventory you can allow Google to compete for that inventory with other ad networks you specify and whoever provides the highest bid gets the inventory. And with the acquisition of DoubleClick you’ ll see Google eventually trying to fill that space with either AdSense or DoubleClick, that is of course if they don’t get outbid by another network. This is good situation for any publisher to be in. You sell as much inventory on your as you can, that way you get the highest cost per thousand ads (CPM) or allow Google to sell it for you knowing they or the other networks will take their cut and dilute your CPM.

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Having bought an iPhone as a consumer and being a developer I can see that the iPhone could have a great future and a potential significant impact on the landscape. I would not go as far as Read Write Web does in their article “Why Apple Will Dominate Next Gen Computing“, but it is worth reading.

The powerful platform that Apple uses to create beautiful applications for MacOS and iPhone is now completely open. Over a decade in making, this Objective-C based stack is complete with interfaces for operating system, sockets, graphics, audio, motion control and UI components; just to name a few. The platform comes with complete iPhone simulator, XCode development environment and 1-click compile/build/deploy process. This platform is a game changer.

A premier venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins, agrees. They sent John Doerr to announce the 100 million dollar iFund, a fund to focus on iPhone startups. Mr. Doerr is one of the most well respected venture capitalists ever. He called the release historical and even claimed that the iPhone is bigger than the PC. Think about this, he said: a device that travels with you everywhere and brings the world’s information and applications to your finger tips. It is indeed a powerful thought.

Say you’re at a conference and you wanted to track all the Twitter chatter on the event, well the highly recommended blog ReadWriteWeb has a Twitter howto worth reading and is timely with South by Southwest (SXSW) interactive conference getting underway today.

“In talking to people who are going to SXSW for the first time and who haven’t used Twitter very much, I realized that it could be helpful to create an easy way for them to follow the messages of the defacto leaders of the Twitter community. Enter the Tweeterboard 100, an algorithm driven leaderboard of the most talked-about Twitter users.”

Now suppose you want to filter out the same chatter? Just because you’re friends and contacts are at an event doesn’t mean you’re interested in it. There are several filter services out there but the ReadWriteWeb howto deals with FeedRinse.

“Take that RSS URL and go to FeedRinse. It’s one of 6 ways we recently profiled to filter an RSS feed, but it’s the easiest to filter things out with. You’ll need to quickly create an account there, then add your Twitter feed. Once it’s imported then you can “create new rules” (see below) and block anything with SXSW in it.”

With an API that is simple to use Twitter is fast becoming an every day need to have tool.

People are lazy. They don’t bookmark sites they’re interested in and so on a continuous basis they type the sites name in a Google search field and search for the address. And voila Google serves up the address. But what they’re really interested in is some information from that site. Google calls this phenomena “teleporting”.

Based on this phenomena Google has introduced “search within a site” feature to their search engine results. So for certain queries you’ll be presented with a second search box that searches just that site. This is pretty cool, but there’s more to it than that. Below is an example. Say for some reason you wanted to search the New York Times but didn’t have the address, fire up Google and it’s the first result. But also notice the search box offered.

And now do your search within the ’search nytimes.com’ field and get results only from the New York times site. Experienced users have known you could do this for some time. What’s new is two things; first the ability to have that search box show on the Google search results page and second you will notice that targeted sponsored links show up on the right of this second search creating what John Battelle calls the “second click”. The second click offers publishers highly targeted ad space and Google ultimately more revenue.

What are your thoughts on this new feature?