Panama: Real Estate

Before learning about what the Panama real estate industry has in store for investors , let us first check on the many benefits of investing in a real estate property in the country.


The economy in this Central American country is growing strong.This is just one of the many reasons why investing in a Panama property is something that is deemed financially viable.

The Panama real estate property scene is continuing to grow. The Panama property or real estate properties along the coastlines are still being developed in an off-plan resort style community. This means that the individual real estate properties are aimed at not just the temporary international tourist market, but also for foreigners who are looking at a more long-time investment.

Finally, investing in the Panama real estate industry will give you real value for your money. The low value of the American dollar in the worldwide currency market makes it more effective for an investor to purchase an off-shore real estate property such as the ones in Panama – while getting it at half the value of what you would have paid for the same property within the US.

Importance of Background Check

In the United States, people also do background checks for those people who are wishing to purchase handguns from licensed firearms dealers. It is also done especially for people who want to purchase restricted firearms like machine guns, suppressors, explosives, or large quantities of precursor chemicals and concealed weapon permits. It is also needed for people who want to work in a position with special security concerns like trucking, ports of entry, and airline transportation.

Information for background check can depend on the reason for which it is conducted. So a person who is seeking employment at a minimum wage job would be subjected to fewer requirements than a person applying to work for the FBI. Information from this check can include criminal records, citizenship or immigration or legal working status, litigation records, driving or vehicle records, drug tests, education records, employment records, financial information, licensing records, mental or medical or physiological evaluation records, military records, social security number, travel records and other interpersonal interviews.

Unfortunately, this information can sometimes be used for illegal purposes like unlawful discrimination or employment discrimination, identity theft and violation of privacy. There are also controversies on drug test and credit checks for employment. There are also some people who are uncomfortable with the idea of investigators poking around in their personal histories. This is because background checks can give information that is not relevant, taken out of context or just plain wrong. Thus, though this can be beneficial, it also has some disadvantages.

North American publishers: Participate in AdSense email Interview Get $50

Adsense recently started conducting email interviews. Interviews are currently available only to publishers located in North America, but we're aiming to expand this program to other countries in the future.

If you're located in North America, you can sign up for a chance to participate in an email interview and openly discuss your opinions about AdSense with a market researcher. Participants will receive a $50 AdWords credit for their time.

https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dFZaVXNaYkdHUjkxQnNYOGZQQkRmWFE6MA

Reasons for Divorce

ADULTERY
It will come as no surprise that adultery is an extremely common reason for divorce. However, research shows that many people are wiling to forgive someone for cheating once. If the behaviour is common though, that often spells the end of a marriage. Adultery results in a lack of trust within a relationship.

DESERTION
There are times when one half of a married couple will up stick and walk away, possible with the other person unaware that the marriage was on the rocks in the first place.

ADDICTION
If someone is addicted to alcohol or drugs then it will inevitably have a major affect on his/her marriage. Addiction takes control of someone and means they are unlikely to function normally, resulting in them being difficult to live with and a whole host of other issues.

ABUSE
Abusive relationships are a lot more common that most people think. Most of the time they involve a man abusing his wife, but there are also many cases where it is the other way around. Abuse isn’t just physical, it can also be emotional.

PERSONAL DIFFERENCES
Different personalities and lifestyle ambitions is high on the list of reasons for divorce. There can be many reasons for this. Although opposites can attract, if a married couple are very different to each other, this can eventually become problematic. Different ideas of the lifestyle they want to live, and how they see marriage can be a major issue.

WORK
If one person is always at work and a couple never see each other, this can be a cause of friction. If one is being made to feel like they are less important than the others work they may feel unwanted. Differences in career goals can also be an area of strain.

FRIENDS & FAMILY
Although friends and family shouldn’t really have an affect on a marriage, they do have an affect on your life and this can have a direct impact on the marriage. For example, if a man is too busy spending time in the pub with his friends to spend time at home with his wife, she may become disenchanted. If someone doesn’t get on with their husband or wife’s family there will inevitably be problems.

CUTURE
If two members of a marriage are from different cultures it can be difficult to adapt. They may have to change their lifestyle to suit the other person and this can be difficult. Religion also comes into it. Someone’s religion can have a big impact on their life, and if a couple have different religious beliefs there can be issues around this.

FINANCE
Finance, and especially financial difficulties can have a massive impact on a marriage. This can particularly be the case if one feels that the other has made financial mistakes which they then have to deal with together. Guilt can also be a factor here; with one feeling guilty that they have caused these problems, and maybe not wanting to tell the other therefore making things worse when they eventually find out.

LACK OF COMMUNICATION
In many ways lack of communication isn’t the cause of problems in the first place, but it means problems can’t be resolved. If a couple don’t talk about their issues they are likely to escalate.
CHILDRENS

Now offering AdSense in Google Sites

As an AdSense publisher, you manage and develop websites. Google Sitesis a free product that simplifies the process of creating secure groupwebsites, whether you're building a family website or a companyintranet. You can publish pages with the click of a button, edit webpages like documents, and add videos, presentations, and calendars toyour pages. Information is stored securely online, and you decide whocan edit or view the site. And now, with a recent integration, you canplace AdSense ads on Google Sites to earn money.

If you're new to Google Sites, we encourage you to take it for a testdrive today at http://www.google.com/sites/help/intl/en/overview.html. After you've built out your site and ensured that it complies withour program policies, follow the instructions athttp://www.google.com/support/sites/bin/answer.py?answer=150360 to addAdSense to your pages.

You'll have the option to place ads in the sidebar as well as the maincontent of each page, and you can choose the formats that work bestfor your site. If you're not sure where to start, we encourage you tocheck out our optimization tips at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/static.py?page=tips.htmlto make sure you're maximizing your site's revenue.

For more information about getting started with Google Sites, watchthis
video:

Attracting more visitors with content and community-Adsense

Jack Herrick, the founder ofwikiHow.com, about attracting new visitors to your site. As we sharemore tips over the next two weeks about increasing your revenuepotential and attracting more advertiser budget, we hope you'll leavecomments with your own suggestions for growing your business. You canalso follow the series at www.google.com/ads/speedingup.


Jack Herrick is the founder of wikiHow, a collaborative writingproject to build the world's largest, highest quality how-to manual.wikiHow is a wiki, which means that any visitor to the site can createor edit wikiHow articles. wikiHow is currently ranked as the 100thmost popular site on the web by Quantcast, and receives over 16million unique visitors each month. Today, Jack shares three of hisfavorite tips to attract visitors. We hope they'll help you come upwith new ways to entice visitors to your sites as well.

Video URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giNdyLY46Mo

Generate revenue from mobile applications-Inside Adsense

Google launched new beta launch of AdSense for mobile applications. You can generate revenue from mobile applications.Participants in the beta will be able to display text and image ads in their mobile applications to earn revenue. We've seen positive results in our trials, and we're excited to roll this out to new developers to continue supporting the growth of mobile applications.

You can visit our new microsite to learn more about AdSense for mobile applications, see our beta requirements, or sign up. If you're selected to participate in the beta, we'll be in touch with you shortly with next steps for getting started.


You can also learn more about the program by watching the video below, in which Howard Steinberg, Director of Business Development at Urbanspoon, describes how he tested AdSense for mobile applications:

Adsense-Default font size increased

As a follow-up to last week's launch of font size controls, we'd like to let you know that we've just increased the default font size for AdSense ad units. This change will affect your ad units if you haven't yet customized your font sizes, or if your ad units are set to 'AdSense default font size' -- you'll notice that the text in your ad units is now the equivalent of 'medium' instead of 'small'. We decided to make this change based on publisher feedback and our testing, which showed that this increased font size improved performance.

If you'd like to change the font size in your ad units, you can do so on an account-wide basis or by individual ad unit -- just follow the instructions listed in our Help Center. Again, we recommend testing these new font size options with your existing customizations to determine which combinations perform best on your pages.

Local currency reports for nine more countries-Adsense

Following our launch of Euro reporting for publishers in five European countries, we're happy to announce that local currency reports are now also available in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Finland, Greece, Portugal, South Africa, Switzerland, and the UK.

If you're located in one of these countries, you can now update your account to display earnings in your local currency. After you've updated your account, any earnings generated from advertisers paying in currencies other than your local currency will be converted daily. If you receive payments in your local currency, this means that there also won't be any additional conversions at the end of the month. However, you can still choose to receive payments in U.S. Dollars or change your payment method at any time.

Before enabling local currency reports in your account, we recommend downloading and saving copies of your past reports in U.S. Dollars for your records. You can then update your account by signing in to AdSense and clicking the link in the green prompt on your Reports Overview page. You'll be asked to review and agree to a new set of Terms and Conditions. Unfortunately, we're not able to interpret the meaning of changes in our legal documents for publishers -- if you have questions or need legal advice on interpreting the new Terms, please don't hesitate to contact your attorney.

We'll be requiring this change in the future, so we recommend updating your account to report earnings in your local currency soon. You can find answers to common FAQs associated with these new local currency reports in a recent Inside AdSense blog post -- all references to 'Euros' in the post now also apply to your local currency. In addition, detailed information about these new reports can be found in our Help Center.

Top ten myths about Google Analytics

All publishers can now integrate their AdSense accounts with Google Analytics. If you're not very familiar with Analytics yet, you might be interested in reading a recent post on the Analytics blog that addresses ten common myths about the product. For example, did you know that you can use Analytics to segment visitor data in real time, or that you can use the new Analytics API to tie your website data to your financials? Check out the post to learn more about these features and other ways you can use Analytics to better understand your site stats.


If you haven't yet linked your AdSense account with Analytics, follow these steps:


1.Sign in to AdSense.
2.Click the link that says "Integrate your AdSense account with Google Analytics" on your Reports Overview page.
3.Follow the onscreen instructions, and watch our video for additional guidance.

Image ads join link units-Adsense

If you use link units, you may have noticed a small addition to the page users see after clicking a link unit topic. We recently added an image ad to the bottom of each of these pages, after our testing showed revenue improvements for many publishers.

These image ads are contextually targeted, based on the link unit topic users clicked to reach the ads. If no image ads are available for the given topic, we'll only show the original text ads -- in other words, we won't show a PSA or insert a blank space in place of the image ad in this case. Advertisers can bid on these image ads on a cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-impression (CPM) basis, so you'll generate earnings for valid clicks and impressions. You can review the performance of image ads on your link unit pages by generating a link unit report on your Advanced Reports page.

If you aren't using link units on your pages, we encourage you to give them a try. They don't take up much space and can help add to your AdSense revenue -- learn more in our Help Center, or visit your AdSense Setup tab and select 'AdSense for content' to get started.

Blogging Helps You Get Better Search Engine Results

Here are some reasons why and how blogging helps greatly in
getting better search engine results.

1- Frequent Updates whenever Needed

Before blogs were popular, webmasters would have to manually edit
their site just to keep their content fresh. This takes time to do and
when things become repetitive, site updates become inconsistent which
is not good if you want good search engine results. With a blogging
platform, you can easily make updates to your site just by posting new
content that will append to your homepage.

2 - More Content means more Pages Indexed

The nice thing about blogging is that all of the entries stick there
unless you really want to delete them which is not recommended. For
example, if you blog consistently every day for one straight month,
you will have at least 30 entries that can all be indexed by the
search engine. In the long run, many of your most popular read entries
can hit the top search results and it can even be better if your
articles are uniquely written.

3- Improved SEO

Even if you aren’t very conscious about search engine optimization,
you will definitely have more search results if you keep your articles
unique. If you have a broader range of topics to cover, your site may
show up when different keyword phrases are being used. If you utilize
content writing skills and be focused on certain keywords per blog
entry, you can increase your site’s rank on that keyword or let your
site appear on more keyword phrases.

4- Link Baiting is there to Help

Some blog posts can be so well written and entertaining that other
blogs and sites would make a link to it. This should not only greatly
increase the traffic on your website, but also generate you more
search engine results because those pages that show your link can be
listed as well.

How To Get A High-Paying MBA Job!!!

MBA from any of the MBA Colleges in India or for that matter any of the prominent B-Schools in India such as the IIMs, (Indian Institute of Management), XLRI, UnitedWorld or IIFM is simply not enough to get that six-figure salary you had been aiming at since graduation. An MBA in Ahmedabad or an MBA in Kolkata has the same chances of netting a high-paying MBA-arena job as an MBA student based in Canada or Australia. Because of the importance that Indian B-Schools have in the global perspective, the prospects of an MBA in Mumbai or any other respectable MBA College in India almost guarantees a good job. But apart from performing well and getting placed with the best of firms, an MBA student has to keep certain things in mind if he wishes a more posh work environment!

MBA should be pursued from a reputed and certified university only. Be it classroom education or in online correspondence, one should not make the mistake of giving monetary considerations and locations a preference over quality. Half the war is won with a good degree from an equally good institute. On the contrary, an uncertified MBA will not only drain your money out, but will also undermine your personal responsibility and trustworthiness in the current work environs.

Get a great resume ready for yourself. You can have it written professionally or can develop it with tips from different online portals or professionals from the industry itself. Reference letters and testimonials from your institute's faculty members or experienced professionals from the industry (such as the manager level guys in the company you have interned in) will also help you stand in good stead. Next have your personality and appearance tweaked to perfection. Most large organizations look for creative, able and pleasant looking people who can uplift their corporate image along with their quality of work.

The Processing of Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is progressions of deciding the most suitable focused keyword expressions linked to your site and certify that this position your site highly in search engines so that when somebody look for precise phrase it places your site on top.
It essentially entails fine alteration of the substance of your site with the HTML and Meta tags and also entails suitable link structure development. The most accepted search engines are Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, AOL and Ask Jeeves.

What the Display Ad Builder means for publishers

It is easier for advertisers to show display ads on the content network -- which benefits you, because it results in more budgets devoted to advertising on AdSense sites like yours. (As a reminder, "display ads" include all types of image-based ads, such as banners, rich media, and video ads.) In addition to recent launches such as DoubleClick Studio, third-party ad serving, and expandable rich media ads, we also launched the AdWords Display Ad Builder last October. This tool allows AdWords advertisers to create display ads using customizable templates and to target them to AdSense sites in a matter of minutes.


Since its launch, the Display Ad Builder has been extended to advertisers in over 100 countries and 40 languages. With over 90 customizable templates and thousands of active users of all sizes, the Display Ad Builder has quickly become what we believe is the largest platform for self-serve display ad creation on the web. Its usage varies from the largest digital agency, like Razorfish, to smaller advertisers like the Wilshire Grand Los Angeles. We'd like to take a few minutes to tell you more about the impact of this tool and how it can benefit you as a publisher:-

More advertisers creating display ads: In just six months, the Display Ad Builder has significantly increased the number of AdWords advertisers using image-based ads. Many of these advertisers were already advertising with text ads on Google.com and AdSense sites, but have now found the visual elements, interactivity, and animations of display ads to be effective at increasing clicks, conversions, and overall ROI.

Higher quality, more relevant display ads for your site: With simplified display ad creation now available to advertisers of all sizes and industries, the display ads that show on your site are likely to be even more relevant to your content and audience. For sites with niche content or with an advertiser base that would be less likely to have the budgets to invest in display ad creation, this is especially true. The templates that we offer also vary well beyond simple static banners, including interactive rich media templates that allow users to scroll between or roll over multiple product images, in addition to multiple templates with animated text and images.

Higher potential earnings: As the reach of ads created with Display Ad Builder grows, we've seen encouraging results -- ads created with the Display Ad Builder have average click-through rates that outperform industry averages. We believe that this is due to the combination of advanced contextual targeting on AdSense, combined with templates that encourage best practices in effective display ad creation. We've also heard from many advertisers that they're finding improved cost per conversion efficiencies with the tool, meaning that more of their marketing budgets can be effectively deployed online, on your sites.

http://mydzo.blogspot.com/search/label/ADSENSE

AdSense Optimization Webinar

Google Adsense next Optimization Webinar , where google group show you how to experiment with different formats and colors to improve the performance of your ads. Google group heard that you'd like us to hold our webinars at different times of the day, and we hope that this helps accommodate those of you who weren't able to attend our last optimization webinar. Remember, they only able to accommodate a maximum of 500 publishers, so please sign up soon.

Date: Thursday May 7, 2009
Time: 6:30 pm PDT (GMT -07:00)Registration: https://googleonline.webex.com/googleonline/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=366085742

Adsense Program Policies Page

A+P+P+P
If you've checked the AdSense program policies page today, you've probably noticed that we've just made a few small updates. We'd like to take a moment to clarify what's been changed.

The first thing you might notice when you visit the program policies page is that we've revamped the look. Based on your feedback, we've reorganized the content and updated the layout to make it easier to read and navigate. We've highlighted some key information for each policy, and added expandable 'Learn more' sections that you can click for more detailed information. Also, we've grouped together policies that are specific to only AdSense for content or AdSense for search.

Google brand violations: This policy has always existed in our Terms and Conditions, but we've now brought it directly to the 'Ad Placement' section of the program policies page so that it's easier to find. According to this policy, we don't allow ads or search boxes to be placed on pages which misuse Google logos, trademarks, or other brand features in the page content or URL, and which could mislead users into thinking the page is associated with Google.>


Deceptive implementations: We've clarified this policy a bit in the 'Encouraging Clicks' section of the program policies - ads may not be formatted in a way that makes them indistinguishable from other content on the page where they appear.>

Ad placement in emails and email programs: This updated policy clarifies that Google ads , search boxes, and search results may not be placed in emails, as well as alongside emails.>

Other Google products' policies: With this new policy, publishers aren't permitted to place ads, search boxes, or search results on, within, or alongside other Google products in a way that violates the policies of that other product or service. For instance, this would include placing ads on sites which allow users to download YouTube videos, which isn't permitted by the YouTube Terms of Service.

AdSense Orientation Webinar

If you're new to AdSense and would like help with getting started with your account, we're hosting a webinar this Friday evening just for you. In this webinar, we'll walk you through the basics of your account, show you how to start displaying ads, and also answer your questions via chat. Here are the details you'll need before registering:

Date: Friday, April 24, 2009Time: 6:30pm - 7:30pm PDT Register at https://googleonline.webex.com/googleonline/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=573101592

A clarification on ad serving

Today I got mail from google group about( A clarification on ad serving).This change in the URL where the ads are served from is due to the DoubleClick ad serving cookie that we launched on the Google content network last year. Since this cookie is on the doubleclick.net domain, we've had to update our URLs to point to doubleclick.net, as well as to give you the associated benefits such as frequency capping and improved attribution.

However, this is only an infrastructure change -- there haven't been any changes to the ads themselves. The ads you see are still coming from AdWords advertisers or third-party advertisers, just as they were before, and it's not the case that you're now receiving 'DoubleClick ads' instead of 'Google ads'.

Along the same lines, we'd like to reassure you that this new URL hasn't changed the targeting of ads on sites. As a quick refresher, each ad that appears on your pages can be contextually targeted, placement-targeted, or soon, interest-based. With contextual targeting, ads are matched to your content based on keywords selected by advertisers, while with placement targeting, advertisers select specific ad placements where they'd like their ads to appear. And with our latest addition of interest-based advertising, advertisers will be able to reach users based on their interests or previous interactions with an advertiser's site.


All types of ads to compete for the ad space on your site, you'll increase the competition for your ad space to help ensure that you're maximizing your earnings potential. However, you can also continue to prevent specific ads from appearing by using your Competitive Ad Filter and the Ad Review Center.


Want to comment on this post? Visit http://dragonjambala.blogspot.com/

More Want To Know Adsense Tips!! Visit --Adsense

Promoting Your Blog

Promoting your blogs-Best 16 tips!

1.Set your blog to Send Pings. When this setting is activated, your blog will be included in various "recently updated" lists on the web as well as other blog-related services.

2.Activate Your Navbar. Do this and you might start to see the effects right away! One of the features on the Blogger Navbar is a button called NextBlog - click it to visit the next Navbar-enabled blog.

3.Install Email This Post. If you use Email This Post on your blog, people will be able to forward your posts to friends. This may not have an immediate impact on your site stats but it enables others to publicize your blog for you.

4.Turn on Post Pages. By publishing every post as its very own web page with Post Pages, you ensure that your entries are way more link-able and more attractive to search engines.

5.Turn on your site feed. When people subscribe to your site feed in their newsreaders, they're very likely going to read your post.

6.Add your blog to Blogger's listings. When you add your blog to our listings it shows up in Nextblog, Recently Updated, and other places. It's like opting-in to traffic.

7.Write quality content and do it well. If your "style" is bad writing, worse grammar, no punctuation, and an ugly design, that might be okay for a niche crowd. But the idea here is to achieve mass appeal, so fix yourself up a bit.

8.Publish regular updates. Simple: the more you blog, the more traffic you'll get.



9.Keep search engines in mind. There are a few things you can do to make your blog more search engine friendly. Use post titles and post page archiving. This will automatically give each of your post pages an intelligent name based on the title of your post. Also, try to be descriptive when you blog. A well crafted post about something very specific can end up very near the top results of a search.


10.Keep your posts and paragraphs short. Strive for succinct posts that pump pertinent new information into the blogosphere and move on. Keep it short and sweet so visitors can pop in, read up, and click on.

11.Put your blog URL in your email signature. Think of how many forwarded emails you've seen in your day, and just imagine the possibilities.

12.Sumbit your address to blog search sites and directories. People look for blog content at Technorati every day, are you on their list? You should be. Submit your blog's url to Technorati, Daypop, Blogdex, Popdex, and any other site of that ilk you come across.

13.Link to other blogs. Links are the currency of the blogosphere and it takes money to make money so start linking.


14.Install a blogroll. It's a very simple yet effective social networking scheme and it has the same result as a simple link if not stronger: traffic! So if you don't have one yet, sign up for a blogroll and get that link-list going.

15.Be an active commenter. This is in the same vein as linking. Most comment systems also provide a way for you to leave a link back to your blog which begs a visit at the very least. So if you feel inspired, leave a comment or two in your blog travels. It behooves you.

And Last Not least
16.Enable Following on your blog. Following a is a great way to keep your friends updated on the latest activity on your blog. New blogs will have this blog feature enabled by default, but for older blogs you will have to enable it from the Layout Page Elements tab.

ADSPACE in April

Members of the Google AdSense team will be present at ADSPACE, and we're looking forward to meeting you. During the conference, you'll hear from our product management team, and our optimization specialists will be on-hand to answer questions and provide you with personalized tips.

If you register for a conference pass with our Google promotional code ADSPACED, you'll receive a 20% discount on the price. With the ADSPACE conference pass, you'll have access to all ADSPACE sessions and keynotes, an ADSPACE attendee lunch, and the ad:tech San Francisco Exhibit Hall. You can find additional information on the official site, including the complete conference schedule, who’s speaking, and who’s already signed up to exhibit.

action required for your AdSense account-Introducing interest-based advertising

Upcoming launch of interest-based advertising, which will require you to review and make any necessary changes to your site's privacy policies. You'll also see some new options on your Account Settings page.

Interest-based advertising will allow advertisers to show ads based on a user's previous interactions with them, such as visits to advertiser website and also to reach users based on their interests (e.g. "sports enthusiast"). To develop interest categories, we will recognize the types of web pages users visit throughout the Google content network. As an example, if they visit a number of sports pages, we will add them to the "sports enthusiast" interest category. To learn more about your associated account settings, please visit the AdSense Help Center at http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=20310.


As a result of this announcement, your privacy policy will now need to reflect the use of interest-based advertising. Please review the information at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=100557 to ensure that your site's privacy policies are up-to-date, and make any necessary changes by April 8, 2009. Because publisher sites and laws vary across countries, we're unfortunately unable to suggest specific privacy policy language.

News Show Wizard From Adsense Publisher

Do you run a site that relates to people or topics often covered in the media? Or are you looking for additional ways to engage your users? If so, we'd like to introduce you to our recently released Google News–based element for webmasters and developers. This element will allow you to easily integrate headlines and previews from Google News into any page to supplement your content and help make it more dynamic. Whether your site's visitors are interested in business, entertainment or fashion, you control the types of stories in your personal news show. You can input keywords like "Obama" or broad topics like "world news" or "politics".

Adding this element to your site or blog is easy using our NewsShow wizard. You can select the size of the frame, the topics, and the number of articles you want to show, and we'll build the code for you. Or, for more customization, take a look at our documentation.

For more information, see our post on the AJAX Search API Blog. To get started now, head straight to our wizard to cut and paste your own NewsShow.

Introducing expandable ads on AdSense sites

Introduce to you expandable ads, a new type of ad that can appear on your pages. Expandable ads are rich media ads that can expand beyond the original size of the ad unit, following a user-initiated action. This creates more real estate for the ad, allowing for more interaction from interested users. For instance, expandable ads may stream a movie trailer, show video game clips, or display various views of an item for sale.



Expandable ads will be served as third-party ads and will be created by Google-certified rich media vendors for the top display advertisers in our network. And like other Google ads, you'll earn based on whether the expandable ads on your site are priced on a cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-impression (CPM) basis. Keep in mind that you'll generate earnings from CPC expandable ads when a user visits the advertiser's landing page, and not when a user simply clicks to expand the ad.



Expandable ads -


Ads will expand only after a user clicks and interacts with the ad. Mouseovers or rollovers won't trigger the ad, in order to prevent accidental expansions.
An expandable ad won't expand more than double its width or height.
Once expanded, the ad will appear as a layer over the page content so that your content will not be modified or shifted in any way.
The user may close the expanded panel at any time.
All expandable ads must comply with our standard AdWords image ad policies.



How can I show expandable ads on my site?


You're located in North America or Europe, with a website in Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish
You've added the AdSense code directly into your site's source code
You've enabled image ads





Can I filter specific expandable ads shown on my site?

Yes - like the other ads on your pages, you can use your Competitive Ad Filter to block contextually-targeted expandable ads. Please note that for third-party ads, we recommend using the top level domain (e.g. 'example.com' instead of 'example.com/sample.html'). Additionally, you'll still be able to use your Ad Review Center to block specific placement-targeted expandable ads. In the Ad Review Center, expandable ads will be classified under the "Rich Media" ad format.

AdSense reports in Euros

International publishers is to view reports in currencies other than U.S. Dollars. That's why we're happy to announce that publishers located in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain can now view AdSense reports in Euros.

If you're located in one of these five countries and make this update, we'll convert your earnings to Euros on a daily basis using the prevailing market rate from the previous day. With earnings converted daily, you'll avoid the risk of currency exchange fluctuations between USD and the Euro. You can still choose to receive payments in either Euros or U.S. Dollars and select from a range of payment methods as well.

To make the switch to local currency reports, you'll need to agree to a new set of Terms and Conditions. Here are the main changes involved:

The party that publishers are contracting with changes from Google Inc. to Google Ireland Limited.
Publishers are responsible for paying any local taxes in their jurisdiction. Google will only issue VAT refunds to publishers with an address in Ireland.
The governing law changes from California law to either English or local law.

You can view the full text of these new Terms and Conditions by logging in to your account and looking for the green prompt, "See your daily earnings reported in Euro amounts!" on your Reports Overview page. Unfortunately, we're not able to interpret the meaning of changes in our legal documents for publishers -- if you have questions or need legal advice on interpreting the new Terms, please don't hesitate to contact an attorney.

Before agreeing to the new Terms, we also recommend that you download and save copies of your past reports in U.S. Dollars for your records. Once you update your account, you'll be able to view current and historical reports only in Euros. However, you'll still be able to view your prior payment history of U.S. Dollar earnings.

Facebook offers control to users

Members of the social network will have comment and voting rights over the firm's future policies regarding how the site is governed.

Founder Mark Zuckerberg said the aim was to "open up Facebook so that users can participate meaningfully in our policies and our future".

Privacy International's Simon Davies said the move was "unprecedented".

"No other company has made such a bold move towards transparency and democratisation," he said.

"The devil will be in the detail but, overall, we applaud these positive steps and think they foreshadow the future of web 2.0."

Mr Zuckerberg admitted that the recent changes to the website's terms and conditions had sparked a "firestorm".

Users had complained that it appeared Facebook was claiming ownership of their data - even if they delete their accounts.

The founder said: "We do not own user data, they [users] own it. We never intended to give that impression and feel really bad that we did."

Facebook has announced a new set of governing principles and rights and responsibilities.

Under the changes, users will be able to first comment and then potentially vote on future changes to the documents.

Facebook will enact a vote on changes to its governance when more than 7,000 comments have been made by users on a topic.

Mr Zuckerberg told BBC News: "We think that is pretty reasonable.

"We have designed the votes so a small minority of users cannot create a binding election."

Facebook is the largest social network in the world, with more than 175 million users. The controversy over Facebook's use of personal data is not the first time it has had a run in with users.

It angered some members in the past when it introduced a new advertising system, called Beacon, which delivered adverts to users on external websites based on their Facebook profile and habits. Beacon was quickly changed in order to give users an opt-in or opt-out button from the service.

Included in the new Facebook principles are specific details regarding the ownership of data.

It states: "People should own their information. They should have the freedom to share it with anyone they want and take it with them anywhere they want, including removing it from the Facebook Service."

Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook had undertaken to carry out all of its business within the framework of the new governance documents.

"We trust our users. We are making this so that we can't put in place a new terms of service without users' permission."

He said he hoped the new policy would "strengthen the community and the bonds between us and the users".

He told BBC News that he believed that opening up decisions about the future policies of the social network was not incompatible with doing business.

He said: "The important thing to keep in mind is that we are strengthening the trust people have in us.

"We believe that good dialogue we will get us to the right place... where everyone is more involved and happy."

Get Goghing on with AdSense for search

Few months ago, a number of AdSense for search optimization tips with you. Here's the story of one AdSense publisher who recently tried some of these techniques and saw substantial results after making a few small changes.

VanGoghGallery.com is an art resource site that provides information about the life and work of Vincent van Gogh. Site owner Greg Alexander runs the Van Gogh Gallery to educate and share information about the artist, and has also used the site to explore new Internet marketing techniques. Greg joined AdSense in 2007, and although he didn't know much about the program at first, he found it "a great opportunity to generate some revenue without spending the effort to sell ads." He also tried other ad providers, "but none of them yielded the results that AdSense did. In addition, AdSense was the only one that provided relevant ads for our visitors."

To help users navigate through the many pages of the Van Gogh Gallery, Greg added an AdSense for search box to the right column of his pages. By enabling SiteSearch and displaying search results on his own pages, he was able to help users find what they were looking for while staying on his site.

As an optimization experiment, Greg recently moved his search box to the center column of his pages and extended it to twice its original width.

In addition, Greg made slight changes to the search results pages -- he removed the borders from the ads and search results, and added a new search box to the search results pages. According to Greg, "altogether, these changes took less than 15 minutes to do."After making these updates, Greg noticed a dramatic and immediate increase in the usage of search on the Van Gogh Gallery. He found that "the number of queries performed each day increased 8 to 10 times, and search ad clicks and revenues increased even more." His search earnings quickly grew from less than a dollar a day to double digits since his optimization test. "Now we frequently receive more search ad clicks than our total number of searches pre-optimization," says Greg. "I'm still amazed at how simple changes can have such an incredible impact."

Greg has started using the earnings from his AdSearch optimization efforts to build and host additional websites about other artists. "Ultimately," Greg says,"we hope to use the earnings to fund research trips to Europe to see the works of the masters and expand the quality of information we offer visitors to our sites."

Adsense launched a brand new English Help Forum to make it easier for publishers to ask questions and share advice. Now, we're happy to announce that this Help Forum platform is available for publishers in seven additional languages: French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian. To start posting on these forums, sign in with your Google Account.


If you're using the new platform for the first time, some of the new features you'll notice include the ability to vote on a best response to each question, receive answers to your posted questions by email, and subscribe via RSS feed. We've also introduced more community-building aspects to the forum, such as a customizable profile page and a rating system that rewards you for your contributions. Finally, we've integrated a CSE search box on each page, which will allow you to find answers to your questions across the Forum, Help Center, and the blog.

Our Help Forums are also available on Google Groups in Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Dutch, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Slovak, and Turkish -- we'll be sure to let you know when we're able to migrate these languages to our new platform.

Payments by Western Union now available in Indonesia-Adsense

If you're located in Indonesia, you can now sign up to receive your AdSense payments in cash using the worldwide Western Union money transfer service. This payment method is quick, easy, and free -- that means no more waiting for checks to arrive in the mail or to clear at the bank.

A few things to keep in mind that:
Payments follow our normal payment schedule and will be available for pickup at your local Western Union agent the day after they are issued.

You'll need to present a government-issued ID that matches your AdSense payee name when picking up your payment. If you need to update or correct the payee name listed in your account, please follow the instructions listed in our Help Center.

Payments must be picked up within 35 days of issue or they'll expire. If this happens, a payment hold will be placed on your AdSense account and the payment will be credited back to your account.

Payments will be made in US dollars, but depending on your local Western Union agent, they may be picked up in your local currency.

Follow these instructions if you're interested in signing up for payments by Western Union. You can also find useful information in our Help Center about exchange rates and other countries where this payment method is available. We hope you enjoy using this new payment option in Indonesia!

Add on to AdSense

Do you regularly work with your webpages and AdSense implementation, tinkering with HTML or PHP and creating images and code on the fly? If you do, Firefox add-ons can help streamline the process of creating webpages. Here are some in particular that you may find useful:

ColorZillaThis extension tells you which RGB or hex color you're looking at, to help you make sure you created that logo for your business with just the right shade of blue, for instance. The tool also creates custom color palettes while you're browsing, so you can use them in your designs.

MeasureItLike the name says, use this add-on to measure the width and height in pixels of any element you see on a webpage. It's very simple to use, and you can define how much space you have left for that AdSense ad unit on the right-side. :)


IE ViewDo you frequently use Internet Explorer to check how your website renders on that browser? This add-on allows you to view the way any page would look if it were opened in IE, without the hassle of opening another browser. You can also see pages that aren't Firefox-friendly much more easily.


WebDeveloper toolbar This all-in-one toolbar gives you quick control over things like JavaScript display, form and CSS elements, screen resizing (so you know what your website looks like in smaller resolutions), HTML validation, and much more.

Hopefully, we'll soon have a similar set of add-ons for Chrome, and we'll be sure to share them with our readers.

Ads back up on Blogger-Adsense

If you have a Blogger site, some of you may have noticed that your ad units began showing public service announcements (PSAs) in the last nine hours. This was due to a technical issue that we've now identified and resolved. As a result, you should now begin seeing paid ads on your pages again.If you're still displaying PSAs after 24 hours, we recommend reviewing our Help Center and using our PSA troubleshooter.

robots.txt

User-Agent: *Allow: /2008/06/adsense-publisher-crawl.htmlAllow: /2008/04/promoting-your-referrals-properly.htmlAllow: /2008/07/adsense-referrals.htmlAllow: /2008/05/website-design-101.htmlAllow: /2008/06/refinance.htmlAllow: /Allow: /2007/08/dragon-jambala.htmlAllow: /2009/01/update-on-us-tax-forms-for-2008.html
User-Agent: GooglebotAllow: /2008/03/repairmycreditnow.htmlAllow: /2008/03/search-engines-and-link-building.htmlAllow: /2008/06/adsense-publisher-crawl.htmlAllow: /2008/04/promoting-your-referrals-properly.htmlAllow: /2008/07/adsense-referrals.htmlAllow: /2008/05/website-design-101.htmlAllow: /2008/06/refinance.htmlAllow: /Allow: /2007/08/dragon-jambala.htmlAllow: /2009/01/update-on-us-tax-forms-for-2008.html

Update on US tax forms for 2008

This is a friendly reminder that we're currently preparing and mailing tax forms to eligible U.S. publishers and will be sending them out by the end of January. Please keep in mind that not all U.S. AdSense publishers will receive a tax form from Google.How do you know whether to expect a tax form? We'll send you one if:

You submitted a Form W-9, are not a corporation, and were paid at least US $600 in 2008, OR
You indicated that you are subject to backup withholding and had taxes withheld-

If you qualify for a tax form, you can expect it to arrive at the address listed in your account by early February. We recommend checking your account to ensure that your mailing address is up-to-date; you can make any necessary updates by following the instructions in our Help Center. Please note that payments dated in 2008 will be reported in 2008. This means that unpaid earnings from 2008 that are rolled over to 2009 (for example, December 2008 earnings paid in January 2009) will not be included.

If you won't be receiving a tax form, but you still have questions on how to report the payments you received from AdSense, please consult your local tax advisor.

Asking Dave Taylor about AdSense

Inside AdSense: Where did the idea for your 'Ask Dave Taylor' site come from?

Dave Taylor: There's a great backstory, actually. I've written twenty different books on various business and technical topics, including Teach Yourself Unix in 24 Hours and Creating Cool Web Sites. Each time I'd publish, I would be sure to include my email address and other contact information. Problem was, people would send me email with questions. Lots of email with questions.

Over time I found myself answering the same questions again and again and realized that there had to be a better way for readers to search through an archive of already answered questions. I tried an online discussion forum, but it didn't really work very well (though it did give me an excuse to write my own bbs system from scratch, but that's another story.

Then early in 2003 this "weblog" thing started to gain a bit of traction. When I first saw how it was built upon the concept of an author writing entries and others being able to add their comments, I realized that it could be ideal for my needs.

IA: Why did you join the AdSense program?

DT: As a businessperson, I had always viewed my website as a cost center. I mean, you had to pay for hosting, you had to pay for graphic design, you had to pay for Internet connectivity, etc. That was just my mindset. It was a marketing expense and its purpose was lead generation for my consulting and book sales.

In mid-2003 my friend told me about this "AdSense thing" and said that he'd been experimenting with it and making some money. So I finally decided that I'd try putting some adverts on my site (I'd been on the Web since 1996 but never had any adverts on my sites until that point). That first month I made more than I expected by simply adding the AdSense adverts to my pages and was surprised as heck.

That's when it hit me, that my website was becoming a profit center for my business, not a cost center. I began to pay more attention to the site and published new content on a more regular basis. Within a few months I was earning enough to pay my mortgage, and today my website, and specifically Google AdSense, is a primary revenue stream for my entire company.

IA: Can you talk a little about your experience with optimizing your ads?

Enter A/B testing. I read and talked with many AdSense publishers, tried what they suggested and what had worked for them, fiddled with my own ideas, and generally tried every variation I could imagine to see if I could improve the click-through-rate of my ad blocks. The greatest boosts I saw in clickthrough rate were when I moved the advert into the middle of my articles, when I made sure it had the same color background as the material around it, and when there wasn't a solid border or other visual element to make the ad stand out from the surrounding content.

Truth be told, I've also paid close attention to the sites profiled on the AdSense blog, looking at how they integrated ads into their own design and trying to emulate their successful techniques on my own site.

IA: Glad to hear you used the blog! Any other optimization tips for our readers?

Focus on generating really good content that meets real user needs.
Design your blog so that there are minimal distractions for the user.
Wrap your blog entry around the Google ad unit and put the ads where users will see them, though make sure you have them visually distinct from your content: trying to trick readers into clicking on ads is a definite no-no and anti-reader too.

Vista tools

You want to find a program you do not use very often, you know it is installed, but you just cannot find it. Windows Vista lets you search straight from the Start Menu and you do not even need to take your hands off the keyboard because the first result is already selected.

This means that you can cut down on the number of shortcuts you need to create, but it does not come naturally to some people.

Since the desktop metaphor was invented, navigating your way around a computer has been about using the mouse, and having all the icons on display. It is like having all your books and tools out and within arms reach.

The more stuff you have, the less useful this method becomes, so it is only natural that we are moving to search-centric navigation.

The search begins as soon as you enter the first characters. You can search for e-mails and websites you have visited. It searches within other documents too, so you are not limited to searching for the filename of a Word document, you can look for matches inside all the Word documents you have.

Speech recognition

There are actually some features about Windows XP that I miss because they are still the quickest way of doing things for me. It is the File Menu I am talking about here. It has been so familiar, so long I feel a bit lost without it.


If you feel the same way, just tab the ALT key and it comes straight back. In fact, you can avoid pressing the keys at all, because Windows understands your voice.

Speech recognition within Windows is not actually new. There has been support for it hidden inside Office since 2002 and you have been able to buy off-the shelf software which does this for years. But now, Windows can do all that itself.

It is still not the easiest to start though, you have to go to the Control Panel, select Ease of Access, then Speech Recognition Options.

First you have to select the kind of microphone you are using, and then train the computer to recognise how you say different types of words. Normally this involves spending 20 minutes or so reading passages from out-of-copyright books. This can get very tedious, but it is necessary if you want the results to be anything like accurate. The only other thing you will need is a good microphone.
STUMBLE IT !

Behind the scenes of scheduled maintenance

AdSense Software Engineer -

We know many of you have questions about what we work on during our monthly scheduled maintenance and how this work affects you. As one of the engineers who's involved with this maintenance, I'd like to provide some insight into what goes on during these periods.

First, you're probably used to hearing us say that maintenance won't affect your ad serving, and that your earnings will still be tracked as normal. Here's why: when someone visits your site, one of our many ad servers decides which ads we'll show on your pages, and we log the fact that we delivered those ads to your site. We use this information to calculate the number of ad impressions your site visitors generated. Likewise, any clicks on those ads get logged by another of our ad servers. These servers operate independently, so as we roll out upgrades, we can update groups of ad servers without impacting overall ad serving or our internal logs.

Reporting, on the other hand, is quite a different issue, and this is why you aren't able to access your account during maintenance periods. The stats logged by our ad servers aren't immediately reflected in your reports, as they need to be collected and tallied in one place before we can give you a single summary of your ad impressions, clicks, and earnings. Our systems diligently work around-the-clock to collect this data from our many ad servers and tally it all up for each publisher, generally updating the reports with recent stats every 15 to 30 minutes.

Although many of our software upgrades occur throughout the month without any noticeable impact to you, certain types of reporting upgrades just aren't practical to perform on-the-fly. When we perform our monthly maintenance, we have a chance to put this reporting collection on hold for these big upgrades. This lets us upgrade our databases, prepare our systems for new features, and perform the necessary tasks needed to keep a complex system like this one running smoothly.

Some of you have noticed that impression and click stats appear a bit low after we bring the AdSense site back online, wondering if maybe AdSense maintenance is used to change data to affect your earnings. That's a theory I'm happy to debunk: this discrepancy is actually a reporting artifact, occurring because we pause stats tallying during our maintenance period. After resuming, our reporting systems have to digest all of the accumulated impression and click logs, and there's a lot of data! It takes the reporting systems a little while to process the logs, but rest assured that once we get the chance to catch up, the reports will reflect all of the impressions, clicks, and earnings that occurred during the maintenance period. If you're concerned about the stats you're seeing, we recommend checking back throughout the day as your reports are updated.

I hope this explanation provides a better picture of what we're doing during these maintenance periods. Though I do have to work the occasional Saturday, it's worth it to make sure your stats are accurate and everything's working smoothly. (Hey, at least it gives me the chance to sing cheesy 80's pop music in the office to my heart's content without disturbing too many other engineers!)

Microsoft begins Windows 7 push

The first public trial, or beta, version of Windows 7 has been released.

Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer used his keynote speech at CES to announce that software developers would get at the trial version on 7 January.

On 9 January members of the public will get the chance to download the successor to Windows for themselves.

Mr Ballmer said Windows 7 would be the pivot of a broader Microsoft push to improve the way its separate software and service families work together.

In delivering the opening keynote, Mr Ballmer has taken over from Bill Gates - who in 2008 bowed out of day-to-day involvement with the company he founded.

In a nod to the chilly economic climate, Mr Ballmer said: "We face some really big challenges. We are all feeling it and its impact will likely be with us for some time."

But, he said, the global economic slowdown would not hobble the pace of technological change.

"I believe our digital lives will only continue to get richer," said Mr Ballmer. "There's no turning back from the connected world."

The newest version of the Windows operating system would, he said, be the "linchpin" of an effort to make it easier for customers to do more with the different Microsoft gadgets and services they use.

Gadget family

Although Windows 7 was a trial version it was, said Mr Ballmer, almost "feature complete" and would help to re-define the way people thought of the software.

Instead of it being an operating system mainly associated with a PC, he said, Windows was becoming a "connected platform and experience".

Microsoft is expected to cap the number of copies of the beta version of Windows 7 available to the public. The minimum requirements for running Windows 7 are a PC with a 1 Ghz processor, 1GB of RAM, 16 GB of disk space, 128MB of video memory and support for DX9 graphics.

Some of the Windows 7's features help it work with other devices. A "home group" system makes it straightforward to enrol PCs, Xbox consoles, media servers and other gadgets into a local network that can share media and content.

Demonstrations during Mr Ballmer's keynote also showed changes to Windows Live online services that let it act as a co-ordinating centre for many of the things people do on the web.

In connection with this Mr Ballmer announced a deal with Facebook which would mean any changes a member made to their page on the social networking site would be echoed on their Windows Live pages.

Another feature shown off was a "Quick Add" system that made it easy to annotate e-mail and instant messages with weblinks and other information from specific categories, such as restaurant locations, without firing up separate applications.

Another demonstration showed a phone running Windows Mobile being used to control the list of favourite TV shows and movies that customers of Microsoft's internet TV system Media Room can compile.

"Today much of the stuff we care about sits in silos; on a PC, phone or the web," said Mr Ballmer. "Your experiences are split when you move from one to another."

"Increasingly these barriers are going away," he said, adding that the internet would act as the cloud linking all three.

He predicted that the PC, phone and TV would become closely connected devices that acted as an individual's digital "ecosystem".

"Connecting all these devices together is the last mile in creating a real breakthrough experience for consumers," said Mr Ballmer.

Adsense-Year in review: 2008

As 2008 winds down, we'd like to follow tradition and close out the year with a look back at a few of the biggest happenings in AdSense.In 2008, we introduced new features like AdSense for feeds and an improved version of AdSense for search to help you generate additional forms of revenue. We brought Google Ad Manager out of beta to help publishers with smaller direct sales teams more efficiently sell, schedule, and deliver their ad inventory. At the same time, we worked towards providing more information within AdSense accounts. In April, we enabled the Ad Review Center in all accounts to help you review ads placement-targeted to your sites. And in response to requests for more insight into your reports, we launched link unit reporting and began inviting publishers to link their AdSense accounts with Analytics.

Internationally, we launched AdSense for content in Thai and also expanded Western Union payments to a number of new countries such as Egypt, Taiwan, and Panama. To help more publishers find answers to their questions, we launched AdSense Help Forums in Hebrew, Czech, and Slovak.

On the English Help Forum, we celebrated our 50,000th member and then unveiled a new platform with additional capabilities. Now, forum participants can vote on the best answer to their questions, subscribe to individual discussions, and receive replies to their threads via email.

In news closest to home here on the blog, the Inside AdSense family continued to grow with the launch of blogs in Russian and Traditional Chinese. With your support, our 13 global AdSense blogs received 3.8 million pageviews from 2.4 million visits this year. Through our blogs, we brought you a Newbie Fridays series, 'Optimisation Essentials' videos from our Australian team, and began distributing AdSense stickers. Check out the sticker requests, postcards, and notes we received in the photo on the right :)

Last but not least, the 2008 Reader's Choice Award for this year's most visited post goes to our April Fool's joke, 'Introducing AdSense for conversations'. Co-author Julie Beckmann had this to say: "A lot of hard work went into omega testing the product for this post. While I found the hat fit snugly, I was disappointed to learn the effect my Orange County upbringing had on my chats -- 17 'like's' sprinkled into a two-minute conversation? My chats aren't fit to be placement-targeted."