Google to Sell Ads on Clear Channel's Radio Stations

Google made a deal with Clear Channel, the largest radio station group owner in the US, to sell audio ads. "The deal will run for several years, and will give Google access to just under 5 percent of Clear Channel's commercial time. That will include 30-second spots on all of Clear Channel's 675 stations during all programs and all times of the day, executives at both companies said in interviews yesterday," reports New York Times.

Google acquired dMarc Broadcasting, a radio ads platform, last year and integrated it in Google AdWords. They already sell ads on more than 800 radios, including XM satellite radios, but this is the first major test for Google audio ads.

Google wants to create a platform that allows advertisers to create and sell ads online and offline from the same place. And that includes TV ads, newspaper ads, display ads - everything managed from the same Google AdWords, using similar metrics, concepts and targets. In a recent interview from Wired, Eric Schmidt said one way to look at Google is "as an advertising system".

Visualizing Human Feelings

We Feel Fine is the name of the project that gathers texts expressing human emotions from blogs. "Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.)."

We Feel Fine aggregated a database of millions of human feelings that can be explored by restricting the view to several parameters like the age, gender, or the geographical location of the post author. In of the views (called "madness"), each feeling is represented by a colorful particle that moves around the screen.

"The Madness movement, with its network of many tiny colorful particles, was designed to echo the human world. Seen from afar, Madness presents a massive number of individual particles, each colored and sized uniquely, each flying wildly around the screen, proclaiming its own individuality. At this level, Madness presents a bird's eye view of humanity – like standing atop a skyscraper and peering down at the street. People bustle to and fro, darting in and out of shops, hailing taxis, falling in love, laughing, handling personal crises. From the skyscraper, the people below are like ants – their words cannot be heard, their facial features cannot be seen, and the notion of individuality is hard to recognize. At this level, each particle seems insignificant."

There's also a view that displays the most common feelings. Right now, they are: "I feel..." better, bad, good, right, guilty, sick, (the) same.

But the most interesting views are "Mobs" and "Metrics" that show the most representative feelings for a population (for example, men aged 20-29 from UK) or the most representative population for a feeling. The system shows that two times more women than men feel happy at the moment.

Why There's No DoubleClick Ad on Google.com

John Battelle tells Google's story in "The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture". An interesting episode happens in 1999, when Google still tried to find a business model and when DoubleClick's banners didn't seem the right way to make money.

Near the end of 1999, Google Inc. had thirty-nine employees, most of whom were engineers of one stripe or another. Omid Kordescani, Google's newly hired sales chief, was still plowing the fields for enterprise deals, but they were few and far between. With more than $500,000 (and growing) going our the door each month and less than $20 million in the bank, you didn't need a Stanford PhD to do the math: the company needed a business model that worked.

There was always the failback of simply running banners on Google's prodigious traffic — one deal with DoubleClick, an ad network that specialized in serving graphical banners, would probably net the company millions of dollars. But that felt like a sellout — DoubleClick's ads were often gaudy and irrelevant. They represented everything Page and Brin felt was wrong with the Internet "They didn't want to turn the Web site into the online version of Forty-second Street," recalls investor and director Michael Moritz.

Instead, the young executive team decided to try a more focused approach—it would sell text-only ads to sponsors targeting particular keywords. When you searched for "Ford cars," for example, an ad would appear at the top of the results for Ford Motor Company. These first advertisements were sold on a cost per thousand (CPM) model. (…)

Turns out the ads worked well enough, but they didn't scale. Revenue was limited by Kordestani's ability to sell, and despite his talents, it was difficult to book enough orders to create a healthy business. "It didn't generate much money," Brin recalls, referring to the program as a "hand-patched life preserver." DoubleClick, he adds, was the ocean liner Google would swim to should the life preserver fail.

Infinite Scrolling in Google Search

If you hate clicking on "next" in Google search, but you don't want to set a higher number of results in the preferences because the page loads slowly, this Greasemonkey script might be for you (requires Greasemonkey for Firefox). It loads the next page of results as you scroll down so it gives the illusion of "infinite scrolling".

This is a Japanese script as it was created by two people from Japan. One downside of the script is that it opens search results in a new window/tab, but removing that bit of code causes weird effects.

If you want a native "infinite scrolling" in Google, try SearchMash and keep pressing the space bar to automatically fetch the next results page. Microsoft's image search is also a good implementation of the concept and probably the first major search engine that used "infinite scrolling" (at first, Windows Live Search used it for web search results as well, but the feature was removed).

Call Google 411 Wherever You Are

Google launched last week a directory assistance service that uses voice recognition to automatically answer queries about the US local businesses. The service is free, but if you're not in the US or Canada, it's not very easy to see how well it works.

Fortunately, Yahoo Messenger lets you call toll-free US numbers that start with 800, 888, 877, or 866. This is a fairly recent feature that was added in Yahoo Messenger 8.1. All you need to do is call 8004664411 and follow the directions.

Skype also offers free calls to toll-free phone numbers, but Google's number is always busy.

If you discover some interesting bugs or funny answers, record the conversation using a software like SoliCall or Audacity*, upload it to odeo and post a link in the comments.

* Most sound cards have the option to record mix that captures the output signal from wave channel AND input signal from microphone channel. In Windows XP, go to Start/Run, type sndvol32 and in Preferences toggle the "Recording" option and select "Stereo Mix" (make sure you select in the main dialog as well). Then you can record the sound using with Audacity or other audio editor.

Google Pays $3.1 Billion for DoubleClick

I don't know if there's a single ad blocker or cookie filtering program that doesn't include doubleclick.net in its black list. For me, DoubleClick is associated with ugly animated banners and tracking cookies. But since today, DoubleClick is a part of Google's empire and will help it expand in the display ads area, where Google failed to attract too many advertisers.

"Web advertising leader Google Inc. said on Friday it has agreed to acquire DoubleClick Inc., a top online advertising network, for $3.1 billion, beating out other major Internet players with its bid."

The major Internet player outbid by Google was Microsoft and that was probably the explanation for this huge value paid by Google for the largest and most ungoogly acquisition ever made.

"Acquiring DoubleClick expands Google's business far beyond algorithm-driven ad auctions into a relationship-based business with Web publishers and advertisers. (...) DoubleClick's exchange is different from the ad auctions that Google uses on its networks because the exchange is open to any Web publisher or ad network — not just the sites in Google’s network," notes New York Times.

But what is DoubleClick anyway?

DoubleClick is a provider of internet ad serving software. Its clients include agencies, marketers (Universal McCann Interactive, AKQA etc.) and publishers who service customers such as Microsoft, General Motors, Coca-Cola, Motorola, L'Oreal, Palm, Visa USA, Nike, Carlsberg and many more. (...)

DoubleClick was founded in 1995 as Internet Advertising Network by Kevin O'Connor and Dwight Merriman. DoubleClick was initially engaged in the online media business, meaning it helped web sites sell advertising to marketers. In 1997 the company began offering the online ad serving and management technology they had developed to other publishers as the DART services. During the internet downturn, DoubleClick divested its media business, and today DoubleClick is purely involved in ad management from the technology end — uploading ads and reporting on their performance. (...)

DoubleClick is sometimes linked with the controversy over spyware because browser cookies are set to track users as they travel from website to website and record what commercial advertisements they view and select while browsing. However, the company maintains that it is important to understand the difference between DoubleClick's ad serving tags and the spyware/adware companies.

Update. In Google's press release, Sergey Brin says:
"It has been our vision to make Internet advertising better - less intrusive, more effective, and more useful. Together with DoubleClick, Google will make the Internet more efficient for end users, advertisers, and publishers." And what about the lack of intrusiveness?

Switch from Google Maps to Google Earth

Oftentimes I find something interesting in Google Maps and want to see it more detailed in Google Earth. You could try to repeat the search in Google Earth, but that's not the best idea.

To move to the same location click on "Link to this page", go to the address bar and copy the value of the ll parameter from a Google Maps address. Then type the value in Google Earth's search box. Here's an example:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&q=Paris,+France&layer=&om=1&
z=14&ll=52.046737,-0.198269&spn=0.024229,0.080338

If you want to save some clicks, after clicking "Link to this page", add "&output=kml" at the end of the URL and hit Enter. A dialog will ask you to open or save a KML file. Choose to open the file in Google Earth.

There's even a bookmarklet that automates the process. Bookmark this link or drag it to your bookmarks toolbar. Next time you want to switch to Google Earth, just click on the bookmarklet.

View in Google Earth