Here's Why

Playing with random toys

I really like having little spots on the blog that come up with something fun and different every time you refresh the page. I've added a random photo from my flickr collection on the main index page, and random GoogleAd link words on my individual entry pages. I noticed that even Cosmos magazine are using Google Ads when I did a search recently to see what publicity was on the net about Science On Tap. So I thought I might play around with GoogleAds again, even though I didn't make any money at all with them the last time. I've discovered they can be unintentionally fun. I've put them against recommendation, at the bottom of the individual entry pages, so that you don't have to look at them if you don't want to. However, when I use the "link units", Google's search engine picks out a little haiku sentence for me based on what the algorythm thinks my entry is about. The fact that none of the entries about Cosmos summon any Cosmos ads should tell you how hit and miss it can be with my MoveableType-based blog. For my Futurian report "Technological Singularity is a buzzword", GoogleAds gave the line: Islam Invented Christianity Science Fiction Another Futurian report "Length is Important" was about a meeting on the topic of the rise and fall of galactic empires. The first Google link? "Black writers". The link ads words are picked from a pool thats partly determined by the content, and partly determined by the advertisers preferences, and partyly determined at random. So some pages will have a different set of link words every time you look, and some will be exactly the same. For my Sexy Lettuce article, it just gave up and went blank.

About the author: Ian Woolf lives in Sydney, has a degree in Applied Science, worked as a solar astronomer, software engineer, systems programmer, webmaster, research assistant, Cisco CCNA tutor, Physics laboratory demonstrator, Computational Theory lecturer, and subject coordinator; while changing his career to freelance writing and broadcasting. Listen to Ian on the Diffusion radio science show on radio 2SER 107.3FM Monday at 6:30pm in Sydney or streaming audio on www.2ser.com, or listen to the Diffusion podcasts. You should follow me on twitter, here

Posted by iwoolf at July 11, 2005 1:09 PM