This morning I got the dreaded email from Google telling me that my adsense account has been disabled due to invalid click activity. I shall be honest and say that I half expected this coming, I was shocked it took so long, they authorised the payment and it was planned to go into the bank and the end of this month – alas not. I have removed all adverts from this site and not putting any back on, if anybody is loosing out here, I feel it was google.

After reviewing our records, we’ve determined that your AdSense account poses a risk of generating invalid activity. Because we have a responsibility to protect our AdWords advertisers from inflated costs due to invalid activity, we’ve found it necessary to disable your AdSense account. Your outstanding balance and Google’s share of the revenue will both be fully refunded to the affected advertisers.

There is a site, which goes by the name of KnowEm which allows you to quickly check your brand, product or user-name across 550 sites. The free services lets you click each of the links to go to the respective site and secure that name but the paid service does all of this for you. Check it out – saves visiting 550 sites right?

Google run a thing called Adsense, the publishers pay Google money to have there adverts displayed and people can apply for an account which allows adverts to be placed on pages, such as this blog for example. This works on Trust in that Google do not want you or anyone else to just click the adverts to make money and the publishers hope google keep an eye on people trying to do this. It is Very easy indeed for google to suddenly one day ban your account and once it is banned, there is no way to find out why and no way to get Adsense back.

How Adsense can work

You have a site such as a Blog for example (can be any type of site though) and you place on your page the google code for adverts – google specify max 3 per page. When people are looking through your websites and providing google is placing the right advert, people *may* click the advert to see what the product is and even buy it. Best example of this would be me writing about Synology NAS Drives and the advert been about NAS right?

As your site picks up, so does the numbers that can click the adverts and slowly you get a trickle of money coming through, google check your account at the end of each month and once it is over £60 or $100, they prepare a cheque for the end of that month.

When adsense can go bad

There is nothing stopping me going to a website and clicking the adverts hundreds of times a day, what this will do is alert google illegal activity is going on and they will close down the adsense account. The advice I got when I did look into this was to install Statcounter and watch out for people doing such a thing, at which point you should ban the IP and hope you don’t get banned.

The suggestion is that if an account is found to be doing this, why do google not deduct the money that the person was supposed to have made them and send you (the owner) a warning? I cannot understand why Google are so quick to ban account, the honest clicks surely help them make money right?

For the record, I am not banned from Adsense, I have switched for now to another provider (BidVertiser) until I am happy to place Google Adverts back n the page.

If you ever wondered how many people have visited your site, what they clicked on, searched for and so forth then one such solution is StatCounter which can place an invisible counter on your site and track what people are doing. The Service is free but you can buy extra space for logs and so forth if you need more detailed stats. Installation requires you have a piece of code on your website (normally the footer) or you can add a wordpress plugin which will do the job for you.

What does it provide?

 There is many stats to choose from such as how many visited the site, what they searched for, what they clicked etc. Once such stat is Browsers used and in this (very brief) example it shows Firefox as the leading brand.

Another such stat is the resolution of the screen that they are using, this could help you maybe cater the site for people with smaller screen estate (such as mobiles).

A further good bit of knowledge is what site people left to and in this case it also shows if they clicked the adverts for example. You can drill down into the information and see a whole range of stuff such as IP and so forth. Why would this be good? If someone was going wild clicking the adverts, you can block them for example.

Feel free to give it a try and as I said this is a free service anyhow, so nothing to really loose. There is many other services that do this and provided normally by your web host but this is as good as any I say.

By now we’re all very familiar that the seeming anonymity of the internet can bring out the worst qualities in some people.

Sometimes you get those who hide behind their computers and become vicious keyboard warriors.

The best and most rational thing to do is just to grow a thick skin and ignore the bad comments, but Kansas City woman Breana Danielle Greathouse, 25, had enough and wasn’t going to take it any more.

Negative comments prompted Greathouse to pack a gun and get in a car to drive to Ottumwa, Iowa where she believed her online hater lived.

Greathouse became enraged after a boy named Forrest Jamison posted derogatory images and videos of her on the internet. The offending video’s since been taken down, but KCTV5 news has clips of it in its report.

Greathouse arrived at the home of Jamison, whose mother Janet opened the door.

“She came after him. I opened the door and I thought she had a camera in her hand but cops said she was holding a gun, a loaded pistol behind her back,” said Janet Jamison. “It scared me to death to think I answered my door and there’s a woman with a gun.”

Police said that Greathouse was armed with a .38 caliber special revolver loaded with hollowpoint bullets.

Janet Jamison admitted that her son Forrest may not be completely faultless in this case, but nothing should ever warrant a road trip to kill.

Heartland Connection has the official police statement:

On September 29, 2010 at approximately 9:45 AM, the Ottumwa Police Department received a report of a woman with a gun in the 1300 Block of Center Street Place in Ottumwa, Iowa.  The arriving officer found 25 year-old Breana Danielle Greathouse of Kansas City, Missouri with a gun in her hand and threatening to shoot Forrest Jamison of 1308 Center Street Place.  The preliminary investigation shows that Greathouse traveled from Kansas City earlier in the day to kill Jamison because she believed that he made derogatory postings about her on the Internet.

Greathouse was arrested and taken into custody without incident.  She has been charged with Going Armed With Intent in violation of 708.8 of the Code of Iowa (Class “D” Felony); Carrying Weapons in violation of 724.4 of the Code of Iowa (Aggravated Misdemeanor); and, Harassment in the 1st Degree in violation of 708.7 of the Code of Iowa (Aggravated Misdemeanor).  Greathouse was transported to the Wapello County Jail where she is being held in lieu of $35,000.00 cash bond.

Ever wondered if all them people your following on Twitter are actually following you back? You could go through the list and see how you can Direct Message of course (if you cannot – they are not following you). A Much easier way is this web site – Friend or Follow – feed it your Twitter name and it will soon spit out who is not following you back, you can then start to remove the crap right.

Want to relive the age old day of Windows 3.1? Maybe you have never seen this old operating system that people speak of? Well now you can in the comfort of your web browser – head of to HERE and press some buttons.

You may have noticed if you logged into facebook recently a message telling you about some up-coming features. From my brief reading, it sounded like something I had mentioned many times that should be there by default.

Groups

Facebook is great to share infomation, pictures and the like but you have to be careful of who you add. You might have read the stories of people writing how much they hate there job only to find they forgot they added there boss to the list and loose there job as a result. Facebook introduced groups a while back and this lets you put people in whatever list you seem fit – such as Work, Friends & Family. As of now, I saw nothing you could do with these lists.

The master plan

It sprang to my mind that it woul dbe great if you could post something and choose what group see this infomation, then only my family get to see the pictures of the cat while my friends get to see the dunken nights out and so forth. This is what Facebook are indeed planning from what I gather and if this comes in – i can see facebook not only been used a lot more but adding more people to the mix.

Thoughts

Will this new move along with Google Wave dampen Twitter which has limited ability to get a message across and no way to put people into groups?

Are you in the UK and are you in need of Ink for you printer at a cheap price, you want free delivery and you want it fast? I needed some ink for my Canon IP4200 printer as the colour was running out, I tried tesco ans they wanted £20 for there own brand Ink. I tried a few other places and they either had none in stock or they wanted £50 for the complete set, again there own brand.

I placed an order on Friday and using the code supplied from the last order – the set came to £8.99 which included postage I may add and it arrived through my door this morning (Saturday) – talk about a fast and cheap service. Don’t waste your money in the big stores, click he image and check out there site.

In the UK – Lord Peter Mandelson has outlined the details of anti file-sharing legislation set to come into play – naming the date when illegal downloaders’ internet connections could be cut off.
The Business Secretary, speaking at the digital creative industries conference cabinet, said that if the amount of illegal file-sharing taking place in the UK hadn’t dropped by 70 per cent a year on from April 2010 measures to cut off file-sharers’ connections would come into place from July 2011.

Piracy – what is it?

From day one of computers and the fact that all information is stored “Digitally”, people have found ways to share and make copies of items. I recall way back when the top 40 hits was played on the radio every Sunday from 4pm to 7pm and recording the songs I liked to Cassette tape, back then they said

Home Taping Is Killing Music

Is it not funny though that music did not die and to this day there is still shops that sell records, CD’s and the such? Is everybody who has a computer and an internet connection downloading illegal files, be they music, film’s or games??

Where do you get these files?

The majority of the computer based generation is happy to go to the cinema, buy the album they like and buy that game for the xbox, they do not even know about this downloading thing, they struggle to download drivers let alone music. The next set will know about torrent’s and would rather get the stuff that way then buy it, mostly as they do not have an income (children) and it is all they know anyhow.

The final set is the heavy downloaders – they know of this thing called “newsgroups” and probably grab everything just because they can. Will the above idea of been 3 strikes and your gone stop them?

3 strikes and your gone

This has already been tried in the UK before and all that happened was the ISP (who was not that big) lost half of there customers. The people who got cut off just went somewhere else and carried on doing what they used to do.

Blu-ray is now out and for me to enjoy this I need to buy a BluRay player (expensive) and splash out full cost per disc with a lot of the times movie’s I already own on DVD but seen as they are BluRay, higher resolution. Did they need to re-shoot the movie and incur new cost or did they just re-write the disc onto a new format? Would I have bought that movie in the first place or even went to the cinema to see it? The answer is no each time.