An ‘Ogg’ is a tactical maneuver from the network game ‘Netrek’ that has entered common usage in a wider sense…
Vorbis, on the other hand is named after the Terry Pratchett character from the book Small Gods. – http://www.xiph.org/xiphname.html
After reading Small Gods a few months back I wondered where they got the names. Nanny Ogg is a character in the Discworld series and so is Vorbis, coincidence? Today I finally took the time to look it up.
Last week, while waiting in a lobby, I picked up a magazine and started flipping through it. I came upon an article about a blogger who signed up with “Google Adsense” and today makes $150/day off of advertising on his popular blog, this was enough for him to quit his day job. Wow, cool, I certainly don’t have the kind of traffic that’ll pull down $150/day, but I do get my fair share.
This past weekend I signed up for Google Adsense. You get paid per click, based on a secret formula. I threw ads up on a bunch of my website pages to see what would happen. Do people actually click these things? The short answer is yes, some do. Of all the ads I put up about 0.7% clicked through. And how much did I make from Saturday-Thursday? $3.27 so far (see report).
Now I’m working on fine-tuning it. Google doesn’t automatically tell you which sites people click through links on, but you can set it up to monitor up to 60 specific pages for clicking activity, which I’m going to start doing. I don’t want ads that are completely irrelavant to my page topics there, and although google is usually pretty smart, the ad for eyeliner on my Lilo splash screen how-to was a bit much, so I took it down. I also took down a bunch that I figured people visiting my page wouldn’t be interested in, which made almost my entire “computers” section of my site ad free. Most of my “writing” pages still have ads, and I kept all ads on WallaceAndGromit.net, because they are all on topic and I think people would honestly be interested in them (even I’m interested in them, it’s all for cool wallace and gromit merchandise! I suspect a majority of my money comes from it.).
Google doesn’t send a check until you get up to $100, so it’ll be a long time before I receive a check in the mail, but this is a fun project. Google Adsense is neat!
Something that is not so neat is President Bush. I wasn’t going to listen to the State of the Union address because without much intoxication I knew it would just piss me off. But we left PLUG last night, and got in the car just in time for it to come on NPR. Sigh. Well I was right about it upsetting me, I HATE THAT GUY! Rawr.
Michael left this morning and will be gone until late tomorrow night at a mountain retreat with work. It’s nice to have some time completely alone I guess, but sleeping alone sucks. Tomorrow some friends are “kidnapping” me for the day, and then we’ll go to movie night, which should be fun, I won’t be stuck at home all alone for another day %)
It’s lateish, I should find something for dinner.