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“Us Now” Documentary
This is an incredibly interesting documentary on social governance. It’s well worth an hour of your time.
AdNonSense
For the past three years, I’ve been an AdSense publisher, displaying adverts on this website (at times) and on a number of other websites around the Internet. All of these websites have conformed to Google’s terms and conditions, and I’ve always revised the advertising displays as Google came up with modifications, new methods of advertising, etc.
Until Monday…
I awoke on Monday to this email, that many AdSense publishers have received:
While going through our records recently, we found that your AdSense account has posed a significant risk to our AdWords advertisers. Since keeping your account in our publisher network may financially damage our advertisers in the future, we have decided to disable your account.
Needless to say, I was quite shocked. Even from my ‘humble’ websites, I’ve made over $400 with Google AdSense in the past couple of years - notable income for a student - with $250 of that sitting in my account, waiting for a payout (I figure, if it’s in the AdSense account, I can’t spend it until I need it).
I appealed to Google, citing whatever evidence I could, protesting my innocence, and offering to co-operate with them in whatever way possible to ensure that the problematic activity was stopped. Reasonable enough, you’d have thought, for someone who they’ve had no problem with for 3 years, right? Wrong…
Thank you for providing us with additional information. However, after thoroughly reviewing your account data and taking your feedback into consideration, we have re-confirmed that your account poses a significant risk to our advertisers. For this reason, we are unable to reinstate your account. Thank you for your understanding.
A ’significant risk’ to their advertisers? Either they’ve been stringing me along for the past three years, or something fishy is going on. Canned responses.
I’ve sent them another message since, but they haven’t bothered to reply… and I don’t expect I’ll ever see the $250 that I’ve accumulated over the past 2 years, or so. They never sent a warning, never offered a reason, and for all I know, it could have been someone I dislike repeatedly clicking ads and getting my account banned. The worst of it is that I’ll never be allowed another AdSense account again.
From searching around, it’s not hard to find publishers in a similar position. Granted, a proportion of them have, in some way or other blatantly violated the terms, but there are plenty of others who have had their account disabled when they’ve reached a certain balance (around $250 seems to be common), or in the days leading up to a payout being due. Extraordinary behaviour, and it just goes to show that organisations like Google can get away with pretty much anything, without giving any rhyme or reason as to why. I’ve submitted complaints to Watchdog in the UK, but I doubt anything will ever get done about it.
The worst part of this? All the ad revenue all went to support non-profit entities in their server costs, domain costs, etc. Now all of that money needs to come from somewhere else.
Good job, Google.
Chrome Bookmarks Sorter
(10-Apr-2009) Application has been featured on Lifehacker. Welcome Lifehackers!
(10-Apr-2009) Whoops: The build process failed to bundle the right assemblies with the exe… so I’ve attached an updated version, below. If you had an error when trying to run this, please re-download!
I’ve had this one sat on my hard-drive for a while now, it’s a simple utility that sorts Chrome’s bookmarks by user-selected parameters. In a recent development build of Chrome, the developers added a “Reorder by title” option to the Bookmark Manager, but it doesn’t sort recursively, and only allows the one option. So, here’s something a little more.
I make no guarantees for it working, provide no warranties, or anything. If it screws up your computer, or whatever, I’m not responsible. This is strictly “it works fine on my machine”-software!
Simply run the application, sort your bookmarks, and re-start Chrome. Requires .NET Framework v3.5.
- Chrome Bookmark Sorter v1.1 (downloaded 1203 times)