Brads Blog

If you ask most people if they know what Google is, they might tell you it’s a search engine. Over the last couple of years, Google has grown well beyond being just a search engine. Their growth exploded once they offered there stock for public trading. It seems like every week, they are rolling out a new program. I wanted to go ahead and list a few of them.

Good Ol’ Search Engine- Old Faithful. I have grown quite accustomed to their search engine and it is the only one I use.

Desktop Search – They introduced this earlier this year and I use it. It makes searching for files on your computer a lot less hassle. I especially like it searches within emails.

Google Earth – You can’t help but wonder what Big Brother can do after you play around with this one. Google Earth lets you enter any address in the world, then takes you from space and gradually zooms in to that address. They do this using satellite images on file. The image is not a live picture, and I know when I looked at my house on it I could tell the image was several years old. There is an option to query directions but there are better programs out there to do this.

While neat to look at and play around with, I don’t think this program is very practical.

Adsense – This is an ad revenue program that is very popular among webmasters and bloggers. Perhaps you noticed the ads in the header of this page. This is Adsense. Whenever someone clicks on one of these ads, Google throws money to me.

Adwords – You can pay to have your ad published on relevant websites. These ads show up on sites that use Adsense.

Analytics – Just rolled out last week, this is a program webmasters can use to track their visitors. A “neat” feature of this program plots dots on a world map of where exactly your visitors come from.

Google Book Search – This is a program I stumbled upon just last week. Search here for a certain book, and you can preview the book before you buy it.

Blogger – Yep, Google owns them. Blogger is a very popular blog host. People can set up their own blog and be up and running in just a few minutes.

Gmail – Free email courtesy of Google. They have a pretty good spam blocker, and occasionally I have to sign in to the web mail to check for real email that got blocked. Otherwise, I use my regular email client (Microsoft Outlook) to check my Gmail accounts. They dish out email addresses by invitation only. If you do not have a Gmail account and would like one, I can send you an invitation just let me know.

This is not all of them, just the ones hat seem to stand out. If you blink you might miss their next one.

Something that really aggravates me is when certain political issues, school levies or other social issues are on the ballot on Election Day, and then gets defeated and then every Election Day thereafter I see it back on there again. This seems to be especially true for school levies. In my area, the local school district had a levy fail five times before finally passing. Now my property taxes are going up. Maybe after the issue passes we should vote to repeal it, and keep voting on it until it passes the other way. We can call it “Tax Tennis”!

Shortly after Rep. Jack Murtha made an ass of himslef by calling for the immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq, Senater John Kerry and his pals climbed onboard with the hype. Last night, the House of Representatives voted on it. The result? IT WAS CLOSE!!! The proposal failed by the slim margin of 403-3. I have to wonder what the liberals are thinking now that it actually came to a vote and now find themselves outside looking in.
Hey John Kerry- You have a large piece of egg on your face.

I recently heard on the radio the new song by Garth Brooks ”Good Ride Cowboy”. I never knew he came out of retirement, but I’m glad he did. I think country music as a whole needs it. I think country music has slowly been taking the shape of pop-music. I see more and more female country music singers wearing less. More males looking like rock stars. I guess it sells. That’s why I’m glad to see Garth back. He is an excellent performer and seems wholesome, not like the sellouts that so many of his colleagues are.

You may have read my post last week about Feedblitz, where you can enter your email address in the sidebar and have feeds emailed to you. I signed up for it a week ago and am quite please with the results.
Most importantly, I have received NO SPAM, as a result of this. The updates are delivered daily, but you can set this to how you want it. The layout is easy to read. If you do not have time to visit bradsblog all the time, or would rather not deal with rss, this is the way to go.
Once you get the feed emailed to you, you don’t need to navigate anywhere else except your inbox, unless you want to comment!

Well this is a new one for me. I was doing a google search and a link I have never noticed before showed up asking if I wanted to search Google Books. My curiousity led me to click it. I was directed to Google Book Seach(Beta). Looks like the’ve scanned in a bunch of books! I looked at some of the FAQ’s, and this service is not meant for you to sit there and read books online. It is to check them out and get a feel for the books. I got the impression that books that aren’t under copyright anymore may be available for online reading. This might be something worth looking into.

I began work on my first Bradsblog Newsletter and am not sure when it will be done. I am hoping later in the month it will be ready to send out. Feel free to comment if you’d like one. The first Newsletter will be more of a bio about me and how I got started blogging.

Phillip Lenssen over at Performance wrote about how many blog readers take offense to affiliate links in blog posts. I sometimes use affiliate links in product reviews, but otherwise I only use Google Adsense ads. I do this to help recover some of the cost of running Bradsblog. I would like to open this up for comment. How do you feel about affiliate links?

All the mainstream media is obsessing with now is President Bush’s low approval ratings. Sure they are low, and some of that may be justified with some of his recent mistakes, but I think as his term ends, those ratings will surely climb again. I am certain that after he has left office, he will go down in history as one of the great Presidents this country has had.

I don’t think I am off base in saying this and this is why:
9/11 certainly will be used as a point of reference throughout American history. I remember how united he brought this country shortly after the twin tower attacks. He seemed to bring the entire world together to fight a single cause.

Another big point in his presidency was the progress made in Israeli/Palestinian relations. The roadmap for peace, although a little bumpy at times, seems to have progressed. The death of Yasser Arafat also helped matters.

Tax cuts are a big one for me, even though I expect them to go through the roof again once the Democrats eventually get back in the White House.

Many people have forgotten that he was pushing for the creation of the Department of Homeland Security BEFORE 9/11.

Put those reasons with the many more I didn’t mention, and you got yourself a pretty decent President. I just don’t put much stock in the approval rating I’m being forced to watch on the news.

Every day, so many people start up a new blog and most have hopes of it becoming a masterpiece. They plan on having massive amounts of traffic, and maybe even making a bit of money doing it becoming big.

The truth is that most blogs don’t last.

Many times, the blogger just gets bored with the whole idea. Others get frustrated, putting countless hours into the blog, then the fact that they do not draw visitors wears on them over time. The reason I will discuss today is what I call “Blog Burnout”.

You set goals, knowing that you want to you want to post to it daily, or twice a day, or more. Keeping up a steady post rate can also drain on you after time. I will point out a few suggestions to help prevent blog burnout.

Make your goals realistic- If you live a very busy lifestyle, it might not be practical to maintain a high post count.

Don’t stress the blog- It is something that is yours. Don’t let anyone else tell you how many posts you have to have, or what to post about.

Realize why you are blogging- If you trying to make money on your blog, do a little research before getting started. Making money on a blog can take a very long time, if it ever happens. Most bloggers barely make enough to keep the site up and running? If you are just blogging for the fun of it, then you can rest assured that there isn’t as much pressure.

Stockpile Posts- I might have a surplus of 10-20 posts prepared, so that all I have to do is upload and be done with it. Set aside a certain amount of time and crank out post after post. That way, you really don’t have to worry about it every day. If a couple of days off are needed, no problem.

This really depends on you niche. With my blog, which features a variety of discussion points, I don’t often publish time sensitive posts, but this is something that needs to be considered when stockpiling posts. For instance-This particular post may have been written months ago, and stashed away for a time when I really don’t feel up to writing anything.

I would recommend using a text editor program such as Microsoft Word to compose your posts. This will help you with spelling and grammar mistakes. I use a single document with a shortcut on my desktop to draft all of my writings. It’s also helpful to add notes.

For example, a draft post in my document may compose a nearly completed post with notes such as “need link for mentioned article” or “need pic”. That way, when you decide to publish, you don’t need to relearn what the post needs. Simply finish it, give it a quick look-over, then publish it. Done.

Hopefully, using some of the steps I outlined will help head off any cases of blog burnout. I welcome any other suggestions you might have!

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