Things and stuff...

It's been a bit quiet around here, but we've not been idle. To make up for no posts for a week, have four posts in one!

After doing a bit of research, and scouting through other blogs, we've decided to trial Google's Adsense. It should hopefully be unobtrusive, and mostly unnoticeable but it will be an interesting experiment. Personally, I've always wanted to know if the Google ads actually work, so this will be a good experiment to see if people do actually click on the ads.

In a similar vein, Google Analytics recently changed their report layout, and we've spent many hours playing with all the reports and statistics. It's quite useful to know what posts get the most hits, and so what people like the most about the blog. I've also signed up and am now using Analytics on my personal blog, as a way to see if a) it does get any visitors at all and b) if so where are they coming from and why do they come to the page.

Meebo has just released MeeboRooms, which are just like the chatrooms of old, just a little more advanced. Basically, the Rooms mean you can share media with the people in your room, and watch YouTube videos together. Obviously, chat rooms are back in fashion. :) They have the ability to be embedded into pages, but when I attempted to add a room to a wiki I'm working on, it didn't quite work. I'm going to need to spend a bit of time playing with it, but if I can get the room working on the wiki, I'll be very happy. Apart from the usual social uses of such a room, I can see it helping in distance education - especially being able to have a 'classroom' feel, where you can watch something with your classmates and then discuss it. Also, training sessions, and possibly, maybe, video conferencing. So someone could be giving a presentation, being filmed via webcam that can then be embedded into the Meebo room. The more I think about it the more uses I can think of!

I've started using Twitbin at home, which does make twitter dangerously easy to use. Instead of having to click through my firefox tabs to find my twitter tab, I simply look at my sidebar. It does make me glad I don't have firefox at work! I'm not following many feeds yet, but I can now see that changing now that it's easier to follow them. I've never been able to make the RSS feeds work in bloglines, so this will be a much easier way to keep up with things.