The Official Google Blog was hacked this morning. Or so it appeared when I logged into Bloglines. Here’s what I saw for their blog this morning.

Google, fix your blog pleeasssee! <3 (P.S. Just t…

By trey

Google, fix your blog pleeasssee! <3

(P.S. Just to clear things up, I’m not associated with Google at all.)

Google’s response now claims that they unintentionally deleted their own blog and somebody else registered the name to make this post. So no passwords were lost or any system hacked.

Ever wanted to automate your bartending for home parties. This guy has the perfect solution. A computer and a few water bottles and your on your way. The worlds first automatic bar.

“The idea of the automated bar originally came from a website I stumbled across about a year ago. In October of 2003 Steven Avery, Dustin Cooper and Brad Greer of Harvey Mudd College build what they dubbed the “Bar Monkey.” It consisted of 16 reservoirs and pumps and were controlled by a computer and small number pad. The user entered a drink and it would pump out through a series of tubes. The idea was picked up by others and a website was launched at barmonkey.net for people to share ideas about their own bar monkey projects.

In early 2005 I began to gather ideas and draw up designs for my own automated bar project. By the summer I finalized plans and began to construct the bar framing. By the end of the summer the frame was built and I had basic software written to control the pumps from the computer. At the end of August, with the help of my roommate and Dad’s truck I was able to get the bar from my off-campus apartment to my new dorm room at my Boston area college (where the bar currently resides). The next two months were spent finishing the bar and software and getting everything ready.

On November 6, 2005 the automated bar made it’s debut. For the most part everything worked perfectly. Everyone was amazed and impressed that they could pick a drink from a list and have it appear in front of them in about 10 seconds.”

Video of the automatic bar in action
More pictures

Just picked up this list from digg.com

Here’s the top 15 keywords if your too lazy to look for yourself.

$54.33 mesothelioma lawyers
$47.79 what is mesothelioma
$47.72 peritoneal mesothelioma
$47.25 consolidate loans
$47.16 refinancing mortgage
$45.55 tax attorney
$41.22 mesothelioma
$38.86 car accident lawyer
$38.68 ameriquest mortgage
$38.03 mortgage refinance
$37.55 refinancing
$35.99 auto accident attorney
$35.52 equity mortgage
$34.34 mesothelioma texas
$34.05 mortgages

Interesting to see mesothelioma and mortgage related terms rate so high. Seems this show how much advertising will make in the long run off folks who are searching for such services.

Performancing released metrics to the public today. This means that any blogger or webmaster can use performancing to track their adsense clicks. Performancing in addition to tracking adsense clicks provides a full range of statistics for analyzing the traffic to and from your blog. It’s super simpler to setup. Just register for a user name, select your blogging tool (Blogger, Drupal, Movable Type, Typepad, or Wordpress), and drop a few lines of code in your footer template. Sit back and wait an hour or two and bingo! you’ll be off and tracking. The adsense tracking support gives you the exact page that an ad was clicked on and shows a “go to www.example.com” in the outbound links. This will give you a complete picture of where your adsense clicks are coming from and more importantly where your clicks are going(something that the adsense channels doesn’t allow you to report today).

There is much to discover in the system, for those that have no patience however (like me…), here’s a quick run down of a few things you should be looking at right away;

* Add multiple blogs - really, add as many as you want. In a couple of weeks, we’ll be able to show you the aggregate data for your entire network also.
* Subscribe to your metrics RSS - the little RSS buttons top right will give you a daily summary of your Metrics
* See Adsense data - Running Adsense? You’ll like this one then, and we plan to improve it, as well as support other ad systems in the future.
* Search Engine Details - Find the Search Engines page, then click on the actual phrase to get drill down data on each search phrase
* The rest you will have to explore, I wouldn’t want to ruin all the fun heh…

More…

Adsense will put the highest paying ads in the advertising blocks highest on the page.  The idea is readers will see the higher ads first and be more likely to click on them.  This is fine for some sites and content.  However it doesn’t work for all publishers.  The first step in getting high paying clicks is to find out which ad blocks user’s click most.  This is very easy to accomplish with channels.  Each ad block on your page should get an individual adsense channel.  Let it run for a few days and review your reports.  You’ll be able to see which ad blocks get the most clicks.  Once this is determined you’ll need to edit your page HTML (or template) to put the highest clicked ad blocks first in the HTML.  This sometimes means you’ll need to use CSS to reposition the ad blocks after the page is rendered.