Launchy – Free Fridays #15

Launchy is great little programme for Windows that doesn’t get in the way, but helps you access any programme on your PC without having to navigate to Start, Programs etc etc. Now hat may sound like it’s going to save you a whopping 10 seconds a day and therefore not worth bothering about. But for me. Launchy’s great strength is that it can find programmes that are hidden deep within the Progams menu.

This means you can keep your desktop free of shortcuts to programmes that you need from time to time, but aren’t as commonly used as a web broswer or a wordprocessor.

To open Launchy, just press Alt + Spacebar and an empty text box pops up.

Start typing and the names of programmes, folders, bookmarks start to appear in a list for you to choose from. As you can see from the screenshot below, the application icon appears as well to give you a visual cue when the correct programme is found.

Launchy is highly configurable and you can decide what you’d like it to have access to. So for example you can even give it access to your music collection so that when you type the name of a song, it’ll launch that file.

Between Launchy’s Alt+Spacebar and Google Desktop Ctrl + Ctrl in quick succession you can pretty much find any document or launch any programme on your machine with a couple of keystrokes.

Launchy can be downloaded from SourceForge, but their official web site is at www.launchy.net

Filed under: Free Fridays, Free Software , keystroke, launcher, launchy, productivity

How Accurate Is IP Based Geolocation?

I’ve just written a definition of Geoblocking for the Web Glossary and came across whatismyipaddress.com in the process. The part of the site that I found interesting is the home page. When you arrive there, they try to display your current location on a Google maps. They do this by determining your IP address and then looking up the location for that IP address.

I’ve always been impressed by the ability of Google Analytics to accurately pin-point my visitors right down to particular areas of a city. But how accurate is this information? Certainly in my own case it’s very accurate, usually attributing my visit to my district of town or the neighbouring one.

Filed under: Benelux, How It Works , brussels, geoblocking, geolocation, ip address

Yahoo Ads in PDFs. When did that happen?

I must have been asleep in November when Adobe announced that they were testing a programme let publishers place ads from the Yahoo Publisher Network in PDFs.

I was looking on the Adobe site today after they announced the new Betas for CS4 and the words Ads for PDF caught my eye.

This is big and I’m surprised that Google haven’t done it already as they are the kings of contextual advertising.

So how will Ads for PDF work?

Well at the moment, Ads for PDF is a Beta programme and this one is a proper Beta where you have to sign up and be approved. You also have to be based in the USA and publish your PDFs.

But this programme was announced back in November 2007 so Yahoo may soon be ready to let the remaining 95.4% of the world’s population have a go some time soon.

Once signed up,though, you upload your PDF for analysis (what Adobe call registration). The content is then analysed and the ad enabled document returned to you and you proceed to distribute the PDF as normal.

The payment model is pay per click so it works just like Google’s Ad Sense.

The interesting thing is that the ads appear in a separate pane from the document unlike traditional blended advert placement on web pages. At present in the Beta, the ad format is 160 x 600 skyscraper and will display up to 5 adverts.

You can see a sample here or if you’re a publisher in the USA, have a go at signing up for the Beta programme.

labs.adobe.com/technologies/adsforpdf

Filed under: Online Advertising , adobe, monetizing PDFs, Online Advertising, pdf, yahoo, yahoo advertising, yahoo publisher network, ypn