thoughtsignals

Just kidding. I’d love to have your ads (maybe, we can talk).

But for advertisers wary of placing ads in places where the content may be unpredictable and perhaps inappropriate, Feedburner has introduced AdClimate. The tool enables advertisers to identify key words that are problematic and keep their ads off posts that contain those key words.

By way of example, let’s say you have an aversion to the word, “wingnut” and the thought of your ad for pinenuts showing up in a publisher’s blog post about the history of wingnuts would be totally unacceptable (hey - who are we to judge?) AdClimate to the rescue. In addition to screening a multi-language default list of inappropriate language, advertisers can submit their own list of keywords next to which they don’t want their ad to appear - wingnuts and all.

Do other online ad providers, like Google, do this? I don’t know. I bet this will be popular, though.

Link.

Goodbye, FeedDemon, hello Google Reader.

Like lots of folks, I’ve been trying out Google Reader over the past week or so. My verdict: It’s my new default feed reader.

For a long time I’ve been using FeedDemon on my home PC, synched to Newsgator for Web-only access. Before that it was FeedDemon synched to Bloglines, and before that FeedDemon by itself. But Google Reader is the first feed reader I’ve tried that seems to almost match the speed and feel of a desktop reader.

The product is still in Google Labs, which is Google’s real beta stage, so it does have occasional hiccups. Overall, though, it’s been working quite well. One feature I especially like is the ability to give individual feeds multiple tags (or folders, which are the same thing). In Newsgator, etc., a feed belonged to just one folder, unless you wanted to subscribe to it more than once. In Google Reader, though, I can tag a feed “personal” and “work,” for example. Since I want to read some stuff only at work, some only at home and some in both places, that’s a nice feature.