Bye Bye Google Adsense

After 5 years*, 14,910 impressions, 85 clicks and $19.81 earned, I am taking advertisements supplied by Google Adsense off of Marin Modus today. Despite the decent $1.33 CPM, profits are not the motivating factor here.

With Google's announcement that they are adding behavioral targeting capabilities to their ad network, they have required that all sites using Adsense update their privacy policies:

As a result of this announcement, your privacy policy will now need to reflect the use of interest-based advertising. Please review the information at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=100557 to ensure that your site's privacy policies are up-to-date, and make any necessary changes by April 8, 2009. Because publisher sites and laws vary across countries, we're unfortunately unable to suggest specific privacy policy language.

So, instead of updating or adding a privacy policy, I am taking the ads down. I do not make enough money from Adsense to warrant the legal work and because they do not feel it is worth their while to suggest legal language, I do not feel it is worth my while to post their ads.

So, as of today, Marin Modus is now exclusively a product endorsements site! The only brands you see here are things we like to use and no one is paying us to put on the site (though, if you'd like to hire me as a product spokesman, I'm all ears).

* Google Adsense first delivered impressions on this site on Thursday, May 6, 2004

Google Reader now lets you Comment

The way I share articles with friends is almost like a conversation. We each share subsequent articles to push forward the discussion. We are busy (and maybe lazy) and instead of articulating our points, we find and push articles that do. This has to be a weird modern way of communicating, but it works with certain friends.

That all said, we still do like to comment on the articles that each sends.

One of the frustrations I have had with the share feature in Google Reader is that when a friend shares something with me, I can not just send a comment about the article back to my friend in the interface. Instead, I would need to email that friend and that process took out a lot of the enjoyment in sharing articles.

Today, Google enabled a comment feature in Google Reader. This is great news and I am excited to use it and see how it augments the discussion.

There are dissenters out there. TechCrunch brings up some interesting points about Copyrights in a 2007 post.

For me, this is a welcome addition. Here is the official announcement from Google.

3/13/09 UPDATE: One more feature that Google needs to add is a 'Share on Google Reader' function for individual articles. Much in the same way that Digg, Reddit, Yahoo, and a multitude of others do. There are many times when I find an article out on the open web that I want to share. If I were to want to share it now, I would need to subscribe to the feed, find the post in Google Reader and then click share. That's lame. I just want to save and share it right from the original post.