New Jshape, Google and a competitor

OOps... looks like I messed up on the date I mentioned regarding the SDTS meeting (see latest newsletter). Apparently the website and documents I referred to were published back in 1997. Thanks to Dale Lutz for pointing out the following page footer... "Last modified: Friday, 19-Dec-1997 14:10:01 CST"

Jshape 5
The latest update to the popular JAva map viewer and components are now available from http://www.jshape.com/gis/jsview. Its free to download and a user guide is also available

Conference Reminder
"Deadlines Approaching for Location Technology & Business IntelligenceConference".. thanks Joe for sending out these event reminders and announcements about 3 times a week... we get it!
World Atlas of Panoramic Aerial Maps
Thanks to KanGIS for this one! (kangis.org/learn)
From Joseph Kerski, USGS: The California Geographical Survey (http://geogdata.csun.edu/) wishes to announce the posting of a new Web resource, the World Atlas of Panoramic Aerial Maps (http://130.166.124.2/world_atlas) in its existing Electronic Map Library (http://130.166.124.2/library.html). The new map collection contains almost 500 panoramic maps of much of the earth. Coverage is uneven, for these maps represent only the experimental beginnings of a much larger archive that will grow with the passage of time

Google.. you gotta love em, but its also fun to bash them as well!

You've likely seen Google adwords all over the place. Those subtle little ads that appear on many websites. People pay to have their ad appear there and others make money for serving them up. I've experimented with adwords in the past and actually still serve them up on another site that I own and operate. My reason for using them is not to make money though. I serve them up as I'm convinced that Google gives you preferred treatment if you use their services (although there's no proof to that).

What sends me around the bend is the payout scheme for these adwords. A year ago I was serving adwords on a small site and pulling in about $400 a month from doing so... not bad. Then the IPO came along and low and behold, my cheques soon plummeted to around $50 a month (if I was lucky). What gives?? Good question. Google played dumb although I give them credit for always being prompt to reply to all queries - they must get millions of them!
On my other website I'm now serving more google ads than ever although I'm only making a fraction of what I used to... where's the logic here? Companies love to advertise and purchase keywords... beware though as websites can blockout web domains from being displayed, something advertisers may have no idea about. For example, if we ran them here, I could easily setup the cfg so that no competing sites could display google ads on our pages. Don't worry though as you'll never see google ads appearing on GISuser. Why would we let someone advertise in this manner? Google would make some decent cash as a result and we'd make peanuts.. it just doesn't make sense!

Google makes a fortune selling keywords but do they perform? Sure they do.. the real losers though are the saps that are serving them up and only making a fraction of the advertising income that they should be getting.

There is a bright spot to all of this... a competitor has popped up and these guys are for real. Check out http://www.kanoodle.com/about/brightads.cool - you might consider trying them if you want to make some cash from your website or purchase some keywords for greater exposure.