The recent launch of Google Trends for Websites was just a dress rehearsal. The real product that it is based on is Google Ad Planner, which the company announced today. Google Ad Planner is built for ad buyers who want to decide where to place their ads. It provides general traffic and demographic information for Websites, including gender, age, education, and household income.

One drawback of Google Ad Planner is that you cannot actually buy ads from inside it, not even Google ads. Advertisers have to log in separately to their AdWords or other ad platform accounts to do that.

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As if we haven’t gotten enough warning about free stuff of the web, here’s a classic case of such malware found by an unsuspecting programmer who just happened to casually do a de-compilation of a popular utility used on Google Mail that allows archiving of all your email. As the story goes, A programmer was on the hunt for a way to back-up his email from GMail which he submitted a request to CodingHorror.com for such a utility from fellow programmers. He was referred to a commercial program called G-Archiver which was distributed by an American firm Mate Media. As all freeware usually do (which is not as much as their advertising says) it disappoints him quite to the extent that he decides to reverse engineer(in the fashion of true hacking) the said utility only to find the email address and passowrd of the program’s creator within the code that raised red flags as to the reason behind the said suspicious details. As it turns out, the said program was sending private data with respect to the users who have downloaded and used the said utility to archive their Gmail accounts.
The program contained the said information (email address and password) of the programmer so the said utility can send information to him without the users knowing about it from any platform and location it may have been used.
Most of the sites which offered the program for download have removed them from their software offerings and the authors at ZDnet Asia where this was first reported have not been able to get a reply from the firm which distributes the said utility as to an explanation to the said event. This is a classic case of complacency wherein people rely on big names for their needs sometimes even sacrificing common sense in the process as sad as it may seem. The reluctance of the developers to reply to the said allegations. The programmer took the email address and the pasword using it to log-on to Gmail where he finds 1,777 email from all the people who have used the software including their passowrds and other vital information. So, be wary of free and sometimes harmless stuff, they are the ones who can do most harm.

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RSS feed publisher FeedBurner has rolled out a new option for monetizing your website. You can use FeedBurner to add Google AdSense in between posts on any blog or website. What you can’t do is the place Google AdSense advertisements in your site’s feed.

It’s a bit puzzling that the Google-owned RSS publishing company is launching a service that has nothing to do with RSS feeds. There are plenty of other ways to place AdSense ads in between posts on your blog.

FeedBurner makes the process pretty easy as long as you have “FeedFlare” on your website. All you have to do is login to your FeedBurner account, click the monetize tab, login to AdSense, and choose the type of ads you want to use. You can choose from 468 x 60 pixels or 300 x 250 pixels.

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Jott is a voice based online tool that we covered earlier this year. The basic premise is that you call a specified phone number, speak a message, and have it’s transcribed and sent as text to your account on a service like Twitter, a Wordpress blog, a Tumblr blog, or even to Yahoo Groups.

Now Jott officially supports Google Calendar. Users will now have the ability to speak into the system, specify a Google Calendar, and have Jott drop in an appointment. Great for on the go and have to set something up ASAP so you don’t forget!

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If you have Google AdSense on your web site in the hopes of making a few bucks, odds are you spend way too much of your day obsessively reading your AdSense reports. But for a company that has a robust web analytics tool, Google’s AdSense reports are a bit thin. You can find out how many people are clicking on ads and how much money you’re making, but there’s no graphs and no good way to view data that’s more than a few months old.

Fortunately, there’s a third party solution that gives you a much fuller picture of your AdSense Stats. CSV AdStats can download AdSense CSV files manually or automatically and loads them into a powerful analysis tool. Now you can get a solid picture of your earnings over time. CSV AdStats lets you separate out data from custom channels, or compare one channel with another. And best of all, unlike Google’s web tools, CSV AdStats lets you view day by day data from the time you opened your AdSense account.

The program does have a few rough edges. It appears to have been designed in French, and even if you select English as your default language, some menu items will appear in French anyway. But CSV AdStats is still incredibly useful for a free download, so we’ll let that slide.

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