As usual, I woke up in the morning, check for emails, tickets, PM’s, and notes sent to me. Got email from Google stating that they’ll be retiring Google Adsense Referral. Read the mail:
Hello,
Thank you for participating in the AdSense Referrals program. We’re writing to let you know that we will be retiring the AdSense Referrals program during the last week of August. We appreciate your patience during this transition and here are some alternative options to consider:
Google Affiliate Network: As part of the integration of DoubleClick, the DoubleClick Performics Affiliate Network will now operate as the Google Affiliate Network for advertisers targeting users located in the United States. Similar to the AdSense Referrals program, the Google Affiliate Network enables publisher to apply for advertiser programs and get paid based on advertiser-defined actions instead of clicks or impressions. For further details, please visit:www.google.com/ads/affiliatenetwork.
AdSense for content ads: If you have less than three AdSense for content ad units on a page, you may wish to replace the referral ad units with standard AFC ad units.
If you currently use referral ads, either to promote Google products or offerings from AdWords advertisers, AdSense Referrals code will no longer display ads beginning the last week of August. We encourage you to take the following steps before the product is retired:
Remove the referral code from your site(s): Please take a moment to remove all referral code from your sites before the last week of August, so you can continue to effectively monetize your ad space.
Run and save all referrals reports on your desktop: Create and save all reports related to the referrals program on your desktop, so you continue to have access to your valuable campaign information
Why is this happening?
We’re constantly looking for ways to improve AdSense by developing and supporting features which drive the best monetization results for our publishers. Sometimes, this requires retiring existing features so we can focus our efforts on the ones that will be most effective in the long term. For this reason, we will be retiring the AdSense Referrals program. If you have any additional questions, please visit our Help Center:
http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=14882
Sincerely.
The Google AdSense Team
———————————————————————————————
Email preferences: You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about the retirement of an AdSense feature.
Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
Good move from Google. The referrals weren’t particularly effective for me. My total income were based on Adsense for Contents. Referrals have been underperforming most of the time. The last 2 months I got my account disable for whatsoever-i-don’t-know reason. Now that It’s growing up again for better flow.
Adsense for Referrals has been in the shadow of the normal AdSense ads for quite some time. We’ll be looking forward to the launch of Google Affiliate Network.
I know Bob by the theme BlogOhBlog designed him long ago, since he was the owner of BlogOhBlog. i acknowledge him to be the great, fast and independent designer. He blogs well too! Bob is one of my respectful person. To be honest, I actually learned to create Wordpress theme based on his themes. Although I’m not actually know him in the real world, but I’ve been following his activity (silent follower since I don’t have blog yet that time) since he was with BlogOhBlog.
After 5 months owning BlogOhBlog web, on November 2007, he decided to sell his domain/site and put the site for bid on Site Marketplace. At first, I was disagree, the domain was PR6, with great Alexa and Technorati rank. Dem! Is this for real? . But, considering at the age of the site (5 months only!!) and the site was sold for USD10,000 to Jai. It was sure a really great investment. Imagine, a Malaysian blog been sold for USD10K! This showed Bob really focused on his job, and he’s good!.
Now that Bob blogs at his own .my blog, BOB.MY, using Simple theme designed by him. I searched anywhere for the theme. After many of readers asked for his current theme, he’s giving away it for free!! Wow!!!
And now he’s giving away a present for those who qualify the review about Bob.my, a Simple Pro Wordpress theme. Every of his hardwork, even for freebies, were excellent. So far, I never found any of his scratch design. I love his design, serious. And I can say he’s the greatest Malaysian wordpress designer. Read here.
I am now thinking to have my own .my blog too. soon… Hehehe 
Dem! .MY for RM120/year? Do you find any, cheaper? huhu…
I’ve Just heard and participated Reviewback, a blog review exchanging service.
Simple!, you submit your blog into the site and then browse over the entire network and find other bloggers to trade reviews. You can browse the blogger sort by Name, Age, Google pagerank, Alexa rating and tags. To make it easy, you also can choose from blog categories to find bloggers with similar interests.
For me, this service is good for bloggers to receive backlinks from other blog. With this free service, you can gain more exposure for your blog, increase your blog pagerank, ratings and visibility. Register Reviewback.
After the fuel hike, now up with the paper products. The paper and stationary products will increase by 10% to 40% and may rise to 50% by the end of the year.
“The industry has tried to overcome the price surge without increasing product prices but we cannot sustain it anymore, so we are forced to increase the price of these materials and products.
“The public doesn’t have to rush and buy these products, as the increase will be gradual.”
Yeah!… Guess we don’t have to rush.. You won’t be surprise seeing DoubleA paper for about RM16 and even IndahKiat for RM13.. Dem!!
ps: After the fuel price hike, you’ll be seeing alternatives to cut down the fuel cost, how can you save money now?
pps: Kemut giler!!!
Toilet paper also increase!! After this you need to pay more to enter toilet! Huhuhu…
After months with Blogger services, Tun Mahathir Mohamad now moved to his own hosting blog. This because Blogger has classified his Blogspot blog as ‘Spam blog’ on 19 June 2008. Though it wasn’t actually a ’spam blog’ i think, but Blogger refuse to re-activate his blog. The blog now powered by Movable Type, one of web blog platform. You can go ahead and read the news at MalaysiaKini.com. And Oh!, maybe you can check his blog is one of top 70 most popular web blog in Malaysia.
See?? , this is why people start moving to own hosting blog.
I’ve been invited to Project Pogo Limited Beta Program, by AT&T, to test out the private beta of New Pogo 3D Web Browser based on the Mozilla code base. The Pogo browser offering a better way to experience and organize the web, with dense visual .
The Installation
The first time ever I downloaded a size 54.558MB of web browser. Well, size may not be the problem since it was a 3D web browser. Once downloaded, I continue to the installation.
The Pogo 3D browser requires you minimum Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon XP or better, minimum graphic of 128MB, 1.0Gb RAM or higher, DirectX 9.0c hardware compatible, and 32-bit display to run smoothly.
Since my Compaq V3000 (Intel 950 Graphic Accelerator) doesn’t meet the minimum requirements for the browser, I tested out Pogo with my desktop workstation (Nvidia 7600GT 256MB 256BIT). Surely this requires lots of graphic memory to run. I won’t recommend you to install if your workstation doesn’t meet the minimum requirement.
The Display and User Interface. (click to enlarge)
From what I can say, Pogo has a really different interface than most normal web browsers. You may find yourself easily used with it since the browsing were based on Mozilla Firefox. But you may need to get used with the “cells” browser (instead to tabs) with the dock of icons along the bottom.
It looks pretty nice with the visual representation of the “cells” functioning as the tab. But I’m not comfortable the docks and cells stucked at the bottom of the screen. I still configuring it for the best look. Pogo browse (I mean, 3D browsing) slowly with my Compaq V3000, but luckily, it shows excellency with my desktop workstation. But overall, it’s pretty! You may want to have a try of it at Pogo Website.
After months with Blogger services, Tun Mahathir Mohamad now moved to his own hosting blog. This because Blogger has classified his Blogspot blog as ‘Spam blog’ on 19 June 2008. Though it wasn’t actually a ’spam blog’ i think, but Blogger refuse to re-activate his blog. The blog now powered by Movable Type, one of web blog platform. You can go ahead and read the news at MalaysiaKini.com. And Oh!, maybe you can check his blog is one of top 70 most popular web blog in Malaysia.