Category — Books

The power of the Internet totally fascinates me. Not 12 hours goes by after I publish a post reviewing The Adsense Code and the AUTHOR shows up on my blog. That’s kind of a mind f#@$. Thank god I really liked the book. lol. It just goes to show you that even though there are millions of blogs out there, word can get around quickly and people can find you in an instant.

Before I dive into the pros and cons of this book, I think it’s important to acknowledge how significantly the book has impacted the way thousands of Internet publishers use and understand Adsense. At this writing, the book is just over a year old and it has been heralded as an instant classic in the growing world of Internet marketing. After making the New York Times best sellers list in 2006, The Adsense Code firmly established Joel Comm as an authority in the world of contextual advertising. Regardless of what I say in this post, the numbers tell the story. This book was a hit. Here’s why.

Although countless millions of websites run adsense ads, very few sites actually generate enough traffic to really see large, consistent adsense earnings. When web site traffic is low, infrequent and unpredictable, it’s tough for site owners to see how small tweaks in the placement or configuration of ads on a page affect click rates and earnings. This makes maximizing your adsense income difficult. But big numbers don’t lie. When a website is getting large amounts of consistent traffic, small changes in the way ads look and where ads are placed can make a big difference to the number of clicks they get.

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Consider this excerpt I pulled out of my book notes from Stumbling On Happiness:

Nothing more than feelings? What could be more important than feelings? Sure, war and peace come to mind, but are war and peace important for any reason other than the feelings they produce? If war didn’t cause pain and anguish, if peace didn’t provide for delights both transcendental and carnal, would either of them matter to us at all? War, peace, art money, marriage, birth, death, disease, religion — these are just a few of the Really Big Topics over which oceans of blood and ink have been spilled, but they are really big topics for one reason alone: Each is a powerful source of human emotion. If they didn’t make us feel uplifted, desperate, thankful, and hopeless, we would keep all that ink and blood to ourselves. As Plato asked,”Are these things good for any other reason except that they end in pleasure, and get rid of and avert pain? Are you looking to any other standard but pleasure and pain when you call them good? Indeed, feelings don’t just matter — they are what mattering means.

Huh.

If you chose to only read one book this year, I strongly urge you to consider this one. It ranks at the very top of a small collection of books that have fundamentally changed the way I think. Daniel Gilbert is not only brilliant, his writing style is irrepressibly humorous, charming and entirely accessible. Stumbling on Happiness, which won the 2007 Royal Society Prizes for Science Books, is a joy to read and will change the way you look at just about, well, everything.

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I first got hooked on audio books some time in the summer of 2005 when I began working as an IT Auditor/Consultant. I travel a lot - more than most. Some weeks I spend as much as 10 to 15 hours in my car or in airports, which leaves me a with a lot of time to fill. Audio books are a great way to turn commute time into something productive.

My audio book addiction has seen a significant resurgence these past two weeks due to heavy commuting - I polished off 4 books in traffic over a two week period - my first read of Po Bronson’s Why Do I Love These People, and my second read of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling On Happiness and Howard Zinn’s A People’s History Of The United States. It had been a while since I’d listened to an author read their own work, but I’m realizing all over again why I’ve come to appreciate the experience of consuming a book that way for all the reasons that make it different to turning pages myself. Here’s why I love (and recommend) audio books read by the author: [Read more →]

It’s almost daily now that I hear some reference, whether from the Western Media or otherwise, to China or India. If you’re currently on a modest diet of TV and Web news, you are well aware that jobs in the U.S. are threatened by off-shoring, that China is rapidly becoming the world’s factory, and that India is becoming the world’s back office. You probably also know that, because of rapid advances in Internet and other communications technologies, the world is “flattening.” I’ve you’ve been AWAKE at all this year, you know that pollution is going to be a global fight for the next 50-100 years because you’ve been exposed to the hype about global warming. What you may not know is how the heck things got to be the way they are today. This book, in combination with Friedman’s The World Is Flat, is a killer combo for anyone looking to put everything that’s going on politically and economically into sharp perspective. [Read more →]

A common phrase I’ve heard associated with Tyler Cowen’s new book Discover Your Inner Economist is Mind Grenade, and less than 50 pages in, it becomes clear why. Although I have yet to come across an explicit and concise definition of Mind Grenade, this phrase has undoubtedly been used heavily when talking about this book because of Cowen’s uncanny ability to create “aha! moments” through expert story-telling using extremely well-considered, simple language. [Read more →]