Experimenting with Adsense and Keywords

I have been looking for tools and tips to optimize advertisements from Google Adsense on this blog without making it obtrusive and clutterred. As is readily apparent, this is a work in progress.

I don't want to hang the readers out on the visual equivalent of dead air; I also want to bring as much motivation and creativity as I can to the information presented here. I beg your indulgence over the next few weeks while I tweak some things around. I don't want to completely whore it out just to attract the most lucrative ads, but I do want to see if I can strike a balance with the ads and some informative and hopefully entertaining content.

Today, however, I am experimenting with the functionality of Adsense and the way it targets ads based on content. I may kick the tires with Chitika in the future; I'll burn that bridge when I come to it.

The reason for the test is that I found some sites that spoke about search terms that purportedly paid the highest amount per click. I took a look at some of them; most appeared to be focused at very specific information and didn't seem like the kind of topics that would normally come up in a blog like this one. Then I started to wonder what would happened if you just shoehorned some of these terms into a regular blog, trying desperately to make it appear like a legitimate entry while simultaneously hurling one's ethics out of the nearest open window.

It would have to be something like being a lawyer in Chicago being chased down the street by an attorney from New York, who ironically wants to inflict injury of a personal nature on you. Or really, a lawyer from an reasonably large city: Las Vegas, Miami, Jersey City... the list is endless.

I could also be likened to someone trying to perform Lasik surgery on you with a flashlight and a magnifying glass. And don't get me started on the mesothelioma. What the heck is mesothelioma, you ask? Essentially, it's a cancer caused by exposure to asbestos. It attacks the cells that produce the lubricating fluid that protects most of the internal organs. That's messed up.

There. This phase of the experiment is concluded. I feel I must go wash now.

Scott Sigler's Cow Prophecy Comes True Twice in One Week

In "Life Imitating Really, Really Horrifying Art" news, writer and podcaster Scott Sigler put out a story called "Ancestor" last year. The story revolves around a biotech company's quest to meld bovine and human genetic material to reproduce a common Ancestor , in this case a creature from which to harvest transpantable organs to lower the risk of rejection.

This week, there have been not one, but two stories in the news about experiments going on RIGHT NOW that were presaged in his story: One is a story from WIRED on an effort to genetically resconstruct what they estimate to be the missing link, the common ancestor to pretty much all mammalian life. The scary part kicks in with the educated guesses needed to bridge the gaps in gene sequences that there are almost no way of knowing for sure, the Rumsfeldian "known unknowns".

The other story was about a Dutch company called Pharming who have already combined a human gene with bovine genes to produce a cow that gives milk with high levels of human lactoferrin, a protein that helps babies fight off infections. ( Um, it also naturally occurs in human breast milk; seems like a solution looking for a monetizable problem, but that's just me.)

Is Scott Sigler psychic? A prophet? Or just deeply, deeply sick and twisted ?

P.S. If life starts imitating his current podcasted story, "Infection", I'm grabbing me a hazmat suit and heading for the nearest gun store. Check out the story and you'll see what I mean.