The Good NET Guide

The good NET guide, is here to the sole perpose of helping everyday uses get the most out of the internet. We all know there are billons of pages, and more infomation on tap then ever before. But its not always as easy to find as it should be. The aim of thegoodNETguide is to make it simpler,  from useful links to helpful tutorials.

The news, the jargon, the trends and all things internet

Last year, Yahoo still dominated display advertising on the Web in terms of sheer number of ad impressions on its properties, but social networking sites MySpace and Facebook came on strong. Some new data from comScore in its just-released 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review ranks the top Web properties by the number of display ad impressions.

Yahoo served up an estimated 521 billion impressions last year, according to the report, followed by Fox Interactive Media (i.e. MySpace) with 368 billion, and Facebook with 330 billion. Microsoft sites (No.4) only served up 218 billion display ads, whereas Google (No. 6) served up only 70 billion. (These numbers do not include paid search text ads)

Here’s the full ranking:

Top Ten Publishers Of Display Ads
in billions of impressions (comScore)
1. Yahoo! Sites: 521 billion
2. Fox Interactive Media (MySPace): 368 billion
3. Facebook: 330 billion
4. Microsoft Sites: 218 billion
5. AOL: 192 billion
6. Google Sites: 7o billion
7. eBay: 36 billion
8. Glam Media: 25 billion
9. Amazon Sites: 22 billion
10. United Online: 20 billion

Obviously, the biggest sites with the most visitors serve up the most display ads. This year, Facebook doubled in size to the point where it is well past MySpace and catching up to Yahoo in audience size. It is already bigger than Yahoo in terms of pageviews.

Facebook has more advertising inventory than it knows what to do with, although not all of it is desirable. But Facebook is now selling all of its display ad inventory itself after it renegotiated its ad deal with Microsoft.

Biggest doesn’t mean most profitable. Facebook might be serving up more ads than almost anyone else, but they are still selling at very low ad rates because they perform poorly for the most part. If Facebook can figure out a way to make the ads on its site become more relevant and useful, it has a lot of room to boost its ad rates.

You can download the entire comScore report at this 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Reviewlink.

For quite a while now, I’ve been following the progress of the Pandora , an open-source handheld for music, movies, and games. It’s hard to stay excited, though, when there’s the constant threat of the thing ceasing to exist. That seemed to be a risk for a while, but now we’re being told that all the hurdles are jumped and the thing will start rolling off the assembly line any moment now

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Pandora open-source handheld is go

Since the launch of the Nexus One, early adopters have likely had one question lurking in the back of their minds: who to take the phone to if it broke. You see, when the phone was first launched, Google was directing people to either T-Mobile (Google’s carrier partner) or HTC (the device manufacturer) depending on the problem, which could lead to an endless circle of hold times and few results. Today, Google has just rolled out its solution: it’s launching its own phone support line specifically for Nexus One customers. Call 888-48-NEXUS (63987) and within a few minutes, you’ll be talking to a real live Google support tech (the line is open from 7AM to 10PM EST).

This is, of course, a fairly major departure from Google’s standard protocol of making it incredibly difficult to reach anyone for phone support for most of its products. It doesn’t come as a total surprise though — last week there were reports of a Google job listing for “Phone Support Program Manager, Android/Nexus One” to be based out of its headquarters in Mountain View, CA.

The news was first reported at TMO News, and we’ve gotten a response from a Google spokesperson explaining the company’s logic behind the support number:

By design, we focused initially on providing the best possible customer support through our on-line channel, and our experience in the four weeks since the Nexus One launch enabled us to significantly enhance that on-line support offering. We have been able to address a large majority of customers’ inquiries successfully through on-line support, in combination with phone support from our partners, HTC and T-Mobile. That said, our approach with our new consumer channel is to learn fast and continue to improve, and we have, therefore, also been developing our capabilities to provide a number from Google, 888-48-NEXUS (63987) for live phone support for the Nexus One. Live phone support from Google, combined with an optimized on-line support experience, enables a superior Nexus One customer experience.

In other words, Google probably would have liked to have gotten away with online-only support, but it quickly became clear that wasn’t going to cut it.

In other news, Google has also announced that the ETF charge for the phone is down to $150 from $350. But that’s still on top of T-Mobile’s $200 fee. The drop may have well been spurred by the ETF inquiry recently launched by the FCC.

Got a Kindle? Get thee to the British Library! Not only are they giving away a ton of old 19th-century literature in e-book form, but they’re a special “first edition” e-book with the original typeface and illustrations baked in. The 1800s encompass nearly all of my favorite literature, so this is actually making me want a Kindle pretty bad right now

The rest is here:
British Library to give away thousands of classics away as e-books

We’re big fans of The Richter Scales, the musical group that have brought us Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas, Here Comes Another Bubble, and gut-busting songs at the 2008 Crunchies and most recently the parody of Silicon Valley at the 2009 Crunchies a few weeks ago. The group is releasing an animated video of its song ‘I’ve Got Mail and I’ve Got it Made,’ which was one of the two songs The Richters sang at the first Crunchies in 2007. As you may remember, it’s about what happens to a guy when he follows the instructions in all the spam email he receives. Enjoy!

Sit back, relax, and enjoy this extensive HD video tour of International Space Station . You better enjoy the ISS while you can.

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The ISS gets its own HD video tour

Last month SecondMarket published data on private company stock sales that they helped complete in 2009. They’ve now released last month’s data as well.

A total of a little more than $13 million in sales occurred, with the average transaction size of around $2 million. There continues to be very strong demand for consumer products and services startups (which includes companies like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, etc.). But the sellers are spread out more evenly across all categories, particularly consumer, IT, Healthcare, energy and cleantech.

36% of the transactions were sales of Facebook stock, and we’ve heard from independent sources that sales are being completed for as high as $40 per share (or a $17.6 billion valuation). That’s a substantial price increase from less than a month ago. Tesla took 29% of the transactions, and sales of Solyndra stock were 28% of the total. Gridpoint rounded the group out with 7% of the total.

The complete report is below, and you can download the pdf here.

Beware the coming of the spider! This strange creature was seen in a back alley, eating cats, small dogs, and any memory chips it happens to find. It has the capability to disguise itself as the Lian Li T1 Pitstop, which is a Mini-atx case with room for a full size power supply. Of course, no word on pricing, availability, or even if we’ll see this case in the US, but it’s a fun video to watch

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Lian Li “spider” case seen creeping around Taiwan

The Olympus E-PL1 budget micro four thirds camera launched last week but Amazon already has it available for pre-order. On one hand this pre-order will ensure you’re one of the first kids at school with the new toy, but that’s not going to be until next month away so you may wanna hold on to your $600 a bit longer. Something a bit more tantalizing might come along

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Amazon is ready to take you Olympus E-PL1 pre-orders

Short Version: It’s an external USB hard drive for your Mac. It’s white. Features Pre-formatted in HFS+ for OS X Time Machine compatible Bus-powered Color matches MacBooks $139 MSRP Pros It’s white like your MacBook Cons Bigger and heavier than most other bus-powered 500GB external hard drives Questionable build quality Review So this is just another external hard drive.

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Review: G Drive mobile USB hard drive