Today Nick and I got a wonderful opportunity to talk about adgridwork live on the radio! The guys from Uniqueness is Power were kind enough to invite us on for a segment to discuss both adgridwork and reviewback. Uniqueness is Power, an Atlanta based weekly radio program hosted by Andy Greider and Lee Kantor, is, in their words, a “marketing, business growth solutions show, centered around the idea that businesses can thrive and expand if they are given fresh ideas of how to market themselves, and shown ways to save bottom line cash each month.” Each week they discuss ways small- and medium-business owners can improve their web presence, effectively market their product, and grow their business. In addition to their own expertise, Andy and Lee also feature different guests from within the marketing community each week. This show is a really good way for the aspiring entrepreneur to get some good ideas before diving headlong into a doomed project. It’s also perfect for the established business that could be doing even better.

If you want to listen to our interview with Andy and Lee (this was our first interview, and live at that, so give us a break people!), you can find the complete show here (we come on 23:38 into the show :). Andy are Lee are great hosts, so make sure to check out all their other shows as well. The show runs on Thursdays, 6-7pm EST, and is broadcast live. You can also check out their podcast and their RSS feed. Make sure to catch up on their sister blog as well, www.saveyourbottomline.com, for great tips on saving your marketing budget.

Kyle

While surfing the web today, I found this interesting new program called Should Do This. Essentially its an easy way to send feedback to us letting us know what you think adgridwork should do. Kyle and I have been thinking about ways that we can improve and enhance adgridwork even more and would love to hear your feedback.

Head over to adgridwork.shoulddothis.com and help us out with some suggestions.

Cheers

adgridwork should do this…

It’s been a little while since we here at adgridwork have released any new features, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been working hard. To prove it, we have a new visualization feature to announce. AdSpy allows you to see the last 20 ads shown across the adgridwork network in real time! There is a link to AdSpy in the header, or you can visit it directly here. There are a lot of cool extensions to AdSpy that we have in mind for future upgrades, but if you have any ideas for the new tool feel free to shoot us an email.

In addition to the new AdSpy feature, we have tweaked our ad display algorithm as well. In addition to increasing the influence of keywords in selecting ads to display, we also have made several changes which we hope will help balance the metrics for sites that had more site requests than impressions. We will keep an eye on some of the statistics for awhile and make the appropriate tweaks, but we cannot keep on top of every site with just the two of us. So if you have any concerns or comments about your site’s metrics or just some general suggestions for the site, don’t hesitate to email us.

Many thanks to adgridwork user Lourdes Sitges, who pointed out a problem with our new keywords that messed with the site submission process in certain browsers. The problem should be fixed now and the submission process should run smoothly; we would like to apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused our users. If anyone experiences any further troubles, please let us know.

Hey there adgridwork users. Summer is in full swing, and we here at adgridwork are busy developing new functionality for the service. Tonight we’re announcing all new keyword functionality. When submitting or editing a site, you now have the option of using an autocomplete keyword field. Hopefully, this will help our users find keywords already in our system and improve the normalization of our keyword data. We also provide a small keyword suggest feature that shows some popular keywords in your selected category. Click on any of these suggested keywords to see other commonly affiliated keywords.

One note, in developing these new features, we also revamped our keyword storage system. We believe we have transferred over all the existing keywords for all sites in our network, but it is possible that some keywords were lost in the transfer. If you happen to notice any of your keywords are missing or mangled, we’re sorry for the inconvenience, but we hope this new system will vastly improve the relevance of our ads in the future.

We have a lot more ideas for improvements to the site, as well as some cool things that we’re holding on to for awhile, but we would also love to hear any ideas our users have for adgridwork. Send us your thoughts, ideas, or suggestions for adgridwork, and we’ll do our best to incorporate as much new stuff as we can. And, of course, if anybody discovers any problems with the new keywords, please let us know that as well. Until next time, we hope everyone enjoys the new keywords.

Cheers,

Kyle & Nick
The AGW team

Just a quick note to all the adgridwork/reviewback users out there. We noticed the other day that some of our customer support emails were being picked up by our spam filter and skipping our inbox. We replied to the ones we saw, but we’re not sure how long this has been going on. If anyone has been waiting awhile for a response from us, there’s a possibility we never even saw your email, so feel free to resend any unanswered customer support messages. From now on we’ll make sure to keep an eye on our spam folder.

Today we are releasing new ad code that does not rely on iframes. This update has been a long time coming, but we believe we have finally nailed down all the bugs in the new code. We hope the new code will be much simpler and much easier to use. Obviously, we cannot force our users to upgrade ad code, so the old ad code WILL CONTINUE to work and be supported. We hope, however, that our users will agree the new code is an improvement. We still allow our users to customize the colors of their ad blocks via the JavaScript variables, though we have done away with the body_color variable. That was used to blend the background of the iframe with the background of the user’s page, and since we no longer use iframes, the body_color variable is unnecessary.

We have spent a long time checking and re-checking the code in many different browsers, but if anyone discovers any bugs or has any comments about the new code, please use our contact page to let us know. Also, I hope to have some more cool updates to roll in the very near future. Now that school’s out for the summer, I hope to be able to devote some real time and energy to adgridwork.

Kyle
www.adgridwork.com

This is kind of a diverge from the normal advertising mumbo jumbo that we usually talk about, but my buddy Ronald Lewis is doing something on his blog which I think is truly amazing. Essentially, he has put himself on display on the web via a live 24/7 Video Steam. You can visit his site and literally have a conversation with him one on one via a live, in-browser flash video (its an amazing technology from Ustream). I spent an hour chatting with him about his new project LifeCasters.tv, the blogging Industry and a possibly video Interview for the future. It’s really an admirable idea to make yourself completely transparent to the world and I definitely give Ronald props for it.

From Our Digg Post:

Help us out by digging

read more | digg story

First off, I wanted to say thanks to everyone who has been actively sharing and participating in the adgridwork Advertising Network. We’ve been going strong for about 6 months now and already have almost 3,000 sites. It’s because of all our users that we continue to thrive and promote one anothers content and products.


Secondly, I wanted to tell you all about a brand new service that we have just launched: www.reviewback.com . Many of you may have heard of ReviewMe and PayPerPost, two services that allow you to pay to have another blogger link to and review your product or website. While, this is an excellent way of gaining exposure, paying for publicity is certainly not the adgridwork/reviewback way Thus, we have attempted to apply the adgridwork model to Blogging Reviews: You submit your blog to reviewback and can instantly begin browse the network and find other bloggers to trade reviews and links with. As always, the service is 100% free and is super easy and user-friendly.

Right now, we have very few blogs on the network and are looking to build a steady user base over the next couple of days. So if you are interested in increasing your brand and exposure via Blog Reviews, give www.reviewback.com a try and let us know what you think.