Thoughts on technology, investing, marketing, and entrepreneurship.

Month: February 2005

Replace Google public service ads with Amazon affiliate products

I’m sure many of you have had this problem. Some of the pages on your site have not been indexed by Google yet and the ads are displaying the public service ads. Now not to be miserly or anything, but the whole point of placing ads on the site was to generate revenue. And the last time I checked, free public service ads are driving revenues to neither Google nor my site. Since Google can be notoriously slow to index pages sometimes, especially new sites, I began researching solutions for my other blog, All Climbing. What I found was a free Perl script called AGAR, Amazon/Google Ad Replacement.

AGAR allows you to replace the Google public service ads with Amazon product links using the . The script is simple to modify. You then just upload it to your cgi-bin directory and then tell Google AdSense to replace the public service ads with the URL to the AGAR script. AGAR looks similar to the Google AdSense ads and can also use the same color scheme.

Management by baseball

Skimming through Tom Peters‘ blog roll, I saw a link for a blog entitled "Management by Baseball" and I couldn’t resist visiting.  Quoting the site’s description of itself:

What do Hall of Fame baseball managers like Connie Mack & John McGraw have in common with today’s business leaders? Why are baseball managers like Joe Torre & Dusty Baker better role models for management than corporate heroes like Jack Welch, Ken Lay & Bill Gates? And just what does Peter Drucker have to do with Oriole ex-manager Earl Weaver? Management consultant & ex-baseball reporter Jeff Angus shows you almost everything you need to know about management you can learn from baseball.

That pretty much says it all. An interesting approach to discussing management topics and issues, my first thought was the book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis.

America’s pastime being used to teach management. I guess it had to happen at some point.