It’s an exciting announcement for anyone who’s looking for a good photo management app on OS X that isn’t iPhoto or for anyone who’s used and fallen in love with Picasa on Windows or Linux. This release still sports the beta tag, so you can expect a bug here or there, but overall it appears to boast most of the same features as its counterparts.

The application is available as a free download at picasa.google.com/mac/. Mac OS X version 10.4 or later is required, and the release is for Intel-powered Macs only.

From the press release:

Picasa for Mac makes it easy to manage large photo collections and helps users make professional-looking edits without any technical knowledge, including:

• A drag-and-drop photo collage tool that gives users control over layout and content
• A retouching brush to wipe out scratches and blemishes – and repair old photos
• A slideshow movie maker that uploads users photo montage videos to YouTube with a click
• Smart auto-cropping that guides users on how to zoom in on their subject
• And, auto red-eye removal.

Many of us take pictures so that we can show them to the people we care about. Picasa for Mac integrates seamlessly with Picasa Web Albums, Google’s free photo-sharing site, which offers features like name tags – the ability for users to automatically organize and share their photos based on the faces in each picture.

If you have a Mac and you manage to install Picasa, tell what you think in the comments.

[via Google: Picasa for Mac]

For a couple months ago, this feature only available for certain publisher, make a date with data in Google Analytics.

Today, they are happy to announce that this feature is now available to all publishers, Analytics integration for all.

By integrating your AdSense account with a new or existing Analytics account, you’ll have access to in-depth reports about user activity on your site. In addition to the wealth of metrics already available in Analytics such as unique visitors and visitor language, you’ll now have access to granular reports that break down AdSense performance both by page and by referring site. Armed with this new data about user behavior, you’ll be able to make more informed decisions on how to improve the user experience on your site and optimize your AdSense units to increase your revenue potential.

You can discover how useful (and fun) new data can be:

• Discover untapped markets. Use the geographies report to determine which regions are under-represented in your site’s user base. Optimize your site’s content to attract more of these under-represented users.
• Drive high-earning traffic to your site. Use the ‘Referring sites’ report to determine where the users who are making you the most money are coming from. Focus your efforts on getting traffic from these sources.
• Delve deeper into AdSense reports. Use the visualization feature to look at trends in your site’s AdSense performance over time, or by time of day.

Once you link your accounts, you’ll find an AdSense-specific menu under the ‘Content’ section of the left-hand navigation bar on your Analytics homepage, containing these reports:

• The Top AdSense Content report allows you to see more details about specific pages on your site and analyze ad performance. For instance, if you find that some of your pages generate a high number of pageviews but aren’t monetizing as well as other pages, you can focus your optimization efforts on improving these pages.
• The Top AdSense Referrers report can help you see how different incoming traffic sources contribute to your revenue.
• Last, the AdSense Trending report lets you analyze how your site generates revenue during different times of the day and different days of the week.

You’ll also notice that other sections of your Analytics account will show a new ‘AdSense Revenue’ tab. You’ll be able to compare how much of your AdSense revenue is coming from new visitors versus existing ones, and view revenue based on user language.

Enjoy your new data and gud lak!

[Source: Inside AdSense]

If you’re located in one of these five countries (France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, or Spain), AdSense will convert your earnings to Euros on a daily basis using the prevailing market rate from the previous day. With earnings converted daily, you’ll avoid the risk of currency exchange fluctuations between USD and the Euro. You can still choose to receive payments in either Euros or U.S. Dollars and select from a range of payment methods as well.

To make the switch to local currency reports, you’ll need to agree to a new set of Terms and Conditions. Here are the main changes involved:

• The party that publishers are contracting with changes from Google Inc. to Google Ireland Limited.
• Publishers are responsible for paying any local taxes in their jurisdiction. Google will only issue VAT refunds to publishers with an address in Ireland.
• The governing law changes from California law to either English or local law.

You can view the full text of these new Terms and Conditions by logging in to your account and looking for the green prompt, “See your daily earnings reported in Euro amounts!” on your Reports Overview page.

Have a great day!

[Source - Reports have gone international]

You can choose between Arial, Times, and Verdana font faces. Please note that while font options will appear in every account, they’ll currently only be applied to ad units on pages primarily in Latin-based characters.

How do I select a new font for my ads?

There are two ways to set custom fonts: across your entire account for all AdSense for content units, or for individual ad units.

To set a custom font as the default for all your AdSense for content units:

1. Sign in to your account.
2. Visit your My Account tab.
3. In the Ad Display Preference section, click edit.
4. From the drop-down, choose your preferred font and save your changes.

The font settings will be reflected in all your AdSense for content ad units shortly.

To set custom fonts for individual ad units:

If you’re creating a new ad unit, you can choose a custom font while generating your ad code. Alternatively, you can update the font for an existing ad unit, by editing that ad unit through the Manage Ads page.

1. Sign in to your account.
2. Visit your AdSense Setup tab.
3. If you’re making a new ad unit, choose AdSense for content as the product and continue to modify your settings. If you’re editing an existing ad unit, visit the Manage Ads page and choose your desired AdSense unit.
4. In the Fonts drop-down, choose whichever font you would prefer.
5. Make any other changes to your ad unit and save. If you’re creating a new ad unit, your font settings will be visible wherever you add the code for that unit. If you’re editing a saved ad unit, font changes will be visible on your pages in a few moments.

Please note that if you customize the font settings of an individual ad unit, changes you make to your account-wide default font settings will not be applied to that ad unit.

If you’d like to quickly change the font settings for every ad unit generated from your account, visit the “Ad Display Preference” section of your Account Settings page to select a new account-wide font face. This will affect all units you’ve created in the past, regardless of whether you used the Manage Ads feature. By default, your ads are currently set to “Standard AdSense font family”.

Have a great day!

Today, they announced that Western Union is now offered as a payment method for publishers located in Panama.

To sign up for payments by Western Union, sign in to your account and follow these instructions. Please also keep in mind that they’re only able to make Western Union payments to individual payee names, but not to businesses.

If you are disappointed again (not living in supported country list), according to Google AdSense blog, they are working hard to find more convenient ways to send you your earning. You are asked to leave feedback on the AdSense blog.

Not located in Panama? We’ve been reading your comments on our other recent payment-related posts, and understand that many of you are looking forward to new payment options in additional countries. Please know that we aren’t able to provide details about when new options may become available, as setting them up can take time due to factors like compliance with local laws and tax regulations. However, we’re working hard to find more convenient ways to send you your earnings, and we’ll definitely announce any new options here. In the meantime, please feel free to keep leaving your feedback, and we appreciate your patience!

OK! So I should be patience for Adsense Western Union available in Indonesia, right? Have a great day!

There’s a new version of WordPress out now, 2.6.2, which addresses a database issue as well as the weakness of mt_rand(). This is especially important if you accept registrations to your blog.

Anyway, go ahead and upgrade WordPress ASAP, especially if you have open registration enabled.

Happy upgrading!

Installation was pretty easy. Click “Download”, Agree to TOS, and then, wait for few moments to get it installed.

For Mac and Linux users, you can sign up on the download page to learn when the Mac and Linux versions are available.

Have a great day!

Western Union payments are also currently available in other countries, including Argentina, Chile, China (Mainland), Colombia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines and Romania.

If you’re located in one of these countries, you’ll be able to pick up your AdSense payments in cash at your local Western Union agent. This payment method is free, and you’ll no longer need to wait for checks to arrive in the mail or to clear at the bank.

Please keep in mind that in order to pick up your payment, you’ll need to present a government-issued ID that matches your AdSense payee name. If you need to update or correct the payee name listed in your account, please fill out our online form. In addition, we’d like to note that payments by Western Union Quick Cash are only available to individual payee names, but not to businesses.

Well, there are a lot of Western Union agent in Indonesia. But unfortunately, Western Union payment is still not available for us, Indonesian. Hopefully next expansion, Indonesia will be include to the countries that can use Western Union for Adsense payment =)

Have a great day!

FeedBurner intersperses ads in blog feeds between every few posts. Integrating with AdSense will allow for publishers to tap into contextual ads for their feeds, in addition to the ads that FeedBurner already sells.

Feedburner also lets you place Feedburner Network Ads on your website, and you can fall back upon Adsense ads in case of lack of ad fill. Now a complete integration of Feedburner and Adsense in feeds will let anyone place Google Adsense ads in their feeds and also let advertisers directly target your feed.

Any publisher who has a Google AdSense account may now run AdSense ads on their site if they already participate in the FeedBurner Ad Network (FAN) or use our FeedFlare service to display interactive links below content on their sites. AdSense ads in 300×250 or 468×60 format will display below the first post on each page of your site that has our script code installed.

To activate the service:

1. Sign in to your FeedBurner account.
2. Click your feed’s title on My Feeds.
3. Visit the Monetize tab, where you can connect this service to your AdSense account (if you already have one), or create a new AdSense account (if you don’t).

Have a great day!

You can compare seasonal trends, geographic distributions, and category-specific searches, and you can group all these variables together to get extremely specific. In addition, Google allows you see “rising searches” overall or in a specific filter that you have set up.

We then show you a graph with the results, indicating interest over time, plotted on a scale from 0 to 100; the totals are indicated next to bars by the search terms.

Insights for Search shows the following search data

• relative keyword search trends for keywords (and A/B comparisons between keywords)
• top related keywords and hottest rising related keywords
• category based top keywords and category based hottest rising searches (and overall top 10 rising searches)
• category based keyword search volume trends, and the relative growth of a keyword compared to its category
• countries, states, and cities where a keyword query is popular
• you can also mash up many data points

Have a great day and gud lak!