Ad Manager is a free service provided by Google that lets you manage advertising on your web site or entire range of web sites. It first appeared in March 2008 after Google acquired the DoubleClick.

Ad Manager can be used on any size of web site with and volume of traffic. A web site owner decides which ad slots are available on their site and the size of these ads placements.

The web site owner then sell these ad slots to advertisers either for an amount based on the number of page views or for a specific time period. Google do not collect the money for you. They only schedule and deliver the ads to your site. The web site owner then uploads the ads to ad Manager and schedules them to run.

This is the key difference between Google Ad Manager and Google AdSense. When Google AdSense is used on a site, a snippet of code is placed on a page and then automatically inserts ads based on the content of the page, the time of day and the readers location. The web site owner receives payment for every click on these adverts. It is much more automated and therefore requires very little effort. But it usually does not yields as high and income as selling specific advertising directly.

However, if you do not manage to sell all of the advertising capacity on your web site you can tell Ad Manager to fill any spare advertising space and time with AdSense ads or indeed adverts from an other network or free adverts of your own.

Gears is a plug-in for web browsers which aims to make browsers a lot faster, allow them to store data on a user's machine, identify where a user is via geo-location and provide the ability to write files to the desktop.

At the time of writing it was available for Windows, Windows Mobile, Linux and Mac OSX in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and the Safari web browsers. In other words, all major browsers except Opera. Opera are known to be working on a version that works in their browser as well.

People can either visit gears.google.com and install the plug-in or if they visit a website that uses Gears, they will be asked if they want to install it. Chrome has Gears bundled already.

Because Gears has access to the local file system, permission has to be given on a site by site basis as to whether or not the site can use Gears. Certain functions of Gears, such as geo-location also have to be authorised on a site by site basis as well.

Gears is used in a number of Google owned web sites, most notably, Google Docs. Google Docs is an on-line word processor. If your internet connection drops or if you are travelling without an internet connection then your work is stored locally and synced back to Google Docs when you next have an internet connection. Google reader also implements Gears, giving you the ability to store 2000 stories to be read off-line.

Non-Google web sites that use gears include WordPress.

In May 2008, the project was open sourced and renamed Gears. So now anyone can look at the code and contribute to the work.

Many of the features that Gears brings to a web browser are part of the forthcoming HTML 5 specification and Gears is an attempt to bring these features to the most popular browsers now. In other words when browser creators have implemented the HTML5 specification then Gears will become obsolete.

Geoblocking is a technology that is used to prevent access to web sites from visitors in particular countries or regions.

At the moment it is mainly used by traditional broadcast companies who are moving their television, radio and music content online. Because of distribution contracts with the producers of these programmes many broadcast web sites limit access to people with in their own country.

Whenever a person connects to the internet, their computer or mobile device is assigned what is called an IP address. This is a sequence of numbers in the form 255.255.255.255. The IP address is assigned to you by the internet service provider (ISP) that you are connecting through and these in turn are assigned to the ISP in blocks. It is therefore possible to say that a particular IP address is from a particular country or even city.

Site owners that want to use geoblocking simply choose to only allow access to a particular range of IP addresses or to block certain ranges.

This type of location based services can also be used to serve alternative content (e.g. with advertising) instead of just blocking the visitor.