Shameless self-promotion

A couple people have independently told me recently that they saw my AdWords ad on [Nelson Minar], and asked me why I was running the ad. I had two main motivations:

• It's universally understood at Google that everyone should experiment with an AdWords campaign. Google gives everyone $1/day to spend on advertising.
  
• I want people to discover my blog, and Google ads work.
  

As for using Nelson's name, well, I drew my inspiration from Google's own advertising campaign. We've long used ads on the names of well-known engineers, especially in information retrieval, to draw attention to our job listings. Why not use them same technique for my own purposes?

Still, the ad text I was using was a little lame, so I've just rewritten it to:

Shameless Self-Promotion
Read my blog about how we can
improve the quality of software.
jonathanbetz.blogspot.com

While I was in there, I updated the list of people I'm using for as keyword triggers. For the record, the list is:

- Brian Kernighan
- Peter Weinberger
- Nelson Minar
- Jeremy Zawodny
- Josh Bloch
- Steve McConnell
- Joel Spolsky
- Rob Pike