With tools like Street View, Google Maps is altering the way people interact with their surroundings, letting you see the facade of the store you're about to visit, plot directions, and find a place to park before you even leave the house. Google Maps has also changed the way information is being presented across the web. Since 2005, web developers from around the world have begun to overlay their content on Google Maps,

This Saturday, July 11th, our engineers will be performing routine maintenance . While you won't be able to access your AdSense and Ad Manager accounts from 10am to approximately 2pm PDT, your ad serving and targeting won't be affected. In addition, your clicks, impressions, and earnings will continue to be recorded as normal.

We've been working to enable local currency reporting in more countries, and are happy to announce that this feature is now available for publishers located in Denmark and Norway. As a reminder, switching to these new reports means that all earnings generated from advertisers paying in other currencies will be converted to your local currency each day. If you receive payments in your local currency, there won't be any additional conversions at the end of the month,

In the final week of our educational series about speeding up your business in a slowdown, you'll hear tips from Christian Ashlock, an AdSense Optimization team manager, about attracting additional advertiser spend. If you have any final suggestions for growing your business, we hope you'll leave them as comments. If you missed a week or want to re-read tips from our team, you can revisit the series at any time at www.google.com/ads/speedingup . I'm Christian Ashlock,

A few weeks back, we announced that all publishers can now integrate their AdSense accounts with Google Analytics. If you're not very familiar with Analytics yet, you might be interested in reading a recent post on the Analytics blog that addresses ten common myths about the product. For example, did you know that you can use Analytics to segment visitor data in real time, or that you can use the new Analytics API to tie your website data to your financials?

We've been working to make it easier for advertisers to show display ads on the content network - which benefits you, because it results in more budgets devoted to advertising on AdSense sites like yours. )As a reminder, "display ads" include all types of image-based ads, such as banners, rich media, and video ads.( In addition to recent launches such as DoubleClick Studio , third-party ad serving , and expandable rich media ads ,

To help you increase the visibility of your sites to potential advertisers, we've just launched the Publisher Center in Google Ad Planner. This will allow you to provide details about your sites to help attract advertisers. Though the Publisher Center is only available in English at this time, any publisher can use the tool. As a quick reminder, Ad Planner is a media planning tool that helps agencies and advertisers find sites that cater to their target audiences.

After talking about a few Google Ad Manager features and optimization tips on this blog in the past, we've received questions from new publishers, asking what Ad Manager is and whether they should use it. In this two-part series, we'll go back to the basics to provide you with an introduction to Ad Manager. What is Google Ad Manager? Google Ad Manager is a hosted ad management solution for publishers with smaller direct sales teams; it can help you sell, schedule, deliver,

The ADSPACE conference and expo in San Francisco is fast approaching, so we'd like to give you a sneak peek into some of the content we're working with ad:tech to develop. We're looking forward to the 'AdSense Publisher Forum', a session moderated by Jennifer Slegg of JenSense.com that will allow attendees to share feedback and ask questions to a panel of AdSense team members.

Earlier this week , we provided a basic introduction to Google Ad Manager to help you determine whether the product is right for you. If so, we hope that you've signed up for an account to help you manage your ad inventory. As you begin using Ad Manager, we'd like to give you some tips and instructions to help you on your way. In addition to the tips below, we'll be hosting a Getting Started with Google Ad Manager Webinar on April 21st at 11:00 am PDT,

If you're reading this, you're probably an active publisher who stays up-to-date with all things AdSense. You're probably also signed up to receive newsletters and surveys from our team. But publishers like you keep telling us that we're not doing enough to reach out to you. That's why we're happy to announce that we'll be rolling out new email notification preferences in your account over the next few days. What does that mean? Simply put,

Advertisers spend more money on campaigns that reach the right audience; helping them do that should drive more revenue to your websites. This week we're announcing plans to provide interest-based advertising across AdSense publisher sites to help achieve that goal. In the past, advertisers have taken advantage of contextual and placement-targeted advertising on AdSense publisher sites.

We wanted to let you know that yesterday at around 2pm PST, a bug in our system caused less relevant contextually-targeted ads to appear for approximately 10 hours. You were still credited for all valid clicks and impressions on the ads which appeared on your sites, but this bug may have impacted your overall AdSense for content revenue if you had visitors to your pages during these hours.

We're excited to introduce to you expandable ads, a new type of ad that can appear on your pages. Expandable ads are rich media ads that can expand beyond the original size of the ad unit, following a user-initiated action. This creates more real estate for the ad, allowing for more interaction from interested users. For instance, expandable ads may stream a movie trailer, show video game clips, or display various views of an item for sale.

We'd like to take a moment to explain a login issue that some of you may have encountered last night, as well as let you know about an upcoming stats delay you may notice. Login loop If you tried to sign in to your AdSense account between 10:45 and 11:35 p.m. PST last night, you may have found yourself in a "loop" between the AdSense login page and your Google Accounts page. We're in the process of trying out some new designs for our US English homepage,

Sometimes we receive reports about AdSense code appearing on websites that may contain content copied from other websites. We understand that many of our publishers are concerned about this issue, so we'd like to give you some information about the procedures and tools you can use to protect your content. For example, let's suppose you own a movie blog, where you recently posted an article about your favorite actor. After publishing it,

Yesterday, we experienced an issue which caused AdSense and Google Ad Manager reports to be delayed through the day. The issue began at 4am PST and lasted several hours, but has now been resolved. No stats from yesterday were lost, and our engineers have been working to restore your reports with the clicks, impressions, and earnings accrued from your sites. Most publisher reports have now been updated with yesterday's data, with a few accounts still catching up.

This Thanksgiving weekend, we'd like to take a moment to ask our U.S.-based publishers to spend a little post-turkey time )when you're not watching football or taking advantage of those Black Friday bargains( to review your AdSense tax information. Tax season is just around the corner and we want to make sure that we give the IRS the most accurate information. So please pay a quick visit to your AdSense account,

Our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance this coming Saturday, January 10th. You won't be able to log in to your AdSense or Google Ad Manager accounts between 10am and 2pm PST, but we'll continue recording your impressions, clicks, and earnings. In addition, your ad serving won't be affected by this maintenance period. For our international readers,

Back in May , we had tremendous interest from readers who asked if they could donate their earnings to help victims in China and Myanmar )Burma(. We heard you loud and clear, and so we're happy to announce that during the next week, you can donate a portion or all of your entire unpaid balance as of November 30, 2008 to reconstruction efforts in these regions. The earth may no longer be quaking and the waters may now be calm, but help is still needed in these areas.