Blogger has added integration of the AJAX news bar and YouTube/Google Video bar as an easy drag and drop addition to your template. The bars are available for every website, as well as blog and web search bars, but Blogger’s addition makes it easy for less advanced users to configure and just drop in.
Also, Anothr is making it easy to receive RSS feed updates in Google Talk. Read more at Download Squad. Finally, Google released today a

Thanks to all of you who sent in an idea to promote Go Visit Hawaii.
We had a great response, each of you provided some valuable food for thought. A lot of suggestions revolved around a contest of some kind. As these were very similar - and as contests are something I already have a grasp on - I thought I’d go with an interesting idea, that didn’t involve an out-of-pocket expense.
So, Mahalo to Rob Williams for this interesting idea

Randy answered a meme called “Why I blog”, and unfortunately he tagged me, so here goes:
Why do I blog? Well, I can’t answer that without saying why I started blogging. Almost three years ago, I felt like I needed a way to keep track of this great Google company, and I was just barely into LiveJournal communities at the time, so I figured I would start a Google community, convince others to contribute, and sit back and read

How would you like a chance to win an iPod for simply sharing your advice for promoting a blog? Interested? Read on!
Mrs. Andy Beal has gotten the blogging bug and has dived head-first into the blogosphere. Her Go Visit Hawaii blog covers Hawaii vacation news and promises to keep readers updated on the latest Hawaiian travel deals and adventures.
So, I have a few ideas to kick-start her blog traffic, but would love to hear what id

The last time this happened, it was February: I’m finally sorta caught up. I still have 73 tabs of stuff to do, but at least I won’t be reading Bloglines 15 hours a day. Thank god.

OK, so maybe Al Gore didn’t try and take credit for inventing the humble “blog”, but, as CNET informs us, there are many early diarists that could stake their claim for being the father of blogging.
Was the first blogger the irascible Dave Winer? The iconoclastic Jorn Barger? Or was the first blogger really Justin Hall, a Web diarist and online gaming expert whom The New York Times Magazine once called the “founding father

Google is now reporting how many of its users are subscribed to website’s feeds, by including the subscriber info in the header its Feedfetcher spider leaves when it grabs a feed. This means that if you look at the header, you’ll know how many users combined subscribe to that feed in Google Reader and the Google Personalized Homepage

Google has agreed to acquire Adscape, a company that puts ads inside of video games, for $23 million. Google had missed out on Massive, a company Microsoft picked up for $200-400 million about a year ago, and is going to have to settle for the much smaller Adscape, which it will have to build into a bigger player

Well, this was a shocker: Many people have no doubt been following the story of the anonymous “JP”, who campaigned to get his marriage proposal aired as a commercial during the Super Bowl, promoting it on his MySuperProposal.com website. The plan fell through, as there wasn’t enough money for the $2.6 million commercial, and CBS couldn’t find extra time in the game to help him out, but he did manage to buy a 30-second spot during last night’s Veronica Mars on the local Seattle affiliate.
So, who was JP? None other than Rand Fishkin, operator of SEOmoz.org

The HDTV is set up, the signal is solid, the 5.1 speakers are spread around the room and the bass is pumping. I’m watching the pre-game show, eagerly anticipating what is going to hopefully be a tight, hard-fought game, with Super Bowl 41 (I’m not a Roman!) starting in one hour. My wife is making tacos (tacoes? taco’s? tacoz?), the drinks are cold, and the excitement is building

If you’ve been paying attention the last few days, you might have noticed an uncharacteristically* low number of posts on all my blogs. The reason: I have embarked on a new career as a cable television repairman.
See, my wife and I moved into a new apartment last Friday (it’s lovely, by the way), and with that came the peril of getting cable installed so I could keep blogging without interruption

Darren Barefoot has put together a cool survey site, asking people why it is that they blog. Since I’m interested in what sort of results he gets (plus, he’s giving fifty bucks to someone who links to it, as well as two people who fill it out), I’m recommending any of my readers who are also bloggers, head down and take a minute to answer the short survey

Thanks to Jason Schramm’s quest to be the top Schramm when people search for Schramms, I discovered a cool site at nathan.com. The site, run by Nathan Shedroff, has a page that links to every Nathan on the internet, including now myself, and is the top site on Google for “nathan“

Read/WriteWeb has a pretty cool summary of all the acquisitions made by Yahoo since around 2005. I’d forgotten one or two, but the list is pretty impressive. What’s even more impressive is how cheaply Yahoo managed to acquire a lot of these companies.
While Google’s out spending $1.6 billion for video technology that it already had in Google Video, Yahoo’s put together an impressive list of Web 2.0 technologies for what appears to be less than $100 million.

Happy stuff for me: The Bruce Clay Inc. blog has added comments, after much prodding from me (and maybe other people, but who cares?). The Bruce Clay blog has been one of my favorites the last few months, with really good articles (mostly written by Lisa Barone) plus a fun “Friday recap” every week

Google’s added a nifty little tool to Google Reader that allows you to view stats on your RSS reading trends. I’m not quite sure how this information is going to help me - other than prove I am addicted to blog reading - but it’s somewhat fun to examine.
What would be cool is to see this data across the entire Google Reader user base (anonymous of course)

Google Reader added a really cool feature, Google Reader Trends, that shows you your personal reading statistics for your Reader account. You get charts and statistics on the feeds you read the most, the stuff you star and share the most, the total number of read items charted by day, time of day, or day of the week, the feeds that update the most frequently, and the ones that have not updated in the longest time.
I don’t use Reader, but I have loaded my OPML in there, and it tells me that the MSDN blog feed is my most active, with an average of 103 items a day

Randy Morin is doing his KBCafe awards for the best blogs of 2006. A whole bunch of Blog News Channel blogs are nominated, including this one, so be sure to vote for InsideGoogle, InsideMicrosoft, Apple Watch and Hoffman’s Hearsay, and for all the other blogs you really like. You can vote for more than one blog in each category, which makes for some interesting possibilities. Voting closes January 10, and check back for the winners.

Matt Cutts is right.
Finally, Arrington’s mention of “Matt Cutts, the unofficial Google blogger” also set my spidey sense tingling. No single person should be Google’s unofficial blogger–that’s not scalable.
Matt’s talking about how some people expect him to be the go-to-guy on all things Google

GSpy lists what they think are Google top creations of the last year, including the Custom Search Engine, Spreadsheets, Checkout, and the new layout for Book Search. I definitely agree with that last point; the UI for Books is amazing, very similar to that of the Adobe Reader browser plugin, but without the need to install anything or the dreadful performance of Adobe’s plugin.
Many of the things on the list are not “innovations” at all, but things Google did that others had done before

I’ve been tagged by Tamar Weinberg, so here are five things you may probably don’t know about me:

Technically, I’m Hispanic, although you wouldn’t guess it from looking at me. My father is from Venezuela, my mother from Brooklyn, and I’ve lived in Queens most of my life.
I used to be on the board of a major New York State advocacy organization

Blogger Dean Hunt got an odd request from a commercial website, asking him to remove his blog from Google, since he was starting to outrank that site. Its possibly the oddest SEO strategy I’ve ever seen; rather than trying to get more links, or buy ads, this site just asked the competition to get out of the way, and seemed to think Google would help them out.
On Thursday morning I checked our google positions and your site is now above us for this term

Danny Sullivan posts that Search Engine Land has launched, and the full design is now live. Looks pretty cool. Damn, they’re good at lining up those advertisements! I need to find someone who can do that for me.

Gabe Rivera announced a new feature on TechMeme today, one that adds a “River of News” so you can browse all the main headlines and see what you may have missed. I like the new feature, but what I’d really love is if the permalinks for stories linked to a page about the story, and not a time period.
Whenever Scoble or someone else links to TechMeme, I wonder, “Did they get the best permalink?” Are there more links fifteen minutes earlier, or three hours later? TechMeme’s

Search Engine Journal is asking readers to nominate their favorite blogs of 2006 in these various categories:

Best SEO Blog
Best SEM Blog
Best Search Agency Resource Blog
Best Link Building Blog
Best Social Media Blog
Best Search Engine Corporate Blog (owned by the search engines)
Best Contextual Advertising Blog
Best Affiliate Marketing Blog
Best Search Engine Community/Forum Blog
Best Web 2.0 Blog
Best Search Linkbait of 2006

There are so many good blogs to choose, just browsing the suggested nominees in the comments could add 100 subs to my RSS reader

Soon, the deteriorating and broken-in-several-places design you currently see at InsideGoogle will be no more, replaced by something a hell of a lot better. Just so we never forget what was wrong, Randy’s got a video showing how the left sidebar turned into total crap. I’ll never figure out what went wrong, but hopefully, within a week or two, it won’t matter anymore:

Randy also helped me fix a finnicky RSS feed problem. If your feeds for this site aren’t working, let me know, but they should be fixed as I implement all the changes.

Danny Sullivan has said he will be doing a new search blog after leaving Search Engine Watch at the end of this month, but nobody expected it to be this dramatic: Danny is launching Search Engine Land with the same damn cast he had at SEWatch! SELand will feature Danny, Chris Sherman and Barry Schwartz, in other words, 2/3 of the editors and SEW’s most prominent regular correspondent are leaving, all in the course of a few weeks.
Holy crap, I think we just saw Technorati’s #66 blog die

Andy Beal is giving away an iPod Shuffle to an eagle-eyed RSS subscriber, with readers who spot a special RSS ad being entered in a drawing to get the super-tiny music player. The idea is to drive RSS subscriptions, and to encourage people to spread word of the contest, the prize gets better the more people that subscribe

Frank Arrigo links to Kineda, which now has a widget which queries Technorati to determine where you go in the blogging hierarchy, from the A-List to the D-List. Frank’s happy to be on the B-List, but I’m shocked that I am apparently an A-Lister:

Basically, the widget’s determination of an A-List blogger:
The Very High Authority Group (500 or more blogs linking in the last 6 months)
In the final group we see what might be considered the blogging elite

I’m fixing the RSS feeds in Bloglines, using some code commented in this post. Please ignore it. However, if the RSS feed is not working in your aggregator, please let me know.
UPDATE: Okay, if you are still not seeing updates in your RSS aggregator, please resubscribe. The proper feed (and the only one I can guarantee works) is http://google.blognewschannel.com/feed/

Philipp ran a great post asking a bunch of bloggers what their most popular post was, and I was one of those featured. Mine was at InsideMicrosoft, a video I posted that wound up making it to number two on YouTube (in the early days of YouTube, natch). Incidentally, my most popular InsideGoogle post was when I had Google Earth launching about ten minutes before everyone else did. How’d I do it? Let’s just say a major search blogger kinda screwed up, and I took the ball and ran.

The US government has issued its report derived from all the user search histories it subpoena’d earlier this year. Seth Finkelstein says the findings include: “About 1 percent of the websites in the Google and MSN indexes are sexually explicit. About 6 percent of queries retrieve a sexually explicit website