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We had never met, but as we talked on the phone I knew she was Googling me. The way she drew out her conjunctions, just a little, that was the tip off — stalling for time as new pages loaded. It was barely audible, but the soft click-click of the keyboard in the background confirmed it. Oh, well, it’s the information age. Normally, she’d have to go through my staff first, but I gave her an appointment.
Is it free? Yes. The cost of postage is offset with the help of relevant, targeted, unobtrusive advertisements, which will appear on the back of your Gmail Paper prints in red, bold, 36 pt Helvetica. No pop-ups, no flashy animations—these are physically impossible in the paper medium.
John Chow must want Darren’s audience for something. Check out this screenshot from proglogger.net.
Here’s the image, since It’ll disappear from Google tomorrow.
We’ve finally gotten a few bugs squashed and a few updates pushed out that were necessary to keep this site going. Here’s a couple of the most important and most apparent ones:
There were many other fixes, but they were uninteresting back-end stuff. 
Enjoy!
Speaking of my post four days ago explaining the real reason Google bought YouTube, today’s news from the SEC reveals that the founders of YouTube and the VC firm Sequoia Capital have filed papers intending to sell their entire holdings of Google stock within the next 30 days. What a huge surprise- nobody could have possibly seen that coming or blogged about it beforehand! Oh wait, I did. Now we all know that technically that this filing doesn’t legally obligate them to sell the shares, but anyone on wall street or anyone who has read financial news in the last decade understands that 100% of the time, these filings mean the people registering the shares for sale will sell them within the next 30 days.
Remember when Google began experimenting with “Ads by Gooooooogle” instead of “Ads by Google” on their Adsense units? It is no secret that Google has been tweaking its ad formats to squeeze every last cent out of them. Here’s a new one I hadn’t seen. I was looking at a page and saw “Ads by Google” and the Google was the stylized Catull font used for Google’s main header image. After refreshing the page, it was back to normal.
In the UK alone, more than 20 per cent of subscribers are expected to have access to mobile internet at broadband speeds by the end of 2007, which should prompt a dramatic increase in the use of search engines via mobile phones. The initiative will come as a surprise to Google and Yahoo!, which have lost no time in striking deals with mobile operators and handset makers. But the mobile industry believes it can retain a greater share of advertising revenues by developing its own service.
Viacom did a general search on YouTube for any term related to any of its shows, and then spammed YouTube with 100,000 DMCA take-down notices alleging that all of these clips infringed its copyright and demanding that they be censored off the Internet. YouTube made thousands of clips vanish, and sent warning notices to the people who’d posted them, warning them that they were now on a list of potential copyright infringers and telling them that repeat offenses could lead to having their accounts terminated.
Cnet’s Elinor Mills has a great article on the demise of “pithy, witty and provocative headlines” — the bread-and-butter of print publishing. You can win awards with a headline like “BASTARDS!” over a shot of the Twin Towers in flames, but in a search-engine results-page, that headline is invisible. Instead, you want a clean, informative headline that alphabetizes well (no punctuation, numbers or articles at the start), along with a totally straight, totally informative lede graf.
Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google, was born in Moscow in 1973, and the first words out of his mouth were Russian. Yet neither Russian nor the Russian market has come easily to Google.
To deal with the mounting copyright issues swirling around video and other content online, a start-up founded by some respected Silicon Valley executives is taking a novel approach: combing the entire Web for unauthorized uses.
An interesting image.
Google has quietly axed the web services API to its eponymous search engine. The stealth move was made without any announcement, but visitors to the page now receive a blunt message, backdated to 5 December, advising them that the SOAP API is no longer supported.
Google searching “microsoft”: 39,500,000 results
Google searching “google”: 52,800,000 results
MSN searching “microsoft”: 80,139,835 results
MSN searching “google”: 648 results
I can understand leaning a little more one way or the other, but 648 versus 52 million? Give me a friggin break.
Imagine a library containing 25 billion documents but with no centralized organization and no librarians. In addition, anyone may add a document at any time without telling anyone. You may feel sure that one of the documents contained in the collection has a piece of information that is vitally important to you, and, being impatient like most of us, you’d like to find it in a matter of seconds. How would you go about doing it?
If you like the Wii, you’ll love Yahoo’s new Wii portal, which aggregates Flickr photos, games, avatars with custom Wii gear, links from del.icio.us and MyWeb, stories from Yahoo’s Games section, Wii-related questions from Yahoo Answers and links to buy consoles and games on Yahoo Shopping. It’s the first of many sites in Yahoo’s “brand universe”, says Variety, and the plan is to roll out over 100 more of these fan sites during 2007, each one focused around a popular brand. They can then use these niches to sell targeted advertising. And while Yahoo isn’t seeking the approval of the brands themselves, they hope that these companies will play ball and provide them with some extra content in exchange for promoting the brand. Future portals could include “American Idol” and “The Lord of the Rings”, according to Yahoo.
Categories are a really interesting feature of Objective-C, especially for those of us who came from C++. Not only do categories allow you to extend other classes for which you may be lacking the source, but they also give you a really simple way of hiding interfaces from your clients without all the baggage of a pImpl pattern
Posted by Lilly Irani & Jens Riegelsberger, User Experience team 9am Mountain View, California. 6pm Zurich, Switzerland. The two of us sit separated by thousands miles, telephones tucked under our ears, talking about this blog post and typing words and edits into Google Docs. As we talk about the title, we start typing into the same paragraph — and Lilly gets a warning: “You’ve edited a paragraph that Jens has been editing!” Lilly stops typing so she doesn’t lose her thoughts and coordinates with Jens over the phone
Funny how “Don’t be evil” includes such things as censoring content in China and attacking people for doing the exact same thing as Google is doing (reusing freely given content). I have to say that while I still use google every day, I no longer consider them to be a “good corporation.” Now I just think that statement is an oxymoron.
I switched from Bloglines to Google Reader a few weeks ago, and my life has forever changed for the better. Here’s the list of tips and tricks from what I’ve discovered so far.
Google has asked for the right to use as many as 1500 city light poles for wireless equipment on a test network of its own, separate from the citywide Wi-Fi infrastructure that the company has proposed along with EarthLink.
Matt talks about the parties at Pubcon and his favorite session. [Continue Reading >>]
I have to say, the Pubcon conference last week was one of the better search marketing conferences I’ve been to. The overriding impression from just about everyone I talked to was that the content was great and the networking even better. Below is a roundup of Online Marketing Blog’s blog posts, photos and videos from the WebmasterWorld Pubcon Las Vegas 2006. I have to say thanks to everyone that let me put my Sony CyberShot to the test and do these 1 minute “interviews”.
Whether it’s white hat, black hat, paid links or just straight up spam, Matt Cutts is the man with the answers when it comes to search engine optimization and marketing. WebProNews caught up with Matt at last week’s PubCon in Las Vegas, and he had some interesting things to say about the future of SEO/SEM and Google’s move toward becoming a comprehensive social media portal and also offered further insight on his specific objectives when attending events such as PubCon.
Did you know Google has a monthly newsletter it sends out? You can sign up here and read past installments here.
The tech blogosphere was getting boring for the past few minutes so Emre Sokullu and Richard MacManus saves us from the hell of boredom by talking about the Google OS. … Why would Google want the hell of doing an OS? They are having a much better time just selling ads on top. And they will continue to be successful at doing that, no matter what Bill Gates says.
Eleven photos of what it’s like to work and play in the Googleplex.
There’s no such thing as the GoogleOS in reality - but despite that, it is one of the most talked about Web products. People can’t stop discussing it - and even imagining screenshots for it! Seems like everyone expects Google to get into direct competition with Microsoft, by releasing an operating system. However Google refuses such claims and even makes fun of this kind of buzz. Nevertheless we decided to analyze where Google may be heading with their product strategy - and from that determine what are the chances of a GoogleOS.
AdSense has changed the landing page that users see when they click on the ‘Ads by Google’ link in any ad unit. See the screenshot below.
Even authors not living in this online age are in trouble. My fellow literary sleuth Alex MacBride recently revealed to me that he’d uncovered an old crime in a new way. MacBride, a linguist employed by Google, idly ran a phrase from England Howlett’s 1899 essay Sacrificial Foundations through Google Book Search, his employer’s massive digitization of millions of volumes from university libraries. To his surprise, he got more back than just Howlett: The search also revealed a suspiciously similar passage in Sabine Baring-Gould’s 1892 book Strange Survivals. A lot of suspiciously similar passages.
Speaking at the Beyond the Printed Word conference in Vienna, Simon Waldman called Google a ‘fantastic red-rag’ that had, over recent months, got the newspaper industry ‘excited and infuriated’.
The entire web is based on linking, for heavens sake. If you have a big problem with that, it’s probably best to just shut down your website because you fundamentally don’t want to be on the web. That’s one way to show Google who is boss! Being on the web and whining about anyone linking to your content is like complaining about people talking about your content because it might suppress a sale if someone overhears the gist of a story. If you publish a book, you shouldn’t start bitching about the existence of libraries. If you get on the web, you shouldn’t start complaining about people linking to your content. Let’s move on, shall we? Besides, Google’s response to the payment rights idea can easily be ‘we should charge you for all the traffic we send you because you monetise that with advertising’.
The first time I ever saw the mysterious inscription Woz was while reading the legendary Red Book that came with my Apple ][. I soon found out that Woz was Steve Wozniak, who had designed the Apple ][ and co-founded Apple Computer. The more I learned about Woz and his inventions, the more amazed I was: how he enabled the Apple ][ to use a cheap cassette recorder to load and save data; his incredible design for color output that two professional engineers told me "couldn't possibly work"; his unique disk controller that somehow managed to use software for timing and eliminated the need for all but 5 chips.
Woz is a Silicon Valley legend of the highest order, so we at Google were thrilled to welcome him here last Thursday to talk about his new book, iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It
Yahoo! announced this morning a partnership with a number of large newspaper chains, controlling a total of 176 publications, to share content and functionality. Both Yahoo! and local papers around the US are in a state of crisis, which is amazing if you consider the market and mind shares both still control. Will this partnership make a significant difference for either party? I don’t think it will.
In the second social media acquisition by Yahoo! story in the last 12 hours, news has emerged that Yahoo! has agreed to acquire MyBlogLog. MyBlogLog is a blog community and analytics tool
An internal document by Brad Garlinghouse, a Yahoo senior vice president, says Yahoo is spreading its resources too thinly, like peanut butter on a slice of bread. Employees that we really need to stay (leaders, risk-takers, innovators, passionate) become discouraged and leave. Unfortunately many who opt to stay are not the ones who will lead us through the dramatic change that is needed. We have awesome assets. Nearly every media and communications company is painfully jealous of our position. We have the largest audience, they are highly engaged and our brand is synonymous with the Internet. If we get back up, embrace dramatic change, we will win.
Baidu.com, China’s leading search engine, faced a lawsuit from music companies after posting links to sites offering illegal music downloads. But the ruling said the service did not constitute an infringement as the music was downloaded from webservers of third parties, state press reported. This overturns an earlier ruling, which had ordered Baidu to pay a distributor of EMI 68,000 yuan (£8,400).
It’s college football season, and one of the best parts in my view is the intense rivalry — when we see our favorite local teams go head to head, each claiming to be the “best team in town” for another year. (And, in the case of Michigan vs. Ohio State this weekend maybe even the “best team in the country”).While the hits, fumbles, and touchdowns keep us all watching, we think — and we hope you agree — that some of the greatest moments in college football come from the fans
A recap of stories posted today to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with other items we’ve spotted but not blogged separately.
I rarely do a search on my mobile phone, but when it happens to do that I want simple information. All the major search engines have a mobile version.
Google ( google.com on your phone, google.com/xhtml on your computer)
Google offers links to Gmail, Personalized Homepage and Google News and has mobile versions for web search, image search, local search, mobile and news search
Here’s a fun new website for you geo-geeks out there that combines the online greeting concept with Google Maps satellite imagery.
GeoGreeting
lets you send a greeting from real buildings found on Google Maps that are in the shape of letters! The “A” I typed for my Google Maps Mania title above brings me to a building in Hamburg, Germany while “E” is represented by a building in Chicago
Great new LA Real Estate Mashup
- LALife sets up a great new real estate mashup for Los Angeles. Color coded squares indicate price ranges with lots of search and filtering options. [Via Curbed LA]
America’s most Wired Cities
- Forbes article + Google Maps
NY Broadway Show uses Google Maps
- The “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” broadway has set up a Grinch Sightings Map on its website
Google Earth is just too great, a revolutionary desktop application: the President of the United States uses it, and now, even Mr. Gates says “Google Earth is fantastic!“, according to eWeek(via GEarthBlog).
“I’ve been told that Google is the company most like ours
Google Enterprise Search Superstars are the people who “have benefited their organizations’ users through their innovative implementation of the Google Mini and Google Search Appliance, our website and corporate network search solutions”.
The newest Superstarts are Razi Mohiuddin from Iron Speed, Danny Perri from The Linde Group, and Chris Hall from IABC
Google Base turns one today! Happy Birthday! Over the last 365 days, hundreds of millions of items that have been submitted, and lots and lots of features have been added to this service. Let’s take a moment to recognize some of the significant achievements of last year.
The release Google Base API that enables users to query items in Base and build their own cool mashups.
Google Base OneBox result for Google Web Search surfaced.
Releasing such features as a rich text editor, reporting for clicks and impressions, and integration with Google Checkout and Google AdWords.
Launching Google Base in the UK and Germany, so that people in these countries have a simple way to upload their data to Google.
Happy Birthday to Google Base! Let’s have a Happy Birthday song from Google Video
Posted by: Kelly Norton, GWT Engineer
I remember sitting in front of my Power Mac G5 reading about Google Web Toolkit in May of last year and thinking about how cool it was. It’s such a great idea for AJAX development: use a language with unequalled tool support to write your code and then compile it into compact, highly optimized JavaScript which automatically works around all manner of browser quirkiness
[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]
When people write articles about Gmail, they usually focus on the big stuff, like how we offer 2.7+ gigs of free storage. But I’ve actually found that some of the smallest features we’ve launched have made just as big of a difference, at least to me and the way I use email.
For starters, Gmail has helped eliminate a bunch of duplicate replies that I used to get in mailing lists. You know how a lot of times someone will email a list and get a bunch of responses from different people that all say roughly the same thing? Last week, we added a feature where if I’m a reading an email conversation, or replying to one, and someone else replies to the same email, a notification pops up telling me there’s a new message. Then I just click a link and Gmail adds the message to the conversation. This is also great because it means I don’t end up being embarrassed by responding to a list just as someone else is sending a response that’s way better.
PCNames.com is a nice, AJAXish domain checking tool. It will show you the availability of a domain name on .com, .net, .org (and a couple of others) instantly, as you type. There’s a “Whois” button next to every taken result as well to get more information.
[Via SEW.] [By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]
