This is a cool idea: DesignComics.org offers free downloads of comic clip arts so you can create your own comics.
The setting is an office, so it’s likely most useful for creating help slide shows to explain certain web products. The main file format is a bit weird – ODP, the Open Document Presentation format, for use in StarOffice or OpenOffice – because these files are brought to you by Sun, makers of StarOffice. However, th

[Mockup by I’m Not A Doctor, with permission.] [By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments][Advertisement] Google books at eBay: background info on Google, AdWords, AdSense, Blogger and more…   [Advertise here]

A “national Google campaign” from Turkey is jealous of special logos some countries get (“Such as 4th of july logo for Americans” or “Australia New Zealand Army Corps … day logo for the martyr in Gallipoli for the Australians”) and demands customized logos from Google Turkey “on our nations special days.” These self-proclaimed “Google lovers” even started to design a couple of Turkis

The official Google AdSense blog announced a new Google Apps referral button – so you can earn $5 if you refer other people to Google Apps – but omits to tell that it seems to be US-only*. Does anyone have screenshots of the different buttons offered, like the one above I copied from Google’s post? [Thanks Haochi!] *The referrals I’m currently seeing from Germany are for AdSense, AdWords, Firefox + Google Toolbar, and G

Google has announced they’re starting a TV advertisement trial building on their AdSense/ AdWords principles: <<Users spend a lot of time watching TV so improving the relevance of advertising information on that medium is important. (…) Working closely with our partners, EchoStar and Astound Cable, we are currently running a trial to deliver better ads to viewers and help advertisers, operators and programmers more efficiently bu

French net artist Albertine Meunier points to her spoken and visualized search history and explains: <<My Google Search History is a video & sound inventory of all my search requests done since 2006 on Google search engine. Displayed as an inventory, my searches show a full selfportrait. Like a big souvenir movie, videos and sounds can refresh the small things i was looking for at specific moments. Beyond this autoportrait feature, th

Ah, finally some common sense in the copyright discussion from one of the “goliaths.” Quote from an EMI Music news bit which discusses a move away from the customer-pestering curse that goes by the euphemism “Digital Rights Management” (my emphasis): <<EMI Group CEO Eric Nicoli today hosted a press conference at EMI’s headquarters in London where he announced that EMI Music is launching DRM-free superior qua

Ionut Alex. Chitu learned about Google Writer. It’s basically a smart tool from Google that helps writing your blog posts by automatically pulling quotes and related media into your posts, along with auto-completion of sentences. Maybe in the future it won’t even need a human writer anymore and blog on its own? That would certainly save a lot of time for busy bloggers. [Thanks Randy J.!] Join the ongoing comments. [By Philipp Lenssen

Google introduces “Gmail Paper”, a change from virtual reality mail, to, ugh, reality mail: <<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.>> And there’s no limit to how many paper mail

The Register reports that Google and Apple join forces to create the “ultimate phone”: <<In keeping with the iPod tradition, the “ID” has no power switch. In fact, there are no buttons at all. More surprisingly, Jonathan Ives’ industrial design means there’s no room for a SIM card, or any embedded cellullar radio circuitry. As a consequence, the “ID” is incapable of making or receiving telep

The official Google blog briefly had a post live titled “We Will Drive You Crazy” but it’s been pulled now. Another April Fool’s joke? Does anyone have screenshots of the full post? [Thanks Tim!] [By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments][Advertisement] Google books at eBay: background info on Google, AdWords, AdSense, Blogger and more…   [Advertise here]

Matt Cutt’s blog looks defaced today… but remembering it’s April 1st, trust no one and nothing! The blog reads … <<This site have been hacked by Dark SEO Team. nous sommes le proprietaire de toi Shoutz to Dan “the man”, the 302 hijack t33m, NYC SEO gang, Linusx [and so on]>> … pointing to DarkSEOTeam.com (this link at the defacement isn’t nofollowed). Join the ongoing comments. [By Phil

TiSP is Google’s new toilet-based, free in-home wireless broadband service. (Yeah, OK, it’s Google’s April Fool’s joke!) [Thanks Pokemon and Randy J.!] Join the ongoing comments. [By Philipp Lenssen | Original post][Advertisement] AdWatcher. Detect Click Fraud. Prevent Click Fraud. Get Your Money Back.   [Advertise here]

Twan Eikelenboom from the Netherlands is currently studying Media & Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He has a special interest in “navigating and exploring this seemingly endless space that new media realities give us.”
  When the invitation for the Benelux Google Geoday 2007, shaped in the form of the Google Maps marker which has risen to fame in the past years, landed in my mailbox it promised to become an inte

Google managing counsel Michael Kwun wrote a peppered letter to the Washington Post in regards to the Viacom/ YouTube court case. His choice of language makes it sound as if the two parties involved are really wearing their battle gear, and you can only imagine the screaming and biting that went on in the background negotiations before Viacom started to sue! Some quotes (my emphasis): <<Viacom’s lawsuit is an attack on the way peop

1. Color shortcuts and color conversions In CSS, you can write color values in a variety of ways, e.g. “RGB(0,0,0)”, “black”, and “#000000″ all result in black. However, you can also use a shortcut for hexadecimal values that follows this form: “#000″. #0BC for example means #00BBCC but is a little quicker to write. Sometimes when you need to feed color values into forms, e.g. for tools such as Google AdSense where you can define a border and b

When you ask Google Maps for the direction from Harvard, Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Kings College, Cambridge, England, in step 12 they suggest you “Swim across the Atlantic Ocean.” Don’t be a sissy!
[Thanks Nicolai!] [By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments][Advertisement] Google books at eBay: background info on Google, AdWords, AdSense, Blogger and more…   [Advertise here]

Some people in the vicinities of the web standardization group W3C (but not directly the W3C) are working on a new version of HTML/ XHTML called HTML 5 (or Web Hypertext Application Technology or X/HTML5). Other efforts at the W3C go into the direction of XHTML2, but these two aren’t compatible or truly befriended. HTML standards continue to be a whole big confusing mess – just count the number of names & abbreviations in this

Google Notebook – a website and browser extension to take (single-user or collaborative) notes & copy stuff from the web while browsing – received a design overhaul. The site looks much more clear now, with individual elements separated into boxes, along with lots of round edges and shadows. A close-up view
The browser extension running on Firefox [Thanks PacificDave and Sohil S.!] Join the ongoing comments. [By Philipp Lenss

21-year old Yvo Schaap from Netherlands created a new website with an interesting idea. At MillionSoulsAware.org – designed and programmed by Yvo – he focuses on one topic a time which he thinks deserves global attention. At this time, that’s the topic of refugee camps. Now whenever someone visits the site and spends a couple of seconds to read the content (Yvo is checking against IP addresses to better ensure these are unique

How nice – some bug pushed an Inside AdSense post from 2005 up the RSS feed and I learned that Google’s AdSense for Search program has a feature to show the top searches people performed (you’ll find it in AdSense -> Reports -> Advanced Reports -> Choose product: AdSense for Search -> Top queries data -> Display report). Finally I know what we’re all looking for here: Top site searches (since some months)

CRM for Google (CRM means Customer Relationship Management) is a set of gadgets for your personalized Google homepage that allows you to do things like track tasks, manage contacts, add notes, or create appointments. (In the beginning while playing around with this I got a couple of errors from Google’s servers telling me the gadget “information is temporarily unavailable,” but this worked after a while.) I wonder though if to

Steve points to his screenshot of what seems to be a new Google results prototype (in other words, you will only accidentally see it, as Google engineers merely aim to collect usage statistics). When Steve searched for red cross, he saw a box to the right side of search results presenting both the different Google engines – Google Images, Maps, News and Groups – as well as a related searches cluster with entries like red cross histo

“At Microsoft, we work to help people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential. This is our mission. Everything we do reflects this mission and the values that make it possible.”
– Microsoft’s mission statement There are so many ways to make sure people understand your search engine is not to be trusted. One of them is putting product placement right into the search box, as MSN UK does. When you

Yahoo ups the ante and announced that Yahoo Mail will start offering unlimited storage starting May this year.
Right now, you’ll get 1 GB for free at Yahoo, whereas Google’s Gmail has almost 3 GB – a lot, but by far not enough to “not throw anything away,” as Google claims. I still prefer the usability approach of Gmail, but Yahoo Mail Beta was already the second-best email client – and probably the best for

At the Flash-based Search Engine Smackdown game, you are entering a fight as one of the big figures in search – like Larry Page or Sergey Brin – and need to answer a series of search-related questions to score hits. A highscore table track the best winning times… [Via Barry Schwartz.] [By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments][Advertisement] Google books at eBay: background info on Google, AdWords, AdSense, Blogger and more..

We’ve been discussing whether it’s against Google’s AdSense policies if your kitten clicks on your ads, and I think Peter Dawson’s photo above perfectly illustrates the case… [By Philipp Lenssen | Original post][Advertisement] Google books at eBay: background info on Google, AdWords, AdSense, Blogger and more…   [Advertise here]

Asian search competitor Baidu is funny. When you use their image search engine and click on a thumbnail, they’ll open a new page on their server which displays the large version of the image, with an additional link to the source page… an interesting interpretation of “fair use.” (There’s some sort of copyright notice on the page’s footer, though automatic translation programs fail to get the precise point across

Google’s AdSense for Domains program partners with businesses that rely on those annoying parked domains (with no added value) for generating revenue. Does anyone know domains using AdSense for Domains, and mechanisms to locate these domains? *Quote Google: “Maximize revenue on your parked pages with Google AdSense for domains. … AdSense® for domains allows domain name registrars and large domain name holders to unlock the valu

Bundleware Google Pack added a neat new feature to their photo slideshow screensaver – you can now add RSS feeds containing photos, like this one from Flickr: http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/
photos_public.gne?tags=horse&format=rss_200 Replace “horse” with any other keyword, like “google”, or multiple keywords in this+form. Also, the Google Photos Screensaver allows you to add any Picasa web album or (th

Google released a new mobile search engine additional to their existing mobile search. While Google’s old mobile search engine lets you pick from different types of engines (web, images, local and so on), the new search engine combine these types of results all into one page for your specific queries. Search for photos of cat stevens, and you’ll get: 3 pics on top of the page, along with a link to “more images”
6 web

The official Google Blog got redesigned, and, annoyingly enough, someone decided it makes sense to switch to smaller font sizes. I think too-small fonts continue to be one of the top accessibility problems with web design. (Sure, there’s a variety of small and large hacks to increase font sizes if web designers screw them up, but none of these are free of effort or side-effects.) [By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments][Advertiseme

Jason Levine writes: <<If you live or spend any amount of time in Washington, DC, you might have noticed a problem recently: Google Maps essentially no longer works here. Sometime in mid-February, it appears that the folks behind the previously-amazing mapping service updated the address parser that it uses, and at this point the parser doesn’t have any clue how to understand the one-letter streets and quadrant system that’s used t

Brian Smith writes about a new form of search engine optimization – data feed optimization for Google Base. Google Base allows you to store your data, e.g. stuff you sell online, and the more Google decides to integrate Base items into natural results, the more it will become interesting in terms of SEO. Brian tells me, “Google has been pretty quiet on Google Base lately, but I have a feeling the service will get pushed a lot more s

Actual screenshot Mathias Schindler sent in an idea to catch evil-doers. I’ll wrap it up: Create an AdWords campaign targeting keyphrases like “build a bomb”*, “how to become a Taliban”, “overtake USA” or “escape Guantanamo”
When someone clicks on the ad in Google search results or on AdSense ads integrated in websites, you’ll track the time + IP address of the user
With that list in hand,

Google Maps now supports the GeoRSS file format, and the Google Maps API now allows you to add geographic data in the form of KML files to your mashups, the official Google Maps API blog reports. Frank Taylor of the unofficial Google Earth blog throws in some caveats: <<The KML Google Maps can handle is still limited. It can handle image overlays, polygons, lines, and placemarks. But, only of limited size. Hundreds of placemarks will throw

Google recently (March 22nd) celebrated an “Alternative Transportation Day,” urging their employees to commute to work without the use of a car. For this occasion, according to Google, they offered every single of their ~2,000 European employees… a new bike (pictured you see the three models employees were able to choose from). How do you get to work? [Thanks Stefan Keuchel!] [By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments][Advert

Raymond Chandler, the 1888-born crime fiction author and inventor of detective Philip Marlowe, mentioned “Google” way back in 1953 in a letter to his agent (my emphasis; you can find two references to this passage in Google Books, too): <<Did you ever read what they call Science Fiction? It’s a scream. It’s written like this: ’I checked out with K19 on Adabaran III, and stepped out through the crummalio

Friend Steve recently asked me, “Picasa Albums are private now, right?”, and I told him, well yeah, you can unlist an album and then it will have a hard-to-guess URL* (which you can then share which friends)… but there’s no real password protection for photos. And here’s an interesting use case courtesy of Fred Jeffry: you create an unlisted album, say your “private pics” album. This album contains 100 imag

Benjamin emailed me this screenshot of his Google search results page: It shows what appears to be yet another user interface test, this time moving the usual search option links from just above the search box to the top left of the page. Some links to other Google services have been added too. As shown on the Google Operating System blog, it seems this test isn’t just restricted to the results page either. In my opinion, this could pot

Google’s Custom Search Engine program now allows you to show off your engine’s popular search queries (this is aggregated data, so you need some popular queries to see this). Just login to your CSE control panel, hit the “statistics” link and scroll to the “popular queries” at the bottom – you’ll find some code to show off these stats on your homepage, Google says, though I don’t have a live

Google released a new API: the Picasa Web Albums Data API for photos. Using this API, which is part of the “GData” framework (which itself makes use of Atom feeds), you can include your photos on web pages or manage them from within other applications, among other stuff. One of the most straightforward, read-only uses is to simply request the contents of a public album to display its images. You’ll use the following URL return a “REST”-style X

Google released a neat client-side code prettifier. What you do is include their JavaScript and CSS files in your HTML page, trigger execution with an onload=”prettyPrint()” event, and then find everything in your <pre class=”prettyprint”>…</pre> elements be nicely colored – see the sample output. (At 44 KB, the JavaScript is a bit too heavy to include in just any page if you don’t need it everywhere, though you

Remember the AOL search query data leak? It gives an insight into what people are looking for. The “database of intentions,” as John Battelle calls it. I’ve hacked together this little page that randomly juxtaposes actual search queries with portraits found on Google Images (I’ve grabbed 10,000 thumbnails by searching for [portrait firstname], where firstname comes from a names database, e.g. “John”). Note th

If you can stomach it, also check out the other Techno Tuesday cartoons by Andy Rementer. [Cartoon by Andy, used with permission. Via Waxy.] [By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

Is Wikipedia.org showing too often in Google results? This weird lil YouTube video says so. [By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

The idea (thanks to NateDawg!): build a Google Personalized Homepage directory where people can upload their themes. The site includes an online editor to guide you to the theme creation process (you can upload graphics, wizard-style, and see live previews of what it will look like – this is because Google homepage themes need to follow a certain pattern). There will be a small optional clickable area on every homepage reserved for self-pr

Thanks to everyone commenting in the Google Wishlist thread. I’m illustrating a wish below. All screenshots shown in this post are my mockups & all descriptions are hypothetical, and any similarity to actual products, living or dead, is purely coincidental.   What’s Google Music? Google already got music searching capabilities. Search for pixies today, and you’ll be presented with a onebox which takes you to music re

Cory Doctorow points out a potentially devastating hypothetical terrorist plot: <<Terrorists could infiltrate the world’s car companies and manufacture large, fuel-inefficient vehicles like Hummers. Once America has gone all SUV, the resulting carbon emissions would contribute to polar melting and global warming, causing devastating hurricanes through the southwest, killing and displacing millions of Americans.>> [By Philipp Le

Google AdSense is slowly starting to roll out their Referrals program for more products than just their own (e.g. their own Google toolbar). As opposed to the usual pay-per-click Google ads, these AdSense ads will be pay-per-action: like with other affiliate programs, you’ll be able to make money only when a sale – or some other kind of action, like a sign-up – is made from your website’s referral. You can now sign up to