Posts with tag "Google"

From the Pipeline – 7.17.08

  • Category: Odds & Ends
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  • Posted 1769 days ago

Today was one of those days when my body decided that I wasn’t going to do anything more than get caught up on my sleep. It didn’t care if there were things that I felt I needed to get done – oh no .. not today. anyway here’s some things that caught my eye on today’s FriendFeed pipeline as I tried to get caught up today – and still trying to.

20+ Weirdest and Ugliest-Looking Animals on Earth [nw] :: Scienceray – weird and ugly doesn’t somehow cover the looks of some of this beasties

Telltale Signs Your Brand is NOT Ready for Social Media [nw] :: VisInsights – social media may be t he hot ticket term these days but not everyone may find that it really matters to them.

ONIGIRI HOUSE made entirely from cedar [nw] :: inhabitat – not sure how livable a home might be but I sure would love to give it a try .. simplicity is beautiful

Is This The Future Of Search? [nw] :: TechCrunch – if this is something that Google is seriously planning on adding then I am seriously going to be looking for a new search engine.

Not All Newspaper Chains Are Facing Doom And Gloom Scenarios [nw] :: Techdirt – much is made of the decline and fall of the newspaper industry but sometimes things aren’t always what they seem.

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From the Pipeline – 7.7.08

  • Category: Odds & Ends
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  • Posted 1779 days ago

Other than some silly ass rumor that Twitter is acquiring Summize the first day of the week has been pretty quite in the way of interesting tech news worth writing about. That doesn’t mean that there weren’t a few things of interest in today’s FriendFeed pipeline.

Identical Twins Create Human Mirror on NYC Subway Car [nw] :: Laughing Squid – you can always count on Scott to post some cool stuff and this is no exception. I have seen this post of his bouncing around the blogosphere for most of the day so I’m not alone in thinking this was cool.

Google: Bell Canada Is Breaking The Law [nw] :: Broadband Report – I guess hiring a Canuck as a CFO means you suddenly give a shit about what is happening above the 49th parallel – ya … right.

The Garden Zombie haunts your lawn gnome [nw] :: Coolest Gadgets – just too damn funny to not post

Russian blogger sentenced for “extremist” post [nw] :: Yahoo News – I get a kick out of these warm and fuzzy folks who think that just because it’s the Internet that freedom of speech applies regardless of the country the blogger lives in – get a grip on reality folks.

Stop Calling My Generation Dumb [nw] :: SheGeeks – Corvida lets loose with a great rant that is really worth reading

How English Is Evolving Into a Language We May Not Even Understand [nw] :: wired – English as a spoken and written language is changing whether we want it to or not.

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Quiz: So How Much Space Does YouTube’s Userbase Take Up?

2 Down - 2 More to go In a hearing today Google found out [nw] that it can’t win them all especially when it comes to its court battle with Viacom. This is the lawsuit where Viacom is seeking more than $1 Billion in damages because of Google allowing users to upload copyrighted material to YouTube. Viacom said it wants YouTube’s userbase information in order to increase Google’s liability in the matter.

It turns out that Judge didn’t go for Google’s safe harbor argument and has ordered Google to turn all user records over to Viacom. The funny part about this is that the judge also used Google’s own argument – that IP addresses of computers aren’t personally revealing in and of themselves – against the company. Needless to say the Electronic Frontier Foundation has reacted [nw] calling the judge’s order a violation of the Video Privacy Act.

But here’s the answer to the quiz question – it will take four terabyte hard drives to hold all of the user records for YouTube.

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From the Pipeline – 6.30.08

I finally decided to buckle down and bring the Off the Cuff podcast back to life and the first episode of the new season :) is now available as you can see from my previous post. Not sure what the schedule for future episodes is going to be but they are back for good. For now though here’s a few items that I found of interest in today’s FriendFeed pipeline.

The human factor in Social Media trends :: Alexander van Elsas – the first post in what Alexander plans to be a short series of posts about social media trends. An excellent read as usual (any major blog network that isn’t looking seriously at offering Alexander a job is missing out)

I Google, therefore I am losing the ability to think :: Guardian – in a theme first started by Nick Carr we fine John Naughton adding his thoughts on the dumbing down of humanity because of the web

Chris Pirillo is always thinking ahead. He is blogging FriendFeed comments! :: Bwana McCall [via FriendFeed] – Chris has always been first to do a lot of what might appear to be wacky but in the end have most of the time worked out well for him .. this is another one of those times.

The Something Store :: Something Store – from the website ….is a fun new website that operates simply: We will send you something, an item selected randomly among many things from our inventory, for $10 (free shipping in the US) and you will find out what your something is when you receive it.

Which Linux Distributions Are Dying? :: Coding Experiments – I always found it humorous that people give Microsoft flack with the number of Windows versions there are especially when you see how many different distros there are of Linux.

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From the Pipeline – 6.29.08

Another Sunday and another episode of the Elite Tech News is in the hands of Art Lindsey the producer for the show and barring him having any hard drive problems this week the new episode should be ready in a couple of hours. For now though here’s a few things that caught my eye in today’s FriendFeed pipeline.

Hyperion – a different vision of the Web :: Broadcast Brain – an interesting comparison of the web, Web 2.0, social media and its future to the science fiction book Hyperion by Dan Simmons.

Full-Text RSS :: echo ditto labs – fed up with those partial RSS feeds then this little web service might be just up your alley in that it lets you grab a URL for the full text version from these cheapskates.

Free the Feed. Or Make It Free. :: Profy – partial RSS feeds are bad enough but ones that come with ads that take up more space the ant actual text are a real piss off.

Are Your Friends in Your Suitcase? :: CenterNetworks – Allen talks about making sure you have all the necessary info about those Web folks who have become close friends safely tucked away where you can easily find it.

Exclusive: No ice at the North Pole :: The Independent – anyone know where I left my paddles cause I think I might end up needing them sooner that I thought.

Google and Creator of ‘Family Guy’ Strike a Deal :: The New York Times – the Google Content Network (?) appears to have signed a deal with the creator of Family guy to bring a internet only comedy show to the web – with Google ads of course.

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Search isn’t about buying stuff

The search game of ad dollars One of the bastions of the search slash advertising has been this idea that people just have to have advertising displayed to them based on what they are searching for. One of the biggest proponents of this ideal has been Robert Scoble who will often use the example of searching for photographs, cameras or even hotels and expecting that the advertising on a site; if available, should be geared to showing results that tie in with the search. This is because there is this supposition that because people are searching then they want to buy something.

Today Dare Obasanjo has a post where he points to a year old post by Bill Slawski on Search Engine Land. In the post Bill; talking about a 2007 study, shows that the majority of search isn’t related to buying stuff

Their research uncovered the following numbers: “80% of Web queries are informational in nature, with about 10% each being navigational and transactional.” The research points to the vast majority of searches being conducted for information gathering purposes. One of the indications of “information” queries that they looked for were searches which include terms such as: “ways to,” “how to,” “what is.”

So one has to wonder just how much of this idea that everyone is using search because they want to buy something is purely a marketing campaign. A campaign being directed in a large part by Google in order to convince advertisers that they can’t survive in an online world without Google and their search results.

I know myself I have never used any search engine in order to find something I wanted to purchase. The other thing that a study like this shows is that CPM ad models are flawed and why ads like Google AdSense only benefit Google and a very small percentage of the high traffic sites.

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From the Pipeline – 6.17.08

  • Category: Odds & Ends
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  • Posted 1799 days ago

Did you hear the news? Some new version of a browser was released today and got everyone so hot and bothered that the download site was out of commission for a short period of time. Other than that is seem to be a rather quiet day but I did manage to scrape a few things of interest from the FriendFeed pipeline today.

The incredible power of being able to think and act big :: Alexander van Elsas – why have just a single destination when instead you can have the whole airport, train station and bus station.

Extreme Ironing, A Sport Featuring Dangerous Ways To Iron Clothes :: Laughing Squid – sorry but I just couldn’t resist this one.

11 Search Trends That May Disrupt Google :: ReadWriteWeb – is this similar to the idea of death by a thousand cuts?

The cake is a lie: IE team bakes a treat for Mozilla :: Ars Technica – trust Ars to take a slap shot at Microsoft – and it didn’t come sugar coated like the cake the IE team sent to Mozilla.

6 Alternatives To Flickr Now Yahoo Is In Full Control :: The Inquisitr – Duncan comes to the rescue of folks worried about what is going to happen now that it is totally in the hands of Yahoo as the Flickr founders head for the nearest exit.

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Wake me when something interesting happens

Gmail Lab options - click for larger view Late last night it began to percolate through the tech blogosphere with TechCrunch and their front row seat blogging about it. Slowly the blog posts and Twitter messages began to filter through the FriendFeed grapevine.

Yes folks Google had everyone on the edge of their seats waiting breathlessly for the anticipated pimping of their Gmail Labs. Finally the curtain was going to be raised on the place where their developers can show off their 20% time projects for Gmail. Speculation had been fermenting since Google first announced that there was even going to be such a thing as the Lab. Now we were going to finally see all the cool stuff that would be taking our Gmail to the next level.

The curtain drops.

Gmail Labs is displayed to the world.

Uhm……

This is it?

Wow …

Are you sure you aren’t hiding anything?

So let me get this straight. This is what you are offering up for serious consideration as improvements to our email experience?

* Quick Links – and this has what to do with email?

* Superstars – marginally useful I guess

* Pictures in Chat – hmm had that with Gtalk already

* Fixed width font – huh? why?

* Custom keyboard shortcuts – again a marginally useful option I guess but what this to do with email?

* Mouse gestures – once more what does this have to do with email?

* Signature Tweaks – this is something that should have been a default option just as it is with any email client.

* Random signature – what’s next a random tagline option?

* Custom date formats – why?

* Muzzle – <scratching head>

* Old Snakey – great another way to avoid dealing with email

* Email addict – gee would just closing the Gmail window work just as well?

* Hide Unread Counts – why?

One would have hoped that all that 20% time being used up would have resulted in something more useful that most of what is in that list. I realize that Gmail is the snitz in the tech crowd but really all this hoopla over a bunch of basically useless code hacks is amazing. At least I’m not alone in wondering what all the noise was about.

Next time Google decides to try for some press I hope it is over something that is actually useful.

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