Published on
March 21, 2007 in
Google.
UPDATE: it appears that I got the new “Google Mail” logo because for some reasons Google maps my IP address to Germany, and so I got the German branding. I still think it would make sense for them to switch to a branding they can use anywhere, and thus get rid of the Gmail name. When, is anyone’s guess.
Now that Google changed the logo in my webmail client, I think we can say that Gmail is close to disappearing from Google’s (European) pages. They’re replacing it everywhere with the even less sexy “Google Mail”.
This might be due to the following legal hassle Google has in Europe:
The latest legal developments arrive just weeks after a European Union trademark office denied Google the rights to register the Gmail name across all of its member countries. Company representatives maintain that the EU ruling has no effect on its use of the trademark Gmail in countries other than Germany and the U.K. and that user experiences will be the same regardless of the service’s name.
news.com.com
They use the URL http://mail.google.com (no longer gmail.com or gmail.google.com) and on the welcome page there is no mentioning anymore of any “Gmail”. On the Google product overview page it’s still Gmail. Same thing for Google Talk: I see hardly any mention on “Gtalk” anymore.
If they’re gonna use common names for all their products, then maybe Froogle will become “Google Shopping”, Adsense/Adwords maybe “Google Ads” and Picasa “Google Photos”.
Published on
January 19, 2007 in
Google.
When I search for Roos Van Acker (in the Google sense of searching), I have 2 sites that show up in the top results: a blog post of mine and the Flickr picture you see at the right. My blog has a Pagerank 6, so that explains why it can score high in searches, but I was sometimes surprised when my Flickr pictures showed up high in Google results; until I noticed that my Flickr stream also had a Pagerank 5. So maybe I had more PR firepower that I suspected. I decided to make an inventory of all sites under my control and see how high their PR is: my Pagerank inventory.
(for more info on Pagerank, check google.com and wikipedia. In short: Google gives each page a ‘weight’ or importance indicator called Pagerank. Pagerank 4 (PR4 in short) is OK, PR7 is kinda hard to get (right, Bart?), PR9 is only for sites like yahoo.com and ebay.com, and PR10 is the absolute maximum (the only site I know with a PR10 is google.com). Continue reading ‘My own Pagerank inventory’
Published on
November 21, 2006 in
Google.
Brad Garlinghouse, a Yahoo senior vice president, has written an internal memo (that leaked, obviously) stating that it is about time for Yahoo! to bite the bullet and start reorganising/refocusing.
I’ve heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular.
online.wsj.com
One of the issues he addresses is that they have internal competitors for a lot of services:
• YME vs. Musicmatch
• Flickr vs. Photos
• YMG video vs. Search video
• Deli.cio.us vs. myweb
Let’s focus on the picture hosting sites: Flickr is an early-adopters darling, while Yahoo Photos is vastly more popular, but (imho) ugly. One option could be to merge both brands, like Richard MacManus proposes:
My feeling though is that Flickr’s technology should be utilized more in Photos -i.e. why not re-brand Flickr as Photos. I can hear the gasps of horror from early adopter Flickr fans (of which I am one). But these are the kinds of hard decisions which Yahoo probably needs to make.
Yahoo could also try and re-brand Photos as Flickr, but that is a more risky proposition – and may I say, not Yahoo’s style.
readwriteweb.com
What I think they should do, is to focus on their low-end, high-volume product, Yahoo! Photos. Yahoo! should put Flickr on the market. Google has the deepest pockets and only a photo hosting site (Picasaweb) that is not a community. Google should buy Flickr and integrate it with the Picasa desktop software. Yahoo would make a nice profit on the original $20mio they invested and would be able to focus on photos for the masses, Google would finally own the photo community that has lead the pack in adding relevant metadata to pictures and it would make me happy too. Why? Because it would make my life so easy.
Published on
November 3, 2006 in
Google.
This is the first time I noticed this: an email in my Gmail with Excel attachments offers me the option to view the document in Google Spreadsheets.
Of course I tried it and indeed, the spreadsheet shows up in a webbased form. It doesn’t work for all spreadsheets though (I got an error message on the second document), but it is a nice extra feature to Gmail and Spreadsheets.
Now they could add this for Powerpoint (via Picasa slideshow?), Visio and all OpenOffice formats, and they just pretty much made the Word/Excel/Visio viewer applications obsolete. Even more importantly: it works on all platforms. Nice one!
Also featured on blogs.zdnet.com, blog.searchenginewatch.com and blog.outer-court.com.
Published on
October 3, 2006 in
Google.
Last week, CNET’s Elinor Mills reported on how a web search for “Martin Luther King” returns, as its first result on Google and as its second result on Windows Live Search, a web site (martinlutherking dot org) operated by a white supremacist organization named Stormfront.
(…)
What’s remarkable, though, is not that a search algorithm might be gamed by extremists but that the owners of the algorithm might themselves defend the offensive result – and reject any attempt to override it as an assault on the “integrity” of their system.
via Nicholas Carr
How were they (i.e. Stormfront) able to reach #1 with only 372 backlinks and a Pagerank 6? Any SEO tricks being used there?
Anyway, the best thing we can do is to push Google and the other search engines in the right direction: link Martin Luther King’s name to another site that is a better start point to learn about the man. Let’s take his Wikipedia page.
If you want to have an idea about who MLK was: check the following page:
Martin Luther King
Feel free to add your push, let’s see how long it takes before the Google results have been corrected.
UPDATE: Scoble added some more links:
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Published on
September 1, 2006 in
Google.
Come on, I can understand Sourceforge needs the Adsense revenue, but this is going too far. A huge 450 x 400 blue advertisement is blocking access to most download links on a Sourceforge download page, and there is no way to make it disappear, no [X] button in the top right or a “hide this” link.
The biggest square ads I can see in the Adsense overview page are 336 x 280 (”large rectangle”), so this must be some kind of special ad. It renders the page virtually useless. Drop it, already.
BTW: more flexible screwing, anyone?
Published on
August 29, 2006 in
Google.
Russell Jones, CTO of SEO firm Virante, has found an original way of showing off his SEO skills: he created a top 5 of SEO excuses, and made sure they listed #1 to #5 for the Google query “five seo excuses“.
So, here it goes, my top 5 reasons that you should avoid SEO. Or, if you want to do it the long way, just search google for “five SEO excuses”, without the quotes!
from thegooglecache.com via netlash.com
The top five SEO excuses are:
- There’s no money in it
- It’s too competitive
- It’s unethical, right
- It’s too expensive
- It just doesn’t work
Obviously, by now the top #5 has completely changed.
The #1 spot for “five SEO excuses” is now taken by digitalpoint.com, a very popular forum for SEO experts. The second is taken by seroundtable.com, an SEO blog. Only on the third spot, one of the ajaxle.com domains has kept its ground. Once the big guys start playing along …
UPDATE: I became #1 Google result with this post. I apparently should be careful about what I say here.
I’ve started a public Google calendar for tango events (milonga’s, salons) in and around Brussels. My preferred site, milonga.be has gone down, the agenda at tango.be is quite ugly (it uses frames *shiver* ), and Marisa & Oliver’s agenda cannot be exported. So I made my own:
Continue reading ‘Brussels Tango on Google Calendar’
Recent Comments