June 17th, 2008
If you go to Google translator and translate “simpaticone” (very funny person) from Italian into English, the result is “Barack Obama”.
I guess it’s to do with the fact Google uses statistical machine translation. Translation Googlebomb anyone?
Via Google Blogoscoped.
June 10th, 2008
photo: _StaR_DusT_
Theres some really interesting research In May’s Scientific American about the possible health benefits of blogging.
Self-medication may be the reason the blogosphere has taken off. Scientists (and writers) have long known about the therapeutic benefits of writing about personal experiences, thoughts and feelings. But besides serving as a stress-coping mechanism, expressive writing produces many physiological benefits. Research shows that it improves memory and sleep, boosts immune cell activity and reduces viral load in AIDS patients, and even speeds healing after surgery.
This comes just a month after the New York Times published an article talking about the poor working conditions often enjoyed by bloggers and the stress that bloggers could be put under.
Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.
…
“I haven’t died yet,” said Michael Arrington, the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a popular technology blog. The site has brought in millions in advertising revenue, but there has been a hefty cost. Mr. Arrington says he has gained 30 pounds in the last three years, developed a severe sleeping disorder and turned his home into an office for him and four employees. “At some point, I’ll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen.”
photo: flattop341
Two seemingly contradicting articles perhaps? To me, the two articles seem to describe different types of blogging. I believe the first article argues that blogging for yourself and for fun is beneficial. It’s therapeutic and you’re not worrying about the number of posts you need to make in a day or how many readers each post gets.
The second article argues that blogging for profit is very stressful and damaging to your lifestyle. I think it makes sense: as a technology blogger you’re essentially competiting with all the big tech websites such as Cnet and Gizmodo and worrying whether you’ll get your article to Digg before everyone else. And of course everything moves really quickly on the internet.
In the end, I think it all comes down to a work-life balance. If you want to blog for profit, there is a certain point where you must let go and employ somebody else to contribute to your blog: perhaps from a different part of the world or a different time zone. One blogger is never going to be able to match the large technology companies for size or speed. It’s not easy to earn money from blogging: otherwise everyone would be doing it.
photo: arquera
I’d personally hate to be a professional blogger. The whole idea of having to spend a lot of time submitting to Digg and having to spend excessive amounts of time on the internet just doesn’t appeal to me. The very nature of blogging means it tends to happen at home making it very hard to get that correct work-life balance.
Saying that, I’ve recently introduced Google AdSense onto my blog archives. As a cash strapped student, any additional money I earn and which can go towards tuition fees is very welcome and very needed. It’s certainly not a huge amount of money and I’d be lying if I said it took no work to achieve even that. The way I see it: I’ve been blogging for 3 years and my blog income is very unremarkable. I couldn’t even begin to wonder how much work it would take to earn a living from it.
April 16th, 2008
If you told me a few years ago that I’d be sending simple math calculations to a bunch of supercomputers in Mountain View, California rather than reaching for the calculator next to me on my desk, I’d probably have laughed. I’ve noticed that increasingly I’ve been using Google’s Calculator. Why? There are three reasons:
You might have found yourself doing this too. Type a number into your Firefox Google Search Box and have a look at the autocomplete entries. When I enter the number 1 into this box, I get whole pages full of maths queries.
I wonder: if we’re sending such basic things such as basic maths equations to computers across the world, isn’t it just a matter of time before grid computing takes off and we send all kinds of tasks over the internet?
March 30th, 2008
The Google Mail Trend Visualiser is pretty cool. It’s a Python script which connects to your Gmail account using IMAP and then produces some pretty graphs, tables and distributions on information such as who is emailing you, subject lines, mailing lists and so on.
Check out the example output for the Enron e-mail dataset and if you’re interested, have a look at the getting started guide. I’ve tried installing this but so far no luck… I get “ImportError: No module named utils” but I’m running Python 2.3 on Windows… your mileage may vary.
October 10th, 2006
If I read another article about the Google purchase of Youtube, I am going to go crazy.
Every single article talks about the same thing and regurgitates the same points - why Google is going to be sued, why YouTube isn’t a great place for advertising and about how Youtube’s videos fit in with Google’s mission of indexing the world’s information.
Google and Youtube are great but is a business deal which has very little short-term effect on end-users really important enough to warrant several posts on every single technology blog and a tons of Digg articles?
I really don’t understand the whole obsession with Google.
September 20th, 2006
I’m not Mr. Techcrunch and I don’t spend my time checking out every cool new Web 2.0 site. But I’ve been on my fair share of them to know what this icon means:
To me, that icon means the browser is busy doing something.
Today, I decided I’d give Google Analytics a go. I added the HTML to my site, returned to the Analytics page and clicked on the link to check the status of the site.
Then I sat there stone-faced for several minutes waiting for something to happen. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
Why? This icon is used by everyone else to show that some AJAXy goodness is being done behind the scenes. The message is also not clear and makes it sound like data is being generated on the server and being delivered to the browser.
The loading indicator is the wrong icon for the job and the message only supports the expectation that something AJAXy is supposed to happen.
I think this is a great example of confusing non-standard use of icons and misleading the user into thinking something is going to happen.
July 24th, 2006
I only use 2 Google services every day: Google Search (Web & Images) and Google Adsense (not out of choice but because every site on the net has Adsense these days). I have not replaced MSN Messenger with Google Talk, I have not replaced Thunderbird with Gmail, I have not replaced Microsoft Office with Writely and Google Spreadsheets.
I admit, Google makes some decent products. Google’s search engine is still miles ahead of the competition and I can’t see myself using another search engine for quite an amount of time. Google Earth provides fantastic satellite imagery but I’ve never used it for anything else. Google Toolbar, Picasa, Desktop, Talk, Spreadsheets can be useful utilities but I’ve never liked them. Other companies - notably Microsoft - make much better products. Google Video is pretty decent but Youtube knocks the socks off Google (primarily because it has decent content). Google Maps has been easily rivalled by Yahoo and Microsoft’s offerings.
What really annoys me is every time I log on to the internet there’ll be an article on half the blogs I read and Digg speculating about a future Google product launch. Everytime there is a change in the robots.txt file it’ll make headline news. Someone will find a file which Google has accidently left on the web and people begin speculating. A small change to the visual user interface of Adsense or some screenshots of some user interface changes to Google which are currently being tested get posted again and again and again.
Sure, Google are a great company. They’ve done some great things. But people are obsessed with Google and every single trivial thing to do with Google will make the headlines. And right now, I’m sick of reading about Google.
July 23rd, 2006
As fed up as I am of continuously reading about Google every day (more on this later), Philipp Lenssen’s Google Blogoscoped still manages to be a really interesting blog. Although it’s mainly about Google, it’s not all about Google. There are posts on other search engines, cool web sites, challenges and some cool experiments. It’s written by the same guy who wrote 55 Ways to Have Fun With Google.
I really like the writing style of Blogoscoped - the posts are generally quite short and easy to read - they link to the source and relevant sites and the blog doesn’t obsess about tedious stuff like a new domain registered to Google or a change to the robots.txt file.
Google Operating System is a similar blog which I also enjoy reading; again mainly about Google but also about related stuff.
July 18th, 2006
I was trying out some alternative search engines earlier as I wanted to become less reliant on Google. Live.com Search is supposed to by Microsoft’s Google killer. I think it’s absolutely terrible.
Take a look at the top results for Firefox on Live.com:
The official Firefox download page isn’t even even in the top 20 results. The top result is a UK company called Firefox which is an acceptable result but most people won’t be looking for it.
The second result is a spammy page which makes money by providing a Firefox with Google Toolbar download. Compare the results to those given by Google which include official download pages, Firefox advocacy site "Spread Firefox" and a link to the Firefox Wikipedia page. Live, in contrast, has an Uncyclopedia result in the top 10.
It doesn’t seem to be limited to just Firefox, Linux comes up with pretty poor results. Even a search for Windows doesn’t even bring up the official Windows XP page.
Worst search engine ever?
June 23rd, 2006
In Philipp Lenssen’s "55 Ways to Have Fun with Google" (now CC and free download as mentioned yesterday) chapter 13, he described a magic trick with Google.
Quoting from the 13th chapter:
Here’s a magic trick to surprise your friends with. What they will see is this: you are at the Google homepage, and you casually ask someone to watch the Google logo. Then, you move two of your fingers to completely cover the “o”s in the Google logo. When you remove your fingers, to much surprise, the letters “o” will be missing from the logo. Now you ask your friend to move her fingers over the missing “o”s. After your friend removes the fingers, the logo will be complete again!
The trick here? It’s not really the Google homepage you and your friend are looking at – it’s a fake page (darkartsmedia.com/Google.html). And when you click on the page, the letters of the logo will disappear after five seconds. Clicking again will make them reappear after five more seconds. So when you move your fingers to cover the Google logo, simply click anywhere on the page, and wait a bit before you remove your fingers… and when your friend covers the letters, you click again. (A third click, by the way, will change the page to an actual Google homepage so you can perform searches to “prove” the page is real.)
I do think it is rather odd to be discussing the best way to implement a joke but it the joke page annoyed me as it didn’t look much like the way Google renders on my system and I knew it wouldn’t catch out anyone I knew. I thought I’d create an alternate implementation.
This implementation uses Javascript and can function as a bookmarklet. You actually use Google’s homepage and not a fake page. Simply visit the Google homepage, and type this in the address bar:
javascript:void(document.onclick=function() {document.onclick=function() { setTimeout("document.getElementsByTagName(’IMG’)[1].src=’http://www.google.com/intl/en/images/logo.gif’", 3000)}; setTimeout("document.getElementsByTagName(’IMG’)[1].src=’http://tinyurl.com/rtcol’", 3000) })
Alternatively, make this link a bookmarklet by dragging it onto your bookmarks toolbar (this will stop Firefox from changing the address bar).
Follow the same instructions as above - this time when you click once on the real Google homepage, the logo will change after 3 seconds. When you click again, it’ll return to the normal logo again after 3 seconds. I couldn’t be bothered to photoshop the Google logo without the "oo" so I used a picture of Steve Ballmer instead.
The great thing about this implementation is it looks exactly as it would render normally in your browser (font sizes, custom CSS, etc) and everything still works as normal.
Enjoy hours of endless fun of proving to people that Microsoft own Google and spamming Digg with proof that you’ve found exclusive information about Google’s next holiday doodle.
 {document.onclick=function() { setTimeout("document.getElementsByTagName('IMG')[1].src='http://www.google.com/intl/en/images/logo.gif'", 3000)}; setTimeout("document.getElementsByTagName('IMG')[1].src='http://tinyurl.com/rtcol'", 3000) })){kind=link}