Posts tagged with "Google"

Seasoned bloggers know people are rarely moved to comment on a blog post. Especially, one hit wonders sent from Google, who were simply looking for train times between Clapham and Norbiton and instead see some commuter rant aimed at South West Trains.

However, microblogging has taught us that people are slightly more likely to grudgingly acknowledge an amusing one-liner with a 'Like' or a 'Fave'. Clicking a button is quick and easy - even for lazy people.

The recently launched Google Plus also uses '+1' both for posts and - probably the single feature I like most of all in Google Plus - the ability to add '+1' on individual comments.

I always equate this with a knowing smile across a crowded room - just to say "I saw what you did there. It made me smile but it's not worthy of a reply to say 'Hey - that clever bit of word play made me smile' but have a 'Like'".

As Drupal 7 has a Google +1 module available and Google Webmaster Tools includes reports to track this metric, I thought I'd add a '+1' button to every single post on this blog.

Now - you know what you have to do. Even if you were just hunting for train times.

Steve Rubel has resolved to return to feed reading in 2011.

However, I have been using Google Reader since 2007 and use it daily to catch up with the tech and sports news in addition to my favourite blogs. I honestly can't imagine life without it. I was also interested by a recent article (prompted by the demise of delicio.us) that described the use of Google Reader as a bookmarking service.

Just installed the Lightning extension which provides an embedded calendar (Sunbird within Thunderbird).

This is made even more useful by the addition of the Provider for Google Calendar add-on that enables seamless, two way synchronisation between Google Calendar and Thunderbird.

Less than two minutes to index a new article. Impressive.

Not its not unavailable but Google have added support for offline reading of up to 2,000 items using the recently announced Google Gears.

Another much requested feature and a surprising omission from Reader - the ability to search feeds - is also thought to be on the horizon.

The recent storm in the anti-blogosphere about Google acquiring Feedburner, the frightening prospect of Google placing ads in your precious feeds, capturing all your personal data, monitoring your every movement (online and offline) and logging your brainwaves into the Google data warehouse is starting to irritate me.

Despite the corporate motto, please remember Google is evil and 2084 is just around the corner, folks. Be aware that Google just announced a partnership with global law enforcement agencies to upload all CCT footage to YouTube.

Thankfully, some intelligent people are able to distance themselves from the hype and present a more balanced viewpoint.

Another irritant is idiots bleating, ironically enough, in Google Groups about the lack of monthly reports in the revamped Analytics and deficiencies in Reader.

If you don't like Analytics V2, go back to Site Meter to track your e-commerce site. Let me know how you get on.

If you can't stand Reader, shut up and go back to Bloglines and moan about that instead.

If you can no longer tolerate the unreliability and limitations of Docs and Spreadsheets, upgrade to Office 2007 and use Word and Excel. The choice is yours.

I use a lot of Google products (Gmail, Reader, Calendar, Analytics, Notebook, Desktop, Bookmarks, IG, Docs, Groups, Webmaster, Adsense oh and, err that Search thingy). My view is that all are excellent, innovative software products and, best of all, completely free of charge.

I really don't care that Google has stored every single keyword related to my searches from October 1991.

I honestly don't care that Google has copies of my homework excuses and letters to the Inland Revenue. Believe me, the contents are really not that earth shattering.

I truly don't care that Google has copies of every single email I have ever sent and received because, surprisingly, I have nothing to hide. I only wish Google could get behind corporate firewalls and retrieve the remainder as I have lost some magnificent blogging material over the years.

If you are genuinely worried that Google is going to tell you what to 'eat for tea', maybe you should do the world a favour and start a protest on behalf of all Interweb users by going on an indefinite hunger strike. Immediately.

If you are a child molester or jumped the turnstiles last night in Athens, then, by all means, please disable all cookies, use Ask.com or give your computer to charity.

As for me, I am putting my money where my mouth in. The next purchase in my SIPP will be the purchase of £7,000 of GOOG stock. Tomorrow.

I was staggered to read on TechCrunch that Yahoo! Mail has 250 million users while the much younger and rapidly growing Google Mail (beta) service currently has a paltry 51 million users in comparison.

I wonder what proportion of these users, in these impressive headline (marketing) numbers, actively use the respective services on a daily basis.

However, I was not surprised at Yahoo's offer of 'unlimited' email storage which gets a cheap headline and was pretty inevitable. A tiny minority will gleefully claim they really need infinite storage and think of inventive ways to upload the entire contents of their PC to a server. Yahoo! will then ban them for uploading copyrighted material.

While I have a longstanding but rarely used Yahoo! Mail account (which I was scanning tonight funnily enough searching for my Flickr credentials), this announcement won't be tempting me back to Yahoo! just yet. I await with interest Google's response though.

I think the Yahoo! Mail screen is incredibly cluttered and the adverts on the right hand side are incredibly intrusive and consume valuable screen estate. As you scroll through Yahoo! emails, the banner ads actually change which is slow and very distracting !

I know this type of thing is very subjective and, in many cases, ones preference simply reflects what you are used to and familiar with but I honestly don't know how Doug tolerates it. Also, Google's spam filter is far more effective which is important.

Also, Yahoo! have a irritating tendency to overuse the exclamation mark as part of the corporate branding. Look at any personalised Yahoo! page and shriek as you count the shrieks. I suspect you will be unpleasantly surprised.

Unfortunately, I appear to have mislaid (or Yahoo have inactivated) my Yahoo! credentials for my world famous Flickr stream so let's try some inline thumbnails. Apologies for the quality.

Note the MASSIVE banner ad on RHS (no I didn't photoshop the red border) and the more subtle ads bottom left.

I continue to use my ISP email account for personal stuff but am starting a gradual migration to Gmail which started around a year ago. Apart from spam, I hardly ever delete a Google email. Consequently, I am barely scratching the surface of my 3GB allocation (35 MB - 1% - of the allocated 2833 MB).

I also like the security of having messages and email address stored on a server (and not my PC).

The ads on Google Mail seem much less noticeable and intrusive to me (yeah I know I'm a Google whore). I can honestly say that I barely notice them. I think this is because of the text (not banner) ads coupled with the white background although I am not sure what advertising men in new media glasses would make of this.

Like most people, I store information in many different places. Lots of data is stored directly on my work laptop while yet more data is stored on my computer at home.

• Mail folders
• Address book
• Text files
• Corporate blogs
• Presentations
• Word documents
• Intranet resources
• Whitepapers
• Web history
• RSS feeds
• Photos
• Music

Even more data is stored on external servers

• Gmail
• Blinklist
• Web site, blogs and mySQL databases at Bluehost
• Post-it on fridge
• Mobile phone
• Palm PDA
• My head (last resort)

I first used Google Desktop a couple of years ago when it was first launched. Back then, the ongoing indexing process seemed to add a unreasonable load on my laptop, so I decided to uninstall the program and revert to old-fashioned searching in Windows Explorer and Outlook (and now Thunderbird).

However, recently I decided to give Google Desktop another go because I am a Google whore. The initial index of the entire computer took a few hours to index a grand total of 131,854 items (44,118 emails, 5,059 Web history and 82,677 files).

After the initial index was complete, the overhead of the ongoing index process barely seemed noticeable (although my laptop has also been upgraded to a higher specification in the interim).

Google Desktop scans email folders, text files, PDF, Powerpoint, Word documents, Gmail and Web history. As you might expect, the search is lightning fast, much faster than searching within Thunderbird although the range of options isn't as comprehensive.

I find myself using Google Desktop a lot. Often I am not looking for a specific email, article or document but researching a topic, trying to locate all possible relevant information from the different sources available. Google Desktop makes this type of searching across multiple, disparate data sources very easy and quick.

Google Desktop caches data locally so you can search Gmail folders and even Web pages while offline. There is also a Preview option available.

I can also increase the accuracy and quality of my search results and save some disk space by deleting dated, obsolete or irrelevant information as I find it.

Another neat feature which worries the men in white (or black) hats is a positive bonus to me. Google Desktop can be configured to search documents and Web history from my home PC. This feature would be even better if my domestic email folders could be included as this would potentially enable me to reply to Dave's email message about drinks next Thursday or Friday from a hotel room in Prague.

Currently, I would have to call the wife, ask her to log on to the computer, educate her how to search in Thunderbird, locate the correct information and mail me the results. All of this is too much trouble given she moans at being asked to perform the simple task of setting the video to record 'Lost'.

The only minor issue I have encountered thus far is that Google Desktop does not search within WinZip archives despite claiming to 'search the full text of Zip files'. This is less than ideal as most of my formal reports are Word documents zipped up to save space. Just as well then, that there is precious little of technical value buried deep within those archives.

Coincidentally, Google Desktop has just been updated to 5.1 (beta) with a dark, transparent sidebar, improved gadget support and enhanced security. Although I have experimented with the sidebar, I don't actually use this feature as I find it too invasive (i.e addictive and time wasting).

This post put me in a quandry. I found the video very amusing so I was torn between leaving a grateful comment on Donncha's blog and awarding the article a (Gold) Star in Google Reader.

But if I only did that, my friend and a couple of (ex-) colleagues who might appreciate the joke may miss it. That would be very selfish. Forgive me Father, but briefly, I toyed with reverting to Web 0.1 (beta) and sending an mass email to 'Friends/Ex Colleagues'.

I compromised by posting an article on my blog referring to Donncha's article so he sees the pingback and gets the credit for spotting the video. So Donncha's happy, I'm happy, everyone's happy.

Well - not exactly because I had to write some additional words on my article to justify its existence. This is exactly the situation that Google Shared Items is for. > These items might be interesting or useful snippets of information > quickly noted in passing which I wouldn't necessarily blog about.

I just want to display a RSS feed on my blog for articles like this that I find interesting, amusing or thought provoking. This is trivial to implement in WordPress so I simply grab the feed URL for 'Shared Items' from Google Reader and create an RSS widget to display 'What I am currently reading' on the sidebar in this blog.

Unfortunately, that didn't work. The feed and article names were displayed but the formatting of the links was broken on WordPress 2.1. Curiously, I tried the same configuration on a test blog on hosted Wordpress and it worked fine.

A little research revealed that the WordPress RSS widget does not appear to support Atom 1.0 format (which is precisely the format used by Google Shared Items).

No problem. Just create a Feedburner feed and see if that works. This should automatically, dynamically and intelligently convert the feed format into a format the recipient can digest. Unfortunately, it doesn't. Sigh. Give up in disgust and make a note to ask in the WordPress/Reader forums.

Only you can't give up. You want this to work and this is now a challenge.

Read the Feedburner FAQ which implies that SmartBurner is what you need. This automatically, converts the original feed format for the consumer on the fly. However, SmartBurner is enabled by default so I wonder why it isn't working.

Examine the configuration of SmartBurner. By default, the output feed preserves the format of the original feed (Atom 1.0 in this case). However, it is easy to force conversion to different format (RSS 2.0) by setting the 'Content-Type'.

Revisit the WordPress RSS widget. Success !

So, after all that time and effort, I sincerely hope you both enjoy my 'Google Shared Items' feed.

OK. OK. I give in. Please stop hurting me, Brin. I now realise that resistance is futile.

Look I did what you asked. I have now converted to Google Reader. Please, no more. I will do anything you want. Please, Sergey - let my wife go.'

Even my son (newly hired Google enforcer) has now installed Google Desktop and is busy indexing the entire contents of the PC.

Just about the only remaining product in the Google portfolio I don't use is Adsense.

Am I a fully fledged Google whore yet ? If not, what else do I need to do ?

'Oh no - you've discovered I am not using Blogger. No Sergey. Please. I beg you. Please, Brin. Show some mercy. Not the pliers and electrical cord. Please stop. Aaaarrgghhh. I give in. Please stop now.'