Google Analytics is what I’ve been saying a search engine should have done years ago, provide hosted stats to any website that uses it. People love stats so this will get huge uptake, and probably provide Google really invaluable information. A year or so ago I hoped Technorati would do this for blogs, but they probably saw it as outside their core business. Interesting note: this is the first stat tracking javascript I’ve seen that validates as XHTML Strict. Good job, guys. (Most examples leave the language attribute.)
Category Archives: Google
Thumb recovering, now flu
Well the good news is my thumb seems to be recoving, though I’m still keeping it in a splint because it’s really sensitive. The bad news is a few days ago I came down with some sort of cold/flu or strep throat (going to doctor again tomorrow) that has really knocked me out. Maybe it’s the same thing as Om Malik and Matt Marshall. (Someone should do a Web 2.0 mashup of blogs, event calendars, and Google maps to identify Patient Zero.) The only thing that has allowed me to stay concious and not fall too far behind is Tylenol Sore Throat, which is one of the most amazing painkillers ever. My sister was in town and bought this for me and it has been magical, though it tastes awful. One of the biggest problems with sore throats is I don’t eat or drink because it hurts too much, which then gets you dehydrated and sicker. With TST I’m able to get some food and drink down and it also helps with the fever. Hopefully within another day or two this will run its course.
Google Aggregator
Check out the Google Reader, their new RSS aggregator.
On Rita
Houston is the 4th largest city in the entire United States. The neighborhoods that flood the worst are the poor areas, but that doesn’t sound like it’ll matter with the magnitude of this hurricane heading to my home of 20 years. My parents have been on the road for 10 hours now and haven’t made it out of the city yet. Many other members of my family are staying, along with my Grandmother who is too sick to travel. After Katrina there was a rush of people metasearches and directories, NOW would be a good time for Amazon, Yahoo, Google, and the other giants to pool their resources and get the infrastructure in place to help before it hits. This one is hitting much closer to home for me, it’s hard to think about.
Get Into Google Blog Search
Want to get into Google’s new blog search? “The easiest way to do this is via pingomatic, which can ping more than a dozen popular pingservers, according to Goldman.” Thanks Jason! Read more…
Google Talk
Niall figured out how to get on Google’s Jabber server, I tried it out myself and was able to chat with him using talk.google.com. Cool!
Google Spell Checker
The source code to Google’s new toolbar for Firefox has some entertaining details and reveals their new spell checker web service, which I think is really nice. Who’ll be the first to rewrite the AJAX spell checker for WordPress to use this web service instead of the PHP pspell extension?
Google’s RSS Ads
A blogger applies for Adsense RSS and finds “As I had suspected, during the inital testing phase they are only accepting blogger.com and Movable Type/ TypePad blogs as of this time.” I would love to know from someone at Google (maybe Jason Shellen?) if there was any technical or logistical reason they decided not to support the 140,000+ WordPress users or if it was just a lack of communication, which is entirely possible (and very plausible considering how busy everyone is). I would encourage WP users to sign up for Adsense for Feeds and list “WordPress” in the “Other” field. Update: Communication has started. (Thanks, Jason F.!)
Blogging at Google
Point, counterpoint and smackdown. Hat tip: Jeremy.
Wider Google
Whoa, Google widened the search box. I don’t know why, but I’m in shock. I remember thinking when the links above the search box got wider than the box itself that they’d jumped the shark, but obviously they got their “mojo” back. 😉
Back Online
I called my sister last night to tell her about a present I found for her in the market and she interrupted me to say she saw my name show up in Google News a few times and started reading some of the articles. Before the phone card ran out she read me some headlines and my stomach sank. This is my first vacation and I almost didn’t even bring my laptop. (Luckily I talked myself into bringing it to do pictures.) I haven’t been on the internet since Monday and I obviously have a lot to catch up on. It was almost midnight when I found out and there was no access anywhere, so I woke up at 4:30 AM this morning to catch the first water bus to the airport and found some overpriced wifi, and here I am.
I have close to a thousand emails and countless blog posts and comments to go through, but I’ll try to synthesize everything and respond ASAP, I think it’s important because some people seem to be spinning things quite maliciously. If you have a specific question please send me an email and I’ll do my best to respond personally or on the blog, even if you’ve already decided I’m the scum of the earth.
Tool Marketshare?
Elise’s look at weblog tool marketshare is interesting if not the most accurate. I’d much rather see numbers from someone who could programatically actually determine what blogs use, like Technorati or Feedster. Anyway I tried to follow along in the audience and typed “wordpress.org” into Google, which gave me a helpful page with “link to” and “contains term” links, which I assume is Elise’s methodology. Link to returned 288,000, as is in her chart, but contains term gave 674,000, which is radically different than the 5,000 she attributed to WordPress. I sent a note suggesting she look at this number, to which she replied to Google for www.wordpress.org, which I did. The “contain this term” link returned the even more modest “Results 1 – 10 of about 981,” so obviously the chart should be updated to 1 instead of 5 immediately.
Technorati Tag API is Broken
The Technorati Tag API is Broken, or so asserts Kevin Burton. The post is a little old and the comments don’t seem to have gone anywhere. I think the tag having to appear in the URI is a weakness, and a restriction that isn’t reasonable under many hosting enviroments. That said, my understanding of rel="tag" is that they don’t have to link to Technorati at all, they can link to your own taxonomy and not Google bomb key terms. (As WordPress does in 1.5.) You don’t even really need to use the links, since they spider categories and dc:subject from RSS feeds anyway, but if you do tag you posts using the link method, it might be worth using nofollow.
Search Meta Tags
Gigablast, the search engine run by one guy named Matt, allows you to do some interesting things with meta tags. Here is a search that finds all “generator” meta tags with “WordPress” and shows the tag itself in the search results. (About 1.5 million results.) I found out about this on the Gigablast blog which isn’t quite a blog. If Matt is looking for a better blog system, I have a suggestion. The results on Gigablast seem on par with Google’s for most things I tried, but the pages themselves need some UI and QA love.
Internet Crash
Is it just me or is half the internet seem to be down? I can’t get to extremetech.com or parts of zdnet.com, and I just got a 500 error from blogger.com when trying to leave a comment on someone’s blog. What’s interesting was the message: “Please contact the server administrator, blogger@trakken.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.” Trakken.com redirects to Neotonic, which according to its meta tag, ” Neotonic Trakken is a powerful web-based Online Customer Support system.” The domain is registered by David Jeske who has an email at Chat.net, a PHP-Nuke site that hasn’t been updated in two years. David worked at eGroups and Yahoo and then started Neotonic which signed Google as its first customer in 2001. If you dig a little deeper you can see what Trakken really is. The obvious conclusion to be drawn from all this is that Blogger is just a highly customized PHP-Nuke installation and should be released under the GPL. Someone contact the FSF.
Yahoo and RSS
Yahoo is standardizing on RSS 2, and everyone knows Google loves Atom 0.3. Battle of the titans?
Alexa Web Services
Alexa Web Info Service, from the people who brought you the excellent Amazon Web Service. Update: Alexa itself isn’t new, but all its data being available through an API like Google’s or Technorati’s is.
Search Patents
Does Yahoo have a patent on search ads? Reading over it looks like it covers paid inclusion, not text-ads like Google has.
A Nine
Amazon’s search engine A9 is looking really good. I’m on a 9600 connection through my cell phone and Google just wouldn’t come up when I needed to check something. I remembered a9.com and how you could just type the search in after the domain. It was faster than Google and I found what I was looking for.
Bloggers Declare Bore
Online Journalism Review writes Bloggers Declare War on Comment Spam, but Can They Win? I’m not sure what that has to do with journalism, but they talk to the same old people and read the same old sites and (not surprisingly) come to the same old tired conclusions. I’m trying to figure it out because I like everyone the article refers to and the article itself is well-written, but it feels very contrived. I think it may be because it draws a lot from blog material a year or more old, and selectively, like the writer had an agenda and Googled until there were enough quotes to fill the space. For example Mark Pilgrim’s blog is called “comment-free” when the entry on the front page for the last three weeks clearly has comments. Is it too much to ask to look at the front page of a blog you’re quoting? The article talks about Blogger redirecting URIs but not about Blogger’s registration aspect. It talks about Typekey but not the PATRIOT act. (Totally kidding there.)
You probably saw this coming from me, but most of all I think it’s silly that they don’t mention a single one of the dozens of other blogging systems that deal effectively with these issues every day. You can’t discuss the Movable Type spam epidemic without talking about people like Molly who tried everything out there including MT-Blacklist to no avail, then switched software and got on with their lives. There is a lot more to the story, but that’s been the conversation over the past year and a lot has come of it. The essence of blogging is communication and comments are here to stay, it’s just a matter of moderation.