You’re no doubt aware that Google update their logo for different holidays. This year, they’re running a competition to decide the logo they’ll use for St. Patrick’s Day. You can vote for your favourite one on the public vote page.
Voting ends at midnight on February 16th, so get cracking soon.
The Google Zeitgeist for 2008 is available online. As expected, it’s dominated by the US election, the Olympics, the Credit Crunch, and The Dark Knight.
There’s a regional breakdown as well, but even though we have Google.ie, there’s no Zeitgeist for Ireland.
Everyone is buzzing about Web 2.0. For the ordinary Joe Soap, Web 2.0 doesn’t mean a whole lot. It’s hard to define for the end user, the end user who just wants to send email, watch some youTube videos, and browse their favourite websites.
I think the one thing that the ordinary user can understand is the concept of Web Applications. Instead of installing an entire Office Suite on their computer, the user can just go to their preferred office site and run the application within their browser. This is Web 2.0 at work. No need to worry about upgrades, or paying for programs that won’t be used. As long as you have an Interent connection, you can work. Sounds easy, and from the end user point of view it is. There is a catch. What happens when there is no Internet connection available? How do you work?
Google are hoping to provide an answer to that question with the introduction of Google Gears. Google Gears allows website designers to make the applications they create available to the end user even when the user cannot visit the website.
Gears is basically a database and server that lives on the users hard-drive. The server stands in for the webs-server when the computer is off-line, and the the database stores whatever information is required. While the concept may be simple, the implementation is not. It takes a lot of time and effort to make something like this work. Used in association with Google Docs and Spreadsheets, this technology could prove to be a major competitor for Microsoft Office.
Along with the technical coding difficulties there are also security considerations that need to be looked at. Using a common method for allowing remote applications to access your hard-drive opens a whole can of worms. For example, it’s going to take a lot of work to ensure that the data stored on your computer from one website is not accessible by another application on another site.
From the limited amount of security information that is available on the Google Gears site, it does look that a lot of thought has gone into the security model, but until this is tested in the real world, it’s hard to know it will be sufficient to protect the end user. It will be interesting to see how this works out.
If you’re involved in the blogging world, you’ll probably heard of Feedburner – they provide RSS management to bloggers, podcasters and content creators. They’re pretty successful at it too, which makes them a target for any company interested in breaking into this market. Which Google apparently are. So much so that Google were willing to pay $100 million in cash, upfront for the Feedburner business.
Google have already dipped their toes into RSS feeds with Google Reader. While Google Reader is designed for those wishing to read RSS feeds, it doesn’t provide any functionality for publishers. With this acquisition, Google now has the ability to provide full RSS management and RSS reading. Along with the feed management side, Google also gets access to something much more important to them – Feedburners client creator list and the content itself. For a search company interested in indexing the entire world wide web, $100 million for this type of information must have seemed like a bargain.
Google does a pretty good job of indexing the web. When your company name has become a verb meaning “to search“, that’s a given. Now Google are taking it one step further and are looking at sites that host malicious code (PDF).
After scanning 4.5 million pages, researchers found that approximately 450,000 sites were hosting software that would install automatically on a users computer. A further 700,000 were hosting software that could compromise a computer. That’s almost a quarter of all the sites that Google scanned.
In some cases, the malicious code was introduced without the knowledge of the website owner or operator. One of the vectors used to introduce this code was the use of 3rd party widgets, such as those used in blogs and forums. In other cases, attackers compromised an entire web server, and thereby were able to introduce their code onto multiple sites. In one case the Google researcher’s computer was in hijacked with 50 pieces of malware by visiting just one site on a compromised server. It almost goes without saying that Internet Explorer and Windows was the most attacked platform.
To protect yourself, be careful about the sites that you visit, for example, don’t visit sites that you find in spam messages. Don’t use Internet Explorer, use Firefox or Opera, or any of the other browsers available. Be careful about what you download and install.
Google’s informal corporate motto is “Don’t be evil”. It seems that Google are now taking it one step further.
Google have teamed up with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum to incorporate images of the crisis in Darfur into Google Earth. Now when you log into Google Earth, you’ll be able to see images of villages burned to the ground, refugee camps, and personal accounts of people who have fled the violence in Darfur.
Google Earth can be downloaded for free.
Google have bought Double Click for $3.1 billion.
As one of the Internet’s largest, and best known, advertising companies, Double Click gives Google access to a huge portfolio of clients. Though only time will tell if the cash that Google just spent will be worth it.
Here’s something to make you think, and maybe laugh. First off read the story on this page: http://deanhunt.com/bizzare-google-request/. Don’t forget to come back when you’re finished and read on for whatithink!
Plug-ins List
Thursday, February 22nd, 2007I was pretty bored, and couldn’t sleep, so I went looking for new plug-ins to install on my blog. I came across Lorelle’s list of WordPress Plug-in Lists, and I went through every site on that list looking for plug-ins. There were quite a few I hadn’t come across before, so the one’s that interested me were duly downloaded and installed.
I also modified one of the sidebar widgets that came with the theme I’m using and I created a “Plugroll” widget. All I did was add a link for each installed plug-in to my blogroll, gave them a category called plugroll, and used the widget to list them automatically. You can see the list below the linkroll in my sidebar.
Without further ado, here’s my list:
Akismet: Comment spain is a royal pain in the ass. Akismet saves you the hassle of wading through hundreds of spam comments. Any comments detected as spam are held in a spam queue for 15 days. You can chose to delete or unmark potential spam comments. Check the spam queue once a day, just to make sure that you have no false positives.
Autometa: Inserts META headers into your pages. Useful for serach engines crawling your blog.
Category Cloud Widget: Creates a cloud of your categories. The number of posts in each category determines its dominance in the cloud.
Category Tagging: Converts your categories into tags. Simple really. Also allows you to create a tag cloud.
DoFollow: Removes the “nofollow” attribute from links on your blog. “nofollow” tells search engines not to count the link from your page when determining the popularity of a site, which has a significant effect on a sites placement in search results.
FeedBurner Feed Replacement: FeedBurner is an alternative method of providing RSS feeds to your reader. Provides all sorts of statistics and extra functionality. This plugin forwards your feeds through FeedBurner without having to rewrite any code.
FireStats: Provides statistics on who’s visiting your site, most popular pages, unique visitors in the last 24 hours, etc. Uses a nice AJAX interface to reload the statistics every 5 minutes without reloading the entire page.
Google Sitemaps: Generates a sitemap for your blog whenever you save or edit a post. Automatically pings Google when the sitemap has been updated. Can also be used to manually generate a sitemap without saving or editing a post. A must if you want to improve your Google ranking.
Joe’s Quote Widget: Generates a random quote every time your site is loaded. Just one of those fun widgets to make your blog more interesting. Includes famous Bushisms, but Joe also provides Futrurama, Family Guy and Simpsons quotes.
runPHP: Allows you to embed PHP scripts in posts or pages, and have it run. Configurable so that only select users can insert scripts. Handy for creating pages with tag/ category clouds, etc.
Search Meter: Provides statistics on what users are searching for on your site. More importantly, also shows searches which return no results. If your readers are looking for something and can’t find it, it will let you know so that you can add it.
Sidebar Widgets: Enables Widgets in your blog. Opens up a whole new world. No more fiddling around with arcane code. Just drag and drop the widget onto your sidebar, and away you go.
Sociable: Add links to the bottom of your posts to submit to numerous social websites. Configurable for the websites that you want your material to be submitted to.
Tiger Style Administration: Cleans up the WordPress Administration Panel. Easier in the eye, and easier to navigate, and all done through the power of CSS.
Ultimate Tag Warrior: The ultimate in tagging, lots of configyration and administration options, supremely powerful. The best tagging plug-in out there. I particularly like the way it has a version number of pi. Just as powerful as pi, if you ask me.
Wordpress Database Backup: Sooner or later you ARE going to need this. No ifs, no ands, no buts. You will need it. First rule of WordPress: backup your database. Second Rule of WordPress: backup your database. Third Rule of WordPress: we don’t talk about the Third Rule…..
WordPress Mobile Edition: You want to reach a large an audience as possible with your blog. Now you can extend your thoughts to those browsing on mobile devices. With a browser sniffer, and a theme designed to display on mobile devices, you won’t go wrong with this plug-in.
WordPress Reports: View your Google Analytics and FeedBurner statistics straight from WordPress. You’ll need accounts with Google Analytics and/ or FeedBurner for this plug-in to have any use, but if you already have accounts with these services, then you know the power of information.
wp-cache: Speed up your blog with this caching plug-in. Creates static copies of your frequently visited pages, and serves those instead of your database intensive, dynamically created pages. May require minor editing of your wp-config.php file, but worth the effort.
WP-phpMyAdmin: Use this plugin to get direct access to your WordPress database. Optimise tables, drop tables if you like, but just be careful before you do.
WPG2: Embed photos from your Gallery2 installation directly into your blog. Can embed random or specific images and albums. According to the home page, not fully compatible with WordPress 2.1, but seems to be working ok here.
That’s it, that’s my list of plug-ins. I have a couple of more installed, but they’re not activated for various reasons. The main one being that I got fed up of them, and just haven’t gotten around to uninstalling them yet.
Tags: akismet, autometa, backup, Blog, Blogroll, blogs, bookmarks, category, category_cloud, cloud, comments, database_backup, dofollow, family_guy, feedburner, firestats, futurama, gallery2, google, Linkroll, plugin, quote_widget, random_images, rss, search, sidebar, sidebar_widgets, simpsons, sitemap, Software, tag, tagging, technorati_tags, theme, tiger, tiger_administration, ultimate_tag_warrior, upgrade, widgets, wordpress, wordpress_2.1, wpg2
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