Science Addiction

There is a lot of talk recently how the FCC should free the “white spaces”. Google’s Larry Page recently alleged that TV broadcasters and wireless companies have injected politics in to the FCC testing process. But what are the white spaces? The People’s Production House put together a video for the non-techies:

[via the Google Public Policy Blog]

AOL has put our privacy at risk by publicly disclosing the recent search history of 650,000 users. This wrong in so many different ways- and yes, your search queries say a lot about you, including your identity. The New York Times discovered just who AOL Searcher #4417749 was just using their search strings. Read the rest of this entry »

After my article reviewing GMail for Your Domain a lot of people were wondering about support for GMail Notifier. The short story is that it works for me. Read the rest of this entry »

Google added Hebrew and Arabic to GMail on the same day. Now that is not being evil on an international scale.

Sometimes it seems impossible to keep up with everything Google throws at us; here are a few places you can look:

• A complete list of Google products ready for primetime
• My article on interesting ways of using Google

Enjoy!

Recently, a fellow blogger asked me for help getting “search” working on their blog. Since my advice was helpful there, I figured there must be other people who could benefit from the information. So here is how you can add a search feature to your web site regardless of how it was built and regardless of the purpose you choose to use it for. You can use it for your own reference or to allow visitors to search your site. Best of all, it’s quite simple to implement. Read the rest of this entry »

The screenwriter John August has a great little example of why Google’s Adsense is not the solution for all seasons. Anyone referencing his article on the use of air ducts/vents in films as a poor plot device on their blog/site, finds ads that try to sell you air vents or ducts. Which are completely besides the point of the article- nobody reading an article about good screenwriting is going to suddenly say to themselves “Wait a second. Reading about that scene from Die Hard reminds me- I’m supposed to buy Air Vent shafts!”

You can see an example of this in the article I wrote about August’s post. Sad. Like the time I saw Yahoo! ads selling cow hide on a Flickr photograph decrying cruelty to cows.

On the other hand, Google Ads to work tremendously well when they are on generic, well targetted and crafted content. They work on my Star Wars site pretty well.

Considering the rate at which Google introduces new features to the public and the small amount of publicity they afford each of them, it’s no surprise that most people are unaware of the many different ways to use Google.

To start, here is a list.

Here are some of my favorite Google power-user tips:

• Music – People are not aware that you can search Google for all kinds of information on artists, albums, songs and more using Google Music Search.
• Movies – Then try searching “movies” in Google or let me do it for you. That gives you showtimes for your area!
• Strange Stuff – Try searching ford escape and Google suggests where you can buy one. Or homes for rent or maybe homes for sale.
• Books – Similar to music and movies, there is Google Book search.
• Phone Book – Try putting in someone’s (or your) lastname, city and state in Google. Like this.
• Q&A – And sometimes just gives you the answer to your question. Like the population of the USA and the birthplace of George Bush (which one?).
• Fedex, Patents, UPS, more – Seach for information on Fedex tracking, UPS tracking, USPS tracking, patent, VINs, UPCs, FAA codes and a lot more using Google numbers search.
• Finance – Google Finance is a fantastic tool for casual study of stock quotes though it doesn’t have the depth of Yahoo! Finance yet.
  And of course, there is a lot more stuff you can do with Google here.

A few interesting stories from around the blogosphere:

• Via DownloadSquad – Google’s beta for their Web Accelerator product, which had been revoked after a short beta and had sparked privacy concerns, is back for download and use for Windows users. It supports IE and Firefox and judging from past experience, may not be available for long.
• Via T. Longren’s blog I came across this interesting blog statistics tool which may make life easier for bloggers everywhere.
• Via Les Jones’ blog there’s a cool Windows (yes, that other OS) setting for making text look clearer called Cleartype.

It seemed as though yesterday was an overactive April Fool’s day; maybe because it was a Saturday or because I was actively seeking pranks. And I found many.

Some of my favorite pranks for this year: Read the rest of this entry »

If you have a GMail account (and who doesn’t these days?), Google has a quirky little advertisement for your enjoyment. Go to your GMail account and click on the “Spam” link in the left sidebar. Read the rest of this entry »

Google recently started offering GMail-like hosted email service for universities and beta-testing private domains. As soon as the Google announced the beta of the service, I signed up my Star Wars website GalaxyFarAway.com for hosted GMail. Read the rest of this entry »