In today's Search Ads column, "Can Google Analytics Be Evil?," Tony Wright is looking for feedback on Google Analytics. Like many search marketers, he has recommended that clients stay away from Google Analytics because of concerns about data privacy and some of the ways Google has used AdWords data in the past.

Is he right to be wary, or are the benefits of a free and easy to use analytics application worth any potential risks? Share your thoughts in the SEW Forums.

A recent eye tracking research from Enquiro looked into Chinese user behavior regarding search results in Baidu and Google. Gord Hotchkiss wrote about this on Search Engine Land.

According to this interesting study there are considerable differences between how users interact with the results. (The research has also looked at the difference between user interaction on Google.com an Google.cn. I’ll focus here more on the differences between Google.cn and Baidu.com). I have one “small but” in regard to this research which I’ll get into at the end.

The main conclusion of the research is that the success level for a search on Google seems to be higher than on Baidu. Users on Google needed half the time (30 seconds vs. 50 second on Baidu) to find what they were looking for. Most of them also didn’t look beyond the fourth result. In Baidu they scanned the whole page, clicked on more results (results pop-out) and as a result took more time.

One of the differences in the way Chinese users interact with search results is contributed by Enquiro to the fact that the Baidu results page lacks transparency between sponsored and organic listings.

It’s true that there are no background color differences like you have in Google for sponsored results on top of the organic results. Baidu does show these days whether a result is sponsored or not. In how far a user will notice this small tag, I don’t know.

Gord also goes into the question why Chinese users prefer Baidu, while at the same time it seems the results on Baidu are less useful than on Google. He mentions that Chinese users may favor Baidu because it’s a home grown, Chinese search engine.

To a point this may indeed still be a factor although I don’t think that will hold true in the future as the quality of the results will become a more important distinctive factor.

He also regards MP3 search as a significant factor for Baidu’s popularity. This last one is definitely contributing to Baidu’s market share as for a big part Chinese users are still young and like downloading whatever is free.

Another reason that isn’t mentioned here but plays a part I think is the fact that the Google website tends to be slower and at times stalls because of censorship which negatively affects the user experience.

Last time I wrote about research showing that Chinese internet users favored Google results over Baidu results. This study shows that users seem to find faster what they want on Google than on Baidu and that may support the favorism of Google results.

There is one “small but” though which I mentioned in the introduction. I haven’t seen the final Enquiro report and this is just an assumption on my side. If I understand correctly Google’s default setting is that search results are opened in the same window. Baidu search results open (in my experience) by default in a new browser window.

I haven’t seen the final report and as such I don’t know what the default settings of the search engines (especially Google.cn) were in this test. I would love to know this as opening results in a new window versus in the same window could have affected the experience and the way their eyes were tracked.

What else happened in China

Google Servers, Content License and Cache

According to an article from ChinaTechTews Google will move more servers to China and will launch more local products. ChinaTechNews rightly remarks that there may be consequences for moving servers to China, for example having to provide user data to local authorities which may be used to prosecute netizens that have a different opinion. This happened to Yahoo before.

Although I’m not sure whether there is a relation with the fact they will be moving servers, Google is saidto have received their own ICP (Internet Content Provider) license.

Websites that are hosted in China are obliged by law to have this license. In case they don’t have the license, the visitor of a Chinese hosted website is shown a lovely cartoon. The current license Google is using has been borrowed from a Beijing classified website and on my last check the license number hasn’t changed yet.

Google.cn has lost a feature that is part of its search elsewhere. The cache feature has been removed reports Google Blogoscoped, and this happened in the end of April.

The “Cache” feature hasn’t been very useful as long as I can remember as it was blocked by the censors here. The fact that they have disabled it , and I agree with Google Blogoscoped, is a form of self-censorship. It isn’t going to cause much uproar though as the average user won’t use this feature.

What I did notice was that the cache feature has also been disabled for Chinese search results on Google.com, at least when I search from within China. Maybe someone searching from abroad can check whether this also applies there.

Baidu and Online Payments

China Tech Stories picked up the news that Baidu is planning its own online payment system, based on statements from Baidu’s CFO, Shawn Wang. I haven’t read about this elsewhere but it definitely could be an interesting move for Baidu to venture in this field. Currently the online payment market is still very fragmented with the current leader being Alipay from Alibaba.

Technorati and The Chinese Firewall

Recently photo-sharing website Flickr was blocked in China. Normally a block by the censors doesn’t stir many waves in the mainland but this time some Chinese internet users are pissed off. Having no access to all your own uploaded pictures makes things personal I guess.

Media blog Danwei writes that Keso, a well know Chinese tech blogger has cursed the firewall in one of his posts (in Chinese). Additionally Keso has added a picture of the “Torture the Net Nanny voodoo doll” in his sidebar. The picture used here, including translation is from the Danwei site. If you like, stick a pin into him.

That’s it for this week.

–
Gemme van Hasselt is an Internet Marketing Consultant, living in Shanghai

Federated Media, which organized some ads here in the past, is currently being criticized for some of their ad campaigns: one controversy surrounds Microsoft’s “People Ready” campaign, and another one is about Cisco’s “Human Network” campaign. Nick Denton of Valleywag suggests that for the “Human Network” campaign, Cisco with FM’s knowledge even created a new Wikipedia entry. For these campaigns, the bloggers were asked to write little ad statements expanding on the campaign concept, like “I knew we were a people ready business, when I left to start GigaOM Inc.”

I wasn’t offered either of these two campaigns by FM, though I was offered something similar for Hakia’s “Better Search” campaign, which I rejected earlier this year because I didn’t want to lend my voice to an advertiser. In my opinion, and opinion on this varies, it risks blurring the line between content and advertisement; it makes it harder to see the natural voice of the blogger, and natural – not paid – conversations are supposed to be what blogs are about. I also still had a bad taste from the Snap ad campaign of last year, where I was asked to write an article at Snap.com about how I think a search engine like Snap could do a successful launch... and while I fully disclosed this article as paid and wasn’t required to write about Snap, it still triggered a conversation in the forum that made me write about problems with Snap.
As with text link ads, paid reviews, or affiliate links in content, advertorial-like campaigns will likely stay controversial, and bloggers will have to make up their mind what’s true to their dream of this blogging thing... it’s nothing for me, anyway.

Update: FM’s John Battelle describes the background of the Wikipedia article creation different from what Nick Denton wrote, telling Jeff Jarvis: “[Cisco] wanted to post a wiki version of their definition, and naturally their first thought was Wikipedia. Thanks to input like yours and many others, they did it on Wikia, the commercial cousin to Wikipedia. In fact, they sought out Jimmy Wales’ advice on the matter. The entry was later put up on Wikipedia by one it its editors, independently.”

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

The German government's proposal to monitor and record email usage in their country has Google threatening to stop Gmail service to the country, according to a SlashDot report today.

Gmail had to rename itself in Germany recently as Google Mail, similar to events in the UK.

Seems Europe is not the friend of the Mountain View behemoth. The German legal changes would not take effect until 2008, reports stated.

Looking for a recycling center? Try TheRecyclingCenter.info, a useful mashup of Google Ajax Search and Google Maps.

I typed in my zip code and got back one general purpose recycling center, one recycling collection service, one metal recycling center, and two electronics recycling centers. If you're looking for somewhere to recycle your computers, you might want to also check out Earth 911.

Groovy guy Philipp Lenssen has an excellent post about how to pull data from Google into Google Spreadsheets.

As he notes the syntax is =GoogleLookup with two variables; to find the population of Boston you could use this syntax:

=GoogleLookup(”boston”; “population”)

When you paste that into a Google Spreadsheet, Google will load the results (in this case with a citation year.) I couldn’t get everything to work — I tried a pounds-to-Euros automatic conversion and it would never come out right. Google has a fairly extensive docs page but I suspect they’re not covering everything.

(Google’s full slogan, if you didn’t know, is “Do no evil, do lots of easter eggs.”)

I would love to combine this with a scraper to extend the functionality a lot. I’ll have to look into the possibilities of offline spreadsheets like Excel — see what they can pull up….

Doing more things with the API

We’ve all used Google to search the web. What if we could add Ajax to the web search operation? Google Ajax Search API does just that – could this facilitate searching?…

You know, the late 90s and the bubble were a long time ago, yet whenever I see some overblown press release talking about revolutionary new paradigms or some other such nonsense I still want to go hide under something.

I suspect with this site I’ll be spending a lot of time hiding under my desk. Killer Startups, at http://www.killerstartups.com/, reviews over 2 dozen new sites a day. It looks a lot like Digg, with spaces for Diggs (only they’re called “Killers”) and reviews of each site.

You can browse the sites by date, search by keyword, or browse about a dozen categories. I looked at the Search category, of course, which has 97 listings at this writing and included sites like TheMolu and ZitGist, but also older sites like Exalead. Each site listing has an overview, a description of the site from the site itself, and a brief review from KillerStartups. KillerStartups also notes why the site in question might be a killer, but also asks some questions about the veracity of the startup (that’s the difference between the late 90s and the late 00s — there is some attempt to pop the bubble.) Each listing also has a “Killer Data” box that attempts to show contact information, traffic data, etc. — but the data boxes I looked at were mostly empty.

There are RSS feeds, of course. Feeds cover all startups, today’s, and the top ten. Sadly I could not figure out a way to get a feed by category (I want to see what this site finds in the way of search; I’m less interested in ecommerce, marketing, etc.) Still, it’s frequently updated and the site reviews aren’t breathlessly excited. Worth a look.

Jerry Yang now Yahoo CEO. Wubba?

Yes, EVERYTHING. Camera Shutter Life Expectancy Database.

Ask dissects the 3D. In a good way.

OH BOY! More battery recalls!

A Yahoo Pipe for translating RSS feeds. Verrrry nice.

Ultimate RSS Toolbox. Whee!

Wow, Arkansas has the electronic government news going ON.

Gnome Chomsky?

Paying your taxes makes your brain feel good? Also giving to your food bank.

Michigan: Online directories for Farmer Markets and Ag Tourism.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Vermont Community Foundation has published the latest version of the Vermont Directory of Foundations in three different ways — printed book, free PDF download, and a free searchable database, now available at http://fdovermont.foundationcenter.org/ .

The actual search form is here; you can search by a variety of factors including grantmaker name, city, field of interest, and type of support. (You can also do a simple keyword search if you like.) Several sorting options are available as well (alphabetical, total giving, and total assets.)

I searched the company name for Foundation and got 278 results. Results are presented in a table showing the name of the grantmaker, city/state, total assets, and total giving. Click on the name of the grantmaker and you’ll get a page of information in a popup window. The page for the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation included notes on the application process, who and what is supported, geographical emphasis (in their case none), examples of causes supported, and so on. There’s a separate tab for links to the latest IRS filings for the organization.

Very speedy. However if you want something to browse, you can go to http://www.vermontcf.org/download-order-vdf and either download the directory for free or order a printed copy for $10.

Fauxto*, released in late 2006, is a Photoshop-like online image editor that’s constantly growing its list of features. Once you edited a photo with brushes, layers, fill tools, eraser and so on, you can save it online – no need to go back to your hard disk (though you can do that, too).

This tool works incredibly well, though I’m not sure if there’s any business plan behind it (registration is free). Perhaps the makers are hoping to get acquired. And Google Inc. seems to be one likely candidate: the Google office already has online Word, online Excel, online FrontPage, online email, online calendar, perhaps soon online PowerPoint, and more (all of these with less features than their desktop counterparts, but better sharing & multi-user editing capabilities), so online Photoshop would make sense too**.

Ongoing comments

*If you pronounce this the French way, faux - to, it supposedly sounds a bit like “photo.”

**Unless Google’s already working on this in-house, of course.

[Thanks Search-Engines-Web.com!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post]

EBay was angry lately when Google attacked their PayPal system by trying to lure people away to use Google Checkout, and as result they stopped their ad spending for Google AdWords around 10 days ago. According to Reuters, they now resume the ads, but less so than before. An eBay spokesperson is quoted:

According to the report, eBay now plans to rely more on “competing advertising systems from Yahoo, Microsoft’s MSN, Time Warner’s AOL, and IAC/InterActiveCorp’s Ask.com.”

EBay made their statement loud and clear, but despite all recent bluffing they still need Google for their business. Nick Denton of Valleywag compares the partnership of the two companies to a non-aggression pact between countries, which he says “never holds.” Google has been focusing on finding partners the last years, but the more they’ll expand their business, the more likely they’re to end up on rival grounds.

[Thanks Colin Colehour!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

Randy Stross wrote an interesting article for the New York Times about search with a human touch, and I wanted to talk about the role of people in Google search.

On this post, you get not one but *two* disclaimers. It’s all part of my read-one-disclaimer, get-a-free-disclaimer program! My disclaimers are:
- This particular post is entirely my own opinion.
- I’m really, really low on sleep. I’m up at Foo Camp 2007 this weekend. This is my first time at Foo Camp, so I stayed up until ~4 a.m. last night talking to people and discovering the crack-like addiction that is the Werewolf game. Okay, let’s begin with a question.

What is the future of search?
I see some obvious answers. For example, Google will continue to work very hard on international search so that we do just as well on a query in Japanese, German, Arabic, or Norwegian as we do in English. But what about longer-term? Will the future of search be

- personalization?
- a completely new user interface?
- semantic understanding of queries or documents?
- social search (which I’ll define as improving search by unlocking the power of people)?
- universal search, which brings in documents from non-html sources (images, videos, patents, etc.)?
- a combination of all of the above, or something entirely different?

Suffice it to say that we spend a lot of time thinking about the future of search at Google, and of course other people think about it too. Let’s take one area, social search, and delve deeper into the subject.

Social Search: the power of people

If you ask an average techie about Google, you’ll hear that we use lots of computers and algorithms. Indeed, the title of the New York Times article is “The Human Touch That May Loosen Google’s Grip.” But (in my opinion), it would be a mistake to think “Google is nothing but cold algorithms and computers; there’s no room for humans at all.” I’ll give you a few examples of the role of people over the years at Google:

- PageRank is fundamentally about the hyperlinks that people on the web create. All those people creating links help Google formulate an opinion of how important a page is.
- Google News looks at a wide variety of news sources; the decisions of human editors at thousands of news sites help Google estimate whether a particular story is significant.
- Google introduced voting buttons on the toolbar back in 2001. They look like happy/frowny faces and they let regular people send thumbs-up or thumbs-down votes to Google.
- Google has allowed users to remove results that they don’t like from Google.
- For more than five years, we’ve allowed users to report spam to Google. We’ve said for years that we reserve the right to take manual action on spam (e.g. if someone types in their name and gets off-topic porn as a result).

And of course, it’s not as if Google’s search engineers drive into the Googleplex in the morning and then spend the whole day sitting around doing nothing while the computers do all the work. Instead, Google researchers and engineers spend our days looking for deeper insights that will let us create the next generation of search. I believe Google’s approach to search has always been pragmatic: if an approach will improve the quality of our search, we’re open to it.

“But Matt,” I hear you say, “aren’t you just saying this now because of the recent coverage of human-powered search companies such as Sproose, Mahalo, iRazoo, Bessed, etc.?” Actually, no. I think I’ve been saying similar things for a long time. I did an interview with John Battelle last year, for example. Read the full interview for my (very long) thoughts on the role of people in search, but here’s some of what I said:

I think that Google should be open to almost any signal that improves search quality. Let’s hop up to the 50,000 foot view. When savvy people think about Google, they think about algorithms, and algorithms are an important part of Google. But algorithms aren’t magic; they don’t leap fully-formed from computers like Athena bursting from the head of Zeus. Algorithms are written by people. People have to decide the starting points and inputs to algorithms. And quite often, those inputs are based on human contributions in some way. ….

So I think too many people get hung up on “Google having algorithms.” They miss the larger picture, which (to me) is to pursue approaches that are scalable and robust, even if that implies a human side. There’s nothing inherently wrong with using contributions from people–you just have to bear in mind the limitations of that data.

I believe that Google has thought about how to unlock the power of people in various ways since PageRank was invented. I’m allowed to make that claim, because more than five years ago I cared enough about leveraging social feedback that I helped write some of the Windows code for the voting buttons in the Google Toolbar.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you’ve used Google Maps to find businesses, you’ll know that it’s had reviews available for businesses for a long time — content that was pulled from other places like CitySearch and Insiderpages. Google has recently announced that you’ll now be able to see user-created reviews at the Web site as well. There’s also a nifty way to see user-created content, but one thing at a time.

First thing: head over to maps.google.com and run a search. I decided I wanted to find a Super 8 near Walla Walla, Washington, therefore “super 8″ walla walla wa Google Maps gave me 129 results (most of them NOT Super 8 motels, but whatever.) Click on the “more info” link beside a listing and you’ll get a map pointer with several tabs providing general information, reviews, Web pages, and photos (there were four photos; three were the same shot and one of them looked like an ivy covered window.) From that window you can click “Write a Review” and provide your own impressions along with a star rating.

At the bottom of the search results you’ll see a “See user-created content” link. Click that and you’ll get links to other Google Maps that incorporate points from your search results, which is kind of cool. For the Walla Walla example I found hotel maps, tourism maps, winery pointers, and a couple of “My Town” type maps. I also found that if you put in a noun or a preference of some sort and then a location you could get very interesting maps. Vegan Chicago was fun. Most of the Google Maps worked, though occasionally the map would be too large to view, formatted incorrectly, or once (in the case of a SmugMug map) couldn’t be found.

I didn’t see too many reviews generated by Google Maps users — Google needs to push that feature I bit. I did enjoy seeing how different locations fit into all kinds of different maps, though!

Workplace productivity blog Web Worker Daily has written up a list of their picks for the top ten streamlined alternatives to Microsoft Word - and they're all free.

There are a lot of really great picks on this list - Google Docs, Zoho, AbiWord, and more. When all you need is something that will help you write content without a lot of extra unnecessary features, this is definitely a good place to look. What's your favorite alternative to MS Word? Let's hear it in the comments.

According to information from Heise, Google warned that they might disable Gmail in Germany as last fallback should the German government maintain its position in regards to a newly passed law on record-keeping and supervision of internet traffic. According to this law, email services here will be forced to maintain personally identifiable records attached to email accounts. What exactly this might mean for Google I don’t know, but perhaps it would result in Gmail having to start requiring full addresses (and perhaps even having to verify an address by sending a snail mail to the user).

As usual in these circumstances, the law is pushed through in the name of fighting “terrorists.” But Heise quotes Google’s Peter Fleischer to have said that this law goes against Google’s policy to offer anonymous email accounts (actually, you need to give your first and last name upon Gmail sign-up, but then again you can fake that). Peter says, “Many users around the globe make use of this anonymity to defend themselves from spam, or government repression of free speech ... If the web community won’t trust us with handling their data with great care, we’ll go down in no time.” Peter added that a German-only solution for tighter control of email data isn’t useful in the first place, because people might simply escape to foreign email service providers.

Google standing up for the rights of their users to save less data than the local government asks is a brave move. And while there are other email providers in Germany, Google is the de-facto default search engine here, and that might give them some leverage – if only to escalate the situation and put the spotlight on this new law. On the other hand, as Jens Minor from the German Google Watch Blog remarks, “If Google will indeed stop their email service in the sense that no one will be able to access their mails anymore, they might as well close all local subsidiaries, and Mountain View can go ahead and forget this market – because they’d destroy all user trust from one day to another.”

[Thanks Patrick Kempf!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

Although all external Wikipedia links are using the nofollow attribute since January of this year, links from the encyclopedia are still important because of other reasons than ranking in search engines.

Next to generating human traffic from people who read Wikipedia articles, external links from Wikipedia also reinforce the authority of a site for the subject of the article at Wikipedia.

Both of these can be very significant and should not be underestimated. For competitive intelligence reasons is it also interesting to know, if your competitor has links to his website within the main article name space at Wikipedia. Of special importance are those links that are references for industry specific subjects and not just a link from the article about the website or company.

There are several methods and tools available to find out about links in Wikipedia in addition to other useful information. Most methods and tools I am introducing here are for a more tech savvy audience (= developers), but a few of them don’t require programming abilities to use them.

1. Wikipedia External Link Search
The Wikipedia External Link Search feature is build into Wikipedia. The good thing about it is the fact that it searches the current Wikipedia database and makes it the most up to date link search tool available.

The problem is that the search pattern is case sensitive and increases the chance that you miss URLs, because of capitalization. Most domain names in URLs are spelled in lower-case though and the search will do a good job for basic domain searches in most cases.

2. Wikipedia Search by DomainTools.com
DomainTools.com is known for their free WhoIs lookup among other great tools for domainers.

One great feature is the ability to search from the WhoIs results and others for references to the domain within Wikipedia. It also has a search that returns all external links for a specific Wikipedia article.

I have not found a “search form” or something like that, only specific links that do a search for a specified domain name or Wikipedia page (including pages outside the main articles name space).
The URL for the domain search looks like this: http://www.domaintools.com/enwikipedia/domainname.tld

For example: http://www.domaintools.com/enwikipedia/seobook.com

The URL for the look up of all external links from a specific Wikipedia article looks like this: http://www.domaintools.com/en/article_name

Note: Replace spaces in the article name with underscores

For example: http://www.domaintools.com/en/Search_engine_optimization

Nice about this tool is the inter-linking to further searches from each result pages, for example to the domain search from the article search results and to the article search from the domain search results.

The tool utilizes the data from the Wikipedia article dumps, which means that the data are not real-time.

3.Wikipedia Database Dumps
Wikipedia makes the content of ALL their wiki databases available for download to the public. Guess where the wiki clones and Search.com get their Wikipedia data from? The dump of the English language Wikipedia main space is the most interesting one for US, UK and other marketers who serve markets that speak the English language.

The name of that dump is “enwiki” and it is not being done every day. The last dump of the “enwiki” was on June 4, 2007. That is over two weeks ago. However, most links are not changing that often. Spam links do not last very long and if they do, only because they are on pages nobody cares about, and that includes us.

Here are the links that are relevant to the Wikipedia Dump.

• Primary article at Wikipedia to Wikipedia Dumps
• Download location of the English Wikipedia dumps
• List that shows the last date and time of all dumps
• Request for dumps - info page; I doubt that they will perform a special dump, if you ask them to, but who knows, you might want to try it anyway.

The dumps are more for the technical experts who can deal with the amount of raw data to work with it and use it for their purposes.
There is a program for searching the database dump available though and worth checking out.

It is free of course and was developed by a Wikipedian with the name “Bluemoose”. You can find the link to the download of the program and a description of its features on this special user page for the “DataBaseSearchTool”.

4. Wikipedia Special Export
Like the Wikipedia Dump Is this feature for the technical folks rather than the average marketer out there. You can export the text and editing history of a particular page or set of pages wrapped in some XML.

The page where you initiate special exports is available at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Export

5. Wikipedia API (alpha)
An API is in development to access information at Wikipedia. The project is currently in alpha stage, but the API is accessible to the public.

The API is located at: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php

For documentation and examples, check out the API homepage at the Mediawiki website at: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API

There is a limitation build in. The API returns a maximum of 500 results for any request. The limit increases to up to 5000 results, if you spend the time to become a sysop or get your bot authorized. The alternative would be to ask an existing sysop for access to the API through him.

6. Wikipedia Query
The Wikipedia Query feature will probably eventually replaced by the Wikipedia API. The Query is available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/query.php

The documentation is provided on the page itself. Calls are being made by the simple addition of URL parameters. The Query is able to return results in multiple machine-readable formats for programmatically access, such as xml, json, php, yaml and wddx, and also in human readable format.

The Query does not provide the option to search for external links. You can find internal linking and category structures and more. To find external links, is it unfortunately necessary to request an articles full content and parse the external links out manually.

This example query returns the content of the article to search engine optimization:

The source code for the query tool is available for download and suggestions to features can be made to the authors. They might be willing to implement an external link feature if they will be motivated enough to do so :).

7. Search Engine Queries
For example a Yahoo! search with linkdomain:yourdomain.com and site:en.wikipedia.org parameters, such as this query for links to SearchEngineJournal.com.

For more Wikipedia resources, check out my Wiki Resources user page at Wikipedia itself. It provides references to a bunch of other tools and resources to Wikipedia, which you might find useful as well.

Carsten Cumbrowski
Internet marketing and web development resources at Cumbrowski.com, such as Web APIs and resources for Web Services development

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Suffering from Lifehacker information overload? Get a digest of our best posts delivered to your newsreader once a week using our Highlights feed. If that's not enough for you, instead grab our daily top stories feed.

This week's best posts include:

• Turn your Windows Mobile phone into an iPhone
  "If your clunky old Windows Mobile phone is just sitting around collecting iPhone jealousy dust, you can either scrounge together 500 leafy Sacagaweas, or you can customize your Windows Mobile phone to emulate several of the iPhone's more interesting features."
• Edit your digital photos with Picasa
  "If you don't have the cash or patience to get a copy of Photoshop and learn what to do with it, the free Windows photo manager software, Picasa, may have everything you need to adjust your photos to your liking."
• 13 book hacks for the library crowd
  "Today, in the interest of lifehacking your bookshelf, I'm rounding up my favorite 13 'book hacks' for getting the most from your bound literature."
• The art of the doable to-do list
  "Your to-do list can be a tool that guides you through your work, or it can be a big fat pillar of undone time bombs taunting you and your unproductive inadequacy."
• Show Us Your iGoogle
  "Last week we asked readers to send us screenshots of their iGoogles, and you didn't disappoint."
• Stephen Colbert, email assassin
  "Stephen Colbert sits down with email etiquette author Will Schwalbe and dives face first into email."
• Monitor your Mac with iStat menus
  "iStat menus integrates system statistics like CPU, RAM, HD, and Network usage into your Mac's menubar."
• Keep track of your browsing habits with MeeTimer
  "The MeeTimer Firefox extension tracks how much time you spend on different web sites and helps categorize the time spent to give you an idea of where your browsing time has gone."
• Insert prompts and delays with Texter 0.4
  "Just released the latest version of our text snippet application, Texter, with bug fixes and a few cool new features."
• Get the fullscreen (read: iPhone) browsing experience with Opera Mini 4 beta
  "The new Opera Mini beta 4 offers the fullscreen browsing experience on the comfort of your mobile device."
• Use a silent ringtone for low priority contacts
  "I just created a 1 second long recording of "nothing" using my computer, transferred it to my phone, and I can now select it as a custom ringtone for numbers that, while I don't want to block, I just don't want to hear."
• Reformat your Gmail address with dots
  "Because Gmail doesn't recognize dots as characters within usernames, adding or removing dots from a Gmail address won't change the actual destination address."
• Better Gmail version 0.8 now available
  "This version adds 3 new user scripts: a Mac Mail-like skin, bottom posting when replying to email, and split screen Google Reader integration, as well as fixes for a few niggly annoyances in the current version."

Yahoo Search is now powering the search results within the Bebo social network.

According to Pete Cashmore at Mashable, Bebo users can now use Yahoo Search Technology to search through Bebo profiles, music and the Internet. It appears that Yahoo Search Marketing is also appearing in Bebo results.

Is this a sign that Yahoo will be acquiring Bebo? Perhaps. But the choice of Yahoo Search over Google Search for a social networking partner makes sense even beyond sponsored search revenue.

• Yahoo Search Marketing Panama is expanding to Europe & Bebo is extremely popular in the UK.
• Yahoo’s communications arsenal in messenger and VOIP could be somehow integrated in Bebo.
• The option of internal payment systems managed by Paypal, Yahoo’s official payment system & prefered partner in eBay
• Integration of Flickr photos & other 2.0 offerings from Yahoo.
• Yahoo’s display advertising network & sales force
• The leveraging of the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium and somehow spinning Bebo into partnerships with major online newspapers

Sure, these may be a bit out there in terms of reasons for forming a partnership, but Yahoo has scored a major search partner in Bebo… and a major showcase for Yahoo Search Marketing’s new Panama interface and the expansion of Yahoo Publisher Network.

The Webware weblog highlights 5 things you didn't know about Google Docs and Spreadsheets, most notably that you can insert live lookups in Google Spreadsheets via Google search and Google Finance.

Using two special formulas, users can create cells that will update constantly with data or information gleaned from Web searches or Google's finance service. This works for things such as stock symbols, sports statistics, or any other piece of information you want to source and keep up to date automatically

For example, you can insert the current price of Google stock in a spreadsheet by entering =GoogleFinance("GOOG"; "price"), or check out the number of internet users in Paraguay with =GoogleLookup("Paraguay"; "internet users"). Very cool.

Google's got a new phrase translation tool designed to provide better results for single-word lookups. The results currently offer translations and related phrases in a limited set of languages. [via Google Blogoscoped]

Yesterday you showed us your iGoogles, and boy oh boy was it hot. For next week's Show Us Yours series, we want to take a look at your browser - specifically, your Firefox.

Why? Because Lifehacker loves Firefox, and Lifehacker loves its readers. It's only natural that we'd want to see our readers' Firefoxes. Hit the jump for submission details.

If you want to submit your Firefox for next Thursday's Show Us Your Firefox screenshot tour, here's how:

1. Take a screenshot of your browser window: If you don't know how to take a screenshot of your browser, you can try one of the many great screenshot apps we've highlighted on Lifehacker. Windows users can try Window Clippings, and if you're a Mac user, our favorite is InstantShot. Make your screenshot as big as you want, but just remember, the biggest images can be in our gallery is 1280px wide, so try to use your space wisely. Also, if you've got something particularly cool going on in your Firefox, do your best to make sure we can see it in action.
2. Write up a short description of the extensions/themes that make your Firefox so great: It doesn't have to be long, but once we're all in love with what you've accomplished with your browser, we'll want to know how to do it to ours.
3. Send your screenshot and description to us: Compose an email to tips at lifehacker.com with the subject title Show Us Your Firefox, then attach your screenshot and enter your description in the body of the email.

Simple enough, right? Feel free to tweak your Firefox to your heart's content before submitting, but remember, we need a little lead time, so you should try to get your submission in by next Wednesday, 12 noon PST at the latest. Submit as many pictures of your Firefox as you want, but remember that one is all we need.

I toyed with the idea of making this a broad Show Us Your Browser call for submissions, but the majority of Lifehacker readers use Firefox, so I decided to go Firefox-specific for this one. If there's enough demand, though, I'll be happy to do a subsequent non-Firefox Show Us Your Browser tour, too, so if you're interested, let's hear it in the comments.

Finally, if you've got something good you want to show off, suggest a Show Us Yours theme in the comments. Happy submitting!

Previously mentioned Google Talk Gadget has integrated a new Group Chat feature for your Google Talk contacts.

To use Group Chat, just start a conversation with a contact, then click the drop-down on the right of the chat window and select Group Chat. From there you can add as many contacts as you want. Granted, the idea of Group Chat is far from innovative (a lot of GTalk users have wanted this for sometime), but it's nice to finally see it rolling out. Group chat is currently only available with the Google Talk Gadget. Thanks Mike!

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It’s a small feature, but much requested, and with interesting implications for all Google Talk users: the browser-based Google Talk gadget now allows you to create multi-user chat rooms. To open such a room, click on “Group Chat” button at the top of any normal conversation; you can then invite several people (and this will work for them whether they use the gadget, or the Google Talk desktop program).

Since some time now, the Google Talk* desktop client is officially worse than the web-based chat; the only problem I had last time I used the web-based client was a lack of “... is typing” messages, but either this was a temporary bug on my end, or it has now also been added to the gadget feature list (as it works now). Ionut Alex. Chitu makes a bet though that “we’ll see a major new [Google Talk] release in the coming weeks that will add all the new features from the web version, phone calls and more.” Admittedly, there’s little need to have an additional Google instant messenger that needs installation, when the Flash-based web version can be just as good.

*Google Talk (released August 24th 2005) is the older brother of the Google Talk gadget (released March 14th 2007); another web variant is Gmail Chat (released February 8th 2006).

[Thanks Henrique Gusso, Dominik and Andreas!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

You might have heard of the news that JetBlue airlines is now showing Google Maps on the in-flight monitors. Well, Jeff Greco snapped a couple of photos for us:

Jeff says, “Am I asking too much in wanting a 3D Google Earth globe next?”

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

Equal treatment for all our big brothers

EU privacy worrywarts will expand their investigation into Google to other search engines' data retention policies.…

You can restrict your web search to...

• ... a site: Use the site:example.com operator.
• ... a directory: Use the site:digg.com/pc_games operator, including an additional folder in the URL.
• ... a page: use the Ctrl+F shortcut within the page.
• ... a part of a page: Copy the part of the page, paste it into a text editor, and search within the editor.
• ... Creative Commons-licensed web pages: In Google, go to the advanced search page. In the “Usage Rights” option, select e.g. “free to use or share” (you can also look for Creative Commons licensed photos by heading over to a special Flickr search).
• ... pages of a certain date: In Google’s advanced search options, set the “Date” box to e.g. “past 3 months.” You can also use the Google News Archive search if you’re interested in much older mentions. Also, you can use the numrange operator to try to find older pages only by searching for e.g. [“copyright 1994..1996 by” prediction] (where “prediction” is replaced by your keywords).
• ... pages of a certain file size: Alexa has a web search platform for developers that might allow you to do this. As a workaround, if you’re looking for complete works of something – like a book – and you happen to have quotes from several different parts of the book, look for a couple of them at once. For instance, searching for just the quote ["The sphere, hanging from a long wire set into the ceiling of the choir"] from Umberto Eco’s beginning of Foucault’s Pendulum will find different pages, not all of which include the full book. By adding a quote from the middle of the book to your search – ["The sphere, hanging from a long wire set into the ceiling of the choir” “But the lights of the Sefirot must be gathered in vessels"] – you will find the full book online.
• ... pages of the site you’re on: If you installed the Google Toolbar for your browser, you can use the Toolbar search box and select the little arrow next to the search button, hitting “Search site."
• ... pages linked from a page: You can use Google’s Custom Search Engine on-the-fly option. Just enter the URL, plus a couple of your search terms, in the top right search box.
• ... pages on a specific set of domains: You can use the Google Custom Search Engine program to create a search engine that will find terms within certain domains only.
• ... pages that link to your site: For this solution, you need to include a Google Analytics counter in your page. Now for your site click “View reports” -> “Traffic Sources” -> “Referring Sites”. Expand the list to 100 items, and hit the “Export” -> “CSV” button at the top left. Open the saved file using the upload service of Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Now copy the list of domains and paste this into the “Sites to search” box of your own Custom Search Engine.
• ... pages you visited before: Make sure you enabled Google Web History. Now when you’re logged in to Google, click on iGoogle on the Google homepage, and then select “Web History.” Here you can now use the “Search History” button at the top search box to search withing pages you saw before only.

Added to these web search restrictions Google offers a variety of special searches, like image search, video search, news search, source code search, location/ business search, book search, Usenet search, patents search, photos search, and scholarly articles search. Yahoo also offers different useful search types, like question & answer searching. For more, Read/ Write Web presented the top 100 alternative search engines, and Gary Price of ResourceShelf also often looks at search alternatives.

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

A study on the search behavior of French Canadians has just been released by Skooiz (a Montreal based SEM agency) and Mastodonte Communication.

1272 French Canadian users were surveyed on 17 questions about their search behavior and attitudes towards search results and online advertising.

Key Findings from the study are as follows:

• French Canadians are very active web searchers. Close to 65% use search engines from 2 to 10 times a day.
• A wide majority of respondents (85%) feel satisfied with the primary results from search requests. Only 1,6% were unsatisfied, while 8,8% were very unsatisfied from the results.
• More than 48,9%, use 2 keywords when searching and close to 31% use 3 keywords. Only 9,5% use one specific keyword and close to 11% type in 4 keywords.
• More than 40% sometimes use advanced search functions and 9% very often.
• 40,2% of French Canadian search users were neutral about the relevance of sponsored links. Only, 17,4% find them relevant or very relevant. 32,3% of surveyed searchers find sponsored links irrelevant.

The entire study can be downloaded from Skooiz; How Do French Canadians Search The Web.

Dave Davis of redfly marketing has an interesting post that gets into great detail about how to make the most of dynamic keyword insertion in Google AdWords.

The article starts with the basics, but pretty quickly gets into a much higher level of detail. One of the more intriguing parts of this article is the various forms of manipulating capitalization:

1. keyword - No capitalization, all word(s) are in lower case
2. Keyword - The first word is capitalized
3. KeyWord - Every word is capitalized
4. KEYword - Every letter in first word is capitalized
5. KEYWord -Every letter in the first word AND the first letter of the second
6. KEYWORD - Every letter is capitalized

Dynamic keyword insertion is a great concept, but challenging to do well. Precise control over the capitalization, and understanding how to make this work to your advantage can be a big key to success.

Does W3C compliance impact a site’s search rankings? The question has been mulled on Search Engine Journal in the past and the basic conclusion is that although W3C is incredibly important for browser compatibility and overall site usability, it does not have a direct impact on Google rankings, especially since Google’s pages themselves do not validate.

However, it is still a common practice to make sure one’s pages do validate W3C standards, and in the future, in an effort to judge site authority and quality, Google may just include W3C validity in their algorithm; you never know.

Besides, believe it or not, there is much more to the web than only Google. And Yahoo, Ask.com & MSN’s Live Search are also major traffic generators in the Global search market.

Additionally, if you’re going to be running a social media campaign, planning on running a story on Digg, and the majority of Digg users use a browser such as Safari or Firefox which your site may not load correctly in or results in botched CSS formatting, your story is going to get no attention and you’ll be missing out on the potential of hundreds of organic editorial links.

So, when looking at the whole picture; presentation is reality is reputation… and having a smooth and valid site is critical to your company’s reputation.

Mike Tekula of New Sun Graphics sent Search Engine Journal a write-up of the importance of valid source code and SEO and here are some of his tips in assuring the search engines can properly read your site’s coding and browser compatibility. Enjoy.

Testing your web pages in browsers is an absolutely necessary process for building any web page. It allows you to see what others can see, and often you will notice mistakes in your HTML code because of the symptoms they cause in browsers. But what about when your testing browser(s) display the pages exactly as you intended. Are your pages error-free? Not necessarily.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) sets the standards for coding HTML and CSS for web pages. They also provide tools to validate your code for free. So do some third-parties. The question you might be asking is, “if my page looks fine in Internet Exporer, Safari, Firefox, etc. why do I need to worry about validation?” If all you’re looking is for proper display, you might not have to. However, if you’re concerned at all with search engine optimization (SEO), and you probably should be, validating your source code is a necessity.

One reason for this is the difference between search engine spiders and browsers. Spiders “crawl” the web indexing web pages and their content. They are basically toned-down web browsers that aren’t concerned with displaying for a user but with recognizing content. In other words, search engine spiders are looking at the same code your web browser is and parsing it in a very similar way. This difference in functionality, however, is vast.

There is a very real pressure on web browser developers to ensure that their browsers display pages correctly to the user. This often includes forgiving errors in the source code. Improperly nested elements, unclosed tags, unrecognized parameters - these are all errors in HTML code that might not affect your web page’s display in your favorite browser. When it comes to search engine spiders, however, it can be an entirely different story.

That is not to say that small errors in your HTML code will spell death for your search engine rankings. Certainly they won’t normally make your page invisible to spiders.

They can, however, disrupt the vastly important process of a spider parsing your page for all relevant content or make some of that content invisible. And since so much of SEO is paying close attention to every little detail of your site and its content, why leave the possibility open of causing problems for search engines when they try to index your pages?

Validation might mean some big headaches when you set out to fix every last error on your pages, but the benefits of valid code are clear - and running your pages through a validation service like that of the W3C can do a lot in the way of educating you about the mistakes you may be making.

So, in a nutshell, here are some basic tips:

• Use W3C to make sure your site is viewable in major browsers, especially Firefox & Safari
• Test your site on mobile browsers
• Check for all errors in HTML coding and fix them when possible
• Pay attention to your programming errors and be aware of them when programming your next site
• If you pay for a designer, put something in the contract that the site must pass W3C validation.

Business.com, the B2B search engine & directory, is up for sale and according to the Wall Street Journal, the web destination hopes to attract valuation between $300 and $400 million via an auction managed by Credit Suisse.

Dow Jones and the New York Times (which owns About.com) may be interested buyers in the major business directory which initially purchased its domain name for $7.5 million in 1999.

Business.com uses a multi-tiered revenue generation method (which is probably the highest profile arbitrage site on the planet) with an even mix of paid business directory listings (sold in-house), paid search advertising (provided by Google), and contextual ads (externally driven).

Essentially, the search engine, could be the dream acquisition of many publishers, since its focus is on the business world, and businesses understand the importance of paying for search traffic and authority links now more than ever before.

The Google Translator has a new feature: a dictionary to translate words. This complements the existing “translate text” box, but is (apparently) optimized for single-word queries, and it also adds some related phrases to results. At this time translations are available between English and French, German, Italian, Korean and Spanish. Chinese and other languages available in Google’s “translate text” feature are missing here. (Interestingly enough, the English - German dictionary translation is in Beta, Google says, even though a non-Beta version is used in the “translate text” tab; perhaps this is one of Google’s in-house machine translation efforts?)

Results are often good but not always. I tried to translate “global warming” from English to German, for instance, and the top result was “Erwärmung,” which doesn’t mean “global warming” but just “warming.” However, some of the related phrases Google suggested came closes to the target (though none of them mentioned the German word “Erderwärmung”). Also, the dictionary simply doesn’t contain certain words; trying to translate “wacko” into German finds nothing, whereas e.g. the existing LEO online translator finds two results for this in German.

Some of the dictionaries also seem to have problems with American vs British English spelling. For instance, Google wasn’t able to translate “color” from English into German, outputting a simple “No translation was found.” After changing the spelling to the British “colour,” correct translations like “Färbung” or “Farbe” were offered. The exact opposite is true when you pick English to French translation; here, you are required to provide the American spelling, “color” to yield results, as a commenter at the Google Operating System blog mentions.

Also, the translator does not use the Google spellchecker to remind you of spelling problems. This would be very useful here, because when you misspell something, it won’t find the translation, and you’ll be left unsure if that’s because there was a typo, or the dictionary is missing your word.

While some basic words can’t be found, Google’s related phrases feature often offers a great range of fitting proverbs. Entering “dogs” in an English - German translation I get (besides the wrong translation “Windhundrennen,” which means grayhound racing [update: see the comments for more on this.]), among others:

• it was raining cats and dogs (“es regnete ganz toll”)
• let sleeping dogs lie (“schlafende Hunde soll man nicht wecken”)
• barking dogs never bite (“Hunde, die bellen, beißen nicht”)

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

Inside Adwords Blog announces the wordwide expansion of  Pay-Per-Action Beta which was released initially for US publishers in March. PPA Adwords is a pricing model which gives Adwords publishers the option o pay only traffic driven to their site through paid Google Ads, if that click resulted into a corresponding action from consumers. PPA gives publishers more value for the bucks they spend for paid links that appear on Google’s content network. 

Rob Kniaz, product manager of Google’s PPA said: 

Starting today advertisers who use Adwords conversion tracking and receive more than 500 conversions from their cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) campaigns in the most recent 30-day period will be invited to join this beta test on a rolling basis. Eligible advertisers will see an alert in their Adwords account informing them that they can now try the PPA beta.

This is what makes Google’s advertising program click, they keep on giving their publishers value for the bucks they spend on paid advertising through Google Adwords.  Google Adwords is a great program that does not only benefit Google but more importantly, the publishers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What’s faster than getting the Google Maps support to temporarily move a marker position? Well, have a look at the photo below the email exchange on this page... [Via Reddit.]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

I didn’t know you can hook up Google’s Q&A feature to a Google Spreadsheet, but you can: the GoogleLookup function “attempts to answer your question using the web, with information about people, places and things, like the population of Japan, the mass of Jupiter, or the place of birth of Abraham Lincoln,” Google’s help entry on the subject says. The syntax is as follows:

=GoogleLookup(“Paraguay"; “internet users”)

... and you can replace the first parameter with other entities, and the second one with other attributes, e.g. “Chicago” and “mayor”, “T-rex” and “weight”, “Stuttgart” and “state”, or “Yahoo” and “CEO” (Google still shows “Terry Semel" for the latter, which goes to show the data isn’t always precise to the day).

You can also automatically attach the first GoogleLookup parameter to another cell. To create the table below, I only entered the name of the famous person, and created a single second cell with the content =GoogleLookup(A2; “date of birth”). I then copied this cell, marked the other cells next to the person names, hit paste, and Google automatically filled the data (you can see a red dot in those cells, and they will also show their web sources when you hover over them or export the table).

View table...

On that note, did Google disable much of its Q&A service? Many things that used to work – like “real name of superman” or “president of USA” – don’t work here anymore...

A related function showing you live Google Finance data is =GoogleFinance(“YHOO"; “volume”) (where “YHOO” and “volume” is replaced with your values, e.g. “GOOG” and “marketcap”).

[Via Digg/ Webware.com]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

You pay only for results

Google has extended its Pay-Per-Action ad beta to non-US advertisers, giving them the option paying only when they get results.…

Sergey Brin is telling employees to stop making old products and start improving new ones. "For example, said Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, Google plans to combine its spreadsheet, calendar and word-processing programs into one suite of Web-based applications."

Buying Yahoo

Kevin Kelleher at GigaOm points out five groups OF potential suitors for purchasing Yahoo, and handicaps each of them. Not too surprisingly, Microsoft has the best odds at 4-1, but with a “strategic sense” rating of only B-. Maybe more surprising is that he set 5-1 odds for Comcast or AT&T with a rating of B. A private equity firm (unnamed) is given 7-1 odds but a strategic sense rating of A-.

Other potential suitors named are News Corp/ Myspace, or one of GE, Disney, or CBS - all with longshot odds and low strategic sense ratings.

Yahoo Buys Rivals.com

Yahoo may or may not be up on the block, as indicated above, but they have their own acquisition trail. Most recently, that included picking up Rivals.com, a college sports site. The official press release states

Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO), a leading global Internet company, today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Rivals.com, the leading online destination for college and high school sports and recruiting information. The acquisition will significantly expand the community offerings and open publishing capabilities of Yahoo! Sports, which has the most engaged sports audience on Internet. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The Senior VP/head of News & Information said that this “exemplifies Yahoo!’s mission to connect people with their passions, communities and the world’s knowledge.”

It seems to me a rather niche purchase for Yahoo, but they do have Yahoo! Sports. Though Deep Jive Interests and CNBC (linked above) are wondering whether it’s worth it.

Google Loses More Engineers

Employee flux is typical, especially in large companies. But Google just lost two top engineers to Benchmark Capital. The engineers, Bret Taylor and Jim Norris, were part of the popular Google Maps application, amongst others. They each received a Google Founders’ Award in 2006. Now, they’ll be EIRs, or Entrepreneurs in Residence at Benchmark, being paid to think up ideas. Nice. Benchmark appears to be beefing up the number of EIRs lately.

Embed Yahoo Pipes-Powered Maps

If you’ve been playing around with Yahoo Pipes at all, you may know that they recently added automatic Yahoo! Maps output tied to certain Pipes modules. Any time there’s some sort of geocoded data created by your Pipe, a map will be displayed.

Now, you can take the map output of your Pipes and embed it on your website using Javascript. There’s also a post on the official Pipes blog about how you can badge a Pipe’s results using Javascript.

Inspecting Your Del.icio.us Innards

While looking up some APIs and mashups at Programmable Web, I came across extisp.icio.us. Enter a del.icio.us username and it returns a large tag cloud based on your bookmark tags. I was surprised to see what topics were of more “importance” to me. (No, it’s not pr0n.) It’s just a bit of fun, and you may be surprised by your del.icio.us bookmarks as well.

Google is set to build a $600 million data center in western Iowa according to an announcement from the state’s Governor, Chet Culver.

The 55 acre site is expected to employ 200 people with an average salary of $50,000, lending an economic jolt to the region.

The Sioux City Journal reports :

The center, which will be part of Google’s worldwide network of such sites, is expected to open in the spring of 2009 at the Council Bluffs Industrial Foundation’s new business park. It will house computers that run the search engine’s services. Workers there will include software and data center technicians as well as maintenance and other facilities support.

There is plenty of room for expansion at the site, as Google purchased about 1,185 acres, according to state economic development officials. Google has said it is particularly interested in the central region of the United States because it is a crossroads for Internet activity.

In an effort aimed at attracting Google, Iowa lawmakers last session passed a bill that would exempt electricity and capital investment requirements from sales tax for computer-related businesses.

• Google gets a property tax break through 2024
• Google will end up paying about $65 million in property taxes over the next 15 years.
• Google also will pay an estimated $6 million in sales taxes over the next couple of years as it purchases building materials and utilities
• A recent upgrade to the local MidAmerican Energy Co. electric-generating station helped attract Google, which regards power reliability as a high priority
• Google says its trying to use local vendors and suppliers whenever possible

Robert Savage is a software inventor with all his heart, producing many awe-inspiring and highly original results. It’s no surprise then that he’s also taking reviews to heart, so I invited Robert to write a guest post after I recently reviewed his latest software, 3D Mailbox. Robert writes:

Thanks, Philipp, for offering me a guest spot. It was great to see your write-up on 3D Mailbox, and here I’ll try to provide additional information of interest to your readers. Your comments have also served as important feedback for us, and we have already made several changes in the program in response to them; specifically:

• We now assign gender to the avatars based on the name in the FROM field of the email. We even added “Philipp” to the list of names ;)
• The display settings now default to a fallback configuration if the system resources are borderline.
• We no longer have an auto-play trailer on the front page.
• The system checker is no longer mandatory; it’s offered now as an option (Our intent in offering it was to save someone a download if they weren’t sure whether their system supported, for example, Pixel Shader 1.0).

In response to a couple of your points:

<<Make sure you only hand over your Google Account password to services you absolutely trust – including the trust that they have security measurements that prevent them from being hacked.>>

All account passwords are encrypted within 3D Mailbox and get transmitted via the secure POP3 connection that is established between 3D Mailbox and the GMail servers.

<<Perhaps if the program design can evolve towards visualization metaphors that add more meaning>>

It may not be apparent at first glance, but every aspect of 3D Mailbox is meant to convey meaning. For instance, when a new mail arrives, it meets the Bouncer (spam filter) near the front gate. There are three possible decisions he can make: Ham (good email), which is allowed through the pool area; Unsure (which is sent to the ice rink to chill until you decide how to classify it); and Spam (which is sent to the beach until you delete it, at which point it’s devoured by sharks). As you know, most spam filters send your mail directly to the spam folder and you never see it; in 3D Mailbox we portray all spam as a particular avatar, so you can instantly recognize it without having to read it.

To continue the metaphor, when good mail dives into the pool, it does laps there until you read it; then it climbs out and relaxes in a lounge chair. You can right-click any avatar and perform all the normal email tasks (read, reply, move, classify, etc.) without even looking at the mail grid. When you move a message from the inbox to a custom folder, the avatar will walk to a cabana and hang out there. When you delete Ham, it walks to the trash alley behind the hotel, and waits there until you delete it completely, at which point it walks through the exit into oblivion. When Unsure is waiting in the ice rink, balloons appear on the outside, and so on.

Hang with your mail poolside listening to Brazilian music and the water.

In 3D Mailbox, every mail you receive is assigned a visible spam score. You can re-classify and re-train any mail with a simple mouse-click.

An intuitive slider makes setting your spam filter thresholds simple and effective.

We have tried to make the world as ’normal’ as possible, so the metaphors are unobtrusive. It really just looks like a bunch of people having a good time, but the more you use it, the more you see how it’s all ordered and keyed in to what you do with your mail. We deliberately avoided making it too game-like, where interaction was necessary. For example, to feed your spam to the sharks, you simply delete them. No extra or special effort is required.

In creating this environment, we were also very careful about meeting deep human needs. There is water in all its forms in Level 1, from the ocean to the pool, from the showers to the fountain, all the way to the ice rink and the clouds above. This, combined with the sunshine and Brazilian music, which plays in all 60 camera angles, provides unobtrusive relaxation. Personally, I like to keep the program open in the background and listen to the waves, seagulls, fountain, birds and breeze in the trees. When a new mail arrives, chimes gently sound. There is so much noise pollution in our workplace and lives. The environment we have created is meant to relax and entertain, resulting in happier, more productive workers and people at home.

People who shoot this down for trying to “visualize mail” are missing the point. It’s not about “analytics” – we’re humanizing mail.

In the past week since the launch, I have witnessed a really interesting thing. People’s reactions are emotional. They’re having strong reactions, both positive and negative. And that’s wonderful. Just look at the success of The SIMs and Second Life. As that corny song goes, “People who need people are the luckiest people in the world” – even if those people are virtual :)

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

Lawrence Lessig, founder of the Creative Commons movement and copyright analyst (and previously interviewed here), is moving up onto a higher plane of the problem: the systematic corruption that makes politicians and professionals of different areas fail to understand his copyright analysis. For the last 10 years he worked on delivering clear arguments to the copyright debate, and for the next 10, it seems, he’s interested in finding solutions for why the arguments (at least the obvious ones, the “no brainers” – like how extending copyright terms doesn’t serve the public at large) are rejected by the system. Lawrence is convinced that “our government can’t understand basic facts when strong interests have an interest in its misunderstanding.”

Lawrence (who also posted a disclosure statement, like other bloggers did, convinced that the corruption of professionals – not just politicians – deserves attention) says he’s a beginner of this new subject that many already have worked on and are continuing to work on. His hope is “to build upon their work” while at the same time giving up some of the responsibilities with the Creative Commons movement... like constant lecturing about intellectual property issues. Indeed, those who wanted to hear Lawrence heard him by now, and many of those who don’t want to may well have a reasons for that beyond failing to see his arguments. But, Lawrence says...

<<... this is not a resolution of silence. It is a decision to change channels. This new set of issues is, in my view, critically important. Indeed, I’m convinced we will not solve the IP related issues until these “corruption" related issues are resolved. So I hope at least some of you will follow to this new set of questions.>>

[Via Boing Boing.]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

One day I’ll write about how frustrating I find searching Amazon. It’ll be a bitter, gloomy post. Ingmar Bergman will turn it into a film. The climax will occur when I discover that Amazon has discontinued e-mail alerts for new products and I throw hummus all over my kitchen. Watch for it. In the meantime, I do have some good new for those of you who want to monitor Amazon for new products — RSS feeds for Amazon tags.

As announced on the Amazon Web Services blog, you can now build an RSS feed for tags. The blog post gives details about how the feeds are set up, but here’s a brief example:

http://www.amazon.com/rss/tag/giraffe/new?length=100

Giraffe is the tag for which you’re searching. /new indicates that the search is for items newly tagged, and ?length is for indicating how many items you wish in the RSS feed. You can also add an associate tag to the feed, see the blog post for details.

It’s interesting to see what ends up tagged; it’s not items that have the tag in the title (necessarily). The RSS feed above generates items like the Paper Creations: Wild Animal Origami Book & Gift Set , which makes sense and Animals of the World 2.0 (CD-ROM) . There’s even a giraffe shaped like a rubber duck, which you would not, by its description (”Stretch - Rubber Duck by Rubba Ducks”) immediately recognize as giraffe-oriented.

I will be making use of this, though it’ll take some experimenting to find the best tags.

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