Relive the ten worst presentation moments, marvel at this sign, understand the merit of drunk programming, read a sketch titled My Darling, start worrying about Y10K, laugh or cry at these pickup lines, create your own avatar double, watch superheroes dating, glimpse at Hugh MacLeod’s cartoon, memorize a Winston Churchil quote, realize spelling may be overrated, donate to Amnesty International, find out if you’re dreaming and provoke lucid dreams, experience dissonance, see how Supergirl is drawn, and type 379009 into a calculator & reverse the display. [Via various!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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."

Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig shifted his focus from tackling copyright to tackling corruption a while ago. He explains the reasons in an interview with Danish television’s Deadline show. One key aspect Lawrence sees in solving today’s problems is to fight the underlying issue which prevents apparently obvious solutions from being applied, namely, financial interests leading into a non-solution direction. And if I understand him right one method for dealing with this corruption in the future he sees in making more data about politics and politicians available online to then data-mine it for suspicious stuff using crowd intelligence.

[Via Boing Boing.]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

Google seems to have updated its backlink tracking tool in the Google Webmaster Tools suite according to a conversation going on in DigitalPoint forums. Some members are reporting increases of backlinks tracked by Google, while others are saying that Google has dropped some of their historical backlinks from its tracking.

Other webmasters are reporting that Google Webmaster Tools has changed their PageRanks from PageRank 7 to PageRank 6 on internal Webmaster Tools reporting. The webmaster community has been patiently waiting for a Google PageRank update for some time, it could be on the way this weekend.

In some sites where I link dropped from PR 7 to PR 6! Maybe big Google is in the process of PR update. My blog is showing PR 4 then goes back to PR 1. Hoping that this next update give positive results to my sites!

This is interesting. I paid for links from one of the blog networks here a couple of months ago. Every link from that network has been dropped from Webmaster Tools for my site. All other backlinks still show up, and links from that network still show in a link: query on Yahoo.

I just lost over 600 backlinks, 1500 is now 876 backlinks, I have not done anything to it, my other sites seem ok though, I have seen this happen before, only temporary though.

Are Journal readers noticing these changes on your sites? Please feel free to share your experiences in the comments below as the possible Google PageRank update unfolds.

Search marketing dominated the lastest IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report, which covered the second quarter and the first six months of 2007.

Internet advertising revenues for the first six months of 2007 were nearly $10 billion, setting yet another new record and representing a nearly 27 percent increase over the first half of 2006. 41% of that ad revenue, or $4.1 Billion, was attributed to paid search marketing (leaving out SEO and link buying).

Advertising Formats - Search and Display continue to be leading formats.

Internet advertising revenue totaled nearly $5.1 billion for the second quarter of 2007, exceeding the $5 billion mark for the first time in a quarter, a 25.4 percent increase over the same period in 2006.

I wonder what the total amount of Search Marketing revenue would be if SEO budgets, link buying revenue and directory listings were part of the equation, or would some of these fall into slotting, sponsorships and/or display ads and how search rankings influence the placement of the advertising classified under display?

My point is, Search Marketing may attribute to much, much more than the 41%.

Last week I traveled out to California for a series of meetings at Google, and also so I could be at the Searchification event. One of the people I sat down with at Google was Sepandar Kamvar (aka Sep Kamvar). While Sep is well known for his work on personalization at Google, our conversation focused on another area, that of Google gadgets.

I learned a few important things about the Google Gadget world. One of these is that getting a large number of gadgets you have developed installed by other users is not something that will help with your web search rankings. This is consistent with a conversation I had later with Matt Cutts, where Matt told me that this signal was simply too noisy.

On another note, promotion of gadgets is something that requires some effort as well. It's easier to get something to go viral if you nudge it along by getting the word out. Sep suggested that one way to do this is to buy Google Adwords ads to promote the gadget.

Another thing I learned is that placement in the Google Gadget Directory is based on popularity. You can get a lot of visibility here, but only if you achieve a high ranking. Note that user deletions of gadget installations also count as a negative signal for purposes of ranking in the Google directory.

We also talked about what makes a really good gadget. Here are the 3 main points I took out of the conversation:

1. The content changes daily or more than daily. Freshness is a big reason why people install a gadget. Trivia, time, and weather gadgets all have done well (don't necessarily rush off and do these, many of them already exist).
2. The gadget needs to be useful in a small space. No matter how useful the information is, users are not going to ties up en entire screen to get it.
3. It should deliver useful content in the gadget itself. In other words, don't make the user click through to your site to get the information they want. Such a structure is not likely to get particularly much interest. Put it right there in the gadget where they get what the need most of the time. Of course, when they want additional information, they can click through to your site, and you always get the branding benefit.

WebSitePulse is supposed to test for you if a website is blocked in China. Enter any URL on top, select a location (if you want to test mainland China, pick e.g. Beijing), and provide a verification code. After some seconds you’ll get either an OK or a couldn’t connect to host message. For instance, www.google.com is supposedly OK whereas www.hrw.org is blocked. Note that sometimes what may be blocked in one region in China mainland may not be blocked in another region in the country. I can’t verfiy if this tool returns correct results, but if anyone from within China knows more, please leave a comment.

According to this tool, (Google-owned) Feedburner feeds seem to be currently blocked in general in China. This blog’s non-Feedburner RSS on the other hand seems to get through fine.

[Thanks James Xuan, who saw it at TechCrunch!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]