Wizard's Blog » Google

Pixazza

Mr.Wizard — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 12:00:21 +0000

Pixazza logo

Pixazza is an interesting service that Google recently invested in. It’s similar to AdSense in that it lets you make money from your site by automatically adding contextual ads to your content.

Unlike Adsense, instead of adding text ads to text webpages it hyperlinks products in your pictures. Since image recognition technology is in its infancy, the hyperlinks are created by people working for Pixazza.

Pixazza sample

I’m not sure I’d actually get much use out of Pixazza. I don’t usually post a lot of pictures, and the ones I post are intended to support the blog post they’re on. They therefore don’t tend to contain a lot of products or they only reference a blog post I’ve already written about.

Google Invests in Pixazza, An AdSense for Images (mashable.com)
Pixazza Launches ‘Product in the Picture’, Enabling Web Publishers to Monetize Images (sociableblog.com)
Pixazza: Make Money with Your Pictures (blippitt.com)

Offline GMail!

Mr.Wizard — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 01:27:46 +0000

: Image via CrunchBase

One of the most eagerly anticipated features for GMail is offline access, and today Google finally announced that it was available! (as a Labs feature)

Once this is finalized as a release quality feature for everyone to use, Google will have really closed the gap with Outlook. Combined with Google Apps functionality for enterprises, Google Calendar and Google Docs, I can’t think of a compelling reason to keep buying new versions of Office every couple of years.

As expected, the GMail offline access feature uses Gears – same as the offline access in Google Docs etc.

As well as straight offline mode, it also has ”flaky connection mode”, which acts like offline mode in that you’re always dealing with a locally cached version of your mail, but also synchs continually in the background like online mode. I imagine this will speed some mail functions in the same way that Outlook’s Cached Exchange Mode does because more of the processing happens locally.

Apparently they’re slowly rolling the offline feature out, so I haven’t been able to test it yet but I’m really looking forward to it.

Once the option shows up in your Labs, you enable offline access by following these steps:

Click Settings and click the Labs tab.
Select Enable next to Offline Gmail.
Click Save Changes.
After your browser reloads, you’ll see a new “Offline^0.1” link in the upper righthand corner of your account, next to your username. Click this link to start the offline set up process and download Gears if you don’t already have it.

Here’s the announcement video:

EDIT: There appear to be some known issues – you can’t send an offline message with attachments and you can’t access the contact manager offline. Forgivable in a beta, but these things will need to be fixed.

Google makes domain squatters' life easier, everyone else's harder

Mr.Wizard — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 18:31:10 +0000

: Image via CrunchBase, source unknown

Don’t you hate it when you do a search or follow a link or type in a URL and you get a domain squatter?

These are people that buy up thousands of domains and don’t use them for anything real, they just stick ads on a page with no actual content. Why do they do this? Because they make money from the 0.00001% of people that click on one of their ads – same logic as spam.

Even worse, they often buy domains for misspellings of real domains so if you type the URL in wrong you see their ads instead of the page you wanted (this is called typo squatting). It’s internet pollution.

This is also why it’s pretty much impossible to get the domain name you want anymore – they’re all owned by domain squatters.

Now Google is helping these people (and hurting you) by creating an AdSense program specifically for domain squatting. Because Google gets paid same as the squatters do when those ads get clicked on.

I guess “do no evil” gets trumped by “recession”.

Gmail tasks

Mr.Wizard — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 05:27:31 +0000

Gmail tasks

Today Google announced the addition of tasks to Gmail labs.

They recently added a ”Add any gadget by URL” feature, and I was using the Remember The Milk gadget with that to add todo functionality to Gmail.

As Gmail tasks are brand new they’re not as comprehensive as Remember The Milk – there’s no way to set a task’s priority, they’re not sorted by due date and there is no use of color to visually deliniate tasks.

That having been said, it is better integrated into Gmail because it isn’t a gadget, and I will be using it for a while to give it a chance.

Google Reader update

Mr.Wizard — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 22:35:42 +0000

: Image by via CrunchBase

Yesterday Google released an update to Reader. The colors have changed, the corners are less rounded and they rearranged things a bit.

I’m not a big fan of the new color scheme – it’s a very stark white whereas I found the old light blue soothing. I also preferred the rounded corners and drop shadows, it made everything feel softer.

I don’t have any numbers to back this up, but the new Reader does seem to be faster.

Google Reader refresh button

I like most of the layout changes, except that now the “Refresh” button is sandwitched between two other buttons. I don’t know about how other people use Reader, but I press “Refresh” a lot. I almost never use “Mark all as read”, and it would be a horrible thing to accidentally press, so why is it so close to the “Refresh” button? The “View settings” button wouldn’t be so catastrophic to accidentally click, but I also would hardly ever use it, so it makes no sense where it is.

Speaking of the Refresh button, why can’t new items just be automatically added to the bottom of the list? That has always annoyed me, and I keep expecting them to fix it, and they never have.

Finally, when you move the mouse over feed it highlights yellow, exactly the same as when a new iteam appears in the feed. I don’t know a lot about design but that seems bad.

Google Chrome Extension Design Document

Mr.Wizard — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 03:06:09 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

Google have published a design document for adding extensions to Google Chrome.

It’s pretty comprehensive, and even exceeds Firefox‘s extension system in a few areas:

We should not need to disable deployed extensions when we release new versions of Chromium.

Unfortunately it’s fairly obvious that the extension feature is at a very early stage, so we probably won’t see it for a long time – at least months away.

EDIT: Google have published a new Extension Process Model document with some more details about how it’s going to work – interesting reading

Use Google Libraries plugin for WordPress

Mr.Wizard — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 22:17:51 +0000

I just found a cool WordPress plugin to help improve the performance of WordPress blogs - Use Google Libraries.

WordPress uses some JavaScript libraries, like jQuery and script.aculo.us. Google hosts copies of some JavaScript libraries on their AJAX Libraries API. What the plugin does is make WordPress use the copies of the libraries hosted by Google instead of the ones bundled with WordPress. The advantage of this is that it:

increases the chance that a user already has these files cached
takes load off your server
uses compressed versions of the libraries (where available)

Amazon EC2

Mr.Wizard — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 03:00:17 +0000

Amazon AWS logo

As part of my job I was asked to take a look at Cloud Computing.

There were several obvious options – Amazon Web Services, Google App Engine and Windows Azure. Google App Engine was out of the running because it would require our app to be rewritten in Python. Windows Azure was out of the running because it would require our app to be rewritten in a .NET language. This left Amazon AWS.

The main part of AWS that we’re using is EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) which provides virtual servers. Fortunately Amazon recently added Windows support to EC2 – before it was Linux-only. Although our platform (Jade) can run on Linux, we don’t have a lot of in-house Linux experience.

You start with a machine image that just has Windows 2003 server installed (they take care of licensing), install your software and save that as a new image. You can then start multiple instances of this to provide your services. You can start different kinds of instances that have differing numbers of cores and amounts of memory. Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Storage) provides storage as a mounted drive for your application data (in our case a Jade database). Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is used for cheaper, larger storage, for example backups. They have nice support for static IP’s and DNS so that you can add/remove/swap instances behind the scenes without negatively affecting your customers.

You pay a certain amount per hour for each instance, depending on what kind of instance it is (the cheapest is around $0.10 per hour), then you pay a few cents per Gb of storage and cents per Gb for network traffic.

All of the management of instances etc. is done using an API, so you can write management apps to monitor your instances and start new ones when need arises or if one crashes. One wierd thing about this is that applications need to be written to use the API’s to do all of the management stuff, so it relies a bit on the community to build what you need. Oddly, the best software I found to manage EC2 with is a Firefox extension called Elasticfox.

So far my experience with Amazon EC2 has been fantastic. We haven’t started using it in a live environment yet, but everything I’ve seen has sold me on it. Basically you have access to an enormous resource of processing, storage and bandwidth so you can start your business off small and cheap and grow it without messing with hosting companies and hardware.

I wondered about moving my website onto EC2, but while the pricing of the service makes sense versus buying a server and paying to have it in a co-lo somewhere, $876 a year ($0.10 x 24 x 365) is a lot more than I’m currently paying.

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Google SearchWiki in use

Mr.Wizard — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 23:00:44 +0000

Image by pollyalida via Flickr

So Google SearchWiki has been out for a few days now, and I’ve finally had cause to use it.

In my job I use a programming language called Jade. It was developed in New Zealand, and they haven’t put much of a push on selling it in the US, so it’s not very well known here. It’s actually a very good language – strongly Object Oriented, powerful, easy to learn and free to develop in.

Anyway, if you do a Google search for “jade”, you get everything from the type of stone to the Mortal Kombat character. Even narrowing it to programming related results just gives various Java based toolkits – the Jade I’m looking for is several pages down.

So – perfect opportunity to hit the little up arrow and put the result I want to the top of the list. It’s not a change many people would want, so in this case limiting my changes to only affecting myself is the right thing to do. I still haven’t felt the need to write a comment on a search result yet.

I haven’t gotten over my surprise that Google would make a change like this. Their interface was so simple and clean, and they’ve added a lot of extra stuff to it. They’re winning the search engine war, so why mess with what works? There’s even been a pretty strong backlash against SearchWiki in the blogosphere.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the feature, but having it switched on all the time for everyone seems odd. It only makes sense if they’re planning on collecting a lot of information that’s useful to them. They’ve already said that they constantly check their results to see whether they are accurate, so I guess this feature gives them even more input on when they need to tweak their algorithm.

Google SearchWiki

Mr.Wizard — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 02:21:48 +0000

Image via CrunchBase

A while ago one of Google’s experiments was the ability to adjust the ranking of search results and comment on them.

Today they’ve announced that experiment has been released as a permantent feature called SearchWiki. You can adjust the ranking, delete, add, and comment on search results. Your actions are stored in your Google account so they’re persistent (for you), but comments seem to be publically visible.

The first thing that comes to mind (other than that I can finally get rid of Experts Exchange!) is that this could be used to improve everyone’s search results, but Google have explicitly stated that this will not be the case (at least initially). It does make sense – that kind of data would be very easy to mess with.

Frankly I’m surprised that they’ve made such a radical change across the board. Don’t get me wrong, I like it, but I would have expected it to be a labs feature or at least optional to protect all the grandmas on dialup from being confused. It’s a bold move.

Gmail themes

Mr.Wizard — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 21:13:43 +0000

Gmail themes

Google just announced that they have added themes to Gmail!

They look pretty cool – I especially like the ones that update the time of day/weather like the iGoogle ones do.

Of course everyone’s tastes are different, so there is quite a variety and a few I don’t care for.

Unfortunately as this is a brand new feature, it isn’t available on my Gmail account yet, but I await with bated breath.

Thanks FeedSmith and thanks for nothing, FeedBurner

Mr.Wizard — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:45:21 +0000

Image via CrunchBase

I tried FeedBurner back in the days when this blog was running Blogger, but I never really saw the point and I didn’t have any subscribers anyway. Since then I switched to WordPress and FeedBurner was bought by Google, so I gave it another shot.

I’ve been using it for a while now, with mixed results. The stats are inaccurate to the point where they seem random (and weren’t stats the original point?), their whole website is dreadfully slow, and there was no easy way to switch everyone over from the direct feed to the burned one.

Then today I read about a WordPress plugin called FeedBurner FeedSmith, which (somehow) takes care of that exact problem. Hooray!

And then I noticed that the FeedBurner feed wasn’t working at all. I checked Google Reader and sure enough, it hadn’t had a blog post in two weeks! And I’ve been posting every day! And although I have FeedMedic alerts set up, I never got one.

The FeedBurner feed was showing this error:

Error getting URL: 502 - Source feed is too large … maximum size is 512K

Which is fairly self-explanatory I suppose, but it still took a while to fix. First of all I lowered the number of posts that WordPress sends to the feed from 500 down to 10. Although that should bring down the feed size drastically, I was still getting the error. It turns out that the trick is to ping FeedBurner so it actually tries getting your feed again rather than just showing you the error from the last time it tried.

So in the end all is well with the world.

Gmail voice and video chat

Mr.Wizard — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 04:25:01 +0000

Gmail video chat

Yesterday Google announced the addition of voice and video to Gmail chat.

You download and install a plugin, and then you get extra options in the Gmail chat UI to start a video or voice chat. It usually seems to work pretty well, though one computer we tried it on ground to a halt. It has the nice ability to use it one-sided, so someone with a webcam can broadcast to someone without – you don’t need a webcam at both ends.

If someone you want to video chat with hasn’t installed the plugin, when you try to start the chat Gmail will send them a link to the plugin, so you don’t have to explain it to everyone.

The plugin seems to install for all browsers at once, which is nice and painless.

Here’s a video demonstrating the new features:

Once again, Google Talk lags behind Gmail chat, but I’m starting to ask whether Google Talk is really necessary…

Google Docs as a tool for writers

Mr.Wizard — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 21:57:06 +0000

Image via CrunchBase

As promised last night, I started writing a story today. So far it’s going well (617 words at time of post), but it’s already mutated away from the original concept some and I really don’t know how long it will end up being.

Although in the past I spent some time trying to find good writing tools, when the time came to start writing I ended up using Google Docs – allow me to explain why:

It’s available everywhere (the joys of cloud computing) though it also has offline access
It can export as several useful file types including HTML, which is what I’ll use when the story is finished and I want to publish it on my website. I could easily publish it directly from Google Docs, but I want the Google Juice for my site.
Revision tracking
Built-in dictionary/thesaurus/encyclopedia/web lookup for words

What Google Docs is missing as a writing tool is a database to store characters, locations, plot points etc.

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2008 US Presidential Elections

Mr.Wizard — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:09:26 +0000

Today is election day here in the US, and here is a Google gadget to show realtime election results:

I’m not an American, but living here it’s difficult to ignore the election, and in any case it’s something that affects the rest of the world.

For the record I think that George Bush has done a terrible job, and the American people need to express that it’s not ok.

I won’t bore you further – there has been more than enough political commentary around for the last few weeks/months/years.

Google Chrome released :) and broken :(

Mr.Wizard — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:35:20 +0000

Google Chrome logo

As promised, the beta of Google Chrome was released today. With great anticipation I downloaded and installed it.

The installer went away for a while, using 100% (of one) CPU, but I think that was because of the sheer size of my browsing history being imported from Firefox. Need a progress bar there, I think.

When it finally installed, I started it up and…

The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000005). Click OK to terminate the application.

I get that message every time I try to load any page.

That makes me a saaaad panda

EDIT: The problem seems to be caused by Symantec Endpoint Security (specifically the Application & Device Control component). Hopefully Symantec will release an update that fixes this soon. In the meantime you can uninstall Application & Device Control without completely uninstalling Symantec Endpoint Security.

EDIT: The problem has been added to the Chrome bug tracker, so you can track its progress here

EDIT: The problem has been added to the Symantec Knowledge Base here

Google Chrome – Google’s Browser Project

Mr.Wizard — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 17:03:43 +0000

Google Chrome

Apparently Google have sent out a comic book (!?) announcing their browser project – Chrome.

For years there have been rumors that Google was working on their own browser – I guess the rumors were true.

They seem to have put a lot of work into performance, usability and security. Each tab is a separate process, which makes memory management and security easier and means a javascript-heavy tab won’t slow your other tabs (or the main browser) down. Hopefully this will also mean that it will take advantage of multi-core/CPU computers.

Interestingly they’ve included an Omnibar which seems to be very similar to Firefox 3‘s Awesomebar and IE8′s Smartbar. They’ve also made a smart homepage like IE8 beta 2 has and Mozilla is thinking about. Google Gears is of course included.

They have also put a lot of thought into a fast JavaScript engine called V8. It seems to do a lot of the optimizations that Mozilla were talking about for Firefox 3.1.

An advantage Google has when developing a browser is the enormous resources of their index – they can run automated tests against millions of websites without ever leaving their own data centers. So by the time their browser gets to beta it should be much more stable than other betas.

One interesting thing is that Google and Mozilla just renewed their relationship for a few years, and now Google will be in competition with them – I wonder how Mozilla feels about that.

I’ll definitely check Chrome out when it’s released, but the one advantage Firefox will still have is Extensions.

EDIT: Apparently they’re releasing the beta tomorrow

EDIT: Google Blogoscoped have found some more info about Chrome

AdSense Catch-22 resolved (maybe)

Mr.Wizard — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 13:56:52 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

As you can see from the ads on the site, my previously mentioned AdSense problem is resolved.

The third message that I sent to AdSense support got a reply, so I guess persistence and rephrasing pays off :-\

I don’t think my problem is one that many people will have – in March I got them to change my account from a UK to a US once (since I live here now) and I got an automatic email saying that I had four months to do the phone verification. But because I hadn’t earned $10 yet, I couldn’t do the verification (hello catch-22). I emailed AdSense support and they said not to worry about it, because I wouldn’t have to do the verification until I earned $10.

Four months later (i.e. now) my account got disabled because I hadn’t done the phone verification :-I

What AdSense support have done is to extend the verification deadline by three months. That’s fair enough, and thank you, but it took me two years to earn $5, so I’m really not sure I can do another $5 in three months…

AdSense Catch-22 redux

Mr.Wizard — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 13:49:13 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

So I finally got a reply from Google regarding my AdSense problem and…

Due to the high volumes of emails we receive, we’re unable to individually respond to your inquiry. Please find instant, reliable answers to all your questions in our online help resources.

Well isn’t that helpful.

I’ve posted my problem to the AdSense Google Group but since I couldn’t find anyone else that had the same problem as me, I don’t hold out much hope for some random member of the public being able to help me.

AdSense Catch-22

AdSense Catch-22

Mr.Wizard — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:29:39 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

Those of you who don’t use AdBlock may have noticed that my blog is now showing public service ads instead of the usual contextual AdSense ads.

There’s a message on my AdSense account saying:

Your pages are displaying Public Service Advertisements (PSAs) because you have not verified your contact information.

I think what it’s talking about is the new phone verification system where they give you a code, you give them a phone number, they phone you up and you put the code in. Or the other way around, I’m not really clear on it.

Here’s the Catch-22 though: I don’t have the option to perform the phone verification until I’ve earned $10, but I can’t earn any more money because it’s showing PSA’s because I haven’t performed the phone verification…

I sent a message to Google asking for help, but so far there has been no reply.

Blogging metapost

Mr.Wizard — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 14:05:00 +0000

Image by LollyKnit via FlickrI’ve had this blog for… …holy crap, for four years. In the beginning it was pretty bare, just single-line posts about things I wanted to buy or things I had already used and thought were cool.

In the last few months I’ve tried to flesh my posts out a bit more and post more often, with mixed success.

I’ve come to see it as a sort of game. There’s no opponent (I refuse to compete with the entire rest of the Internet) so it’s a bit of a solitary game. You start the game with a PageRank of 0 and the goal is to get a PageRank of 10. I refuse to resort to any kind of SEO, so it’s all about whether I can produce good enough content to get the attention of the world. So far the answer is “not really”. I have got a PageRank of 3, which is better than I ever thought I’d do, but there’s a long way to go. I don’t really have any really good backlinks, and no RSS subscriptions.

For me, the most fun part of the game is checking how well I’m doing every day. PageRank changes slowly, so that’s no fun, but between Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics and Google AdSense, I get some interesting feedback.

When something happens like my Amazon pre-order of GTA IV shipping unexpectedly early, rather than telling someone, my first thought is to blog it. Not because I’m so short of real-life friends or I think there’s anyone out there that cares, but because it gives me some content and I want to see what that’ll do to my standing in the game.

I had an interesting experience a few weeks ago, when the Call of Duty 4 map pack came out and I couldn’t download it because of an Xbox Live error. I blogged about it, and had the biggest spike in my visitor stats because of everyone else having the same error and googling it. Of course my post wouldn’t help any of those people because I don’t know what the error means or what to do about it, so I wouldn’t hold it up as an example of good content. But it did get me a spike.

Another interesting thing is how many visitors I’ve had because of my posts about having invites to private betas (Twine, Xobni, socialthing, EverNote). Again, not the best content, but visit magnets.

It’s interesting that pretty much nobody has ever clicked on the AdSense ads on my blog. I wonder whether that’s because the ads weren’t appropriate (Google’s fault) or whether my readers all run AdBlock (nobody’s fault) or whether ads appropriate to my posts weren’t interesting (my fault)…

Google Base launched!

Mr.Wizard — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 07:08:00 +0000

Announcement

Today we’re excited to announce Google Base, an extension of our existing content collection efforts like web crawl, Google Sitemaps, Google Print and Google Video. Google Base enables content owners to easily make their information searchable online. Anyone, from large companies to website owners and individuals, can use it to submit their content in the form of data items. We’ll host the items and make them searchable for free. There’s more info here.

long time no blog

Mr.Wizard — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 15:01:00 +0000

Well, no blog in almost a year and a half… hear the disappointment of all the people reading this, just listen to them all…

Aaaaaanyway check out la website de mi amigo, tis teh cool

Mostly reading RSS using google reader. People have criticised it, and it’s not perfect but I’m such a google whore that I stick with it