pelago

More insight into the inner workings of the Google empire.

I saw this in Wired this month:

Egg & Muffin Toaster

Product Demo

We’ll prolly add one to the office here shortly – Michael

Online advertising is still going off. I have absolutely no problem with paid searches and online advertising in general. I do however, have issues with Rich Media Ads that take over your browser. These forced ads are annoying and just get in the way of why you are at a site in the first place. If you want to be annoyed, go to espn.com and try to view MLB scores. Unless things have changed, you’ll get a hefty ad that blocks a healthy portion of the navigation. This is a perfect example of advertising gone too far.

>> Michael

This Yahoo news article summarizes a Reuters report on US Internet Ad revenue…. $3 billion in Q2 this year:

Web 2.0 deals with the ongoing evolution of Web 1.0 (aka the Internet as we know it). It’s a statement on the condition of things and where they are evolving to.

Digital Web Magazine has a good summary of Web 2.0 and how it impacts web designers. Check it out here.

Internet 2.0 is a departure from the current Web as we know it. Internet 2.0 is a consortium of universities with some government and non profit involvement. It has an all fiber backbone with extremely high bandwidth throughputs and applications are built around experimental protocols. Here is the official Internet 2.0 site.

-Michael

Here’s how the creator of the application marumushi describes it:

“Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap’s objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.”

>> Michael

“NEW YORK (CNN/Money) The first anniversary of Google’s initial public offering is rapidly approaching.

And to commemorate this occasion, it seems safe to paraphrase Frank Sinatra: For Google, it was a very good year.

Shares went public at $85 on Aug. 19, 2004 and now are trading at about $285. Sales are expected to increase by nearly 90 percent this year and profits are expected to more than double. ”

>> Any predictions on where Google’s stock will be at the end of the year? The low and hi opinions in our office say $135 on the low end, while another boldly predicts $317.

- Michael

“Ever look at a product on a website and wonder if you could find it cheaper elsewhere? This script adds links & prices from other sites (Amazon, Buy, BN, Powell, Half) to the current book site you are at!”

Fears of computer viruses and other invasive software have caused a profound shift in how people use the Internet, including which Web sites they visit and e-mails they open, according to a study released Wednesday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

>> The other day a client of ours contacted us and was asking why a random link to an insurance site was showing up on some of the pages of their site where they have Content Management tools. It turns out that one of their content contributors had spyware installed and it was programmed to look for certain keywords and change them to links…so as the employee was publishing content, the spyware was changing the input field.

Any other horror stories out there? Any thoughts on how to combat this?

- John

Here’s a convenient free tool that allows you to mask a very long URL with a new short one. Extremely helpful when sharing with other people through phone or email.

For example, a google map of our office is this: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=810+east+montecito+street+93103&spn=0.039439,0.056391&t=k&hl=en

But when you tinyURL it, it comes out to: http://tinyurl.com/8yy4m

Check out TinyURL.com

Google continues to offer innovative niche search tools. According to Google, scholar.google.com:

“enables searching for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts, and technical reports from all broad areas of research.”