Well it must be, because until tonight, Google did not bring up any result for the word, yes here it is, Interestream. But not for long of course.
Let’s check how long exactly. When will Google pick up this new word and show it in the search results? Will it take one day, one week?
By the way, I have come up with the word Interestream as a nice concatenation of Interest and Stream, or Stream of Interests, for a new section of my blog that will hold my bookmarks from Del.icio.us and some of the books I have read in the past and maybe some more stuff in the future. A special service to my readers.
Update: well, it took probably less than 6 hours to get the new word up in the Google index.
Technorati tag(s): Interestream, Google
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posted Feb 19, 11:26 pm on Feb 19, 2007 |
category: Google
This weekend Second Life reached the 1.5 million residents mark. Only a month after the 1.000.000 celebrations! There can be no mistake: Second Life is very, very popular! Of course, all media attention helps to get people in and try it all out. But whether they will stay, is another question.
Part of the answer to the latter question, is determined by the user experience. And that has actually very much worsened over the last months. Just tonight, the whole system appeared to be very much under pressure again, with an unbearable “lag”. A lot of people are complaining.
The main question that emerges from all of this is, and it is hanging above the market for quite some time, whether Linden Lab is actually capable of pulling this off? Do they have enough resources in terms of people, money and knowledge to support this very big experiment?
So, before the whole virtual world collapses, I wonder if Google or Yahoo or any other company with the resources could or should come to the rescue?
Anyone? Can Google do this at much lower costs? Could we have a virtual Island with a Gmail account?
What does Second Life actually have to offer for a company like Google? Could it be just an extension of their current business model: placing ads everywhere? So would we get a good SL search function with ads? Maybe relevant ads in places where you walk or sit down? Who knows….as long as Second life is saved!
Related: all my Second Life articles
Technorati tag(s): Second Life
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| posted Nov 20, 11:37 pm on Nov 20, 2006 |
category: Second Life
/ Google
A couple of months ago there was a lot of buzz about the Google Trends beta product and I wanted to present a few results, but I forgot all about it.
Recently I was confronted with it again, so here’s a second chance.
First about the Google Trends product. I will not try to explain what it is, as Google does that perfectly well on the about page:
Google Trends analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. We then show you a graph with the results — our search-volume graph — plotted on a linear scale. Located just beneath our search-volume graph is our news-reference-volume graph. This graph shows you the number of times your topic appeared in Google News stories.
So here are a two comparison charts:
So what does it all mean? Well not much actually: it’s just search activity, but I guess it tells us something about the “fan base” of the artists.
Related: all my Billy Joel articles
Technorati tags: Billy Joel, Billy-Joel, Elton John, Madonna, Google Trends
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| posted Oct 31, 11:45 pm on Oct 31, 2006 |
category: Billy Joel
/ Google
After yesterday’s exciting news on the integration of the Socialtext wiki into Sharepoint, today brought us more news from “wiki country”. The mighty Google has grapped Jotspot from the market, with the main (assumed) purpose to give it a central part in the Google Office strategy.
For more info: it’s all over Techmeme right now.
I wonder whether the Socialtext integration into Sharepoint means something for Microsoft’s aquisition strategy?
Technorati tags: Jotspot, Google, Sharepoint, SharePoint 2007, Socialtext, Microsoft, Enterpriseweb2.0, Enterprise2.0, Web 2.0, Office 2007, Wiki
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| posted Oct 31, 11:26 pm on Oct 31, 2006 |
category: Google
/ Wiki
I had this documentary on Google lined up in my Del.icio.us bookmarks for quite some time now, but this post on the Lifehacker blog made me look at it tonight.
First of all, in contrast to what is mentioned at Lifehacker, this is not an Australian but a Dutch documentary. Also unlike, expressed on Lifehacker, you can really view it legally on the internet via this link, but you will get some Dutch commentary and subtitles, although most of the time you hear English speech.
After having viewed the 51 minutes documentary, I was (intentionally of course) left with a scary feeling of a company about to monopolise the world’s information and important Google employees providing rather naïve answers like “were are computer scientists responding to needs users, we are not the government” (Marissa Mayer). What should we think of this?
Some of my personal highlights:
- Nice shots of Google building, personnel and campus.
- Vince Cerf: “Google does not look for the truth, it tries to provide relevant results”
- Google is working on machine translation through which people using e.g. Dutch language will be able to find information presented in their own language from sources in e.g. Chinese or any other language. And they are using the many European Union translations of official documents to train the computer!
- Ian Brown (of the Open Rights Group), in reaction to the storing of information by Google, is advising not use services like Gmail or Calender, because he does not want to have stored his lifelong record of things he was interested in in the past. Should we really be scared??
- Brown quotes John D. Barrow “censorship is the editing of the collective human conscienceness ” on the potential problem of having a monopolist of information.
- The scanning machine used in the Google Book Search project is a secret.
- Interview with the Italian guy who found a Roman villa in his back yard via Google Earth, including the images.
Related post: Is Google Bad? (review of an other Google documentary on Dutch television)
Update: here is the Australian version of the same documentary, so in English!
Technorati tags: Google, Lifehacker
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| posted Jul 13, 11:10 pm on Jul 13, 2006 |
category: Google
Recently the famous French blogger Loic Le Meur was invited at the important Google Zeitgeist Europe event.
His talk was about citizen journalism and the difference between journalists and bloggers.
Loic did a very nice job presenting by the way. And I love his suit!
Thank you Internet for providing all this interesting content, which only a few years ago we would not have dreamt off being able to see.
Technorati tag: Google, Loic Le Meur
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[1] | posted Jun 22, 10:06 pm on Jun 22, 2006 |
category: Google
/ Social software
Recurring visitors (if I have any?) will have noticed my set of posts: here, here and here, about the Dutch train chair scandal. This is actually becoming a classical case of Google exposure and the power of weblogs in exposing companies that treat customers badly, so badly they start to write about them.
When checking out those nice server logs I recently found that personnel of the Dutch Railway Company, has visited my blog again (see picture). They were already here a few weeks ago.
But what is far more interesting is the way they entered my weblog this time: through Google! They have actually searched on Google using search terms related to the subject (but not looking for a “scandal post” of course, or were they?) and found my post in the top-10 of the search results (like here). A clear example of how favourable weblogs are being treated by Google and as a result how companies can get bad exposure.
Well I must say this “live case study” almost beats reading my favourite book on this subject: Naked Conversations (a must read if you are interested in the power of weblogs).
Technorati tags: Google, Customer experience, Naked-Conversations, Naked Conversations, Blogging, Current Affairs, Commuting, Marketing, Nederland, Netherlands
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| posted Jun 14, 09:51 pm on Jun 14, 2006 |
category: Customer experience
/ Google
Today there was something nice in the e-mailbox: my invitation to Google Analytics. This personal web traffic service was introduced a couple of months ago, but at the time I was too late for the first round of invitations.
Signing up was a breeze and now I am awaiting the first data for this website. Google allows me to track 4 more sites under the current account. Well, I already got three additional domain names…
Technorati tag: Google, Google Analytics
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[2] | posted Apr 5, 10:06 pm on Apr 05, 2006 |
category: Google
/ This blog
I just stumbled upon a 45-minute documentary about Google on Dutch Television. I didn’t see the first quarter, but of what I saw the message was a grieve one: this gigantic company should be closely watched in order to prevent it from doing more harm than good, especially concerning the privacy of the Earth’s inhabitants.
The docu showed private investigators finding more information than the average person might feel well about. It also highlighted the common practise of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) as manipulation that would mislead the Google users for showing them “relevant” information that is actually not so relevant.
Personally, for the latter SEO issue I think that the user is quite capable of judging the relevancy via the source of the information (the URL?). As for the privacy thing, I just do not think you can blame Google for the fact that somebody else decides to publish information.
I think Google has done a great job of “making easily available all the world’s knowledge to anyone and everyone, anytime, anywhere” (T.L. Friedman, The World is Flat, p. 153).
Still, one needs to consider that things are going so fast with Google, and the world of Internet in general, that it might be hard to oversee the consequences of all current actions.
And Google sometimes really does controversial things like the Google Book Search project, for which it is being sued by many publisher firms at this moment, for not respecting copyrights.
By the way, I very much welcome documentaries like this on television. It is so much better than the average Soaps, Shows and the like! Why not give us a whole channel like this?
Technorati tag: Google
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| posted Mar 30, 10:07 pm on Mar 30, 2006 |
category: Google
A while ago, looking into the log files, I saw a search via Google that concerned an automatic translation of this weblog into Spanish.
Another nice Google service, which, in this case, considerably broadens my audience!
Technorati tag: Google
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| posted Mar 12, 11:24 pm on Mar 12, 2006 |
category: This blog
/ Google
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