Featured
Posted on

Google Related Content for Your Website

It seems that couple of weeks ago:

Google has modified it’s robots.txt file to include a line which may signal the beginning of a new search feature — similar content search.  This innocent looking piece of text (“Disallow: /relcontent”) appears related to “Disallow: /relpage/” which has existed in the file for a very long time.

Zdnet Blog also wrote at that time:

It’s unclear how this speculated feature could differ from the existing “similar pages” functionality –  I thought using “related:” was designed to find similar content already.

Well after all it seems that things started to get clear. It seems that all is about some snippets to get inserted and syndicated by users in their webpages that look like this one:

Google Related Content
The feature seems to be still in tests, but is probably yet to come out soon.

Tags: , , ,

Featured
Posted on

Romanian Blogging is Going Mainstream

Besides some long discussed and not that good articles in which romanian mainstream media talked about the growing blogosphere there are some good things happening lately.

hot news bloggingI’ll start with the last that I personally noticed: Hotnews.ro, my favorite news source, started blogging at blog.hotnews.ro. Excellent news and I hope the blog will be at least as good as the site itself. This blogging initiative is basically following the, probably better known, one of Evenimentul Zilei. And more than that there is another blogging attempt: Blogul lui Dinescu, which I was actually expected for a while now. It is a beginning and I’m still looking for some of the big names to jump in.

RoBlogFest 2005More than that, Dragos is hosting the RoBlogFest 2005 2006 . Check it out and go find out more about romanian blogs, read, make up your mind and vote, as you can do it until next thursday, March 9th.

Tags:

Featured
Posted on

Google’s Marketing Principles

Since I’m keep on blogging about Google lately and since it seems that this fact is part of their marketing strategy here is an intersting list of Google’s main marketing principles:
Google Marketing Principles

  • Results must be trackable.
  • Promote trial.
  • Let others speak for you.
  • Data. Not Hype.
  • You’re smart. And your time matters.
  • We’re serious. Except while we’re not.
  • Big ideas move us.

Via

Tags: , ,

Featured
Posted on

More on Google Strategy

google on time magazine coverThe Google guys made it to the cover of Time magazine which runs an inside look at how success has changed Larry and Sergey’s dream machine:

Is there a grand strategy for Google? It seems as if you’re diving into almost everything.

SCHMIDT: We try very hard to look like we’re out of control. But in fact the company is very measured. And that’s part of our secret.

PAGE: We don’t generally talk about our strategy … because it’s strategic. I would rather have people think we’re confused than let our competitors know what we’re going to do. That’s an easy trade-off.

Tags: , , , , ,

Featured
Posted on

Danish Cartoons (part 2)

Even if I had the feeling from the very beginning that the whole wave of protests in the arab world was orchestrated I didn’t have any solid proof on this. Meanwhile, this post just gets me closer to this belief:

Egyptian newspaper, Al Fager (as pronounced in Egyptian Arabic) has published the controversial Danish Mohammed Cartoons five month ago on Oct 17, 2005. Any ideas why it might have taken the Muslim community so long to react?

See scans of the egyptian newspaper here.
Tags:

Featured
Posted on

Romanian Highways

From the category “I live in a country where you can never get bored” here is one thing I think I knew, but never actually saw the numbers:

The time span between the political decision and the inauguration of one kilometer of highway is 58 (yeah fifty eight) months, which means 4 years and 10 months. That because of some time consuming procedures. That means 50 cm of highway daily.

For the romanian language readers, more about it here.

Featured
Posted on

REbranding (sort of)

In order to help online organizations bridge the gap between themselves and their markets, Deep/Young Anodyne Laboratories was commissioned to REbrand several web sites. The first step in this campaign was to add a welcome page (also known as a “splash” page) to each site. Each splash page attempts to more honestly represent the true nature of the site.

Here are some examples:

reamazon

or this:

Tags: ,

Featured
Posted on

Google Desktop and Gmail Updates

First of all today Google released the beta version of its Google Desktop 3.0. Besides some new important features like dragging panels out of the sidebar and place them anywhere you want on the desktop or sending content from your sidebar to others, probably the most important new one is the Search across computers one.

Important from the utility point of view as well as the privacy issues debate it will launch. That because:

In order to share your indexed files between your computers, we first copy this content to Google Desktop servers located at Google. This is necessary, for example, if one of your computers is turned off or otherwise offline when new or updated items are indexed on another of your machines. We store this data temporarily on Google Desktop servers and automatically delete older flies, and your data is never accessible by anyone doing a Google search.

Basically Google Desktop gathers all manner of data on one’s computer and makes it available via another, if the user chooses to store it on Google’s servers.

More about it here or here.

More than that Google added lately new features to its free mail service, in a try to push its IM client to mainstream. As such Gtalk chats are now integrated (along with the chat hsitory) in the webmail client. In terms of gmail too, it seems that is more than that:

Their next big move will likely be GMail for domains — a powerful way for anybody who owns a domain to utilize GMail as a mail server, not just a client.

More here.