Sunday, October 26, 2008

Your Quotes, For The Last Five Years, On Google News!


If you thought the feeds that we get too much and there should be a better way to check out the news, I am with you. I have three separate news feeds that, I use to manage daily doze of various news. Still they fill up fast, 1000-2000 articles each. But until I have a better way to parse these, I have to deal with it.
Main while Google News team, has done something marvelous with the "Quotes" system. I have used the thirty day span of quotes by various people many a time. But now I am able to do that for a span of five years!
Just imagine indulging yourself in analyzing quotes by various people over last five years. I can forget about parsing my news as I will be spending a quite a bit time, with these quotes!
Just check out the quotes by Presidential Candidates, Obama and McCain.
But if you not into politics, there are many other people who uttered good and bad stuff, that might interest you.
To access these new features, first search for a person's name on Google News. If Google News has a recent quote, it will be shown above the search results, and if there are more quotes, you can expand on it!, which is again sortable depending on date or relevance. Go get quoted!
But the custom edition was much more enjoyable.
Google News Blog: Words matter

Sunday, September 28, 2008

Google Toolbar 5 Ready If You Got Firefox

Sneaking behind Google Toolbar for Firefox users, Google updated the Google Toolbar for IE with new features a few months back. (What? how could that be?) Yes a few others also thought so and promptly emailed the toolbar team asking when those new feature will be available to Firefox users.
The answer and the new toolbar is ready. You can download the Google Toobar 5 in 29 languages and it is the the first Toolbar launched out of our St. Petersburg, Russia office. So head over to Google toolbar for Firefox site get yours.
The Autofill stands out as you can keep your profiles ready to be filled on your computer and those pesky sign up forms could be filled with just a one click.
Of course what is the toolbar without Google gadgets? you can add any gadget from the Google Gadget Gallery.
So lastly here is a video, that shows the virtues of Google toolbar 5 for Firefox.




Official Google Blog: Google Toolbar 5 now available in Firefox

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Google Reader Brings Friends Everywhere, And Gets Friendlier.

Google Reader Blog posted about some improvements to the Google reader. First of all it the sharing feature that was only available to US friends, now expands to the rest of the world. The other feature is that there is a new way to sort your feeds, if you do not like to drag and drop to arrange them, alphabetically.

Official Google Reader Blog: Friends Everywhere, and other Friendly Features

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Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Sergey Brin goes blogging.

Sergey Brin goes blogging. With the first post about Parkinson's disease, shows that it is truly a personal blog. He also tells us what Google got to do with Googol.

Thursday, September 18, 2008

BOTW To Buy DMOZ! (End Of Free Reviews?)

According to a post on Shoemoney, BOTW, Best Of The Web is on it's way to acquire DMOZ. DMOZ had so far maintained a premier position on the web directories due to several reasons. The strict control of listing, and the association of companies like Google that relied on the directory maintained by AOL to create it's own Google Directory.
According to the article, BOTW has already hired those top editors away from the DMOZ and by any means doing much better than DMOZ already.
In the age of Google looking down on web directories, (Page rank drops etc) DMOZ (and BOTW) maintain a heafty ranks. But there is a big difference between DMOZ and BOTW. DMOZ is free and wether your site get included might boil down to a boil in the pants of those volonteer editors. I have managed to get some of my sites included but sometimes I wonder if it is worth it.
BOTW on the other hand charges a $249.99 review fee which is a prerequisite. BOTW also makes the point that their review for inclusion is not a guarantee of inclusion in their directory.
But I doubt that many people get excluded but I have not tried nor do I know the inner working of BOTW. But Google thinks they are good enough to give them a high PageRank.

I have no idea nor the Shoemoney, how the drama may unfold. But it might turn pages, web pages pretty soon. May be it is time we down loaded a copy of the directory. A few years ago we started parsing the directory for one of our search engines but I have not visited the DMOZ recently. Hope BOTW do good to DMOZ.

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Google Gadgets For Your Blogger Blogs!

Fresh out of Blogger's own testing ground, Google Gadgets have now been enabled for all layouts blogs. This new interface allows for the integration of iGoogle Gadgets directly into your sidebar, with an array of customization options for easy tweaking. Also built into Gadgets is our robust Gadget Directory, which lets you browse through thousands of cool gadgets and add them to your blog with a simple click of a button.
Blogger Buzz: Spice Up Your Blog with Google Gadgets!

Friday, June 06, 2008

Super Charged Blog List, RSS Powered

This example at work on the sidebar on the left side, scroll down to see.
Blogger has released a new page element for Layouts blogs: Blog List. If you were using Link List before to create a list of your own or friends blogs, Blog List is the link list with a woomph!. Instead of the static links, now you can have dynamic list that uses blogs’ RSS and Atom feeds to show update times, post titles, and snippets.

Here’s a quick summary, that I took from Blogger Buzz, of the features that a Blog List gives you:
  • Link to blogs, web pages, and feeds from your blog’s sidebar, with an optional favicon
  • For pages with RSS and Atom feeds, Blog List can show last updated time, post title, and a snippet of the latest post
  • Sort links alphabetically or by last update time
  • Show all links, or hide some behind a “show all” link
  • Import subscriptions from Google Reader
  • Blog List links are visible to search engine crawlers, so your blog’s PageRank and reputation flow to those you link to
Read more here and watch a video.

Blogger Buzz: Show off your favorite blogs with a Blog List

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Friday, May 30, 2008

Bloglines VS Google Reader, Show Me The TOPDOG





I came across a post by Heather Hopkins of Hitwise about how Blogline doing it's deeds against Google Reader. I use both bloglines and Google Reader and so does my collegues. So who is the top dog? Who does the best fetching? (TOPDOG is the best hotdog around where I live and where we get our midnight snacks, usually two dogs! Calabrese and Hot Link, eaten on the street, leaning against the car! So this dog fetches me, time to time)

According the analysis done by the lady and her firm Hitwise, Bloglines is still running in the front but Google Reader is steadily closing in.

I am more of a numbers guy than a word guy, so I am going to grab some graphs and let you go and digest the words of Heather later. The graph above is how they stood in August of last year and the one below is how they are doing now. Both are heavy climbers and Google Reader seem to be doing some catch up. There are other players as well but these two dominate the scene now. (until Feedotopia shakes the ground!)

But the gem of the analysis was the graph below!. These are the downstream visits to publishers from both Bloglines and Google reader. This makes me want to have Google Reader be my traffic cop. Because except shopping, Photography and personal blogs, Google Reader seem to be doing wonders. I think Photo attributes to the new Flickr feed module in Bloglines Beta. I use the feature a lot and I like it. Further more if you are a Shopping or Retail site, it is better to have Bloglines behind you!.Following is Heather's view of it;
  • The top downstream category for both feed readers was News and Media. However, Google Reader sent 61% more visits to News and Media websites than Bloglines.
  • Bloglines sent almost as much traffic to Blogs and Personal Websites as to News and Media (9.98% and 9.95% respectively). By contrast, Google Reader sent more than twice as much traffic to News and Media websites. This indicates that Google Reader users are more inclined toward mainstream media - using the reader as a front page of a newspaper - while Bloglines seems to be used more for following blogs.
  • Bloglines users are also more inclined toward Photography websites, while Google Reader users are more inclined to visit Television websites.
  • And the last difference I'll highlight is that Bloglines users are 24% more likely to continue on to a retail (Shopping & Classifieds) website.
You can see more data and Heathers analysis at her Blog, here is the post.
Bloglines Beta.
Google Reader
TOPDOG


Sunday, May 18, 2008

RNews 0.91 With a bunch of new features, bug fixes, and performance improvements.


Rnews has released a new version, 0.91, at the beginning of this month. I have tested RNews in many test settings but yet to deploy in a production environment. Perhaps this new release will convince me to do so. I have just downloaded and soon will replace one of my test setups of old version.

This release has a raft of new features, bug fixes, and performance improvements. It's definitely the best Rnews, yet. Thanks to everyone who contributed ideas and bug reports!

  • Feeds are scored using personalized statistics, one- and two-column block views are more flexible, keyword search is supported, heuristics try to fix broken feeds, and feeds may be added using bookmarklets or a Firefox extension.
  • New user options were added for keeping stats, expanding articles in single-feed view, and opening links in a new window.
  • Rnews received a styling upgrade, with rollover icons and more AJAX interaction.
  • IP-locked cookies are now optional (though recommended).
  • Many bug fixes, in caching, IE presentation, redirects, and elsewhere.

Database structure has changed, but there is now an automatic upgrade process (from 0.8x only). See the instructions on the download page.

Update: minor bug in 0.90 is fixed in 0.91, which is drop-in compatible.

Monday, May 12, 2008

Shorten your Net Time With RSS Subscriptions.

I always use my Google reader to go through my favorite blogs. I also have a bloglines account setup for blogs that I read infrequently, like once or twice a week. You take it for granted, just like email, I read it a few times a day. But you assume everyone knows about it. But today I read an article by The Net Fool, (A young guy but by reading his posts you never guess. You have to visit his about page and I think you will say great!)
But the reason for this writing is that the net fool is out to tell teach others about making money online and his lesson on RSS, simple but very informative. He explains virtues of RSS feeds as we do here but never wrote actually how to use it. So without my rumblings, here is the article;Five Reasons Why Subscribing to RSS Feeds Is Worth Your While.

Friday, May 02, 2008

VisualRank, A Pagerank For Your Logos, Photos Or Any Image On The Internet!

Google has unveiled a new tools and plans to rank images on the internet better. Today most image search engines rank images based on text description of the image. But this might not bring out the best image! The researchers have sighted two searches on Google image search for "Eiffel Tower" and "McDonalds", as examples. The Eiffel images were relevant but McDonalds were not exactly what you want if you were looking for "McDonalds"
Image search has always fascinated me, from large database pattern matching, (You draw a doodle of the image you are searching for with your mouse on a slate) to face recognizing for security purposes. Both the subjects are bordering each other as well as my latest fascination with medical imaging with pattern matching. But the Google researchers may look at it from another angle.
So how does this work?
The algorithm, (which is also presented in very technical and theoretical paper, which is very interesting if your field is image processing.) is to collect a bunch of images based on the search and then analyze the results to select best possible image among them.
I will be reading both the papers that were presented by Official Google Blog article, Visualrank,
Pagerank for product image search and YouTube datamining (which I have read before).
The see the Google blog, click on the link below.

Official Google Research Blog: VisualRank

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Feedburner Advances and AdSense in Your Feeds!

Within next few weeks selected publishers at www.feedburner.com, will have the opportunity to sign in using their Google Account. Feedburner became apart of the Google a while ago.

If you are among the selected few and decide to migrate the accounts, all of your settings, feeds will be managed through your new or existing Google account. Basically this is a single sign on that I have with Google, I sign in once and all my services like blogger, Google Docs, Google Analytics, AdSense are auto signed in. So if I am one I will be able to do the same with Feedburner as well!.

Thalking about AdSense, there will also be a tighter integration with AdSense. This should be good news for feed advertisers, and whom those plan to be. Google AdSense in your feeds! Wow.

There are few other changes as well, following is directly from the Feedburner blog;

As part of this Google Account migration, we will need to make a few process changes for our API partners. Effective immediately, the FeedBurner Management API will only be available for existing FeedBurner partners and those Google partners who currently have access to other Google AdSense APIs. The Awareness API will continue to work exactly as it did before, noting that once you migrate to a Google account, you will have to use your Google account credentials IF you use the authenticated API.

If, going forward, you do not want to sign in with a Google account, you can always take your feeds with you by redirecting your subscribers back to your source. Migration will ultimately be here for everybody, including all you MyBrand folks who are master of your domain.

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Friday, April 18, 2008

AideRSS To Help You Filter Your Daily Doze Of RSS Feeds!

I came across AideRSS while ago but did not have time pen something about it. But now it is a must as it is everywhere I manage read my feeds. So instead of writing I have borrowed from other peoples writing! ;).

But I have a question, What if you are a publisher? your pagerank goes higher if people read your posts and propagate them and you get you postrank high. But people don't read your articles because of your post rank is low! Oxymoron RSS!

But no worry you can fix it, just get two of your friends to dig your article and the postrank will jump!

"Users of the NewsGator Online Reader are going to find a new, nifty feature in their readers today: AideRSS PostRank filtering! Similar to the AideRSS GoogleReader Extension for GoogleReader, this functionality will enable NewsGator users to easily sort posts based on social engagement, and quickly find and read what matters."

If you do not know what AideRSS is;

There are only 24 hours in a day and a near infinite number of blogs to follow. You don’t attempt to read the entire newswire every day, and we didn’t think you should be doing the same for every blog. We set out to create an aide, like the newspaper editor, to help you find and read what matters.

AideRSS is an intelligent assistant, which continuously monitors RSS feeds, finds the good stuff, creates a PostRank™, and delivers it to you. We do the grunt work of collecting information on every post, allowing you to focus on your agenda and stay on top of the news stream.


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Thursday, April 17, 2008

New Alexa Ranking Is Live!

Alexa has changed it's ranking algorithm and a new and less Alexa toolbar dependent method is up and running. This would change the Alexa Ranking for some. Now the ranking data come from multiple sources that will enhance the ranking. But they are not telling us what those sources are! Perhaps to deter those who misuse the ranking or may be something that they forgot to announce.
Here are some Q&A from Alexa;
My site's ranking has changed. Was it wrong before?

Your ranking wasn't wrong before, but it was different. Alexa toolbar users' interests and surfing habits could differ from those of the general population in a number of ways, and we described some of those possible differences on our website. While the vast majority of sites' rankings were unaffected by such differences, we've worked hard on our new ranking system to adjust for situations in which they could matter.

The new rankings should better reflect the interests and surfing habits of the broader population of Web users.

Why are the long range graphs gone? I can only get 9 months of historical data.

We are recalculating historic traffic data and will continue to add it over the coming weeks. We apologize for the inconvenience, but should have several years of data back on line shortly.

Will you change the rankings again?

We are constantly working to ensure that we provide the most useful data that we can. We will continue to fine tune our algorithms but don't foresee any additional big changes. If you think something is amiss please let us know.

I liked the old rankings better. Are they still available somewhere?

We liked the old rankings as well. However, we developed the new system in response to the huge number of requests we got from users like you, and now that it's done we like it even better. We hope you will too.
We think that having more than one ranking system at a time would be confusing, so we have removed the old rankings.

Do you want to know what I think about this?

Definitely. We've been collecting suggestions and ideas for months now, and would love to hear more. If you have thoughts on what we've done so far, or ideas on what we should do next, please share them with us.

You can give your Feedback to Alexa here
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Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Bloglines Beta Brings A Slew Of New Features, Search, Flickr View and Improved Add Page

Bloglines have made a bunch of nice changes to Bloglines beta. I have already signed up and enjoying it. Below are some facts from bloglines News. But there are more like Bloglines Top 1000, which I liked very much. The movers and shakers are visible together with moves and shakes (graphs).
I really dig the bloglines beta.
Blog search is finally in Beta, and we've incorporated some popular Ask 3D features. For example, related searches are displayed in the right-hand column next to results. All of classic's features are still there, but with newer styling.

Flickr View Selecting a Flickr feed and viewing it in quick view now uses the Flickr API to show images at their maximum resolution.
Add Page Beta's old add page was spartan, to say the least. The new Add page has package tracking, weather feeds, and a new feature: Packs. You can now add popular categories of feeds with a single mouse click.
You can sign up here!
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Sunday, April 06, 2008

Self-Service Feed Transfer capability with Feedburner .

If you are a Feedburner user, you may have noticed the new feature that burning people have added to your My Feeds control panel, (see above picture, just above Monetize.), called Transfer Feed. According to Feedburner, this has been live for weeks.

What is it good for?

Nowadays more and more people build blogs, websites, portal pages. They also get wise and burn feeds to increase awareness of the pages and to promote the sites in this large ocean of publishing. As usual there will be changes in content ownership and control lead to the desire to move a FeedBurner feed from one account to another. This used to be a hassle to the owner of the feed and the Feedburner itself. Before this feature, if someone who wanted to transfer a feed to another account used to a submit a request to Feedburner, and then one of the burning people would verify the accounts and then complete the actual feed transfer. Reliable, but time-consuming and tedious for all parties involved.

So no more sweating over transfers, you can now transfer it to anyone you like simply by using the Transfer Feed… link. (Please note that only feed owners may initiate transfers from their own accounts to others. Additional how-to info about Feed Transfer is in our Help Center topic.)

feedburner blog

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Friday, March 28, 2008

RSS For Educators, A New Book On RSS Technology.

A powerful technology, but a simple concept, RSS (“Really Simple Syndication”) makes it possible to easily access frequently updated content on the Internet. RSS allows you to “subscribe” to content and have updates automatically delivered to your computer. Many Web 2.0 tools, including blogs, podcasts, and wikis, have been made even more useful with the advent of RSS technology.

Let expert John Hendron show you how to use a news aggregator to harness the power of RSS for a variety of purposes, including classroom projects, professional development, and keeping students and parents informed. Learn how to use free and inexpensive software such as Garage Band and Audacity to manipulate audio files and create podcasts. Explore the pros and cons of various blogging platforms. Have your students blog, and use RSS to deliver their assignments to you automatically. With RSS and the Read/Write Web, the possibilities are endless.

A glossary and an extensive list of online resources round out this essential guide to the power of Web syndication.

Features

* A complete introduction to RSS technology
* How to harness the power of RSS for educational purposes
* The pros and cons of low-cost and free Web 2.0 software

"RSS for Educators" is available online for $20.95 for ISTE members and $29.95 for nonmembers. More information about the book, including the table of contents and a free, downloadable excerpt, is available at http://www.iste.org/bookstore. The book is appropriate for grade PK-12
teachers, pre-service teachers, technology coordinators, curriculum developers and teacher educators.
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LegalFish Newsroom Bring Legal (as in Law) Feeds To You.

Chicago, IL, March 27, 2008 The latest legal news from various sites is now available at your fingertips with a simple click to the LegalFish Newsroom.

To avoid the hassle of unnecessary searching, typing, and opening of new browsers to obtain information, the LegalFish Newsroom uses RSS feeds which enables consumers and attorneys to access the latest legal news on one page from the top three legal sites: Law.com, LexisNexis, and CNN Law.

RSS feeds aggregate updated content and dynamically feeds it in real time to a website. The LegalFish Newsroom, in turn, receives these dynamic updates on the day’s top legal headlines with links directly to the source article. “Rather than time-consuming and relentless searching, RSS feeds allow these legal news sites to work for you by constantly keeping the consumer filled in,” said Joshua Fuhrmark, Managing Director of LegalFish. He further commented on the efficiency of the LegalFish Newsroom application by noting its benefits to readers. “You don’t have to flip channels, and consumers stay informed in a timely and relevant manner on the latest legal news and trends,” Fuhrmark said.

Mr. Fuhrmark hopes that readers bookmark the LegalFish Newsroom page. He believes that having easy access to legal news educates and benefits those consumers who are looking to find a qualified attorney or law firm to help them best address their unique legal issues. Within the industry of Attorney-Client Matching (ACM), LegalFish is the first to employ RSS feeds.

To visit the LegalFish Newsroom, go to http://www.legalfish.com/newsroom/index.php.
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Tuesday, March 04, 2008

myFeedz, A Social Newspaper

I have been using the myFeedz for a while now. One might think it is a online RSS reader at first glance. But the site says it is not. According to myFeedz, it finds what's important from the information overload that we try to navigate everyday and shows you what you need to read. How does it know what I read? It learns from what you like and helps you keep up with your interests.
myFeedz also finds the most linked to and referenced news and then present it to you based on what you usually read at the on line news paper.
But to learn what myFeedz is really like you need to visit it. The first thing that you will notice is the smooth interface by Adobe Labs.
and for startes, you can start with the FAQ and you may find answers to questions like;
  • What is a feed?
  • How are feeds used in myFeedz?
  • What is a tag?
  • What is a tagcloud?
  • How are tags used in myFeedz?
  • How does rating work?
  • Why am I not getting any fresh articles for my tags?
  • Can I submit my favorite sites?
  • How do I remove irrelevant articles?
etc. So enjoy your news paper, myFeedz.

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Friday, February 08, 2008

New Newsgator Products

NewsGator has released the NetNewsWire 3.1, FeedDemon 2.6, and NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile 2.0. At the same time public beta of NewsGator Inbox 3.0 also was started. The award-winning products for PC (FeedDemon), Mac (NetNewsWire), and mobile (NewsGator Go!) deliver a best-of-breed RSS reading experience that synchronizes through NewsGator’s online platform. All of the new product versions deliver a better user experience with the inclusion of significant performance, usability, and relevance enhancements.

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Thursday, January 17, 2008

Blogger The Trip Through 2007 and The Roundup

Yes I have been with Blogger with for more than three years and always wondered why didn't I start before? So if you have slightest inclination, start now.
Yes the year 2007 passed without noticing that Blogger beta became The Blogger and I was one of the first to try the Beta Blogger. I am not much of a tweaker (I am not much of a writer either) so I just used regular templates and learned bit by bit how to add stuff. But with the new layout system, it is a breeze!
Yes, I have been breezing through more than 3000 posts in various blogs that I command. I thank Google and the Blogger team for the service they provided and only one time I had to contact the support was to get my site checked to verify that it is not a spam site!
The Blogger Buzz has an article about what they went through during the 2007. I think you will enjoy! I did.
Blogger Buzz: 2007 Roundup
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Indexing Trouble At Technorati Is Being Fixed

According to Technorati blog, they are in the midst of repairing most of the effected data due to some indexing troubles they had this past week.
Technorati's spiders were shutdown for several hours last week due to this reason while the Technorati team was investigating and fixing the problem. Some newly created weblogs had their data scrambled.
No blogs that existed in our system before Dec. 18th were impacted at all.
They expected to fix everything during the weekend but it proved to be not the case due to vast amount of data that Technorati handles. Since then further work on the problem is working andd they are recovering now and the backlog of data processing is getting worked through.
So if your blog is not showing correct data or if your blog is not there at all, when you visit;
http://technorati.com/blogs/YOUR_BLOG_URL
you can inform Technorati at the support request page. A selection for 'The January 8th System Outage' will be available this month to specially aid the abnormal troubles with this case if there are any!
Information is from Ian Kallen's Dog Ate Your Blog post.


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Tuesday, January 08, 2008

Re-learning the Web at its principles

I was hunting for information on Feed Technology when I came across this gem of a n article. Although I do not agrre with all it has to say, I enjoyed reading it, in fact, I changed some of my directions, indirectly, based on the information and links provided in the article.
So if you also want learn something about about Content Negotation and URI, information spaces and so on dilemmas, in the Semantic Web areas, head over to Casual Info Ina Bottle.
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Technorati Authority Bug Fixed, But My Rank Is Still Low ;)

Technorati Fixes Authority Bug. The bug gave some sites with sub domains an inflated authority, according to Dorion Carroll at Technorati. (I went there to find out about why pings are not registering and article posts are all haphazard. Some of my blogs show old posts as latest. I will check support later.)
The bug fix to the Technorati Authority should not affect many of us who are in the lower rungs of the ladder. According to the same post, mostly affected were top 100 or weblogs and sites. I wish Technorati gave me some of those fallen off authority rankings! ;). Well may be I have to work on it.


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Monday, January 07, 2008

Wikia Search Goes Live today

Search Wikia, the widely awaited search engine from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, is slated to make its official debut on Monday, with the bet that an open-source, community-driven effort can disrupt and reshape this Google-dominated market.
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