Category Archives: Google and Gmail

Google tests RSS adverts

Google is testing ads in RSS.

I was reluctant at first to switch geekrant.org to providing full RSS feeds (entire posts, not just extracts), as it would reduce the already-paltry revenue from Adsense. But really, any revenue from Adsense is a bonus in this game, it’s not the end game unless you’re racking up a gazillion hits a day. The main point is to get your blogs read.

This however has the potential of re-gaining some of that advert revenue, even if readers are getting to you via an RSS aggregator. Question is, would people find it too annoying to find adverts mid-feed? If I personally found it too annoying, could I bring myself to include ads in my feeds?

Here we get about 4 times as many hits on the RSS feed as on the home page. But of course we have no idea how many people read that RSS feed, since it goes to places like Newsgator which might get it seen by hundreds of people.

It’ll be something to watch, anyway.

PS. Friday 8am. Dave Winer on RSS ads: “If we wanted to, as an industry, reject the idea, we could, by asking the people who create the software to add a feature that strips out all ads.”

What next? MyGoogle?

Google has announced search history, and unlike your browser’s field history, it’s attached to your Google account, so it’ll follow you around between computers.

So, let’s see, we’ve got email via Gmail, news headlines from Google News (including personalised news alerts), discussions in Google Groups and now your own search history. How long before a fully-fledged portal brings them all together onto one page? They could call it MyGoogle. (Whoops, they’ve already registered it…)

Dave Winer and Google News

Dave Winer applied to get Scripting News onto Google News, and got rejected.

Apparently they did so on the basis that it’s just him that writes it. I suspect the real reason is that his site is not a news site, at least not in the conventional sense. It’s mostly just pointing to stuff elsewhere on the web, rarely with any comment or analysis. It’s certainly valuable, and maybe the media world will change over time, but for now a one-liner with a hyperlink is not a news service.

Firefox and application internationalism

Having installed the UK-spelling version of Firefox, it almost looks unnatural to see dialog(ue) boxes about “colours”. And I think it’s the downloads dialog that refers to saving to “disc”.

It’s a consequence of most IT-related innovation coming out of the USA that we’ve become used to US spelling dominating the world of computers. From Windows 95’s “Network Neighborhood” (yes, even when installing Windows with supposedly Australian English) to “floppy disks”, “dialog boxes” and of course IE’s “favorites”… You just learn to live with words spelt (spelled) just a little differently.

Admittedly it starts to get a little grating when spellcheckers claim “English” is the same as “US English” and otherwise usable applications keep showing the dates the wrong way around, or insist on two character states and five digit postcodes. Not to mention web sites that have a country dropdown list and put USA at the top (rather than, say, putting it in alphabetical order and defaulting to it).

And don’t get me started on programs that default to Letter sized paper instead of A4.

Ahem.

Anyway, one catch with having dispensed with Firefox’s US spelling is ending up on Google UK when searching. Fortunately the “Add Engines” feature of the search box is pretty easy to use. Search for your preferred engine eg Google Australia for me, and click to install it. Easy.

Removing the old Google UK option may be a little trickier, but it doesn’t much matter, since once you use the AU one, it sticks as the default.

Where art thou Google X?

Google’s new beta Google X Mac OS-X-themed page was taken off air only about a day after appearing. Given how aggressive Apple (and Google) have been at pursuing imitators, maybe they thought better of copying the OS-X Dock.

Who knows, maybe Google were scared of Apple, who certainly don’t hesitate to call in the lawyers when they think they’ve been wronged.

Scoble’s found some mirrors so you can see Google X for yourself.

Briefs

The weird bounces I was getting a while back are apparently due to a bug in QMail. They’re also causing some mails to be sent multiple times from webmail. Triffic. But I’ve switched webmails from SquirrelMail to IMP, and that seems to help. I don’t like IMP’s “This mail was sent by IMP” footer, but I do like its features, especially the timezone setting, which was never satisfactory in SquirrelMail.

A big batch of Microsoft patches are out. Through as someone at work pointed out, they shouldn’t be due to buffer overflows, ‘cos MS claimed years ago that they’d eliminated them in Windows XP. (Thanks Ian)

Mr 99Zeroes has apparently been sacked from Google. As Scoble remarks, the rule for blogging about work really needs to be: Don’t piss off your boss. The alternative is simply not to blog about work.

C/Net’s new online news/RSS reader/aggregator: NewsBurst. (via Steve Rubel who features on the latest G’day World podcast)

An Englishman was arrested after he used the text-only browser Lynx to donate money to a tsunami fundraiser. Apparently British Telecom technicians looking through the web site logs thought it was a hacking attempt.

Life at Google

A guy called Mark Jen is blogging about his life at Google. A couple of his early posts included a bit too much financial info, and were pulled, but are quoted here. Didn’t look that compelling to me, but then, I’m not a stockbroker.

Unlike the official Google blog, he gets a little critical of the company at times, such as taking a swipe at employee benefits.

then look at all these other fringe “benefits”: on-site doctor, on-site dentist, on-site car washes… the list goes on and on with one similarity: every “benefit” is on-site so you never leave work. i’m not going to say this isn’t convenient for us employees, but between all these devices designed to make us stay at work, they might as well just have dorms on campus that all employees are required to live in.

One to watch.

The Google blog has announced they’re starting to index TV, by the way.