Lets Just Do This All At Once
I am so sick of the news on this blog being, on average, a week old. Its my fault. I let these tabs build and build and build, and I don’t have time to write because I’m too busy amassing tabs, and when I finally do write something, it’s a week old. Dammit! I am so not doing this anymore. I hate missing news, but it is beyond stupid to have late and irellevant news because you don’t want to miss anything.
And because of that, here’s everything I’ve got, leading up to just about today:
Google announced the 2007 Summer of Code. Wordpress is part of it, among others.
As part of the 50th anniversary of Gumby, all 200 episodes of Gumby are now on YouTube, absolutely free. Oh boy!
Scott Clark has a Google Doodle for Gumby he thinks Google should have used.
Google acquired video game advertising company AdScape, which everyone knew was coming. They are competing with Microsoft’s acquisition, Massive, which is far more massive and successful. Google will likely use an automated system and have the same success they had with dMarc, which is to say, none at all.
Google also acquired Gapminder, a data visualization firm that makes Trendalyzer. Looks like they are buying new features for Analytics.
Gary has the search engine logos for St. Patrick’s Day, mostly just Google’s. Barry has Yahoo’s and Search Engine Roundtable’s.
Google has added a feature for the Personalized Homepage that lets you customize the top portion of it with some cool themes. The regular Google.com homepage remains the same, but the Personalized one can now have some cool stylings.
Valleywag has a screenshot gallery of the Google homepage over the years.
There’s an easter egg in there. In most of the themes, just visit the page at 3:14 am (get it? Pi time!) and you’ll see something funny happen. Screenshots at Google System.
Blogspot.com has more spam, by far, than any other domain on the internet. I’m shocked!
Google AdSense is doing Pay-Per-Action ads, that pay out when the user clicking the ad actually does something, like buy something or fill out a form. The ads come with a rotating product format, and even embeddable text links, so you can write about a product and link to it as an ad, just like an Amazon affiliate link.
Arrington’s right when he says Google has crossed a line here. We’ll have to see if they’ve crossed the wrong line. Hopefully, unlike the Google referral ads, Google will never make this available to all AdSense publishers, instead holding it for trustworthy publishers.
Some bloggers just plain don’t like it.
The internet is so slow, Google is transferring data by FedExing hard drives!
Philipp has done this page that puts search queries from AOL’s privacy leak of last year with random images from Google Images, resulting in fun and poignant statement. My favorite is when the dog says, “I’m searching for ‘cute glitter myspace’”
The judge has thrown out the Kinderstart lawsuit against Google, saying Google is not liable for PageRank drops. Kinderstart lost so badly, they actually have to pay Google’s legal fees!
Google is classifying some “second class” employees as hourly workers, with compulsory unpaid lunch breaks and other breaks, limits on overtime, and the “threat of a black mark on the review of anyone who fails to punch in properly to the time-tracking window on their desktops.” Yoiks.
Yahoo has released a new version of Yahoo Widgets, the former Konfabulator. New features include a Widget Dock, auto-updating widgets, hidden widgets, 40% improved performance/memory usage, a FLickr widget, and lots of stuff for widget developers.
There’s a new look being tested on AdSense ads. Unlike some of the previous tests, these are pretty cool.
Oh, and holy crap! Lessig responded to an article of mine! I feel honored, and even more so since every point he makes in response to me is dead wrong.
Holy cow… Now that’s an overload of information. Great post though. I’m a newcomer to your blog and look forward to reading it.
Comment by knupNET | March 22, 2007
Now that’s what you call a blog dump. You need one of these mate…http://www.google.com/reader/shared/05696026800398748487
That way you can share everything as you see it.
Comment by Andy Beal | March 22, 2007
nobody except Pilipp seems to have picked up on the newly announced Picasa API - http://code.google.com/apis/picasaweb/overview.html
this is really worth reporting, i think, as it puts Picasa more on par with Flickr in that people can now easily develop plugins and applications to manage and embed pictures and albums for other sites or applications.
Comment by joe | March 22, 2007
Need help..?
- Michael Moritz to leave Google board: http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/michael-moritz-leave-google-board/story.aspx?guid=%7BC89B5CCD-A184-446F-8BDD-FC420FFC4E4A%7D
- News Corp. to unveil YouTube rival: http://uk.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUKN2233520020070322
Comment by Laurent Van Winckel | March 22, 2007
That’s just great. Now your tabs are gone, but now *I* have way too much open tabs.
(Actually, I just dealt with most of them, only five left.)
- I suspect that Gumbly thing is not accessible outside of the States, and YouTube doesn’t look like they WANT to admit that. I’m getting 404s and: “This video is unavailable.” Man, I just wanted to know what you guys were talking about in the first place… What is it? A children’s cartoon or something?
- About the pi thing: is it just me? What’s there to be seen in “seasonal scape”? The aurora?
Comment by Tim | March 22, 2007
Hey knup, glad to welcome a new reader. Hope this post keeps you busy for awhile
Andy: The problem is, I want to write a full post on everything. I don’t want to just link to things. Looks like I need to let a few things go one in awhile.
Joe and Laurent: I’m blogging all of those, so thanks. I already did the YouTube rival one (read it, I’m on a science of war trip lately).
Tim: Sorry, man, you should do a linkdump comment :-). You really gotta start blogging (maybe here?). And you’ve never heard of Gumby?!?
Comment by Nathan Weinberg | March 23, 2007
[…] Google Overload [InsideGoogle] […]
Pingback by knupNET » Around the Net 3/22/2007 | March 23, 2007
Haha, yeah… I often feel the need to set up my comments the same way you did this post, but with such comments I usually try to stick to the stuff that’s actually relevant/interesting/funny.
Gumby I’ve never really heard of, except for a previous post by you in which you announce that it will be available on YouTube. I don’t think we have Gumby here (and apparently not legally on YouTube either…), but I do recall some other clay-figure stop-motion series.
Thanks for the compliment - I take it to be one, anyway
- starting a real blog has definitely crossed my mind more than once. Basically, I’d like to be sure that if I commit to blogging, that I keep going… I’d like to be sure I can invest a steady amount of time to it each day, and keep doing that. I’d also like to make sure I have some kind of added value, I don’t want to chew on the news items even more, and then redeliver them to my readers (assuming I’d have readers in the first place 
). But your suggestion really means a lot to me, thanks!
Comment by Tim | March 23, 2007
Nathan,
I am a long time reader/follower of this blog, and I am a little concerned. I hope that you will take the following comments in good spirit, as a sincere and well-intentioned feedback from a well-wisher and regular reader.
Not only were you posting news that was week old, but you are also posting less frequently. And most of your posts are regurgitated from other sources - you are posting a lot less brand new stuff, lot less conclusions you reach on your own.
Also, I detect more of a negative/pessimistic tone towards Google than you used to have in the past. I am not saying that you are not entitled to expressing your feelings. All I am saying that in the past, your blog reflected a more diverse range of attitudes - positive, negative, neutral, etc.
I feel that you are less happy in general, these days. Whatever it is that’s bothering you, I hope it gets resolved soon and everything gets back to being nice and great for you again.
LL
PS: I apologize for this personal comment on your public blog. You are welcome to delete this comment, if you so please.
Comment by Libran Lover | March 28, 2007
Libran: For most of this year, I have been dealing with a lot of outside distractions, which have reduced how fast I can react to news and how much of it I can report. Those have finally started going away, and hopefully in the last few days you’ve seen major improvements. I appreciate any help you’d like to offer, and any suggestions.
It’s not that I’m less happy, it’s that I’m more exhausted. Things are finally easing up, and that means the quality of stuff here should continue increasing. I’m sorry things got the way they are, but you should expect great things in the near future.
Comment by Nathan Weinberg | March 28, 2007