Steve Rubel writes that, more than a month after Google News added the ability for participants in news stories to comment on them, News has only collected 104 comments. If you look now, you’ll see even less, a mere 95 comments. Looks like uptake is slow. Next month, we’ll have to see if momentum is picking up.
Let’s see some of them:
This is part of a comment on Colony Collapse Disorder:
The only strong evidence presented related specifically to IAPV. Since it is possible that hundreds if not 1000s of other microbes might also be more common in bees experiencing colony collapse disorder I think it is a bit premature for everyone to jump on the IAPV bandwagon.
Hmm… Sounds smart.
On the other hand, here’s a comment from John Silvia, Chief Economist at Wachovia:
* Job losses in manufacturing, government and construction headline the weakness in the outlook. Perhaps weakness is overstated but even so slower growth and Fed ease lie ahead.
* Employment growth is consistent with slower household income and consumption growth, and slightly below-trend growth for the overall economy the rest of this year.
Fed to ease later this month
Yes, that’s the entire comment. Maybe Google should require actual paragraps?
This comment is just cool. Yes, it’s a comment by presidential candidate Senator John Edwards. Nice! Okay, technically it’s a press release from the campaign, but still very cool to see a candidate using the system.
Interestingly, Google is not using nofollow on the links back to the commenter’s blog, making the comments very valuable for SEO purposes.
There are a bunch of comments that seem at least worth checking out, if only to see how the program is working out. You can view them all on this page or subscribe to an RSS feed of all the comments as they come in.
September 9th, 2007
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
General |
no comments
Google has put together a special tab for your iGoogle personalized homepage for the Rugby World Cup which started Friday in France. You can add this tab to your iGoogle page, merely by heading over here. The tabs let you follow live scores, see the scores in all games, hear cheers for your team, see fan videos from YouTube and see Google Maps satellite view of stadiums.
Google also ran this Doodle in a bunch of countries to commemorate the start of the Cup:
September 9th, 2007
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
iGoogle, Doodles, Culture, Products |
one comment
Chris O’Brien read through the form 990 for 2006 filed by the Google Foundation, the charity arm of Google. He found a number of interesting things, including that the Google Foundation was started on $90 million endowment, is run by Dr. Larry Brilliant (who does not get a salary from the Foundation, but is paid by Google itself), and that the Foundation had revenue of $4.07 million and paid out $2.096 million.
So, it’s a slow start, which is alright, since they are trying to build a successful and world-changing charity organization (everybody wishes they could be as good at this as Bill Gates). The biggest recipient of Google’s generosity so far? The World Bank-sponsored Development Marketplace, whichfunds health. nutrition and population programs in developing countries.
(via Valleywag)
September 9th, 2007
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
Google.org |
one comment
Somebody decided to advertise in my comments (bad boy! buy an ad!) for their Firefox toolbar that is a StumbleUpon clone for porn. I just found the screencast for a software product that includes a ton of pornographic material, all while descibing features in a very dry delivery, to be hilarious. If you need a way to Stumble on porn (with tons of categories!), check out BringThePorn.com.
Obviously, clicking the link will reveal some stuff that is very NOT SAFE FOR WORK.
I’m gonna christen this Porn 2.0.
Also worth noting that Google Trends is tracking a lot of people searching for naked photos of Vannessa Hudgens, the High School Musical star who stupidly took nude photos of herself and sent them to her boyfriend. Trends for Friday show “vanessa hudgens pictures” as the number one gainer for the day
Yes, Google actually describes her hotness as “volcanic” (previously, she was merely “on fire”).
Interest in the shots of Hudgens nude made Trends not just at number one, but with related terms showing at #2, #10, #14, #22, #24, #25, #26, #31, #34, #37, #63, #71, #76, #89 and #100, proving that the internet is, indeed, for porn, and that the majority of searchers have no idea how to spell. That poor, naive girl.
The top gainer for Saturday was icarly.com, fan-generated content show from Nickelodeon:
And so far, today’s top gainer is “nfl scores”:
September 9th, 2007
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
Search, Humor |
one comment
A commenter here had a story of how he noticed some strange activity on his AdSense account, and being a good citizen, he told Google that something odd was going on. What did Google do? They banned his AdSense account! Jeez. If the reality is as ridiculous as it sounds, Google should have been thanking him, not cutting him off.
September 9th, 2007
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
AdSense, Advertising |
5 comments
I’m looking for any readers or fellow bloggers in San Francisco to attend a short but important industry event I can’t attend myself (since I’m in New York). I can’t say what it is or when, but you’d have to take a half-day off work, see some really cool stuff, and live blog it (or send quick emails/texts for me to transcribe) for all to enjoy.
The coolness of it should make it a no-brainer once I tell you what it is, but if not, I’ve got a box of DVDs and peripherals that might help sway you. I’d prefer a reader who comments here often or a regular blogger, but the main thing is that it is someone trustworthy. For reasons I can’t explain, employees of three certain technology companies cannot take this opportunity, but employees of a really big tech company can go.
If you are interested, use the contact form listed in the sidebar or just leave a comment. The comment can be anonymous, just leave your email address in the email field (it won’t be shown). Suffice to say, most readers while find this too good to pass up, as its the sort of event I’d run to in a heartbeat.
September 9th, 2007
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
General |
no comments
A Miami University student did some cool work with the Google Docs API to create a desktop-style file manager for Google Docs & Spreadsheets. It accesses the API for a list of docs, letting you see your documents as icons arranged on a desktop, just like you might on your regular desktop. Add icons for other Google services (search, Gmail, Calendar), maybe some widgets, and we’ve got a real Google OS. Nice!
It’s by no means perfect, but some really cool things are possible with this idea. Check out Google Web Desktop and see for yourself.
September 9th, 2007
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
Docs, Products |
2 comments
Remember last Thursday, when Apple and Nokia were running dueling ads about the iPhone price cut? Turns out only Nokia’s ad was run by the actual company. “Didn’t You Hear” admits to running the ad, mostly to get some laughs. It wasn’t a terrible idea, what with it pulling a clickthrough rate of 12.72%. Apple, of course, wasn’t so pleased.
(via Gizmodo)
September 9th, 2007
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
Apple, Humor, AdWords, Advertising |
no comments
Lots of people were expecting Google to launch Google Wiki and Google Presentations, the next two pieces in its Google Docs office suite, at the Office 2.0 conference this week. It was such a widespread belief that I stopped running my “Days Until Google Presentations Is Late” countdown, figuring the wait was finally over.
But…
The conference ended two days ago, with nary a Wiki or a Presentation to be found. So, since Google isn’t going to use a big venue like that to launch, when the hell are we seeing Presentations? Anyone want to put odds on it at this point that we’ll see Presentations in the next 13 days, 21 hours?
September 9th, 2007
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
Docs, Products |
no comments
Friday was Google’s ninth birthday. Maybe. Not this year. Arghh!
As Barry explains, Google changes their birth date every year, celebrating it some years on September 7, others on September 27 (depending on what you count as the birth of Google). Looks like this year they will be celebrating on the 27th, since nothing happened on Friday. Last year, it was the 27th, in 2005 it was the 7th, as it was in 2004.
Google’s official answer is a good one:
When is Google’s birthday?
Google opened its doors in September 1998. The exact date when we celebrate our birthday has moved around over the years, depending on when people feel like having cake. For more on Google’s history:
http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html
Quite Googley.
September 9th, 2007
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
Culture |
no comments
Everyone’s been having fun lately with the tool that shows you Wikipedia edits from certain corporate IP addresses, including Duncan Riley, who’s discovered a surprising (or maybe not) number of Googlers who have a lot of knowledge on some kinky topics. Googlers have edited entries on “mutual masturbation”, “amatuer pornography”, “List of male performers in gay porn films”, “sex show”, “breast expansionist fetishism”, “anal sex”, “motherfucker” and “glory hole”.
I wonder if they ask about this sort of stuff in the potential employee questionaire? After all, isn’t the goal to hire new employees with similar interests to current employees? More importantly, first person to send in a picture of the Google Glory Hole gets a free iPod dock.
I say, let people have their fun. Some people have these fetishes, some people have fetishes for the latest gadgets, and some people just love their own cute wives. There are worse things.
September 9th, 2007
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
Culture |
no comments
Tihomir has a long list of questions a friend of his was asked at a Google job interview. These are always fun to check out, so read the list and see if you can answer any of them.
I like the last question, the one about the pirates, but the hint kind of gives it away. The answer’s here, but it wouldn’t work, and you’d still wind up dead.
The pictures above come from a Business 2.0 article about the brain teasers, which seems to indicate that a number of the questions are interested in seeing if you can make large estimates quickly. Like, these questions and answers:
How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?
About 500,000, assuming the bus is 50 balls high, 50 balls wide, and 200 balls long
How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?
Assuming 10,000 city blocks, 600 windows per block, five minutes per window, and a rate of $20 per hour, about $10 million
Those estimates could be extremely wrong, and I’d consider anyone who even attempted to answer the questions an idiot and unhirable, but apparently it’s exactly what Google wants. Is a school bus fifty golf balls tall? Well, fifty golf balls are 7 feet high, if stacked perfectly on top of each other. So, it’s possible, but it’s a crazy question, and requires knowledge of the height of a golf ball (1.68 inches), ignoring the seats on the bus, ignoring the logistics of getting golf balls on a bus, ignoring method of stacking (it’s impossible to stack round objects perfectly in any efficient manner) and ignoring if the bus will break under the weight of 500,000 golf balls (50,625 pounds).
September 9th, 2007
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
Culture |
one comment
Google Spreadsheets has added some really amazing features related to the use of data sets. Ionut Alex has the details, complete with screenshots and some instructions, but the short story is that you can:
- Start off a set of data and let Spreadsheets attempt to Autofill the rest of a set, using data from the almost-forgotten Google Sets service. For example, enter January and February in successive rows, and Spreadsheets will autofill the rest of the months. Enter a few types of music, and Spreadsheets can autofill other kinds of music.
- Using a specific expression, you can import data from any file on the internet. You can use an expression to tell Spreadsheets to look at a web page or file, locate a list or table using a certain criteria, and publish the results from that place as a rows in the spreadsheet. You can even point the function at other Google Spreadsheets and get data from them, creating complex linked spreadsheets.
If Google can do a good job exposing these advanced features to regular users, Spreadsheets could really win some converts. One of the best things Microsoft’s Office 2007 does is expose advanced features through a new Ribbon interface, since the features users tell Microsoft they want most are features they didn’t know the product already had.
If Google can do a better job than Microsoft showing off the power available to users, Spreadsheets could steal a lot of users, and deservedly so.
September 9th, 2007
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
Docs, Spreadsheets, Products |
no comments
