XKCD, one of my favorite comics (and so popular, a comic of its made Google Hot Trends) ran this a little while back:
Wei-Hwa Huang, Google’s resident award-winning puzzler, wrote a Google Gadget in about three hours that does exactly what the guy in the comic does. Here’s a screenshot:
And here’s the Gadget, live and in action:
I love how he’s implemented it, even implementing the punchline. Get the Gadget for iGoogle here, and add it to your webpage like I did over here.
Google has added a new search experiment and a new UI to its Google Experimental service. The site, which lets you try out different variations on Google search, still has the timeline view, which displays search results based on the date of the content, and the map view, which is like Google Maps with webpages instead of businesses. The new view is the info view, which shows images, locations, measurements and dates associated with the search results.
The big change is that the three experimental search types are now integrated with regular Google search (referred to simply as List View), and you can click tabs beneath the search box to switch between the four types. This means you can use Google Experimental alongside regular Google search, and get the benefit of the old and new.
If you are ever running a regular search, add “view:map”, “view:timeline” or “view:info” to the search box to activate Google Experimental and the corresponding view
John Malone, a partner with IAC Chairman Barry Diller in various ventures since 1992, has started taking steps to have Diller removed from the board of the company he built. Diller has been working for months on splitting up InterActiveCorp into multiple smaller companies, and Malone’s Liberty Media Corp. wants the media veteran taken out, by force if necessary, in order to stop his plans.
While Liberty only owns 30% of IAC’s stock, it controls 62% of the voting power. The structure of the stock gives Liberty all of the Class B shares, which have ten times the votes of regular shares, as well as 23% of all regular shares. However, an outstanding agreement gives Diller full voting control over Liberty’s shares, and he isn’t about to vote himself out anytime soon.
Malone wants the voting rights to be reclaimed by Liberty so he can show Diller the door, claiming that Diller’s plans are contrary to Liberty’s interests. If he succeeds with his lawsuit, he won’t need anyone else’s help removing Diller from the company, which owns many internet properties, including Ask.com.
Normally, any company would love to be owned by a mogul like Diller, since he is a very successful businessman. However, Diller’s actions at IAC prove that he has no knowledge of the tech industry and no interest in building innovative or even successful companies. Diller buys floundering firms, gives them enough resources to become healthy (but not necessarily successful), and sells them for a tidy profit.
Diller bought and sold Ticketmaster seven times in the last decade, including three seperate times just in 1998. The man doesn’t want to build the next Google (or, more accurately, the next FOX), he wants to buy low, sell high, and doesn’t care what he leaves behind. It may work for him, and has worked very well, but it isn’t good for the industry, the economy, or for most of the employees at IAC.
Recently, Diller let go Ask.com CEO Jim Lanzone, reportedly because of delays with Ask’s news site. While Ask hasn’t made huge market share gains, no one can deny it is innovating, and if not for the efforts of dedicated employees like Lanzone was, Ask.com would likely be completely gone from the market today. Diller wanted a bunch of projects done quickly, probably so he could sell some of it off, and his strategy only hurts the company and cost it a valued exec.
I won’t be sad to see Diller go. Liberty may very well lose this battle, but if it doesn’t, hopefully Ask will be much healthier under Malone than it ever was under Diller.
photo of Barry Diller by JD Lasica under CC license
This one is a bit of a no-brainer: A bird takes a little doo-doo in a TV news reporter’s mouth during a live broadcast, and it becomes a top search on Google and should pass 1 million views on YouTube by the end of the day.
Take a look, if you aren’t afraid of what you’ll see:
On Google Hot Trends, “reporter bird shit” is the number 3 search of the day. Also, “reporter birdshit” is #50. If you don’t watch it today, you’ll be one of millions of Americans watching it during the coming weeks. I love watching a viral video develop.
Now we just have to start the debate over whether the video is real or fake.
UPDATE: Looks like, not only is the video fake, but there’s a fake video-behind-the-video video. Take a look:
Now that’s smart. Thanks to Ralphie214 for pointing this out in the comments.
Incredimail, an Israel-based “fun email” company that is publicly traded on the NASDAQ, has a business model consisting entirely of revenue from Google AdSense. The company discovered the danger of that single stream earlier this month when their AdSense account was disabled, but the rest of the world got to see that common problem unfold in a unique way: They stock tanked.
Incredimail’s stock, traded as MAIL, fell 30% in a single day on news that the company had lost its means of making money. In the interim, the company probably could have found another partner, like using Yahoo’s Publisher Network as a backup, but instead they watched as the market lost confidence in their company. It took 11 days to reach an agreement with Google to resolve matters, and since then the stock is up, but still off 21.92% from its price three weeks ago.
There is a lot of danger in solely relying on AdSense. I use AdSense, but I also have Blogads bringing in a little extra, as well as an Adify spot that is funded by ComputerWorld and significant Amazon referral revenue, and it’s still not enough to cover our expenses. For the last two months, we’ve been trying to solicit ads from tech companies and startups, but without any sales experience, it hasn’t been all that successful. I need to figure out how Andy Beal does it.
If you are relying on AdSense, and only AdSense, as your primary source of income, for god’s sake, just diversify. Try other, complementary ad networks, try finding something in your niche, try selling ads yourself or finding someone to sell ads for you. At the very least, sign up for an account with another contextual ad network, like Yahoo’s, so if something goes wrong with AdSense you can rotate in the new code.
Ask.com expanded the skinning feature of its homepage, now letting you choose from a large gallery of homepage skins, or even upload your own image for a completely personal look. Just hit the dropdown arrow on the homepage, and either click to browse the gallery or Upload Your Own. Choose any image (under 6 megabytes), give your skin a name, mess with the text color, align it properly, and, tada, a completely unique search engine homepage.
Here’s a homepage I made, using a photo from my recent vacation:
It’s not great, but it took about 90 seconds, and it’s in the Skin gallery right now. Try uploading some cool ones, and let me know how it goes.
