Friday, February 25, 2005
More Chat Updates
There have been some minor updates to the chat, including a dozen new avatars (one who looks like George W., another is a brain in a jar). Also, the Googlebot is now able to give some simple answers to simple questions. For example, you can say “Googlebot, what’s the time?” and he will respond. There have also been some bug-fixes. If you have feature requests, I’d like to hear them in the forum, or, of course, in the chat when I’m there.
Photoshop Cubism
Here are photoshopped images which display cube shapes. [Via J-Walk.]
Oscar Blog
The guy producing the Oscars, Gil Cates, writes a blog on the Oscars. He says “Readers of my blog will be able to consider themselves true Oscar insiders by the time you turn on ABC-TV to watch the 77th Annual Academy Awards on Sunday, February 27.” Great insider information in tiny font. [Via Steve.]
DHTML Pop-ups
So, DHTML pop-ups are called floaters (or overlays, or popovers). Floaters usually have a hard-to-find “Close” button, and sometimes, annoying Flash animations – and they aren’t caught by pop-up blockers.
Google Update Penalizing SEOs?
A larger Google update than usual unraveled recently, and many overoptimized sites are now pretty much unranked. It seems Google now penalizes the following SEO-specific behavior:
- A lot of Googlejuice coming from mainly a single site, and not from a great variety of sites
- Little to no deep links
- Little to no link text variaton
TomThumb in WebmasterWorld writes (case adjusted):
“I’ve been reading masses of opinions over the past few weeks and it strikes me that with so many conflicting opinions and contracditory evidence, what conclusions can the average webmaster draw? It seems to me that the best tactic may be to just develop a site with plenty of good content, relevant titles, get the ODP and Yahoo listing and leave it at that. I’ve seen plenty of sites developed in notepad reach the top of their SERPS without ever requesting a link or giving more than a relevant handful out.
I can accept that there exist webmasters and companies with genius techies and a [hard-working] team of web promoters who can get results. But for the average webmaster is his time not best spent in developing a good site? Especially when no one can agree on what works anyway?”
Also see SEO 2004.
Firefox 1.0.1
Firefox 1.0.1 is out with some security fixes. Internationalized domain names like www.bär.de or www.bücher.de – the German words for “bear” and “books” – will work, but are instantly rewritten to “Punycode”. This means www.bär.de turns to “http://www.xn--br-via.de/” in the browser address bar. The reason behind this apparently is to prevent phishing attacks, which could fool users by leading them to URLs which look like “paypal.com” but actually contain a cyrillic “a.” (Google, by the way, does understand special characters in domains, which you can see by entering “site:www.bär.de”.)
Super Mario Diorama
GKworld.com sells different Super Mario Bros. Diorama sets for $35. Wired has a higher-quality photo.
Odeo for Podcasts
Former Googler and Pyra Labs founder Evan Williams has co-created the new podcasting service Odeo.com:
“Somewhere in an apartment in San Francisco, we’re making it easy for you to discover, create, and subscribe to fresh, independent audio content for your iPod (or whatever MP3-player-type-deal you prefer).”
Odeo is pronounced like “rodeo,” but not much else information is on the site – though you can sign up for new information at their site, or glance over the blog. The New York Times writes (subscription):
“[Odeo] plans to introduce a Web-based system that is aimed at making a business of podcasting – the process of creating, finding, organizing and listening to digital audio files that range from living-room ramblings to BBC newscasts. (...)
Compared with the other various approaches so far, Odeo (...) means to be podcast central – an all-in-one system that makes it possible for someone with no more equipment than a telephone to produce podcasts and also makes it possible for users to assemble custom playlists of audio files and copy them directly onto MP3 audio players.
The company plans to make money by selling audio content and advertising and, eventually, software for producing and editing podcasts.
Odeo (...) plans to embed automatically generated audio ads within the downloadable files.”
Yahoo Image Search Transformed Queries
Yahoo now supports what they call Transformed Queries in their image search. This means when you enter “hello kitty wallpaper,” large images to be used as desktop backgrounds will be found. You can also enter e.g. “large image of flower” or “small black and white pictures of warhol.” [Via Yahoo Blog.]
Google Shirt Song
“Everybody wants a Google shirt” is based on “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears. [Thanks Eric Leebow.]
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