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Wednesday, June 6, 2007

Street View Van in Washington, D.C.

Jarred Taylor has an update on the subject of Google Maps Street View:

This was probably inevitable, but while walking the streets of DC today I spotted a modified VW bug with an Immersive Media decal and a camera device attached to the top. It looked like a team from Immersive (or Google?) was showing off the vehicle to a group. Photo (sorry it’s blurry, took it with camera phone) is attached. Looks like Street View will be coming to DC sometime in the near future?

Google’s Kay Oberbeck at the recent Google Developer Day told me it’s most likely that Street View now will continue to roll out for bigger US cities (as opposed to, say, German cities). The van seems to be Immersive Media’s indeed – Immersive shot the footage for all cities except San Francisco, though SF is available in best quality. [Thanks Jarred!]

Google AdSense Site Authentication

Google AdSense introduced a new sub-tab called “Site Authentication.” With this feature, you’re supposed to allow the AdSense crawler to access pages behind a password login (with the benefit that Google will be able to see your content, thus make their AdSense ads served more relevant, thus increasing click-throughs & revenue). “Our crawler will access these pages only to determine content for ad targeting purposes and will fully comply with Google’s privacy policy,” Google says on their AdSense page. Bogdan Popa of Softpedia reports that the Site Authentication function “was first introduced in November 2006 when some of the AdSense clients received an email to inform them about the starting of a new beta testing for the advertising platform.” [Thanks Bogdan!]

Your IP Neighbors

MyIPNeighbors.com is a handy tool to look-up the sites which are hosted on a specific server. For instance, you enter google.com and you receive maps.google.nl, video.google.ca, ditu.google.com and many more*. Enter blog.outer-court.com, and you’ll see e.g. authorama.com, howlinkable.com or diggsoundboard.com, all thanks to a reverse IP domain check, as the site explains. (And if you happen to detect that your server is crammed with questionable content – like hundreds of SEO spam domains – you might want to look for another host...)

Markus Renschler, who sent in this link, also points out that MSN search has a similar tool; the “IP” operator. Type “IP:” followed by an IP address**, say ip:64.62.209.14, and MSN will show you other sites hosted on the server.

*The results for google.com vary depending on the data center the tool hits.

**Which you can find out about by e.g. entering cmd in the Windows execute tool, and then typing tracert example.com.

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