Google Ads on TV

New York Times published an article titled: Google Wants to Dominate Madison Avenue, Too. According to the article, Google wants to use its technology to make ads on TV (and just about everywhere else) more relevant.

"Now Google is preparing to extend its technology to nearly every other medium, most significantly television. It is looking toward a world of digital cable boxes and Internet-delivered television that will allow it to show commercials tailored for each viewer, as it does now for each Web page it displays."

Google Print is back

Google has decided to continue with their plans of digitizing the content available in some of the biggest libraries in the world. Google Print is due to resume from tomorrow in spite of the fact that the company has been hit by two separate lawsuits claiming that the program breaks copyrights of the authors of the books.

Google Print is now scheduled to restart from November 1 after they suspended the process to give the publishers and authors enough time to contact the company if they objected to having their books stored in Google’s database. The deadline is now over and the Google Print program would continue as originally planned.

Major publishers represented by the Association of American Publishers had earlier sued Google this month for digitizing books without the permission of copyright holders. They claimed that Google should have contacted them regarding the copyrights of the content they owned. Before that, Google was sued by the Authors Guild for a similar reason.

Google continues to claim that their program adheres to fair use clause of the U.S. Copyright Act that allows for the reprinting of portions of copyrighted material for certain purposes. Interestingly, now both Yahoo! and Microsoft MSN have announced similar plans to digitize books but they are only targeting books, which are outside the copyright issues.

IBM uses Google technology

IBM, the world's largest computer services company, will use Google Inc.'s technology within its own search programs to help clients better find and manage information.

The agreement is part of IBM's new strategy, "Information as a Service," to provide software, hardware and services to make it easier to find and use data across various formats and locations, Chris Andrews, a spokesman, said in an interview today.

In linking with Google, IBM is tapping a technology used by more than 400 million users a month to search the Internet and desktop files. IBM, based in Armonk, New York, is betting it can use the technology to boost sales by helping customers manage their documents.

Mike Grehan: Google to become a portal

MARKETING SEARCH guru Mike Grehan said at a Netimperative dinner that it was inevitable that Google would turn into a portal.

He suggested that Google had run its course, and the third generation of search would cause changes in the market.

Despite Google's clean interface, all you need to do is to click on the "more" button and it begins to look like a portal anyway, Grehan said.

More at: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=27271.

PageRank 10 Sites

PageRank is an algorithm for ranking web pages, based on the number of incoming links and their importance. The algorithm was created by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and is the main innovation that made Google the best search engine.

PageRank values are integers from 0 to 10, but very few sites have PageRank 10. Here is an incomplete list.

Software companies:

www.google.com

www.microsoft.com

www.yahoo.com (since April 2007)

www.adobe.com

www.macromedia.com (now redirects to adobe.com)

www.real.com


Government / governmental agencies:

www.whitehouse.gov

www.nasa.gov

www.energy.gov

www.nsf.gov


Sites with many backlinks:

www.w3.org


Educational institutes:

www.keio.ac.jp

www.lcs.mit.edu

www.ercim.org


Sites that dropped from PageRank 10 to PageRank 9 in 2007

www.apple.com

www.mozilla.org

www.firstgov.gov

www.statcounter.com

www.blogger.com

www.nytimes.com (New York Times dropped to PageRank 8)


Found another one? You can check the PageRank of a site and report it in the comments.

Last updated: May 12, 2007

Random Google

Visit a random webpage from a Google search: Google Random.

Google random image: www.ghettodriveby.com/.

And a random Wikipedia page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random.

Office web applications

Until Google comes with an Office web application here is a list of Ajax-based Office replacements:

Writely - "The Web Word Processor" (note that for creating documents, it uses an HTML editor and then converts to Word format)

FCKeditor is also an MS Word-like web app.

gOFFICE - "a browser-based online word processor and desktop publishing program"

Num Sum - web-based spreadsheets - except only the author of a spreadsheet can edit it.

Kiko - Online calendar solution powered by Ajax.

called S5 - web-based Powerpoint

Webnote - web-based version of Microsoft's OneNote

thinkfree - online Office suite

Openomy - online file-system

WebOS

The Web browser becomes the primary application interface through which the user views content, performs services, and manages data on their local machine and on the Web, often without even knowing the difference. (...)

Aside from the browser and the Web server, applications will be written for the WebOS and won't be specific to Windows, OS X, or Linux. This is also completely feasible, I think, for organizations like Google, Yahoo, Apple, Microsoft, or the Mozilla Foundation to make happen.

Compared to "standalone" Web apps and desktop apps, applications developed for this hypothetical platform have some powerful advantages. Because they run in a Web browser, these applications are cross platform (assuming that whoever develops such a system develops the local Web server part of it for Windows, OS X, Linux, your mobile phone, etc.), just like Web apps such as Gmail, Basecamp, and Salesforce.com. You don't need to be on a specific machine with a specific OS...you just need a browser + local Web server to access your favorite data and apps.

More: http://www.kottke.org/05/08/googleos-webos.

Base speculations unconfirmed

"You may have seen stories today reporting on a new product that we're testing, and speculating about our plans. Here's what's really going on. We are testing a new way for content owners to submit their content to Google, which we hope will complement existing methods such as our web crawl and Google Sitemaps." (Tom Oliveri, Product Marketing Manager at Google)

Well, the screenshot doesn't seem to match this information.