Google Web Fonts has a new user interface which is a lot more user friendly than before. If you haven’t seen, check it out.
Google Web Fonts is a project by Google to provide webmasters and designers with high quality, free, open source fonts for website usage. What I like the most about this is that, Google has made embedding the fonts very easy. Basically you just point to them for the CSS source, and apply the fonts to your website via standard CSS styles. You can see the example here.
Google Font Directory is a great place to integrate different fonts other than the usual Verdana and Arial to your blog. With the launch of Google Font Viewer, it got a lot easier to change the fonts of your blog to nicer looking fonts. With just a few selections and copy-pasting a CSS code, your blog’s fonts can be different.
I hope font designers will support this project and contribute more free fonts to the directory.
URL: http://code.google.com/webfonts/preview
Personally, it was very disturbing to use Google with Pac-Man sound constantly looping at the background. If you don’t know what I am talking about go to google.com now and see (before it expires).
I think Google’s Doodle Team went too far this time. Should have just sticked to graphic logos and not games.
Btw, Google TV is launched at this week’s I/O Conference. TechCrunch has the details here. What is Google TV for bloggers? Well, it’s another channel for you to reach out to wider audience with your ads, probably your ads can be seen on TV in the near future. And for vbloggers (video bloggers) it probably means more money since people can watch their videos on TV. More banner impressions == more money.
Update: now you can see this page at http://www.google.com/pacman/ anytime.
In case you didn’t know, Google Docs now allows you to upload any types of files to your account, not only word docs, pdfs and spreadsheets like before but virtually any type of files.
It can basically serve you as an alternative backup space for all your important data. Google also makes it very easy to share your files with your friends. And if 1GB space is not enough you can easily add up to 16TB (yes terabyte) additional disk space. For example additional 20GB disk space will only cost you $5 per year, more details on pricing here.
It seems Google really wants to know more about you :) The more info and files you give to them, the happier they will get. But frankly, what would we do without Google and it’s free services?
Website: https://docs.google.com
Implement breadcrumbs navigation in your website and Google will reflect it on its Search Results, instead of the URL path that it normally shows (see below).
And the links in the breadcrumbs actually point to different sections of the website, just like the navigation on actual website. That’s cool.
I didn’t know they did that. Looks very user friendly to me. So, if you can, try implementing breadcrumbs in your online projects.
Breadcrumbs and Usability: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/breadcrumbs.html
Bit.ly, the popular URL shortening service has an extension for Chrome and Firefox browsers, which allows you to see number of clicks on your bit.ly links in a tooltip (see below screenshot from my twitter).
Clicking on “More information” link will take you to the details page for that particular link on bit.ly. I have been using it for a week now and find it very useful.
I have some (25) Google Wave invites. If you need one, just drop a comment on this post and I will send you. It will be sent to the first 25 commenters.
screenshot:
Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google has this to say about the Privacy issue on his interview with CNBC:
If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines — including Google — do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities. watch the video
This statement from Schmidt has caused quite an uproar on the net, Mozilla’s Director of Community Development Asa Dotzler even pointed out that Bing has a better privacy policy than Google and encouraged people to change the default search engine in Firefox to Bing.
This kind of comment from Schmidt definitely won’t go well with their to-be-launched Operating System Google Chrome.
Rupert Murdoch the founder and CEO of the world’s second largest media conglomerate News Corp. has said in his latest interview with Sky News that they will be blocking Google from indexing their sites.
This he said will be their strategic move to increase the profitability of their online versions of their newspapers. Somehow he believes that Google is doing more harm by sending tons of traffic to their websites because he thinks that it’s better to have small number of people who pay (paid subscribers) rather than tons of people who do not pay and read his (News Corp) news from Google News for free (even if Google provides a link back).
News Corp. own tons of newspapers, magazines, tv and radio stations worldwide. Newspapers like The Sun (UK), The New York Times (US), and The Wall Street Journal (US) are owned by News Corp. (full list here)
That’s an interesting strategy indeed. He is the only person I heard on internet who doesn’t want traffic and Google’s indexing of his sites :) Normally everyone is after traffic and always trying to improve their SEO to better rank in major Search Engines.
I personally think this strategy of R.Murdoch will do more harm to his websites’ profitability if he indeed will block all search engines from indexing his sites. Sure, he might have loyal customers who will read WSJ and New York times everyday, but any product and website needs advertising. And free advertising like what Google is doing for them is the best thing that any website can get. He only needs to tweak the website to make it free section and paid section. Perhaps free section could only have some brief news and full articles could be accessed only by paid members etc.
Bad for Google?
In his private mailing list, Jason Calacanis of Mahalo suggested that, this move by News Corp might be bad for Google and good for Google’s competitors. Because he believes, now is the time for Bing and Yahoo to approach News Corp directly and be the exclusive provider of News Corp’s news on their search engines. Obviously this would affect Google’s reach and Google’s competitors could effectively snatch some Search Engine Share from Google. (read his article here).
What is your opinion on this issue? Do you think R.Murdoch is doing a right move by blocking Search Engines? Do you think his move is a loss for Google? (R.Murdoch’s interview on YouTube after the jump) Continue reading →
Want to read Google News like a newspaper? Go to newly launched Google News Timeline by Google.
Google News Timeline is a web application that organizes search results chronologically. It allows users to view news and other data sources on a browsable, graphical timeline. Available data sources include recent and historical news, scanned newspapers and magazines, blog posts, sports scores, and information about various types of media, like music albums and movies.
URL: http://newstimeline.googlelabs.com/
TinEye is an image search engine that employs image identification technology rather than keywords – you upload sample image (or give URL of the image) and the search engine will find for you images that has the similar shapes, concepts, characteristics.
The results can be the same image, modified version of the image or a different image altogether as seen below. Also, the naming of the images do not really matter in this case as long as they match in appearance.
If you want to see more examples of search results, see cool searches page.
Additionally they have iPhone app which allows you to search for products using your mobile phone’s camera. Just take a picture of the product to start searching for product info and reviews. Cool Stuff!
Website: http://tineye.com
Google Analytics is a great service and it’s used by many. One of the features that I like about Google Analytics is – sharing your reports with others.
Sometimes advertisers or potential partners would ask for your blog’s/website’s traffic statistics. And in this time of fraud and forgery, screenshots won’t simply do it (perhaps this might do). They want to see the real, live statistics. So, in this kind of situations G.Analytics’ “share reports” feature is a great solution.
Sharing your reports is easy, can be done in 3 simple steps.
1. Login to your G.Analytics account and go to your overview page of your reports. At the end of the page you will see a link “User Manager”, click it.
Recent Comments