Seasoned bloggers knows people are rarely moved to comment on a blog post. Especially, one hit wonders sent from Google, who were simply looking for ‘Train times between Clapham and Norbiton’ and instead see some commuter rant aimed at South West Trains. However, microblogging has taught us that people are slightly more likely to grudgingly acknowledge an amusing one-liner with a ‘Like’ or a ‘Fave’. Clicking a button is quick and easy - even for lazy people....
A few weeks ago, I signed up for a invitation to Google Music. The service is only available in the US but, by a lucky chance of fate, I just happened to be connected to my corporate VPN so I was successful and an invitation duly arrived in my Inbox. Initially, the Google Music Manager software didn’t support Linux. Nor was the Ogg Vorbis audio format supported so I didn’t pursue it any further as both of these were show stoppers for me....
I have followed the development of Google Reader since it was launched in 2005. Having used Thunderbird and then NetVibes, I have used Google Reader for the last two years to read blogs. The main reason I like Reader are the UI, the keyboard shortcuts for quick navigation and the fact I can also use it on mobile devices and multiple computers. During that period, I have sporadically marked articles that interest, amuse or shock me on my ‘Shared Items’ feed and Google recently added improved support for the sharing of ‘Shared Items’....
Google have recently added some ‘social’ features to Google Reader which enables much improved sharing of people’s Shared Items. The features have re-energised my use of Reader as these were features I have wanted for a long time.
Although it’s very cool to post on the corporate message board: ‘Hey - why don’t we save the company millions of dollars by using Linux, Gmail and OpenOffice ?’, there are obvious barriers (security and Excel Luddites to name but two) to large corporations adopting server based software. However, I always thought Google Mail would be an obvious fit for academic institutions to reduce the costs of software licenses and IT management....
When I moved this blog from hosted Wordpress , I submitted the site to Google and Yahoo! After that, I noted the respective crawlers indexing the blog and thought no more of it. I subsequently registered the site in Google Webmaster and Yahoo! Site Explorer and added a sitemap to help the robots index my site more efficiently. After a while, it was clear that Google was responsible for the vast majority of traffic to my humble blog....
John Chow notes the vast majority of traffic to his blog from search engines comes from Google. I see a similar pattern for this humble blog with over 95% of search engine traffic arriving from Google despite the fact that the blog has been indexed by the major players. Although I use Firefox (where the default search engine is Google) and I hardly ever use any other search engine, I was surprised that the number of visitors from Yahoo was a paltry 2%....
Google have announced ‘Docs & Spreadsheets’ which is an overhaul of the original Writely interface and integration with Google Spreadsheets. I must admit I prefer the Google Docs interface and was interested to see that Docs can still publish to a blog (just like Writely). The documentation suggests that tagging the article with keywords will be mapped to matching blog categories and that the document title will indeed be preserved in the blog entry....
Apart from the ‘vi’ shortcuts, I was slightly underwhelmed by Google Reader when it was released last year. Imagine my surprise, when I just used Google Reader to quickly check that I had reinstated full text feeds for this blog. Unless I see it with my own eyes, I just don’t believe it. Google Reader launches with a modest splash screen with some exciting announcement (which I immediately skipped) and I was greeted by some unexpected and welcome changes to the interface....
Rakesh Agrawal presents an interesting summary of a talk by Carl Sjogreen describing Google’s approach to the software development process. Google Calendar was a relatively small project (3 engineers, 1 product manager). Google talk to real users (‘Grandma in NYC’) not techy geeks to find what users really want. Google ’eat their own dog food’. Lots of internal testing prior to public launch. Gap in the market. Lots of calendar products out there but none do what people want....