Just noticed that for the last (hour?) the main adsense login site has been down with an interesting multi-language error message page. Ads seem to be served still, but the login is offline at the moment. And back up by 1AM EST 12/17/05.
Tag: Google
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Google Talk notes
Since Google Talk is based on the Jabber protocol (XMPP) it’s been compatible with any jabber client for instant messaging. That was a well and good move. Very welcoming to see a big name use an open protocol that can be implemented by anyone. There were some concerns though that the voice talk features were only supported in the Google Talk client and so, no one else would be able to get in on the voice features.
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Google Music
Beta news is reporting on Google Music. They say it will make it easier to find artists, album titles and lyrics. Not too long ago there was a report that the Recording industry was going to wage a war on lyric sites… Apparently Google will also provide links to music downloads if the music is available from paid download services.
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Microsoft may pay for search users?
Infoworld has an interesting article this afternoon, that suggests that Microsoft may pay users of their MSN search out of the ad revenue that Microsoft earns from their new adertising service. Speaking of Google, Bill Gates says…
But they don’t share these advertising revenues with the end users who help them get the revenue, Gates said. “Google keeps all of the money with itself,” he added.
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Registrars not verifying contact information on domains?
According to a GAO report one of the reasons that phishing and scam websites are because of a lack of enforcement and policing by registrars of accurate contact information. According to their study over 5% of sites had been registered with false data. ~2.5% had been registered with incomplete information. These findings come from a random sample of 300 domain names that they then did lookups on the domains.
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Google indexing weirdness
In looking at my Google Analytics info…. I checked on the Northcarolinagenealogy.net site’s stats and found that it’s really dropped since about Friday or Saturday from decent traffic to next to nothing. (20 visitors a day now.) The first thing I noticed was no google.com referrers…. So, I started looking and sure enough the last Google search visitor arrived Friday. So, I started investigating further site:northcarolinagenealogy.net brought up nothing (as did site:www.northcarolinagenealogy.net).
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Microsoft (MSN) virtual earth becomes Live Local
The Virtual Earth project at MSN will become local.live.com competing with other local search tools from Google and others. There will be some new features. It looks as though one is a 45 degree angle view of most large cities. Directions to a point by just clicking on the map (no address needed). It sounds like there are some interesting features here. Good to see some competition happening in the maps/local search space.
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Google tightens Google Desktop security to avoid IE bug
Last week there was word of a bug in Internet Explorer that would allow users of Google Desktop to be vulnerable to having the files on their machine viewed from a malicious website. Today, there is news that Google has made changes on thier site that prevent that flaw from being exploited through their software.
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PCworld top 100 products of 2005
Although some of the linked reviews are old, PCWorld has released their list of top 100 products of 2005. It’s nice to see a number of familiar products in the list, several Google offerings are listed (main search engine, desktop, and GMail at #2). Ubuntu makes #26 which is noteworthy. I notice Wikipedia is in there as well. Many of the items on the list of course, have been out a bit longer than a year so it’s not 100 top NEW products, just 100 top products. Mozilla Firefox tops the list at #1.