Archive for google

Sorry, Y’all, I’m not doing a Full Boycott

By Sephyroth on November 17, 2007 at 10.24 pm · Filed under blog, google, nablopomo

There’s been a lot of talk about the sheer crap that Google has been putting a lot of people through, including stripping well-meaning people of all of their PageRank. If you’re not familiar, PageRank was introduced as a way for people who used the Google Toolbar to judge the “worth” (in Google’s eyes) of a website.

However, Google have made it possible for outside organizations to access a site’s PageRank and as such, it has become a tool for sites to judge the “value” of a site for various money making enterprises. Recently, there has been a rash of people getting penalized for committing various “fouls” against some rule or another, especially selling advertising on their websites.

For many folks who blog, they do it because they love it and the fact that we can make money from it is a great thing - I’ve personally made some money blogging and I enjoy doing it quite immensely. However, Google see it almost as their mission in life to screw with everyone who is making a little money on the side (or for folks making their only money online) by pulling this stunt of dropping PageRank on some sites involved.

That brings me to something that has cropped up in the last couple of days - boycotting Google. For those of you who are going to a great length to remove Google from your world, I say good for you for taking a stand and trying to make do without them in your world.

However, I will not boycott Google completely. Yes, I’m definitely taking this as an opportunity to diversify where I do things - for example, using Yahoo and Live for my searching in addition to Google, however, I find that Google has always given me the best results for my searches, so I will still likely use them as a reliable backup to Yahoo and Live.

I’ve already started to use Bloglines for reading feeds on an infrequent basis, and I can easily import my feed list into there from my Google Reader. There are posts that I’ve marked in Google Reader and items I’ve placed into special folders which don’t get exported when you export your feed list from there, so I will still check in there on a regular basis - over time, I may transition all of my feed reading over to Bloglines on a permanent basis.

As far as email is concerned, I like Gmail, especially because I can use Thunderbird to send mail through my Gmail accounts; I can’t do that with my domain account as my ISP block me from using the standard mail port for any accounts other than my ISP account. One thing, admittedly, I haven’t tried, is to send mail from my domain email address using my ISP’s mail server. Let me try that now…

As a matter of fact, I can send email via my ISP’s outgoing mail server for my domain accounts, so I’m not dependent upon Gmail or my personal ISP email account for sending mail from Thunderbird. Sweet! However, my main “personal” account will still be a Gmail for the time being; I always have the option of opening a Yahoo Canada/UK/Australia account so I can have free pop access. By the way, if you ask me, Yahoo’s not offering free pop access on US accounts is one of the biggest scams out there.

So far, I’ve found alternatives for just about every Google application, except for a couple - first is Google Maps. By far, they have the best online map, especially with their drag and drop routing options. Their satellite is also great, and so is Street View. Windows Live Maps and Yahoo Maps have been catching up, and I really love Live’s Birdseye view mode - it’s taken from a plane not flying too high in the sky. Another option that you can use for an online map is Flash Earth - it lets you choose from a variety of maps and satellite pictures from the same window.

The other main Google application that I don’t believe there is an alternative to is Google Earth - it’s a fun tool to play around with, especially when I want to have some perspective on how things are positioned, and I might not find it on a regular online map. I only use it every so often; mostly when I’ve been asked to get a shot of how something looks from the sky. ;)

A couple more Google-owned products that it’s difficult to go away from are FeedBurner - they bought that this year, and as far as I know there aren’t any alternatives out there to it. I did see a post about using WordPress plugins to replicate the service, but I have to admit that I would prefer the feeds to be through FeedBurner because the traffic from the feed fetchers is going to their servers and not the one my site is hosted on.

Another product that is ubiquitous is YouTube - they’re owned by Google as well, and as you all will know are the major clearinghouse for videos on the web. There are alternatives to it, and there are definitely advantages to each site, and the content is different on all the sites. Here’s just a small taste of the sites that I have used a bit -

There are also other niche sites for videos, but they’re really “gray market” stuff, which really shouldn’t be mentioned in the open; I’ll just say that I get some really nice videos (and no, they’re not pr0n, I’ve seen other sites that let you download free pr0n tho…maybe i should download some :lol: :twisted: ) from there. If you’re interested in auto racing, Aussie/NZ TV or UK TV, you probably know these sites ;)

Another service that Google provides are the Google Alerts - I don’t know of an alternative to it either; if you do, definitely feel free to leave a comment.

Below is a list of a lot of links. These are some of the best articles that are out there about the recent goings-on by Google:

I’d like to hear your opinion - am I less of a person for not boycotting Google totally? They don’t receive any money from me, and compared to a lot of people, I don’t give them a lot of traffic (as it is I block Adsense ads, and most other ads for that matter). I’m also not a shareholder, so I have no financial stake in them. To them, I’m just another IP and another cookie, and not much else.

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How-to: Move from Google Reader to Bloglines

By Sephyroth on November 14, 2007 at 8.41 pm · Filed under blog, google, how to, nablopomo, tech

So, the other day, I got a question from Snoskred about switching Google Reader feeds from one account to another. However, thanks to her PageRank being lowered, she’s done with them and wanted to move over to a different feed reader, namely Bloglines. As is the case, I go and find out how to do it, and then come back with how to do it, and I’m sharing it with all y’all. ;)

Step 1: Export your Google Reader Subscriptions

The first thing that you have to do in order to change your reader over is to get a list of the current subscriptions you have now. In Google Reader, it is fairly simple to do that. Starting from the page you see when you log in, click on Settings.

Click Settings.

Once in the Settings screen, you then click on Import/Export, and then on Export your subscriptions as an OPML file. Really, there is no need to worry about what an OPML file is, other than a file that lists your subscriptions in a format that is readable by most sites.

Settings. Where to click.

When you click on the Export link, a new window or tab will open, and you should be asked to safe the file. Put it in a folder that you will remember, such as your desktop or your Inbox folder, if you’re following an organized desktop plan :)

Step 2: Importing to Bloglines

Admittedly, it’s not the easiest thing to do when you go to import your old subscriptions for the first time, but now that I found it, I can say that it is quite easy to do. Here’s how. I’m going to assume that you’ve already signed up for Bloglines and have been to the Feeds screen at least once.

When you’re in the Feeds page, to start the import process, click on the Edit link in the left panel

Bloglines feed screen

Here, simply click on the Import Subscriptions link.

Bloglines edit

Now, the right panel will change to allow you to upload your recently-exported subscription list. Click Browse to bring up a window that lets you search for the file. You should start out in the same folder you just used, however, if you don’t, you should remember where you saved it.

Bloglines import

When you’ve got the file selected, click Import, and Bloglines will automatically go through the list, and import your feeds and maintain the folders you have put them in. When it’s finished, you will see a list of all the feeds that were imported, which looks something like this -

Imported feeds

That’s it. You can now go back to the feeds screen and see the following sight:

Eek! 16,113 unread items!

If you’re interested (or haven’t put your mouse over the image ;) ), there are 16,113 unread items there. That’s a quirk of Bloglines - when you import feeds to there, it picks up the first 200 items for every feed that are available to them. Almost none of these items are from anytime in the recent past - for example, I found posts from ProBlogger from over a year ago, and from other blogs from almost two years ago.

Luckily, when you’re reading through, you don’t have to load every item, rather you can simply click on each folder and mark it read, and if you are good at going quickly through a list of things, it should take no more than a few seconds.

Hints and Tips for Bloglines

The first thing that you will notice about Bloglines is that it does mark everything read when you click on the feed or folder. If you want to save something for later, there is a small checkbox in the bottom right of every entry called “Keep New:” - if you click that, it will keep that entry for you for the next time you load that feed or folder.

Another important thing to note about Bloglines is that they have a limit (in the current version) of 200 items per feed; that means that if you have a feed that updates quite regularly, then it won’t pick up more than the first 200 items since you last looked at the feed.

A glimpse into the future

Note in the last paragraph, I mentioned “current version.” There is a current Beta out for Bloglines, and here is a sneak preview of it (note that this is with my main Bloglines account so it doesn’t have the imported blogs in there, yet).  There are a lot of really sweet ideas that you may want to explore, such as being able to put your most favorite blogs on the front page of the site and be able to move them around.

Future == Fun

To check the beta out, go here and sign in with your username for Bloglines.

Over to you

Is there anything you’d like me to have a how-to put together for? All it takes is asking; just go ahead and send me a note via my contact page, and I’ll be happy to do it. :)

Also, if you’re a user of both readers, or are partial to one or the other (or like something else, such as NetVibes or Thunderbird), have a say in the comments. :)

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Google Reader & Blogrolls - There’s Room for Improvement

By Sephyroth on November 9, 2007 at 8.15 am · Filed under geeky, google, nablopomo, tech

Obviously there are a lot of things that we all use from day to day which come from Google, but that doesn’t mean that everything they do is something we should be jumping up and down and running towards.

A couple of weeks ago, Matt Cutts opened up a Poll on Google Reader Features that his readers (and all of you) would like to see added to the program. Honestly, there is only one thing that I see which would be of use - drag and drop to rearrange feeds.

Not surprisingly, it’s the second most popular option. One of the most interesting items on the list of suggestions Matt has on his list is “Let me click to rename feeds”. Apparently there are a lot of people who haven’t made use of an already built-in function of Google Reader - Subscription options. Right in there is this strange option - Rename subscription.

One thing that I swear that there wasn’t much overwhelming demand for was having the ability to create a blogroll from your list of subscriptions. However, they’ve gone and done just that. If you look at the post where the developer mentions it, you’ll see that he’s using it.

I don’t mean this as a criticism of him personally, as I have as many, or possibly more, blogs in my reader, but the thing I notice is that the blogroll is quite long, and could use a way of putting it into a div that would scroll in the page. In fact, it extends a full 4,000 pixels beyond the end of the content.

The other thing that I notice is how it doesn’t integrate with the rest of the page very well. I know that there are javascript blogrolls that will pick up the page’s preexisting CSS and fit in with the rest of the page. Unfortunately, this widget doesn’t do that, rather opting for a style which, and I think this is a partially good thing, somewhat screams Google.

No, it’s not the poor integration with the site it’s hosted on, or even the fact that it’s a javascript-based element (it makes sense considering that your reader is a flexible thing, so products produced based on it would need to be fluid). The thing that gets me is the complexity of the code.

Snoskred pointed me to a link about this new feature on TechCrunch. She made the observation that this should make grabbing the HTML from a blogroll easier than how we do it now - manually making the links and updating the sidebars.

Let us take a look at an entry in a couple of blogrolls. The first is from one of the bigger Blogrolling blogrolls out there, the Blogger Chicks blogroll. Because of how big it is, it’s set up to have a scrollbar, but what I didn’t expect was that it is set up as a table. This is the code for one line of the blogroll -

<tr class="blogroll_tr"><td class="blogroll_td"><a href="http://www.expired-convictions.com/" target="_blank" title="Last updated: 04:18:46 [GMT] on Saturday, September 29″>Expired Convictions</a></td></tr>

It’s fairly simple, and you can easily extract the information you need - the linking code. Now, for comparison, here is the code for one line — yes, just one line — of the blogroll listed on TechCrunch -

<li style="border: medium none ; margin: 0pt; padding: 0.4em 0pt; background: transparent none repeat scroll 0%; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial; text-align: left; text-indent: 0pt; text-decoration: none; font-weight: normal; list-style-type: none;"><a style="border-style: none none solid; border-color: -moz-use-text-color -moz-use-text-color rgb(151, 224, 122); border-width: medium medium 1px; margin: 0pt; padding: 0pt; background: transparent none repeat scroll 0%; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial; text-align: left; text-indent: 0pt; text-decoration: none; font-weight: normal; color: rgb(88, 191, 47);" class="i" title="CenterNetworks - Social Media News, Opinions and Insights" href="http://www.centernetworks.com">CenterNetworks - Social Media News, Opinions and Insights</a></li>

Again, that is just one line of display. In numbers for geeky types like me, the Blogrolling listing is 207 characters long, and the Google listing is 963 characters long. Before some statistician starts jumping up and down to tell me that I’m not using a full statistical sample, I know that and that I’m sure that the numbers would be different depending on the actual length of the address and name of the blog. However, if you have, say, 50 blogs on your blogroll, using the numbers above, that leads to an extra 37,800 bytes to the load every single person viewing your site has to download. It may not seem like much, especially with broadband being so omnipresent, but over time it does add up.

Not only that, it makes grabbing the HTML quite difficult. The one redeeming feature is that the title and the href properties are right next to each other, at the end of the a tag. However, it’s not the simplest thing to get accomplished.

Some Suggestions

Since this is Google, they’re fairly responsive to suggestions, for the most part, there’s always a great amount of suggestions that people have. Andy Beard has brought up a suggestion about opening up feed lists for wider use. One of Google’s engineers has mentioned that you can get this information, but right now it’s not fully optimized. I don’t think it will take too long for that to get sorted.

I also have a couple of things that, if some Googler would like to maybe take it up and make them options.

Post Time

One of the things that I like about Bloglines is that it will tell you what time the post was made on the blog. However, in Google Reader, you’re told the time that the post was picked up by Reader. It’s a minor pedantic point, but it’s one worth mentioning.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’d rather have the time on the post reflect when it was made instead of, in the instance of some feeds, a bunch of posts all “posted” at the same time.

Rename Tags

While you can easily rename subscriptions, renaming tags is an arduous process. To change the name of a tag, you have to go through the following procedure:

  1. Make a new tag
  2. Assign all subscriptions from the old tag to the new tag
  3. Unassign all subscriptions from the old tag
  4. Delete the old tag

It’s a major hassle, and one which I’ve not taken the time to do. However, I can’t see why you can’t simply go into the Settings, and under Tags, rename the tag. You can do that in Gmail, I can’t see why you can’t in Reader.

Over to you

What suggestions do you have for Google Reader, or for that matter any Google product? Feel free to leave a comment; if you haven’t commented before, it will be held for moderation, and should appear within a few hours of posting.

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How much control does Google have over us?

By Sephyroth on October 4, 2007 at 11.14 am · Filed under blog, google

I know that, as a blogger, I am quite dependent upon Google for giving me traffic. If you were to look at my referrer logs since the start, I’d venture to guess that about 95% of all search engine traffic that has come here has been from Google.

So, it concerns me when I see posts about people getting penalized by Google for seemingly small mistakes. The first one that I saw was Leigh, whose allforwomen.com.au site was penalized after making a mistake with a server file, causing Google to drop her site from the top of common keywords people used to get to the site.

More recently, David Airey had a similar experience when his site was penalized for using the wrong type of redirect on one of his domains. When he first found out the news about the penalty, he had thought it was because of paid links, and herein comes the big irony.

If you have used Google’s Webmaster Tools, you will have certainly seen the link that says you can dob in people who have paid links. I’m not sure if they themselves are aware of it, but the last time I checked, they sold paid links and you see them literally all over the place. You know, Ads by Goooooogle (or however many o’s they have put in there; I wouldn’t know, I block adsense ads, along with a lot of other ads and annoying elements of webpages).

Has anyone ever tried to report a page that has Adsense installed for paid links? Certainly those have to be just as “despised” as paid links that appear in other forms - such as plain text, which seems to be the type of link that Google have a problem with.

For that matter, what about just about every major commercial website? Take, for example, The New York Times’ webpage. They have ads there, yet rank first for new york paper, new york times, have high rankings for other New York news related searches. In fact, they even buy ads from Google for their home delivery service. How is it possible that someone hasn’t reported them for having paid links?

Take a look at their front page, as it appeared this morning and tell me there aren’t any paid links on there…

However, you never hear about them having “Google penalties” - it always seems to be bloggers who take the brunt of Google’s judgments. Is there something that these major corporations are doing right that us “little guys” are doing wrong?

Does the fact that there are a lot of bloggers who have started making money using their blogs have something to do with these reports? Could it also be that this has something to do with the lost PageRank update as well?

Whither PageRank?

I know that this has been in the echo chamber for quite a while now, but Google have not updated their much-touted PageRank system in well over five or six months. Recently, in a post on the popular DigitalPoint forums, one of Google’s engineers, Matt Cutts (whose blog I read, incidentally), said to not expect a PageRank update for some time.

Since then, there has been post after post after post after post, jumping up and down saying “OMGWTFBBQ!!! TEH GOOGLEZ DESTROYING THE PAGERANK!!!!111″, using the post on DigitalPoint (though ironically not linking to it) by Matt as some sort of evidence that they are going to move away from PageRank. The catch is that almost every system used to make money through blogging uses PageRank as a criterion for the importance of your page.

I know that I have been waiting and waiting for them to get their backsides in gear to update the PageRank so that my site (and quite a few others which have started up or changed locations since the last update) will be able to stand on something other than the Alexa ranking and other measures of a blog’s worthiness.

The most interesting thing about the update is that, while everyone is running around almost like Chicken Little saying that the sky is falling, you don’t hear anything from Google at all, other than that one comment by Matt, made almost a month ago. It would seem that the blogging world lives or dies based on the comments of one or two people.

Personally, I think some of the best advice on how to handle the delayed update was given by Darren from Problogger, who made the observation, in a video post, that you shouldn’t worry about it and just go out there and make money in other ways. Even before he came out with that advice, I’ve gone to two sites where I was given a good ranking for this domain, despite having a PageRank of 0 - blogsvertise and sponsoredreviews.

So, how much control do they have?

I hate to answer a question with a question, but how many of their services do you use? I know that I use a lot of their services, so they probably have a lot of information about me, whether or not I know about it. They know what RSS feeds I subscribe to, what I search for (however, they don’t know what I click on because I’ve done one of the best things you can do for privacy - turned Web History off), who I email, what I blog about.

As someone who is hosted on their Blogger service, I also am dependent on them for hosting my site reliably, which it has been for quite a while, save for a few incidents where the service went down for various reasons. As I mentioned a while ago, because of being on Blogger, I don’t have control over the management of my own domain, a lesson that I had a firm reminder of when they decided to change my robots.txt without even a mention of it in their Blogger Buzz blog, or a notice to all users.

If you’re a user of their Adsense product, then you are aware that they have control over the money you earn - not so much the amount you make, but where you have to do everything by the book, lest you lose your adsense account, and however much money you have already legitimately earned from the ads you had on your site. If this were any other normal business arrangement, you would be entitled to most or all of your earnings that you had before being removed, yet Google have made it so that they keep your money.

How in the world can that be good for anyone? I’m sure that Google don’t need to keep the money.

Over to you

What do you think about Google’s control over our world? Are you affected by not having PageRank updated?

Have you been impacted by a “penalty” in the past?

Have your say in the comments, all views are welcome. :)

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