Archive for Blog
October 23, 2006 at 7:44 am · Categorised under Blog
Tesco has launched a new online site in a bid to capture some of the Internet market share that they have lost to brands such as Amazon, Empire Direct and others. However, the site I’ve found doesn’t seem to render properly under Firefox compared to IE. Check this page out to see how it renders in Firefox. It is designed much like other modern web sites with bright colours and lots of white space. It also has a RSS feed attached to it that contains the "Deal of the day".
For those who don’t know how big Tesco are, they take approximately £1 in every £8 spent in the UK. In other words they account for a huge proportion of the UK’s sales. I think they turned in profits of approx £2 Billion last year (which is about $4 Billion). The more competition the better I say.
· Posted by Utills
October 18, 2006 at 6:17 pm · Categorised under Blog
Mihai of the Google Reader team and of persistent.info has written a cool Greasemonkey script to integrate Google Reader with Gmail . One of the problems I have with it is that it doesn’t let you select a specific label from the GUI. It is possible to modify the script so that you can either view the entire interface or so that it selects just one label. However to select another label you would have to manually edit the script.
However, I’ve found a better way to do it. Just press “g t” when using the reader and a box containing your labels will pop up. You will have to use the arrow keys to navigate, and then press return to select the label you want. Using the shortcut “g a” will take you back to all items.
Update: In fact all of these shortcuts can be used (using 1 and 2 will switch between list and expanded view):
Here are some useful keyboard shortcuts:
- j/k: next/previous item
- space/shift + space: next/previous item or page
- n/p: scan down/up (list only)
- o/enter: expand/collapse (list only)
- s: star item
- shift + s: share item
- v: view original
- t: tag item
- m: mark item as read
- r: refresh
- u: toggle full screen mode
- shift + a: mark all as read
- 1: switch to expanded view
- 2: switch to list view
- shift + n/p: next/previous subscription
- shift + x: expand folder
- shift + o: open subscription or folder
- g then h: go home
- g then a: go to all items
- g then s: go to starred items
- g then t: open tag selector
- g then u: open subscription selector
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· Posted by Utills
October 18, 2006 at 5:35 pm · Categorised under Blog
· Posted by Utills
October 18, 2006 at 4:51 pm · Categorised under Blog
Something that surprised me when Google released Google Docs and Spreadsheets was that there was no Google Notebook contained in the package. One of the simplest functions of the Google Docs is to use it to create simple notes, shopping lists and other non-professional documents that serve as a virtual scratchpad.
Google Notebook is designed with these users in mind and so it would be logical to place the notebook into the web application. The interface of the Google Office itself somewhat resembles Google Notebook and so would probably not require too much work to integrate the two together.
I think that Google have a broad range of products at the moment and just need to be able to create those synergies that make a website a place to stay rather than a place to visit. Gmail is an excellent example of this in that I usually just keep Gmail open in my browser all the time. Also with the new Greasemonkey script that integrates Google Reader with Gmail, I no longer need to have Google Reader open as I can see from the small "Feed" node how many unread feeds there are.
In terms of grouping Google’s products together I see the following groups:
Communications/Organisation
- Gmail
- Google Calendar
- Google Reader
- Google Talk / Chat
- Google Groups (maybe)
Productivity
- Google Docs
- Google Spreadsheets
- Google Notebook
Web Stuff
- Google PageCreator
- Google Analytics
- Google Webmaster Tools
- Google Adwords
- Google Adsense
Personal Files (not yet exploited enough)
- Picasa
- Google Video (more public oriented)
- Google Drive ?
- Google Audio ?
That leaves things to do with search such as Google Maps, Froogle, Google Co-op, Google Base and Google Groups, etc which all obviously are to be integrated with the main search functionality.
· Posted by Utills
October 18, 2006 at 4:27 pm · Categorised under Blog
Cool Flash advert about perpendicular drives. [via InsideGoogle]
· Posted by Utills
October 18, 2006 at 1:03 am · Categorised under Blog
GigaOM writes about the lack of ads for Audio/Video by Google. They are the king of ads for text but nothing has really developed in the so called “rich media” environment of audio/podcasts and video clips(henceforth to be called media). Many companies seem to be focusing on writing software to recognise speech, fingerprint videos, and a whole host of other adsense for rich media programs.
However, I disagree with this approach. Sure you may get some extra information from the video or audio file that you eventually will watch when you visit the site, but you have to ask yourself how often do I blindly visit a site knowing nothing about what is contained in the file and then go forth and consume the media? Very unlikely right! Well that’s because we generally infer things from our environment or context. We know the gist of what is going to be contained in the media before actually view it due not only to how we find it but the context around the content.
YouTube is probably a very easy place to advertise on. The best thing about YouTube as many have written about is not the technology, it is the community. In a paper for a module last year I wrote about how a company in this day and age needs to add value to their site to bring people back without making them jump through hoops. I talked about eBuyer as a classic example of a site that does this. Their excellent rating and review system that in some respect dictates the health of a product is both a convincer to buy the item and also a source of after sales assistance for technical problems. YouTube also adds value to their videos.
The community of YouTube have not only tagged/labelled the videos very well but also the comments beneath the videos are excellent for inferring a context. Get someone to load a random popular video and just show you the comments and you’ll find that it is more or less a few key phrases that will have you understanding the content of the video straight away.
Therefore, Google can easily use all of this information to build up a map of how to base their current text based adsense on a site that just contains tags, names of videos, categorisation and comments. Furthermore, Google can use the videos on YouTube to try and create a relationship map between videos, people, categories and link all these to video and text adverts.
For example, there are many sports based clips on YouTube that are very easy to target. Now the word football has different meanings depending on which sport we are talking about. Google would use all of the surrounding contextual info such as the title of the video which invariably contains a team name or the comments that will have player names or different score systems to infer what type of sport is being talked about. Then they can easily link to text based stories on the web such as Newspapers, TV channels that show sports, and perhaps even a sponsored video paid for by someone like Sky for example to showcase their legit service on their site.
The trick is to vary ads as much as possible so users notice them, however, without forcing the issue that it becomes an annoyance.
· Posted by Utills
October 17, 2006 at 11:57 am · Categorised under Blog
Predators caught by digging into MySpace and cross checking against external databases. [Wired]
· Posted by Utills
October 17, 2006 at 11:18 am · Categorised under Blog
Haven’t blogged for ages. Hopefully will be blogging much more
frequently in the coming weeks. Just a test message using the email
post that Blogger offers.
· Posted by Utills
January 23, 2006 at 8:39 pm · Categorised under Blog
CNet reports that The British Parliament was attacked by Chinese hackers trying to exploit the WMF vulnerability.
The emails were individually tailored and pretended to come from a Governmental organisation. Spammers are trying harder everyday. The more information they gather on us through spyware, the easier they can beat spam filters since most spam filters work on the premise that spam and genuine email read completely differently and can be told apart easily by a human.
Btw..has anyone noticed Gmail’s spam filter faultering lately. Its been letting quite a few spam emails into my inbox and it also produced a false positive the other day.
· Posted by Utills
January 23, 2006 at 8:19 pm · Categorised under Blog
I am starting to experiment with simple one sentence long posts linking to stuff that I have been reading about but doesn’t really deserve sitting down and pouring my thoughts out. I think it will make this blog much fresher as it will be updated on a far more regular basis. The theme will however stay the same, with most topics being about Google, Firefox, gadgets and random tech or comp sci stuff.
I will of course migrate the whole thing to a del.ico.us style linkblog in the future, however, for the time being I want to leave the links open to simple thoughts from myself. In this way I can perhaps maintain the blog even when I am very busy during the week.
· Posted by Utills
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