China and Walmart RFID Haved Problems

Nice news for the Christmas time !

TalkDigger : A New Meta Meme Tool

This is one of the best tools to track conversation about a specific URL. This URL can be a blog post, a news story, a product page, whatever you want to find what people on the web say about it.

Talkdigger will look in thoses sites (Technorati, Google Blog, Bloglines, Feedster, BlogDigger, Icerocket, MSN Search, Google, Yahoo!) to see who is linking to it. It will show you all it can find on thoses sites with a PageRank meter associate to each entry. You can also generate a RSS feed to keep track of your URL in your aggregator. A really cool new tool. The only little problem, for now, is the UTF8 characters parsing in some site.

Videotron DNS and Google/Gmail have Problems

UPDATE 26 december: Seem to been a DNS server problem from our ISP. It should be a good idea for Google to provide on the help page the IP numbers of Gmail.


For the last 24 hours I don't have any access to my Gmail account. Here is what I saw :


I have access to Gmail static pages subdomain without problem, the dynamic one's are very slow to load sometimes and with some other time, will not load at all. No way to access my Gmail account ! The only way to see something is to log on my Google Personalyze homepage, to saw only the header of the new messages I received but can't full read thoses. Frustrating !

I leave message on the gmail forum and I also use the troubleshooting form to tell my problem. I received at my ISP email address this automatic reply email :

Hello,

Thanks for taking the time to send us your report. Please consult our technical issue help pages at: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/request.py?troubleshoot=1&ctx=troubleshoot
for guided assistance with the problem you're experiencing. Just click 'Invitations/Registration' or 'Login/Account Access' to begin the process.


If your browser gets stuck on 'Loading' when you log in to Gmail, please visit the following link to troubleshoot the issue:
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=8767.

If you can't access your account, please disable any Internet security or
personal firewall software installed on your computer for troubleshooting
purposes. Then, clear your browser's cache, and try logging in to Gmail.
If you are still unable to access your account, please respond to this
message, and include answers to the questions provided at the end of this
message. We'll then be able to investigate the issue, and assist you
further.

We're sorry, but we can't respond to inquiries regarding feature requests
and feedback. Please know that your comments are important to us, and we
read each individual message. All suggestions, feedback, and feature
requests are forwarded to the appropriate teams. Thanks for helping us
make improvements to Gmail.

Sincerely,

The Gmail Team

---------------------------------
1) When are you encountering difficulties? Are you receiving any specific
error messages?

2) How often does this occur? Is this your first time you've seen this
problem or has it been a consistent issue?

3) What operating system are you using? Example: MAC 9.2.1.

4) What browser version are you using? Please specify the exact version.
(In Internet Explorer, use 'About Internet Explorer' in the Help menu; in
Netscape, use 'About Communicator,' also in the Help menu.)

5) Do you have any Internet security, firewall, anti-virus or pop-up
blocking software installed? If so, which application(s)?

6) Do you have any browser extensions or toolbars installed?

7) If applicable, please include the full message header for each message
affected by this issue. To display full headers, open your message, and
click 'More Options' next to the recipient(s') name(s). Click 'Show
original.' Copy and paste the contents of the new browser window in to
your reply email. If you do not wish to include the text of the affected
email message, please be sure that you paste the entirety of all other
information listed above.

------
If you'd like to view more Gmail troubleshooting tips, check out the Gmail
Help Discussion to see what's worked for other users:
http://groups.google.com/group/Gmail-Problem-solving?lnk=lr
------

Did this email resolve your issue?

If yes, please click here:
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/request.py?survey=2&ctx=14351y
If no, please click here:
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/request.py?survey=1&ctx=14351n

The problem is I can't access your *$#%$??#$@* links in your email !!! I saw no other easy way to communicate with Gmail, -no phone number-, and it's not a browser/cookies issue because I try the same with IE.

I start to thing it was a very bad idea to promote my Gmail address as my main email ! I also saw a few folks who have also problems with Gmail in forum and a few with Google too. It's not a very nice Christmas gift for us :-(

Brin and Page Men's of the Year

The Financial Times have proclamed Sergey Brin and Larry Page men's of the year. As I mentionned last week, Google is just behind IBM for the market capitalization of Goog.

Copernic Acquisition by Mamma : Finally Done !

The montreal search engine Mamma.com finally acquired Copernic for $15.9M US. Mamma will also release $2.38M stock option to complete the transaction.

From the Montreal french news site LaPresseAffaires (req sub).
Update: Globe and Mail article

Joyeux Noel à Martin nouveau papa ;-)

Technorati Tags: mamma, copernic, acquisition

Google Zeitgeist 2005

The 2005 edition is out and is revealing a small bit of *ours* search habits. Here's what's get my attention :

• The biggest lie (WMD) of the 21 century (for now Georges) get his peek,- hohoho surprise -, in the US Election Campaign.
• Major Disasters, if not located in US or are not a vacation destination, don't make it !
• A good news finally at the end of the year : The Wiki got a great progression.

GMaps Pedometer : Google Maps Distance and more

GMaps Pedometer is not only a good tool to calculate distance (and burned calories) between points in North America, it is also using a more detail map layer than Google Local/Google Maps.

It seem to use the Destination Gazetteer layer of Maplandia, wich provide a lot more information on small place, specially for small place. Here is the comparison of Google Maps/Local and Gmaps-Pedometer at the same zoom level :

GOOG Still in a Good Mood

A new breaking day ! And the market cap will soon overtake IBM !

Web Site Traffic and Bots

The fight against undesirable bots at WebMasterworld seem to be win. After a 40% traffic lost, Brett seem to correct the problem with the help of the SE folks and a few other dudes. Note the WMW Robots.txt still blocking all the bots from crawling the site.

Low posting this week

Here why :



It was hard to find my car where my portable was ;-)

Technorati Explore : Watch for the splogs

Technorati have launched a new service called Explore to find out what bloggers are saying right now on any topic. But my first try give me some splog (spam blogs) at the top results :-(

Technorati Tags: explore, technorati

First TV Commercial for Google

After word-of-mouth and a bit of viral marketing, the 1998 company of a few employes who is now a $100 billion market capitalization with more than 5,000 have make a significant change in his marketing strategy with a TV commercial. I,m glad they choose a PBS's science program for the first air (QuickTime Mov) !

More on the excellent MediaPost Online Daily

Alexa Web Search Platform : Only a new packaging !

Humm, may be John should get a little less excited. Alexa and the WayBack machine was doing that vertical search for a while and for free. I remember also around 2002 they have set a free and public vertical search for a couple of days. They also selling vertical data set on DVD since 2001-2002. And, like Danny says, they are plenty of other free solutions to do that, and thoses seem less complicated to use.

Tags: alexa, wayback machine, vertical,search

China : Tracking versus Internet

Funny to see those two news published today :

1. The first Internet addiction themed television show in China will soon be aired to show teenage viewers the horrors of using the Internet too much.
2. Chinese LF RFID market is mature both in terms of industry chain and market applications. LF RFID has been widely applied in low-end markets such as campuses, internet cafes and access control applications.

Google and the SEO World

This post, from Google software engineer Matt Cutts, who act as a spam and black hat detective in the Googleplex, is very informative on what are the good and bad techniques on the SEO profession. I also loved his sense of humor ;-)

Tags: seo, spam, black hat,matt cutts,

Google Earth Mac Version is Coming Soon

For peoples who can't wait the official release, this link out there to grab-it.

Yahoo acquired Del.icio.us

After Flickr, Yahoo get another tagging site.

Podcast : The Word of 2005

The New Oxford American Dictionary choose "Podcast" for the Word of the Year.

• September 28, 2004 : 24 results in Google
• September 28, 2005 : 63,800,000 results in Google
• December 6, 2005 : 78,100,000 results

The Ten Golden Rules of Google

Eric Schmidt and Hal Varian talk about how the coordination and communication works at Google.

Copernic Acquisition by Mamma : Postponed Again

The saga continue with the acquisition of Copernic by the Mamma. The definitive agreement closing is now acheduled for before or no later than december 31st, 2005.

Google Candy Cane for Christmas

Google separate organic results from Adwords with a candy cane for a few word like Christmas, Candy canes, mints.

Via ZorGlob.

Grease Monkey Extension to Add Ordinal Numbers in Results

Nice little Google extension for Firefox and GreaseMonkey who work even with Firefox 1.5 and GreaseMonkey 0.6.4.

A little blog's post can cause huge damage

Here the story by Mediapost on a bad shopping experience who result in a delisting of the company in Yahoo and PriceGrabber and revealed a problem on the reliability of merchant rating. The online store is now unreachable ! The original post is here .

Why dissallowing Google Base to main SERP's

Google Base to be another Froogle

Sorry for Google Base team, but I'm pretty sure that Google Base will never lift up. As I mention in that post, the site lack of thoses elements:

1. If the upcoming Google Base will allow in a near future the possibility of GUI (graphic template to be add to dataset)
2. If the data is well integrated in the SERP's (search engine results page)
3. If they avoid major bugs in deployment
4. If they can avoid spammers (were the Captcha ?)
5. If it include a payment system (Google Purchases or Google Wallet)
6. If it have a well developed Google Base API

Since that, even the deployment have problem with point 3 with the porn/adult and casino spammers.

Also this week, Google have put a final nail in point number 2, by blocking Google Base in his main index using a Disallow: /base in his Robots.txt !!!

Why dissallowing Google Base to main SERP's ? If I make a query to find a bike nearby for my girlfriend, I will use Google first... And found a Craigslist entry in first spot!


Technorati Tags: google base, Craigslist, Google Base Disallow