Planet Google

The Register: Googlebooks re-deal won't let orphans go

Revised pact frees foreign works (UK excepted)

Google and its fellow parties in the ongoing Google Book Search case have released a revised incarnation of their proposed settlement, as they attempt to win court approval of the controversial pact.…

The power of collaboration within unified communications

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Slashdot: Russian Whistleblower Cop On YouTube

Planet Google

Planet Google presents :: AHuxley notes series of YouTube videos that have gone viral in Russia, in which senior police officer Alexei Dymovsky — in full uniform — details police corruption and calls on Vladimir Putin to act. "[Dymovsky says:] 'Maybe you don't know about us, about simple cops, who live and work and love their work. I'm ready to tell you everything. I'm not scared of my own death. I will show you the life of cops in Russia, how it is lived, with all the corruption and all the rest – with ignorance, rudeness, recklessness, with honest officers killed because they have stupid bosses.' His series of three 2-to-7-minute long videos released over the past week have together garnered 1 million hits on YouTube, and have spread across Russia. Dymovsky was promptly fired after the clips spread across the Internet, and a local prosecutor has opened an investigation into libel. An interior ministry source accused him of working for foreign agents and hinted that the format of Dymovsky's complaint was a problem, using a medium that remains largely free of government control." It's best to visit the Global Post link with NoScript and Flashblock enabled. Here's a Google cache link in case it's needed.

Digg: My Nightmare Interviews With Google

Planet Google presents :: A girl struggles with her initial Google interview

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Slashdot: Google Files a Revised Books Settlement Proposal

Planet Google

Planet Google presents :: At 14 minutes to midnight last night, Google, the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers filed a revised settlement agreement with a US district court in New York. Here is the blog post of Dan Clancy, Google Books engineering director. Google has provided an outline of the differences from the original settlement (PDF) and a FAQ (PDF); the full revised settlement (PDF) is also available. In brief, the changes include limiting the settlement to books published in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia; a court-appointed fiduciary to represent the rights of orphaned works' (undiscovered) rightsholders; and further opening up Google's library to competitors in ways that don't favor Google. The new plan was immediately criticized as a "sleight of hand" by the Open Book Alliance, a consortium of Google's opponents including Microsoft and Amazon. The Internet Archive said, "None of the proposed changes appear to address the fundamental flaws illuminated by the Department of Justice and other critics that impact public interest."

Googling Google: Is imminent Chrome OS launch reckless?

Planet Google

Planet Google presents :: It sounds like Google will be releasing an early version of their Chrome OS sometime this week -- that leads us to a question of whether anybody will use the new operating system, and if they do, will they like it?

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eWeek: Dell Mini 3 Smartphone, with Android, Headed for China, Brazil

Planet Google presents :: Dell officially introduced its Mini 3 smartphone, which will run Googles Android operating system, and announced that the Mini 3 will arrive this year on the China Mobile network and Brazils Claro. An AT T version for the U.S. is expected.
- U.S. carriers may have passed on a Dell smartphone, but the computer-maker-cum-smartphone-maker announced on Nov. 13 that it had found two new partners: China Mobile and Brazils Claro. Dell confirmed its entrance into the smartphone business in the past, Michael Dell has discussed explori...

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Joanthan Dingman: How Fast is Your Site? It Will Soon Matter.

Planet Google

Planet Google presents :: During Pubcon Vegas, Matt Cutts hinted at a potential new algorhiym factor for 2010. Site speed. For sites that already do this, such as this one, there’s nothing to worry about. But for those sites that taken 30 seconds+ to load, you really need to begin considering caching and other like functionality to speed [...]

Blogged on Google News by Jonathan Dingman © Fireside Media
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How Fast is Your Site? It Will Soon Matter.

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Digg: Hey, Google! There's Another Programming Language Called Go!

Planet Google presents :: When you're a huge web company, and you choose a name for something as important as a new programming language, you should take great care to investigate.......................

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eWeek: Facebook Case Sets Up Google Latitude as Tempting Legal Tool

Planet Google presents :: The exoneration of a Brooklyn teenager with the help of a timely Facebook status update has sparked interest in social networking tools as evidence for law enforcement officials and litigators. This could heighten interest in Google Latitude Location History, an opt-in feature that lets users store where they've been. Yet the fact that Google is now storing location history has privacy advocates such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation concerned about what sort of protection Google will offer Latitude users in the case of legal compliance.
- News Analysis: Defense attorneys everywhere are high-fiving in the wake of a Brooklyn teenager's acquittal over robbery charges when it was learned the teen had posted a status update on Facebook from his home computer during the crime. And with that, proponents of Facebook, Twitter...

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Search Engine Journal: Google Analytics Now Tracks Feed Item Clicks

Planet Google

Planet Google presents ::

Google Analytics has just added AdSense for Feeds and Google Feedburner data to the items it monitors and analyzes. So, if you are using either of the two tools for feed advertising, you can now see how far your ad implementation are doing in terms of item clicks. Google Analytics will even provide you with additional information that may help you understand who Feedburner gives more traffic to your sites.

If you’re using AdSense for Feeds of Google Feedburner, the new feature will also help you classify links through tagging the source as – “Feedburner”, the medium as the channel by which feeds are sent, that is either as “feed” or “email.” The content of your feeds will of course be classified as the actual endpoint application in which users are viewing your feed contents. This could either be through Google Reader, Yahoo mail and others. You can see this data on your Google Analytics account under All Traffic Sources view.

If you have enabled item click tracking on your Google Analytics Account, your item URLS are being automatically tagged with the Google Analytics parameters.

If you haven’t sign up for Google Analytics, now is perhaps the best time to do it. Things can get pretty exciting with RSS feed advertising.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
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Google Analytics Now Tracks Feed Item Clicks

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Search Engine Journal: Site Speed May Soon Affect Google Page Ranking

Planet Google

Planet Google presents ::

In a recent interview with Google Engineer Matt Cutts, Web Pro News is reporting that Matt may have hinted on the future of how Google may rank websites. And guess what? It has something to do with how fast a website actually loads.

During the interview Matt told Web Pro News:

“I think a lot of people in 2010 are going to be thinking more about ‘how do I have my site be fast,’ how do I have it be rich without writing a bunch of custom javascript?’”

Of course it is a given that the speed by which your sites load matters a lot to your visitors. Slow loading sites drive away potential visitors while fast loading sites encourage them to stay longer on your site. And this is what Google has been advocating recently – making the Internet experience of users a little bit faster.

It is not yet clear how Google is going to implement site ranking based on site speed, if indeed there is such a plan.

But just in case it pushes through – are you ready for some site speed optimization? SSO side by side with SEO might just be the norm in the coming days, don’t you think so?

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
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Site Speed May Soon Affect Google Page Ranking

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The Register: Acer Aspire One D250 with Android

Planet Google presents ::

The first netbook with Google's OS

Review Installing a second operating system on a PC is nothing new. Plenty of manufacturers have done so before, building a slimline Linux distro into their machines to provide a much more rapid start-up than Windows can manage: full access to the internet within seconds of pressing on power key.…

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BBC: Reading rights

Planet Google presents :: Europe fights Google's book plans

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Wired: Verizon Won't Offer Free Tethering, But Droid Hackers Might

Planet Google

Planet Google presents :: The Droid will be able to do a lot more than Verizon is telling you. All we await is for Google to open Android 2.0's source code, which will enable mods to unlock features such as free tethering, iPhone-like pinching and more.

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LifeHacker: From the Tips Box: Multiple Logins, Firefox Betas, and Electrical Tubes [From The Tips Box]

Planet Google

Planet Google presents ::

Readers offer their best tips for logging into the same site with two accounts at once, running multiple versions of Firefox on the same Mac, and threading wires through long electrical tubes.

Don't like the gallery layout? Click here to view everything on one page.

About the Tips Box: Every day we receive boatloads of great reader tips in our inbox, but for various reasons—maybe they're a bit too niche, maybe we couldn't find a good way to present it, or maybe we just couldn't fit it in—the tip didn't make the front page. From the Tips Box is where we round up some of our favorites for your buffet-style consumption. Got a tip of your own to share? Add it in the comments or email it to tips at lifehacker.com.

Using Multiple Logins at Once

Marc lays out a workaround for logging into the same site more than once:

Just a tip I like to use when managing multiple gmail accounts, flight check-ins, etc. simultaneously.

Instead of logging out of one account and into the other, I open an incognito window in chrome (don't know if this works in ff / ie) and login from there. Not a game-changer, but saves a hassle every now and then...

I tested this in Firefox and it did not work; starting a private browsing session gets rid of all your open windows.

Running a Firefox Beta Alongside a Stable Mac Build

Brad shows us how to run multiple versions of Firefox on one Mac:

It seemed obvious to me, but apparently a lot of people don't know that you can run a release and beta versions of Firefox on the Mac without them overriding each other (a feature the Windows Firefox installer nicely provides).

On Windows, the Firefox installer (quite considerately) won't override existing non-beta versions of the browser with a beta version (like the recently released Firefox 3.6 betas). Though it doesn't explicitly say so, Mac OS X users can have a similar behavior, which by the surprised faces I see when I tell people this, many people don't know about.

It's simple:

1. Grab a Firefox beta download, then mount the disk image
2. Instead of dragging the Firefox app to your Applications folder, drag it to your desktop temporarily
3. Highlight the app on your desktop, hit the return key, and give it a new name (like "Firefox 3.6 Beta")
4. Drag the newly renamed app to your Applications folder

You can then run these two Firefox versions with little interaction between the two. I say ‘little' because they will share the same profile (where your bookmarks, extensions and the like are kept), and so cannot be run at the same time. This has the plus side of meaning you won't have to re-import bookmarks and such, but you will have to sit through a harmless extension compatibility check whenever you start a different version of Firefox than was last run.

You can find Brad's original blog post here.

Easily Thread Cables Through an Electrical Tube

Photo by Rick Heath.

Joost shows us how he gets cables through long electrical tubes:

If you can't get a cable through an empty electricity tube:

Find an audio tape, break it and put an end of the tape in the tube. Put a vacuum cleaner at he other end of the tube, it will drag the tape through the the tube in seconds. Tie the tape to the cable you want to pull through, and pull it through. I've done it several times.

The main idea is to use something lighter than the cable that will actually be pulled by the vacuum—I imagine a piece of string would work just as well, if you're not the type to ruin your music collection.

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Wired: To Play With Giants, App Devs Risk Getting Squashed

Planet Google

Planet Google presents :: Mobile app developers find that there's a risk to being a little guy: Sometimes the corporation that controls the platform, like Google or Apple, will make your app obsolete.

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The Register: Google Docs set for 'get rid of' Office moment

Planet Google presents ::

Only a year away. Says Google

By next year, Google says, its web-happy word processor will be so effective, most enterprises will be able to "get rid of [Microsoft] Office."…

What is your recession sales strategy?

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eWeek: 12 Things to Know About Google's Go Programming Language

Planet Google presents :: Google's new programming language, called Go, took the application development world by storm when the search giant released it Nov. 10. The ambitious technology's pedigree features programming experts from the Unix world, including Ken Thompson, who teamed with Dennis Ritchie to create Unix. Created as a systems programming language to help speed up development of systems inside Google, Go is now viewed as a general-purpose language for Web development, mobile development, addressing parallelism and a lot more.
- Google's new programming language, called Go, took the application development world by storm when the search giant released it Nov. 10. The ambitious technology comes with a pedigree featuring programming experts from the Unix world, including Ken Thompson, who teamed with Dennis Ritchie to cr...

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LifeHacker: The Google Wave Invitation Donation Thread Is Open [Google Wave]

Planet Google

Planet Google presents ::

In our continuing efforts to help as many of our readers get a chance to play around with Google Wave as possible, we're back again with our (now weekly) Google Wave invitation donation thread. Note: Read the entire post carefully before commenting.

If you've got Wave invitations you're willing to donate, post a comment below, saying something like: "I've got 10 Wave invites; who wants one?" In that case, the first ten people to reply to that comment providing that generous soul with a means to invite you get invitations.

Here's the important part:

Do not start a thread unless you have invitations to hand out. These threads get unwieldy very quickly if we don't follow some ground rules. Despite that, we really want to help give our readers a chance to try Wave, so we're giving it a go anyway. Please, please only start a thread if you've got invitations. Don't just post your email address thirty times hoping someone will grab it. If you want an invitation, reply to someone who's offering one. Finally, it takes our interns hours to admin comments every day, and these threads wreak havoc on their efforts, so if you don't already have an approved commenter account, please don't comment on this thread.

Make sense? Good luck, and thanks to everyone who's donating invitations. If you do happen to secure an invitation, be sure to check out The Complete Guide to Google Wave, Gina and Adam's comprehensive, freely available book on Wave.

Note: If you're posting comments but they aren't showing up on the post, that means you are not an approved commenter. How can you become an approved commenter? Read our comment FAQ. In the meantime, please don't post any more comments on this thread asking for invitations if you're not an approved commenter.

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eWeek: Microsoft Bing Now Features Facebook, Twitter, Wolfram Alpha Access

Planet Google presents :: Microsoft announced a broad range of new functionality for Bing, its search engine, on Nov. 11. In addition to incorporating results from Wolfram Alpha, a self-described computational engine that provides a definitive numerical answer to a search query, the revamped Bing offers a more robust video page, with feeds from MSN Video, Hulu and ABC, and more intensive search in categories such as local events and cities. In a sign of the increased importance of social networking to corporations such as Microsoft and Google, Bing has also incorporated Facebook and Twitter into its search features. The following product gallery demonstrates the various tweaks that constitute Bing's unofficial Version 2.0.
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