yowkee essential

Technorati is the most friendly web service to non-English blogger

At the mean time, Technorati should be the best ping service and blog search engine. It has millions of blogs ping to it and doing a good indexing job, except that sometimes you’d still seeing its searching temporary out of service (due to the heavy traffic).

Nevertheless, even if it’s not the best ping service yet, it must be the most friendly towards non-English bloggers. Checking all the other famous blog services and you’d probably notice most of them are English-centric. But Technorati’s doing a good job to normalize the blog-weight, you get to see all different language tag got into the top/hot tags and top search at the hour.

For example, if you do monitoring on the top searching tag/keywords on Technorati, you might find “Microsano” to be a hot keyword today. I was surprised I couldn’t find anything of this word on Google early morning, while I noticed this word at Technorati. Instead, Google was suggesting me if I am looking for “Microsoft”. This’s implicitly telling me if gonna search for any hot event in blogosphere, do go for Technorati first.

Out of curiousity, I’ve check against Google late afternoon and get some result. Via Google’s translation service, it’s translated as “microhealthy”. Not quite knowing what it means. It seem to be some Spanish organization is organizing an event to spot a keyword to be first appear on Google, and pushing it! (well, so this has something to do with Google). Whoever get the top of search result of “Microsano” by March would be rewarded. Interesting idea.

Google Mini

If your company has tons of essential/vital documents stored in the intranet servers, distributed in the various intranet services, wouldn’t you wish to have “local google” site for you googling it? Google’s answer to this particular market demand is its new product Google Mini. As the product name revealed, it’s a shrink down version of Google’s technology. It’d index all your files, providing similar interface as the Google search engine, capibility to view your Word, PDF files as HTML file on browser.…etc.

It’s targetting to small and medium size companies. But I thought only BigCo needed more for such search engine to plug into their existing intranet services (all the huge and sloopy web services recommended by consultants..). Is Google aim at the correct market?

It could be seen as Google’s steps on trying to keep its competency on what it excel — technology. Despites of various web services released over the years (and the buying over products to merge into its web services), trying out different channels with its core technology would be a good go.

Google Analytics reopen its subscription by invitation

If you are still keen to sign-up for Google Analytics, they’ve now giving out accounts by invitation (you have to sign-up first). From its homepage:

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve begun re-opening signups for Google Analytics on an invitation basis. For more information on when you might receive an invitation, please read our Progress Updates page.

We will continue to send out more invitations to sign up as we add additional capacity to Google Analytics. If you’d like an invitation, please submit your e-mail address on our signup page.

Thank you for your patience and for your interest in Google Analytics.

Google Video Store

Google didn’t lay its hand on music selling business, instead, it started with Video. Google Video is now providing paid video content to users. They hook up with groups of provider like CBS, Sony BMG, NBA….for various entertainment video.

That could be pretty convenient if you missed out show of the TV series that you’re following, feel like to watch the NBA game last night that isn’t available at your subscribed channel. Now you could just “google” it. (note: Apple iTMS has certain TV series provided too, I am not sure which having more videos to sell). And people like Joel probably don’t have to ship their Aardvark’d DVD all by themselves, as it’s available here at google video store.

However, it’s controversial that Google has their own DRM used on the google video player — which customer used to play the video they bought. Of course, DRM could be possibly pushed by the content provider. And with DRM doesn’t necessary made Google an evil, as Apple and Microsoft applying that too. The issue is Google used to be technology driven company, and one who has largest control on Internet search market, the proprietary DRM used without revealing any details would bring in the worry.

On top of all that, I am inspiring of some ideas. It might be a good idea that its video store could allow individual to sell self-made video. Think about that, if you are a personal tennis coach, a software engineer, experts in some fields, this is a great chance and direct-channel for people to sell their talent. The video recording technology has evolved to a stage that everybody could record and doing close-to-professional video editing with various tools on market. So a tennis coach might record a series of tennis learning lessons, software developer could produce tons of targeted tutorial videos… It’s kind of podcast but probably video is a market easier for most people to dive in.

Google Services

TipMonkies has an Ultimate Guide to Google Services.

Google isn’t just doing search and ain’t simply giving you that simple plain text box. It has tons of other services related to images, video, book, desktop app, map, blogging, advertisement…and more. Going through the list, except most search related — which basically indexing the contents on web (takes it to be images, video, published papers/books), Google has bought over some other small companies to provide quality image management application (Picasa), desktop search (still about searching, but just a layer up your hard disk), Google Earth (would map info via satellite consider information on web to be indexing?)…

All and all, google is slowly building up whole chunk of technical driven services or application (self-build or bought over). Nevertheless, technology is the core competency of Google. And it ain’t following other old web startup like Yahoo, who target to be the homepage of everybody’s browser and having its own army for media contents (Warner’s style). Google stay focus and grow around its core. That’s good because both has the separation of web market and giving its own different evolving path. These companies’ future is interesting to look out.

Google Base

In the old days, the start of the web crawling activities tend to categorize content on web — Yahoo started that way. Then the volume of web contents grew tremendously, no one could really follow and no single company could afford spending enough manpower on categorizing each web sites pop into the web world. And so Google borned with the type of simplest single textbox interface — that you just type in whatever you got to grab from the web, who cares which category that thing has to fall in.

Google was big, back then it stormed into the search engine world and creating a huge cake of ads market place. All kind of texts are crawled, stored into its thousands of servers. Text could be stored and searched. All right, why not image? Why not published books? Why not video? Oops, there are more and more to be revealed on how we’re going to defined the content generated by human being. Why not you define it?

Here’s come Google Base. It said:

Google Base is a place where you can add all types of information that we’ll host and make searchable online.

Now you have the influence, you defined it.

Google Analytics

Google acquired Urchin on last March. Now it has converted to Google Analytics.

This is what Google Analytics offer:

Learn how visitors interact with your website and identify the navigational bottlenecks that keep them from completing your conversion goals. Find out how profitable your keywords are across search engines and campaigns. Pinpoint where your best customers come from and which markets are most profitable to you. Google Analytics gives you this and more through easy-to-understand visually enhanced reports.

The software originated from Urchin perform analysis on your website traffic, study the visitor’s surfing behavior and from there you could identified where’s the bottlenecks or strength in terms of the advertisement potential. Should give it a try.

Google CC Search

The above is shown in Google Advanced Search. There is a new criteria for search filtering based on Usage Right:

• aren’t filtered by license
• allow some forms of re-use
• can be freely modified, adapted or built upon

Google seem to use Creative Commons to identify the license of the pages it archived. Truely that is big effort spent to make this work.

On the other hand, Yahoo Advanced Web Search seem long having the option to filter your search based on licensed content. And it specify to use CC. It’s CC search option is shown as figure below. Here’s its tips:

• This special Yahoo! Search finds pages that have content with a Creative Commons license

Google’s approach is not to confuse the users with less information provided. Yahoo’s approach seem to be more appropriate if users know what actually is CC.

Would users really care which license was specified? Not really, might not at the stage when they go to the search engine. At the first place, they might want to look for something could be freely distributed, or some licensed content. When it was found, the license details has to be further studied then.

Also, would it mean Google plan to identify web content or downloaded softwares which use GPL, BSD ….etc licenses?

• Reference: Joi Ito’s Google + CC = Good

Google Adsense Referral

In short, this is a new referral program run by Google Adsense (well, at least new to me). If anyone going to sign up Google Adsense with me as the referral, when you earn the first 100.00 and eligible for the paid out, the referral’s account (me) would get the 100.00 credit too.

Note: well…I don’t think you would be interested. If you really do, please look at the right sidebar of my main blog page, and click at the ads image below my Flickr photos :p.