Author Archives: Sara

Google No Longer in the Search Industry

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Google Knowledge Engine

So the title may be a bit misleading, Google is still a search engine, however their search group has now been named the “knowledge group”. This comes after Larry Page took over Google as the new CEO in April.

Maybe we’ll see the search engine re-branding themselves as a “knowledge engine” :P

The change is said to reflect upon Page’s vision to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” as well as “facilitating the creation of knowledge”. With the recent Panda Update we can begin to see the direction Google is hoping go in within the search industry, however with the internet becoming more of a myriad of memes, ads and just plain bad content it will be more and more difficult for the search giant to continue to be relevant and return valuable results.

National Trust Makes Farmville a Reality with ‘My Farm’

The National Trust has released a new project called ‘my farm’ which allows anyone to sign up (for a £30 annual fee) to help run a real-life working farm via the web.

No previous experience is required, you sign up on a first come first serve basis with a maximum of 10, 000 virtual farmers ‘helping out’ at the farm.

The chosen location of the real farm is on the Wimpole Estate in Cambridgeshire. Users get to vote on decisions made on the farm such as what crops to plant and what to do with the farm’s livestock.

Each month users are told of the decision to be made and have a few weeks to discuss it with the My Farm community, then at the end of the month they vote to decide what should be done.

The first vote is on 26 May to decide what crops will be planted. To sign up and find out more information visit www.my-farm.org.uk.

National Trust My Farm Project Facebook Feed

Hopefully my Facebook feed wont be filled with My Farm requests!

Buy a Failing Social Network!

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News Corp. has finally decided to sell MySpace!

MySpace is Dead

In 2005 News Corp. purchased the social network for $580 million (£348 million).

In 2009 MySpace traffic took a big hit, plummeting as users left it for the now more preferred Facebook. It never managed to recover from that even after several revamps, added features and a whole new layout. Maybe now they’ve realised people are just fickle when it comes to their technological obsessions and if they’d invested in other more important parts of the site that would make it faster, less confusing and less spammy (I usually got 10 friend requests a day from random sleazy strangers).

Alas it is too late now for MySpace, they’ve now become the laughing stock of Social Media.  So now after axing over 500 jobs in January and investing some $275 million (£165 million) into restructuring the company Murdoch’s media giant has realised it’s just not worth it and is trying to get al least $100 million  (£60 million) for it.

The only way any one can turn a profit from a deal like that is to take the existing application, make it better and re-brand it because MySpace is most definitely dead.

The Independant’s URLs can be changed to anything! (Warning: Contains Swears)

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Google has indexed almost 30 fake URLs for a story by The Independent about a Jelly Bean which resembles a vague likeness to the princess to be Kate Middleton.

The flaw in The Independant’s CMS allows you to put anything in the URL as long as the article ID is at the end of it.

Some of the URLs Google has indexed are:

I think you get the gist of it, but if you want you see a full list of fake URLs simply Google “site:http://www.independent.co.uk inurl:2269573″ (with out the quote marks).

My Experience of the New Google Analytics Interface

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Three weeks ago Google announced on the Analytics blog that a new interface was available to use for some accounts, I’m not sure if it’s been rolled out across all accounts or if I was one of the lucky few who are able to use the new one, either way here is what you can expect from the new interface!

One of the main features to get excited about is a brand new dashboard which you can customise with as many widgets as you want displaying almost any metric, pie chart, timeline or table.

But it doesn’t allow you to add custom reports to the dashboard, which is a step backwards for an ‘upgrade’ however the new interface is still in BETA so Google Engineers may still add this feature.

Another feature I found useful that has disappeared is the ability to export as a PDF. The only options available now are CSV, TSV and CSV for Excel.

The content section has been changed, so instead of looking at a Top Content report you can see a pages report, which has a navigation summary tab above the time line graph which shows where users navigated from to get to that page and where users navigated to when they left that page (think of it like a non-graphical in page analytics).

This enables you to track the most popular routes users take to get to goals on your site.

Overall I’m impressed by the new interface hopefully some of the currently exclude features will be added when a full release is ready.

Google Offers 2 New Products to Get You Fit!

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Gmail Motion, currently in it’s BETA stage is one of the two new ground breaking products Google is offering today!

Gmail Motion uses your computer’s webcam along with Google’s spatial tracking technology to register your movements and translate them into meaningful commands, phrases and characters, as shown in the image to the right.

This exciting new technology breaks down the currently existing barriers between humans and the restricting input devices we are lumbered with.

Google Motion can increase your productivity by up to 12% whilst keeping you fit.

Google has also said a Google Docs Motion could be available in the next few months as well.

But that’s not all Google is offering today, in keeping with the physical fitness theme Google Chrome has released Chormercise, a workout for your hands!

Google understands that web surfing can be strenuous, and with browsers becoming faster and faster how can you keep up?

They’ve created a workout to give your hands greater strength and dexterity so you can surf the web faster and loose your phalanges flab!

These products are some of the most revolutionary Google has brought out I hope to see them integrated with all the services Google currently offers (Motion Maps?, Google Buzzerobics?).

Click here to find out more about Gmail Motion BETA and Google docs Motion BETA.

To learn more about Chromercise visit www.chromercise.com.

This may be an April fools joke…

Google Doodle Lets you Boil Water with your Mouse

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Google Bunsen Burner

If you used Google today (who doesn’t use Google every day?) you would have seen the doodle for today is celebrating Robert Bunsen’s 200th birthday, what you may not have noticed is the mouse control it has.

Move your mouse left or right and the flame goes from yellow to blue respectively, move your mouse up or down and the flame gets bigger the higher your mouse is.

Google Phoned – Changes Made to AdWords Billing System

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Today we were called by Google to let us know that their billing system isn’t working properly!

A recent update has caused many user’s cards to be automatically disabled, so you need to click the ‘Enable’ button to re-enable the card.

They’ve had to phone every use to let them know of the issue so if you have an active AdWords account in the UK (or possibly worldwide) you may have received a call from Google as well.

Let us know in the comments below if you’ve been called by Google or had any issues like this!