If like me you were unable to see the lunar eclipse last night due to the immense cloud cover you still have a chance to experience it!
The Google Logo has been transformed into a 7 second video of the of the event (which actually took about 1.5 hours). This was said to be the longest lunar eclipse in over 11 years!
You can see a video of the doodle below:
Did you get to see the eclipse last night? Let us know about it in the comments below!
Chrome is the last from “big browsers” to join the race for market share and since 2009 thanks to consecutive campaign in all sorts of media from 0% it went to 20%. Of course this shows power of Google money and Google infrastructure.
Chrome similar to Firefox picked up first users from web related industries. Based on Safari engine it offered plethora of tools for webmasters in original installation. Without add ons people were able to check uploading times inspect web design elements and code in user friendly manner. Application was lightweight to download, start and offered revolutionary tab system where each tab created separated browser window – when drag and drop is there people like it.
There was no more need for multiple bars and boxes – one bar to search write web address it ticked all the boxes in efficiency and user interface simplicity.
And guess what? – It was good enough to change the way browsers operate – two years on we have Firefox 4.0 and IE9 and they all look this same (Safari of course being Chrom’s “mother and father” always looked similar ):
Lightweight design, one box and more internal tools. Only my lovely Opera suffers – with its 3% market share (unchanged for last few years) loved by hardcore group of nerds and unaware users with once great OperaMini for mobile devices seems to fight back with latest 11 version to regain its status of the most edgy browser.
The latest Chrome Ads in UK TV feature new Chrome logo 2011 and several other services it looks like for a moment Google forgot about OS for PC (they’re happy with Android) and try to launch Chrome as one stop shop for internet users (despite the platform). Apart from Chrome features we see all Google arsenal: YouTube, Gmail, Picassa etc, etc
As a viewer you are taken through the journey of email creation by “Daddy” the Google Way, You may have also seen this ad playing at the beginning of Youtube videos.
Google has also aired ads during the Superbowl in the US featuring Lady Gaga.
With growing importance of cloud services for hi-tech giants we see here modular marketing in its best form
TV Ads for software are a very effective way of Gaming the industry. Among browsers creators the first to realise how powerful it is was Mozilla Foundation in 2006 shifting its market share to about 20% followed by folks from Opera with their Mobile version in 2008. Microsoft as usual “slow burner” regarding web related affairs realised TV is a way to go when Chrome was in still in it’s infancy. But for IE8 the 2009 TV campaign was a battle to keep market share while for Chrome it was start of effective offensive.
It looks like 2 in years on Chrome gained 20% of the market most of this market unfortunately half of this was taken from Firefox and only about half from IE. Apart from TV Ads and great push this advance of other browsers on the market comes from legal action agains Microsoft which resulted in need for Microsoft to offer other browser options instead of forcing all windows users to use IE.
Choose your side in Browser Wars!
Whatever happens next we are glad to see broader adoption of CSS3 and HTML5 which makes modular online marketing simply easier.
Unfortunately there is also the dark side of “browser wars” (“Microsoft strikes back”). The way Microsoft works removes chance for a lot of people to see web in its latest format. Without automated updates for IE many users experience web as it was back in 2005. IE6 remains the only window to internet for about 10% of users (mostly corporate).
We hope this nightmare will be over soon although with IE7 being better than IE8 we are frightened to see IE 10 :-S
Today I received an email from Google webmaster central letting me know the +1 button code is now available!
You only need to add two lines of code to get the shiny new +1 button on your site.
In the head tag, or just before the end of the body tag put this line of code in:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script>
Place this line of code on the page where you want the +1 button to appear:
<g:plusone href="http://modularinternetmarketing.com/"></g:plusone>
Place the site that you want to +1 in the href attribute.
In a wordpress site if you want each post to be +1′d page the code would be:
<g:plusone href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"></g:plusone>
| Size | Button With Count | Button Without Count |
|---|---|---|
| Small |
|
|
| Standard |
|
|
| Medium |
|
|
| Tall |
|
N/A |
If you want to use a size other than the standard 24px high you need to add a size attribute, which can have one of 3 values: small (15px), medium (20px) and tall (65px).
To stop the count from displaying put count=”false” into the code. Note that this doesn’t work for the tall size button.
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” 
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.
News Corp. has finally decided to sell MySpace!
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.
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…
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!
Last week Google announced a search algorithm update which would impact nearly 12% of all queries. The update was aimed to reduce visibility of “low-quality sites” from the SERP (Search engine Results Page). It has only been released in the US so far, but it has already caused quite a stir…
Although Google has never explicitly stated it the new update is an attempt to crack down on content farms like eHow, answerbag.com and other Demand Media sites. However the effect on page rankings in the US alone have been unexpected to say the least.
Many content farm sites have seen their rankings reduced, but they’re not the only ones seeing a negative impact on their search engine rankings. Several sites which create their own unique content were slammed, losing in some cases over 90% of their Google spots.
cultofmac.com, an Apple-focused blog which produces it’s own unique content has seen 96% of it’s Google spots disappear in the past week!
ehow.com has actually seen improvements in it’s Google visibility and search engine traffic, so the update has actually removed some of it’s competition and boosted it’s traffic.
It hasn’t been a very good week for Google, on Monday 0.02% (about 35, 000) Gmail users logged onto their accounts only to find ALL of the emails missing. According to the Google’s Gmail blog the error was caused by an update that created a software bug which infected Google’s online backups of the accounts, so they’ve had to bring in the back-up tapes to restore the accounts.
Let us know if your site has been affected by the update whether it’s good or bad news.
Yesterday Google Relesaed an Extension for Chrome which allows user to block selected websites from SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).
This may look like a poor solution to solve Google ‘s content farm result issues, however it is just a tool they are using to help them combat this issue.
The data from this extension will be sent to Google and analysed to create a “potential ranking signal for search results” according to Matt Cutts (head of the web spam team at Google).
The Extension is called Personal Blocklist Extension.
I decided to try it out myself to see if it is any good. It took less than 10s to download and install and no browser restart is required so you can block as you please straight away.
It’s quite simple to use, when you search for anything on Google a link is displayed underneath each result which can be used to block a domain.
Pages from blocked sited no longer appear on the results page. However they can be allowed back into your current results page by clicking the “show” link that appears at the bottom of the page.
A list of blocked sites can be viewed, edited or unblocked by clicking the red logo next to the address bar.
So all in all it’s a pretty good extension, however for Google web spam team to find the data collected useful a lot more users will need to
a) Use Chrome (currently with only 10% market share)
b) Bother install and use the extension
There has been speculation of Twitter buy out talks with Google and Facebook. Figures as high as $10 Billion (£6.23 bn) have been said to come up.
Considering that in December the microblogging site was valued at just $3.7 Billion after reporting some $200 million in profits, are they offering too much?
However they have just set two phenomenal records for the most Tweets per second. In Japan an astounding 6,939 tweets was recorded just after midnight and the most Tweets during a sporting event was set during the last minutes of the Super Bowl this year at 4,064.
Assuming the site still has a few more years left until it becomes as redundant and slow as MySpace there is still time for it to expand. However if I were in charge I’d take the $10 bn! Social Network fads don’t last too long!
