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.
After checking out webmaster tools blog today I saw they’d announced a new tool in the labs section.
It’s an Instant Preview Troubleshooter. It send a request to the specified page of your site to create a small screenshot of it and crawls the page to create a preview that will appear in the SERP. You may need to request pages several times so all images can be cached and presented in the instant preview.
In conjunction with the Fetch as Googlebot tool you are able to see your site the way Google sees it in real time rather than waiting for it to be crawled, indexed and updated in the SERP.
One thing to bear in mind when using this tool is that each request you make using this will be considered a page view in Google Analytics.
So don’t be too surprised when you request every page on your site and end up with a huge spike in traffic!
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.
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).
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.
On Sunday Google’s was a bit sweeter than usual, to commemorate the 119th anniversarry of the first ever recorded ice cream sundae!
119 years ago in Ithaca , New York John M. Scott and Chester Platt invented the dish, which they first derved as the “Cherry Sunday”. After attempting to trademark the term “Sunday” it became known as a “Sundae”!
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…
