Well. That last post seems pretty hard to top. But things must keep moving here lest you think I’m a completely lame and inane father incapable of speaking other than to mention the bowel movements of my child.
Alas and alack. The Internet goes on. So. Here is an advert for being on the internet, from Google India. I like it.
Cool story. This camera. A Canon EOS was underwater for over a year. Somebody with a little bit of tech knowledge found it, while diving, and managed to salvage some of the photos. The camera is obviously a write off. The photos were from August 2010, which meant it spent quite some time in the ocean and exposed to the elements.
The cool part of the story is that the guy who found the story managed to crowd source the contact details of the owner, reuniting photographer with photographs…
“The photographs, having spent 440 days on the ocean floor, have been reunited with the photographer and the family. I am very happy to have facilitated the journey back to where the photographs belong! I certainly didn’t anticipate the attention this created, any photographer finding my camera would do the same, right? Thanks again for the great help that came from all of you – the Google+ community. I received an email from the recipient of your help this morning:
“Again thank you so much!!! Seeing the pictures brings tears as we really had forgotten what we were missing by not having them.”
And in a nice little PR twist, perhaps predictably, Canon is replacing the camera for free. It is perhaps a better endorsement for the memory cards than for the camera maker – and San Disk are sending some free goodies to both the finder, and the photographer. Good news all round…
A group of performance artists/social commentators/internet anarchists are trying to give Google back to the people. Setting up advertising and using the money to buy google shares.
“We generate money by serving Google text advertisments on a network of hidden Websites. With this money we automatically buy Google shares. We buy Google via their own advertisment! Google eats itself – but in the end “we” own it!”
On current modelling this date is some time off.
202345117 Years until GWEI fully owns Google
“By establishing this autocannibalistic model we deconstruct the new global advertisment mechanisms by rendering them into a surreal click-based economic model.”
A while ago I considered starting up a webpage where people could punish bad companies by clicking on their ads. Turns out this is against Google’s click fraud policies so that couldn’t have worked. This too is against such policies, but these guys have hidden their links around the Internet. They’ve managed to purchase $400,000 worth of shares. The catch is that this money hasn’t come from google, but from the pockets of its advertisers. It’s a reverse-reverse Robin Hood scheme. They’re robbing the poor, through the rich, to buy the rich, to give to the poor.
Content farms are the bane of the content creator’s existence. Other people flooding the Internet with cheap mass produced content has the same effect on the content market that any mass producing of something once good and pure has… it cheapens the experience for everybody, big companies make all the money, and then eventually something shifts in the market. It happened with beer. It happened with coffee. Now Google is stepping in to stop content farms leeching off the Internet with their search engine snake oil.
If none of this makes sense to you – then don’t worry – this infographic and accompanying post from techi.com is here to help.
This is a beautiful website/book designed to introduce people to the internet – Google serves it up when you download Chrome for the first time.
If you want to know about the Internet, or have an old or young relative who keeps pestering you – then you should send them to that link.
Nice video.
Containing some subliminal adverts for Google’s products.
Google put together this presentation of cool stuff from around the web. I’ll no doubt blog some of it – but if you want an advanced screening and haven’t seen this yet check it out.
How cool is Google’s real time provision of search results. Are other people getting it too or am I signed on for something experimental?
I’m not paranoid about the data Facebook, Google and Apple are gathering about me. Because I put too much stuff out there voluntarily for that to be overly concerning, and I don’t do anything I wouldn’t want the world seeing anyway. But some people find this sort of thing scary.
From here.
As reported the other day, to celebrate Pacman’s 30th birthday Google created a playable Pacman version of its logo. It’s now permanently available. The playable logo is estimated to have consumed 4.8 million man hours globally.
RescueTime is a program that monitors online usage. They extrapolated their data to reach that figure.
Here’s the baseline:
Our average Google user spends only 4 and a half active minutes on Google search per day, spread over about 22 page views. That’s roughly 11 seconds of attention invested in each Google page view. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but next time you do a search, count to 11- it’s a long time.
Here’s what the study found:
The average user spent 36 seconds MORE on Google.com on Friday.. Thankfully, Google tossed out the logo with pretty low “perceived affordance” – they put an “insert coin” button next to the search button, but I imagine most users missed that. In fact, I’d wager that 75% of the people who saw the logo had no idea that you could actually play it. Which the world should be thankful for.
If we take Wolfram Alpha at its word, Google had about 504,703,000 unique visitors on May 23. If we assume that our userbase is representative, that means:
- Google Pac-Man consumed 4,819,352 hours of time (beyond the 33.6m daily man hours of attention that Google Search gets in a given day)
- $120,483,800 is the dollar tally, If the average Google user has a COST of $25/hr (note that cost is 1.3 – 2.0 X pay rate).
- For that same cost, you could hire all 19,835 google employees, from Larry and Sergey down to their janitors, and get 6 weeks of their time. Imagine what you could build with that army of man power.
$298,803,988 is the dollar tally if all of the Pac-Man players had an approximate cost of the average Google employee.
Pacman is thirty today. Google is celebrating. You can play it on the homepage.
I’ve written quite a few Pacman posts over the years. Here they all are.
Celebrate by baking a Pac-Cake…
Ahh Google. If jumping the shark is the way TV shows die then the search monopoly will be hoping “hitting the deer” isn’t how internet companies die – especially when they’ve documented it for posterity’s sake…
This is a great little video that plots the story of Google (until just prior to the launch of Wave) in two minutes. I think I saw it first at CafeDave – so he can have a link.
I signed up for Google Buzz just then – have you? Google is going after Facebook. And they’ve integrated with gmail so that I have a nice one stop shop.
Here, in case you’re wondering, is my google profile (that existed before Buzz) – I don’t know how “friending” works with this thing yet – but feel free to work it out and add me.
Streetview is cool right? For the luddites (who are unlikely to be reading a blog) it’s Google map’s feature where you can actually experience moving along certain streets because they sent a car that looks like this out into the wild to take photographs.
These photographs have been built into maps. Making it much easier to stalk people or check out the neighbourhood you are thinking about living in.
Google is great at turning things like this into money. So Make is reporting that Google has patented technology that will allow them to turn billboards in their street view photographs into spaces for adwords. If these adwords are location based this will be a fantastic tool for geographically specific advertising.
