Archive for September, 2009

Google Sidewiki

Thursday, September 24th, 2009

As you browse the web, it’s easy to forget how many people visit the same pages and look for the same information. Whether you’re researching advice on heart disease prevention or looking for museums to visit in New York City, many others have done the same and could have added their knowledge along the way.

What if everyone, from a local expert to a renowned doctor, had an easy way of sharing their insights with you about any page on the web? What if you could add your own insights for others who are passing through?

Now you can. Today, we’re launching Google Sidewiki, which allows you to contribute helpful information next to any webpage. Google Sidewiki appears as a browser sidebar, where you can read and write entries along the side of the page.

In developing Sidewiki, we wanted to make sure that you’ll see the most relevant entries first. We worked hard from the beginning to figure out which ones should appear on top and how to best order them. So instead of displaying the most recent entries first, we rank Sidewiki entries using an algorithm that promotes the most useful, high-quality entries. It takes into account feedback from you and other users, previous entries made by the same author and many other signals we developed. If you’re curious, you can read more on our Google Research Blog about the infrastructure we use for ranking all entries in real-time.

Under the hood, we have even more technology that will take your entry about the current page and show it next to webpages that contain the same snippet of text. For example, an entry on a speech by President Obama will appear on all webpages that include the same quote. We also bring in relevant posts from blogs and other sources that talk about the current page so that you can discover their insights more easily, right next to the page they refer to.

We’re releasing Google Sidewiki as a feature of Google Toolbar (for Firefox and Internet Explorer) and we’re working on making it available in Google Chrome and elsewhere too. We also have the first version of our API available today to let anyone work freely with the content that’s created in Sidewiki.

We’ve been testing Sidewiki with several experts and news organizations for a while and are happy to hear their positive responses. We hope you’ll try it for yourself, follow our Twitter feed, and let us know what you think!

If you’re ready to start exploring the web with Google Sidewiki, visit google.com/sidewiki to download Google Toolbar with Sidewiki and contribute your own entries alongside pages on the web.

Source: Official Google Blog

Posted in Browsers, Web Site News | No Comments »

Does Google use the meta keywords tag?

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

GoogleIn a single, and clear word, no!

This may come as a surprise to some people, but Google completely disregards the meta tag for keywords.  Then why populate it?  Hard to believe, but Google isn’t the only search engine out there, and other search engines do use the keywords tag.

Google officially confirmed this on their Central Blog, and have a short YouTube video explaining this.  Definitely worth and read/watch…

Posted in Browsers, Web Site News | No Comments »

10% Market Share For Chrome

Thursday, September 17th, 2009

GoogleChromeLogoAs we noted yesterday, version 3 of Google’s Chrome web browser is now available for PC users. But in an interview yesterday with Reuters, Google revealed a couple of interesting tidbits about the project.

The first is that while Chrome currently has just under 3 percent of the browser market currently, a year from now, they’re planning to have at least 5 percent. More importantly, 2 years from now, if Chrome doesn’t have at least 10 percent share, Google will be “exceptionally disappointed,” Chrome Engineering Director Linus Upson told Reuters. And Google’s own internal projections for the browser are even higher, apparently.

While I think I have yet to meet anyone who doesn’t like Chrome — a lot — this past year has proven that it may be hard for Google to hit such numbers. While plenty of people in the tech scene have posted their internal numbers (like Google’s own Matt Cutts) showing some pretty impressive Chrome share numbers from visitors coming to their sites, the general public is clearly not as quick to switch as the early-adopters in the tech scene. Just having a great browser may not be enough, Google will likely have to step up its advertising campaigns (mostly on the web) to get real gains.

But Google also has a big wildcard it has yet to play: Mac support. And in the same Reuters article, Google confirmed that it Chrome for Mac will be available before the end of this year.

So yes, sometime in the next 3 months, Google’s 3 percent share should see a fairly big bump from Mac users who will at least try it out. Right now, the majority of Mac users browse with Firefox or Apple’s own Safari. But Firefox is typically pretty slow, and Safari, while fast, has some quirks and doesn’t allow for the easy use of plug-ins. Chrome promises to bring a combination of both speed and plug-ins to the Mac. I’ve been using the developer builds of Chromium (the open source project behind Chrome) for months now, and it’s definitely getting really, really close to being ready for prime time.
Source: TechCrunch

Posted in Applications, Browsers, Web Site News | No Comments »

Google acquires reCAPTCHA

Thursday, September 17th, 2009

reCaptchaGoogle has acquired reCAPTCHA, which provides CAPTCHA technology for Web sites.

A CAPTCHA is a bit of text that Web sites use to verify that it’s indeed a human being on the other end of the line — not a spam robot or computer.

The twist in the deal that could help Google is that many of reCAPTCHA’s words come from scanned newspapers and old books. By having humans type the scanned words into reCAPTCHA, they get help reading the scanned text. This could be helpful for Google’s book scanning project.

Posted in Applications, Browsers, Web Site News | No Comments »

Horizontal Menus: Roundup

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

This is another great article from Smashing Magazine.  It covers Trends, Patterns and the Best Practices of Horizontal Navigation Menus, and also focuses on techniques used to improve usability.

It then goes on to provide a list of examples of the most common trends, which is very useful.  It also does a little name a shaming of poor examples!

Article: Horizontal Navigation Menus: Trends, Patterns, and Best Practices

Posted in Web Site News | 2 Comments »

iStat now supports OS X 10.6

Friday, September 4th, 2009

I clock that to be only 1 week I was without iStat Menu.  Well done iSlayer team!

iStat Menu is a great little system monitor that sits in your menu, monitoring all sorts things such as CPU, Memory, Network, Disk Usage etc.  It’s very customisable, and personally I have mine just monitoring CPU and RAM.

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Define default apps with RCDefaultApp

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

RCDefaultApp is a Mac OS X 10.2 or higher preference pane that allows a user to set the default application used for various URL schemes, file extensions, file types, MIME types, and Uniform Type Identifiers (or UTIs; MacOS 10.4 only). MacOS X uses the extension and file type settings to choose the application when opening a file in Finder, while Safari and other applications use the URL and MIME type settings at other times for content not related to a file (such as an unknown URL protocol, or a media stream).

RCDefaultApp also allows setting the application when digital cameras or FireWire webcams such as iSight are connected to the computer. For completeness’ sake, there are also settings that mimic the existing “CDs and DVDs” preference pane, which allows setting the action to take when various types of CDs and DVDs are inserted into the computer.

Finder’s Get Info panel can be used to set the default application for file extensions and file types, but it’s not intuitive. Apple’s Internet preference pane in MacOS X 10.0 through 10.2 (Jaguar) allowed you to set the Web and Email applications, but no other URL handlers. In MacOS X 10.3 (Panther), these settings have moved to Safari’s and Mail’s preferences — meaning you have to run those applications if you want to choose to not use them. Similarly, the digital camera preference is located in Image Capture’s preferences, and the webcam preference is a checkbox in iChat’s preferences. RCDefaultApp allows the setting of all of this information, and ties everything together in one preference pane.

Posted in Applications | 3 Comments »