Anthology of Ideas

The following announcement landed in my in-box today:

Today, we’re excited to announce the introduction of Google Sites as part of Google Apps.

Google Sites makes creating a team web site as easy as editing a document. You can quickly gather a variety of information in one place — including videos, calendars, presentations, attachments, and gadgets — and easily share it for viewing or editing with a small group, your entire organization, or the world.

* Anyone can do it — Building a site is as simple as editing a document, and you don’t need anyone’s help to get started.
* Share from one place — Create a single place to bring together all the information your team needs to share, including docs, videos, photos, calendars and attachments.
* Work together — Invite co-workers, classmates, or your entire organization to edit your site with you to keep it fresh and up-to-date. And let as many or few people view your site as you want.

Take a look at the following stats and let me know if you see anything odd.

Didn’t notice anything odd? Take a look at the first 4 days of the month below (focus on the bold column.)

If you noticed, Yah, seriously, but if you didn’t: in two days I used as much bandwidth as the previous months. It turns out that on the SoBe Lizard post I added 5 PNG screenshots to the post.

Oh yay…yippee…It seems that lately most everything that I post — especially posts about WordPress — are being auto-scraped and ending up displayed in “feed-reader” websites that are just the next generation of splogs. So what am I doing about it to protect my WordPress blog? Simple. I’m adding more links to my past posts.

The sites claim that they aren’t doing anything wrong, and I do have to give their arguments credit, so here is the catch: if they remove the links, then they are modifying my content and aren’t “just another feedreader”, so I can report them, if they leave them in, I can get a little more traffic and “google juice” — although the later is falling in importance and relevancy —, or if they notice this post and remove my site from their list, I get what I really want. It is basically a win-tie-win scenario here.

This is old news, but for the first time in 6 or so months I signed into my adsense account. (I wanted to make sure that money that I’ve been owed for a year hasn’t magically reached the payout mark.) I looked around a little bit, and I considered updating the Google Adsense Widget with any changes, and I stumbled upon these new YouTube ad-enabled players.

These may have been around for a year for all I know have been around since October, but I’ve never seen them and they are rather cool looking. For one, they are far more attractive than the default YouTube video box, and they have the ads embedded right into them.

EDIT: One issue with them is that Adblock bocks them, so maybe it wouldn’t be so good for “normal” videos unless they released a version with and without ads.

Matt Cutts [was at Wordcamp] shared with the audience…that underscores in URLs are now (or at least very soon to be) treated as word separators by Google. -News Blog

This is very good news.