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.

There are a few pre-made examples:

Take a look at some example sites to see how you might use Google Sites:
* Company intranet
* Team project
* Employee profile
* Classroom
* Student club

So far I’m rather apathetic towards it, but only because I can do everything it offers by hand. If I couldn’t, I’d be all ooh ahh.

I heavily promote the WP and Google Apps combo to my clients, so I’ll very interested to see how this project takes on Microsoft’s Sharepoint.

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. Then I went back to the Super Bowl party. Well, Google found it very quickly, a lot of people searched for it, and the post ranked very high, so that one post got the Google version of the slash-dot effect.

Turns out that each one of those 5 images were about 200KB. It wouldn’t have been a big deal on a normal post, but it meant that each visitor downloaded about a Megabyte of images every page load. (In comparison, the CSS, JavaScript and the HTML files adds up to about 31KB.)

Like I said: blink, blink…woops.

Update: I contacted my host, and asked to buy more bandwidth, and they were kind enough to grant me an extra 3 GB of bandwidth for free. I love this company: I’ve never had an issue with them (unlike most of my previous hosts.)

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.

I apologize if they are irritating to normal readers, but they are always pseudo-relevant links, so I’m not spamming you guys in response to being spammed.

P.S. Not all seem to be scraped, so I’m wondering how many times I need to say WordPress in a post about WordPress to get the WordPress “web reader” to borrow the content from my WordPress site?

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.

Right now you can only add pick general keywords and categories, but I would love for these to be usable with specific videos just for the pretty-factor.

How do I earn with video units?

When you place a video unit on your website, you’ll earn revenue from two types of ad formats: companion ads, which sit above your video content within the player and can be either text or image-based, and text overlay ads, which appear in the bottom 20% of the video content area. Ads on video units can be paid on either a cost-per-click or cost-per-thousand impression basis.

The first question in this series comes from an American using Windows and Internet Explorer, and they ask “What religion did the People of the Roman Empire follow?” Well I’m glad you asked that… um…let’s call you Fred… while your search landed on a very popular article entitled Causes and Effects of the Popularization of Christianity in the Roman Empire, I’m afraid that it won’t answer your question entirely.

Yes, for a portion of its history the Roman Empire was Christian, but for most of its history Rome itself (including the period of the Republic and the Empire) followed a mythopoeic religion that was closely related the classical Greek religion. It wasn’t until Constantine realized that a single unified religion could revitalize the Roman empire that Christianity actually became a quasi-official religion. Prior to this the Roman Empire as a whole did not have an official religion: each culture was allowed to worship their own gods as long as they paid tribute to the gods of Rome and did not deny their existence. Even this requirement was ignored for a time and the Jewish peoples were allowed to live peaceably under Roman rule for many years. However, as the Roman economy degraded and the Empire spread to encompass many different cultures, it began to fracture and there was little to integrate the different groups or the classes. Read that article if you want to know more.)

For the rest of Roman history, the Romans followed a pagan religion and allowed people to believe whatever they wanted. That was the long way of saying: there was no one religion of the Roman empire, there were many.

My next question comes from … let’s say Sarah … who hails from Canada and also uses Windows and Internet Explorer. Sarah asks Did the church unite the Roman Empire?” Sarah landed on the same page as Fred and again the question is not fully answered. The real answer is both yes and no because individually the Eastern Empire and Western Empire were united through Christianity, but because they both had a slightly different view of Christianity (this is the divide between the Greek Orthodox and Catholic sects) the two parts of the empire slowly separate because of the religion.

You see Sarah, as Christianity spread in its early days, certain cities became the founding cities of the religion think Québec and Toronto or New York City and Boston, so they had a relatively large Christian population with widespread influence. However, in what was to become the Western Roman Empire, there was only one city: Rome, but in the Eastern Roman Empire there were several cities such as Jerusalem and Antioch.

Each of these major cities basically had someone, think a bishop, who was sort of a guide to the people under their influence, so while the Eastern Empire had several religious leaders to look up to, the Western Empire had only one: the Pope. As the two empires split the Western side looked only to their Pope for religious guidance and over time the two churches separated because the Western Pope was seen as the single most influential person in the religion by his own people, but the Eastern Empire was used to following several different religious leaders, so the religious structure of the two sides slowly separated.

So the short and sweet answer is yes, Christianity did unite the Roman Empire, but it united it in two slightly different styles.

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.

Linking should be mutually beneficial for both the linking site and the linked one and more these benefits must be obvious and immediate. For quite some time I’ve been thinking about a strategy that would realize these objectives and finally I think I came up with one –LZZR.com

LZZR then continues and suggests that by searching for blogs that link to you on websites like Bloglines or Technorati and then linking to those search results, (eg: My Technorati reactions page) you can boost your own PR by boosting the PR of the sites that link to you.

And what’s the point, you might ask? Surely if you are greedy it does not make any sense to promote someone else’s URL but if you are clever you’ll quickly realize that it’s in your own best interests to have inbound links from strong pages…From strictly SEO point of view you create a perfect 3-way linking structure where Search Engine Results Page (SERP) serves as an intermediary between you and pages linking to you. In other words you link to results page and results page links to a number of sites each having a link back to you. This 3-way linking is known to be much more effective than a usual reciprocal linking and is not punishable like the outdated link farm method. –LZZR.com

But are these links really considered strong? Now I’ll ignore the fact that LZZR is only PR 3 for the moment and Technorati is a bad example because it uses nofollow in its META tags. So after sticking my head in the sand for a moment, Google can and does understand that sites like Technorati are just glorified search engines and will link to any page, so it seems likely that even though Technorati has been judged by other sites to deserve PR 8, its OWN ability to judge other sites is far less trustworthy. While I believe LZZR is correct that it won’t cause any harm, I don’t think it will have much of a positive effect either. At the very least, even if this does work in the short term, Google will quickly adjust itself to avoid these sorts of tricks just like it did the link farms of yesteryear.

So will the method work for him in the long run? I doubt it. However, he got one more incoming link, so I guess it was worth it at least a little bit. However, for everyone else out there, if you come across an idea that sounds exploitive, it probably is and it is best to ignore it.

WPのダッシュボードは、自分好みにカスタマイズするには、wp-admin/index.php などを開いてコードを書き換える必要があります。 正直、そこまでしてカスタマイズしようとは思いませんでした。 しかし、管理画面から自由にカスタマイズできるのであれば、もちろん自分好みにカスタマイズしたいと思います

This is the text translated from Japanese to English:

The dashboard of WP, you customize in your own taste, opening wp-admin/index.php, and the like has the necessity to rewrite the cord/code. Honesty, doing to there, it will customize you did not think. But, if it can customize freely from the management picture, you would like to customize of course in your own taste.

Not a perfect translation, but understandable. Because Kanji is based off of Chinese letters I wondered what would happen if I tried to translate it from Chinese, and I got this:

WP ボ ー ド の は totally Games preparations suffered from sub midst of a good Japanese Departments に papers ス Properly protecting け る に は イ because Iraq had bought. wp-admin/index.php NADO questionnaires open Word-sized book for a long questionnaires kosoa ー ド え け る necessary ga Toru mada protecting Xiaochun . Integrity River Wall mada distortion of Applied Training midst Properly ス と は イ because Iraq had bought Shika Binging Israeli thinking Word mada’s ambassador ん distortion Shika た. Shika Shika saying it this way, budget and management of images This article is free papers midst Properly イ ス の distortion because Iraq had bought distortion Ikirutikara Ever “he Xiaochun. Word Meaning ん Dei sub good Japanese Departments に papers from the midst Properly イ ス と because Iraq had bought Shika tai thinking Word mada protecting.

You will have noticed the word Iraq. It seems the character ズ translates to ” because Iraq had bought” according to Google and the character う means Israeli, but the characters ズう mean “Because Iraq had bought clashes “.

Oh and the opening paragraph of this post translated from English to Arabic to English to German to English to Korean to English reads:

We translated, in the word which is the strangeness which occurs in point the some sleeping love rival all, the total sheep it saw in speech. It is different but. It in Japanese paid attention to Trakpak of these reports (me it thinks,), from g Mlai attachment equipment places of gathering. It goes out and it will can go mad, but it goes out and with the document and a possibility basically it is used position machine I or there is not, to a surroundings and, kanji Qana illustration… What it is referred will carry is knowing, consequently and it will read and it went

I just had to.

As an aside to the person who found my site on Google while searching for INAP help: If you need help with a plugin, post in the comments. I try to answer within the day.