Tag Archives: google

Is the advertising pie big enough?

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I’ve wondered about this but not as thoughtfully as Ben Compaine, who posts on the Rebuilding Media blog:

Can the media survive on advertising? Lots of folks are counting on it. Broadcasters have always had this single revenue stream. Daily newspapers get about 80% of revenue from advertising and the hot print properties, such as the give-away Metro dailies, depend about 100% on advertising. Now much of the Web is counting on advertising: Google, Yahoo! and increasingly AOL to name just a few of the biggies.

Either the pie gets bigger or somebody gets a smaller slice.

Google Earth

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Just when I think the Web and computers can’t get any cooler, something like Google Earth comes along. WSJ’s Walt Mossberg wonders if it has any practical benefits but admits it’s damned cool.

“The program lets you view satellite and aerial photos of pretty much any spot on the planet. In big metropolitan areas in the U.S., Canada and Western Europe, you can locate, and zoom in on, individual buildings and houses, and see cars and trees. … The program rapidly fetches the images from the Internet and visually “flies” you from place to place around the globe. The process is so fluid it feels like a Hollywood stunt.”

The image above shows where I’m sitting.

stevemays@gmail.com

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What’s an invitation for a Gmail account worth? If you have an invitation to open an account on Google’s new e-mail service, you could sell it on eBay for as much as $60. But if cash is a little too prosaic for you, your Gmail invitation could net you 4 pounds of fresh fudge, some Jewish mystical knowledge, a photo of a wife and a girlfriend kissing, a tarantula, Paris Hilton’s phone number or any one of more than 1,000 other options. Full article at Wired.com

[Update: Google launched on April 1, 2004. Created my account on April 21, 2004]

Invite to beta test Gmail

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As a long-time Blogger subscriber (going on three years), I got an invite to beta test Google’s new email service, Gmail. And they allowed me to invite two friends to try the service. One of whom pointed out that these accounts are selling for as much as $50 on eBay. Might be just because not everyone can get them yet… or the gig of storage. I’m not ready to drop Hotmail as my back-up (to work) email.

Evan Williams on blogging

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“The whole “do not be evil” thing, and sort of a democratic approach to how information should be distributed and available for us. We’re all about giving anyone a voice, and Google’s all about finding out what’s important on the Web by what people link to and what people say.”

— Evan Williams (C|Net’s News.com)

Google’s new News Alerts.

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Google has invented another great tool: Google News Alerts, which are e-mailed to you when news articles appear online that match the topics you specify. Email news alerts aren’t new but what makes Google’s so powerful is that Google News trolls 4,500 news sources continuously throughout the day — and you can set the alert to send you links to related articles as soon as Google News find them. So if you’re writing about the debate over the Episcopal Church’s first openly gay bishop, for example, you can set an alert to send you an e-mail as soon as any of 4,500 news sites posts an article containing the words “gay and bishop.”

Gnomedex: Google

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Nelson Minor is a software engineer for Google and he gave a fascinating presentation to kick off this two day conference. Starting with the Google mission statement:

* Work on things that matter
* Affect everyone in the world
* Solve problems with algorithms
* Hire bright people and give them lots of freedom
* Don’t be afraid to try new things (According to Minor, Google News was the idea of one guy who said, “Hey, wouldn’t this be cool?”)

Average search time on Google: 1/5 of a second. He even explained how Google works…in a way that even I could sort of understand.