I wouldn’t have thought I’d be a widget guy but my side bar is practically bristling with the little buggers. Okay, I’ve only got two. My beloved Google Shared Items and a little flickr badge.
Joining them is the My Library widget. It randomly pulls covers from My Library Thing. You are what you read.
Remember James Keown? He’s the former Missouri radio guy charged with first-degree murder in the the death of his wife, Julie Keown. Authorities allege Keown poisoned his wife by spiking her Gatorade with antifreeze so he could collect on her $250,000 life insurance policy.
One of the witnesses in the recent evidentiary hearings was Andrew Winrow, a computer forensic investigator who testified that Internet searches recovered from at least one of James Keown’s computer hard drives revealed a search for The Anarchist Cookbook and ” homemade poisons” allegedly occurring on Aug. 17, 2004 and Aug. 18, 2004, less than a month before his wife’s death.
This story got me wondering what I’ve searched for and, as you might expect, Google makes has this info. Looks like I can go back about 90 days. I didn’t spot anything incriminating, but it’s an interesting snapshot of what I’ve been thinking about. I assume the NSA has this information as well.
I’ve been steering clients to Google Calendars for some time but never bothered see if I could embed the calendar in a blog post. You can. In most applications, it probably makes more sense to just link them out to the full size calendar but I can imagine situations where I might want to display the calendar like this. Nifty.
This story appeared last week in the New York Times and is one of the best I’ve seen in a while on Google. Posted here for future reference.
“Google does more than simply build an outsized, digital table of contents for the Web. Instead, it actually makes a copy of the entire Internet — every word on every page — that it stores in each of its huge customized data centers so it can comb through the information faster.
As Google compiles its index, it calculates a number it calls PageRank for each page it finds. This was the key invention of Google’s founders, Mr. Page and Sergey Brin. PageRank tallies how many times other sites link to a given page. Sites that are more popular, especially with sites that have high PageRanks themselves, are considered likely to be of higher quality.”
Seth Godin on the “organic success” path to a high Google rank:
“If you want to be on the front page of matches for “White Plains Lawyer”, then the best choice is to build a series of pages (on your site, on social sites, etc.) that give people really useful information. Once you’ve done everything you can… once you’ve built a web of information and once you’ve given the ability to do this to your best clients and your partners and colleagues, then by all means apply the best SEO (search engine optimization) thinking in the world to your efforts.”
In another lifetime I wrote radio “spots.” A lot of ’em. So please feel free to skip this “shop talk” post.
TechCrunch is getting reports from advertisers that Google Audio Ads have been added as an option to their Adwords accounts. Interesting to see the data collected with the “About Your Ad” form (Goal of ad; target customer; key messages; call to action; etc.).
And this from the comments on the post: “I’ve been using Audio Ads for months now. I like how you can listen to the actual snippet of your ad being played on the station. I don’t like how you can’t choose a specific radio station, only the type of format and DMA.”
Wonder how they’re getting the mini-air check? I can see how advertisers would love that.
Bonus link: “Analysts Peek Into Google’s Pitch to Radio” (Radio World)
Okay, make of this what you will. A few days ago I posted a couple of lines about having a problem with the “Share” feature in Google Reader. I did not report the problem to Google. But within about 24 hours, I received the following email:
“Hi Steve, if you send me your email address I’d be happy to take a look at your account to see what’s going on.
Justin Haugh
Google Reader Engineer”
Justin subscribes to a search feed for “google reader” at blogsearch.google.com, saw my post, and reached out to see if he could help. (The issue had already resolved itself.)
Think about it. There must be a bazillion people using Google Reader. I didn’t ask for help, but someone at Google took watch for users needing help and take time to offer. Does your company go that far? Does mine? Do the Google Fan Boy T-shirts come in medium?
I am a Google Fan Boy. I can’t help it. I love most of the Google services I’ve tried. And I keep discovering new ones. The “Share” feature in Google Reader is not new, but I just got around to playing with it and I love it.
I frequently come across a story that I’d like to share. I’ll sometime email it to friends and –if I have the time– post on it here. But there are times when I just want to point you to the story and have nothing to add. With one click in my Google Reader, I can add the story to a public page (“Steve’s Shared Items”). The five most recently “shared” stories also appear in the sidebar here at smays.com.
This simple tool extends my role of “who asked you?” editor/aggregator. While I cannot post on everything I find interesting, Google Reader has made it easy to share.
Google has broken into radio with a multi-year advertising sales agreement with the largest U.S. broadcaster, Clear Channel Radio. Clear Channel said it has agreed for Google to sell a guaranteed portion of the 30-second spots available on its 675 radio stations in top U.S. markets, in a bid to expand the universe of local radio advertisers to Google’s online buyers.
A Clear Channel executive said Google has access to less than 5% of the radio broadcaster’s overall inventory of advertising air time. The U.S. radio industry generates $20 billion in annual sales. [USAToday]
Just installed Google Earth on the MacBook and….oooh! Nice. Last time I looked at the app it had just come out and I was on a PC. Everything about Google Earth is better. The images have been updated and the tools are amazing. Here’s the smays compound: