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I used Wakoopa to track which applications I run on my home Windows machine. Here’s what it says:
When 96% of your computer time is spent in a browser, that’s living in the cloud.
Written by on December 19th, 2008 with no comments.
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I noticed that The Guardian drew up a list of top 100 sites for 2009. There’s a lot of great sites on their list, from stackoverflow.com to popurls.com to xkcd.
One snag for me is that The Guardian only recommended two sites for blogging: Bloglines and WordPress. WordPress is great and just came out with a new version. But I haven’t seen as many changes happening in Bloglines compared to Google Reader. So I thought I’d hit FeedBurner to check on my recent RSS reader stats. Here’s are my stats:
My readership data is going to be way-skewed, but I do think Google Reader is more popular than Bloglines these days. What do your FeedBurner or RSS reader stats look like?
P.S. If you haven’t see Lee Odden’s post about it, Lee collected the subscriber numbers for a bunch of search-related blogs a while ago.
Written by on December 18th, 2008 with no comments.
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It’s the end of 2008, which means that it’s time for one of my favorite posts of the year: what charities would you recommend donating to?
As I said a couple years ago:
If you’re not aware of them, GuideStar and Charity Navigator are two good places to start. … Does anyone want to mention specific charities? Or mention other things that might not strictly be charities, but might be “good deeds” that readers would be interested in?
I’ll get the ball rolling with a few suggestions. I believe the Electronic Frontier Foundation does important work. They tackle many fights that need to be fought. I’ve also been impressed with the projects that the Sunlight Foundation has worked on, including Earmark Watch.
On a related note, I’ve been getting interested in how bloggers can be more like journalists in terms of shield law protections, or learning more about defamation, privacy, and copyright. It’s frustrating […]
Written by on December 14th, 2008 with no comments.
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I’ve checked with folks at Google and they confirmed that http://too.blogspot.com/ is Sergey Brin’s blog. The name “too” reflects Sergey’s additional life outside work. One of his first posts is about the fact that he might be more likely to develop Parkinson’s Disease when he’s older. That’s based on data from 23andMe, the personal genetics company co-founded by Sergey’s wife Anne Wojcicki. It’s a serious reminder that healthiness is one of the top issues for anyone.
I’m sure that lots of people will flood Sergey with advice like “Add Google Analytics to that blog!” or suggest how to tweak his blog template or offer him free SEO tips. Personally, I’m just glad that Sergey is blogging. I think it’s a great idea and I hope that he keeps doing it. Sergey, welcome to the blogosphere.
Written by on September 18th, 2008 with no comments.
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Bookmarklets are very handy pieces of JavaScript code that you can bookmark. In HTML, if you want a link to open in a new window, you’d write it like this:
<a href=”http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/” target=”_blank”>Matt Cutts</a>
Go on, try it on this link: Matt Cutts
If you wanted to create a bookmarklet to open a new window or tab, you’d do it like this:
javascript:(function(){ window.open(’http://www.cnn.com/’); })();
so the actual bookmarklet link that would appear in your HTML as
<a href=”javascript:(function(){ window.open(’http://www.cnn.com/’); })();”>CNN</a>
and if you want to play with it, here’s the trivial CNN example bookmarklet. On Firefox, you can drag the bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar. On Internet Explorer, you can right-click and select “Add to Favorites…”.
The reason I mention this is that bit.ly is a url shortening service that I like, and they have a bookmarklet, but it replaces the page that you’re shortening. Their bookmarklet looks like this:
javascript:location.href=’http://bit.ly/?url=’+encodeURIComponent(location.href)
So suppose you find a new page that […]
Written by on August 4th, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on Web/Net and How to.
I’ve started to post more on my twitter account recently. Less than two weeks ago, Twitter bought Summize. Good for them; I like both companies. But http://search.twitter.com/search?q=wordpress+mattcutts should return this entry in Twitter’s search results. I don’t see it in Twitter’s search results:
What’s the story, Twitter/Summize folks? I can’t escape the feeling that I would have found that entry on pre-acquisition Summize. Does anyone know more about when Twitter’s search has gaps?
Written by on July 27th, 2008 with no comments.
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I still like my last start-up idea about converting MP3 music collections to be legal and cleaning up mangled/ugly filenames. As Amazon and others start to sell MP3s, a startup could easily offer some interesting services. For example, I just saw that a new product called TuneUp will clean up your filenames, metadata, and cover art. That’s cool stuff that fixes a real problem a lot of people have.
Ready for another idea? This one is simple. Make an Android or iPhone app for people who need a taxi. Imagine: you’re in another city, and you just learned that from your hotel to dinner is not walkable. You’re standing on a street corner. What do you do? WHAT DO YOU DO!?
Answer: you fire up “Call me a Cab” on your app-enabled phone. Your phone automatically senses your location and (anywhere in the world) gives you 3-4 suggestions for local cab […]
Written by on July 20th, 2008 with no comments.
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Carolyn Y. Johnson has a great article about companies that listen online today in the Boston Globe. She mentions that Comcast and Southwest monitor Twitter for frustrated users and Dell for improving its customer service as well as providing a site called IdeaStorm where people can provide feedback. Dell has implemented over 50 of the suggestions from the IdeaStorm site.
I’ve talked about listening online before, because I think everybody at Google should do it to some degree. Google is pretty good at hearing outside feedback, although there’s always more we could (and should!) do. Here’s what I said last time:
Some of the most dynamic teams at Google are the ones that listen to bloggers and respond. ….
My ideal would be if every Google project had someone watching the blogosphere for feedback. It could start as simply as a persistent search in Google News and Google Blogsearch for mentions of that […]
Written by on July 7th, 2008 with no comments.
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[Adding an xkcd cartoon to my last post made me remember that I had this leftover post that I never published.]
I’m ruthless in pruning my work email down to the essentials. In particular, I auto-archive emails about different speakers at Google. So many neat/fun speakers are always visiting Google that if I started going to all those cool lectures, I’d never get my regular work done.
I’m at peace with that choice, but it does mean that sometimes I find out about awesome speakers at Google by reading about them on an outside blog.
I missed Randall Munroe, the guy that draws xkcd, which is a bummer. It’s one of my favorite net comics. Here’s my favorite xkcd:
My second-favorite is this map of the internet, because some real internet cartographers used the idea and made a real map of the internet with the same basic design.
If you like xkcd, Ellen has a […]
Written by on May 23rd, 2008 with no comments.
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I communicate with people in lots of ways: face-to-face, email, via my blog, leaving comments in the blogosphere, conferences, etc. At SMX West a couple people asked “I sent you a friend invite on service X but you haven’t responded. Do you not like me?” Please don’t feel bad, because it’s not that. I’m letting a lot of requests drop on the floor — even requests from other Googlers to chat on Google Talk. I did a quick check of various social services and here’s what I found:
LinkedIn: 176 invitations to connect
Twitter: 671 requests 1060 requests
Google Talk: 27 chat requests
Facebook: 190 friend requests
MySpace: 35 friends, and it’s a fake account that someone else set up in my name (I’m not 42 years old, thank you very much ).
At this point, managing friend invitations feels more like work than fun. Many of these services have really poor interfaces for mass […]
Written by on April 17th, 2008 with no comments.
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