tagged me in this where I get to find out more about what happened on my birthday. So what, besides me being born, happened on March 20?
Three Events on March 20
In 1815, Napoleon enters Paris with almost 350,000 troops and begins his Hundred Days rule.
Albert Einstein publishes his general theory of relativity in 1916.
The United States invasion of Iraq from 2000-2003 started in the wee hours of the morning on March 20.
Two Births on March 20
1904 - American psychologist B.F. Skinner
1928 - Mr. (Fred) Rogers
One Holiday on March 20
The Vernal Equinox - The First Day of Spring is generally celebrated on this day
How this meme works?
Go to Wikipedia and type in your birthday (month and day).
Write down three events, 2 births, 1 holiday and tag 5 friends.
There are five slots in the Birthday Meme. As you are tagged, you have to remove the name in the first slot and bump everyone up so that your name can be added to the bottom.
Bloggers have been using RSS feeds for years - many people use their preferred feed reader to quickly get scan the content of many blogs at once. If you have timely, frequently updated material, RSS feeds are a great way of syndicating content.
RSS feeds (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary) allow webmasters to deliver a summary of the site’s content and these can be updated as the site is updated. By delivering headlines, snippets of the content, or a full view of what is offered on the site, the reader can be drawn to the site, give them information or both.
While big business is now attracted to what RSS feeds can offer, I am generally seeing these being used by magazine and newspaper publishers to boost readership. But what about boosting sales?
With , having listings in Google Books should now be key to publishers’ online marketing campaigns. While there is no doubt of the value of Google Books to those looking to increase book sales online, there is some concern about the lack of order in Google Books search results.
The results in Google Books search results come from two sources, the and Google Books Library Project. The Google Books Partner Program allows publishers submit their book lists at no cost. Publishers have a choice of four formats for the submission.
Full view where you can view or download the entire book. This would be of no value and actually would devalue the book itself, and I gather this is generally for the Google Books Library Project.
Limited preview allows the user to view a limited number of pages of the book.
Snippet view allows the user to view a few sentences surrounding the search term.
No preview available shows no content from the book.
Personally, I think that limited preview is the way to go. I like to read a few pages of a book when I buy it in a bookstore, and I feel the same way about making my online purchases, and I have no doubt that many people feel the same way.
Google Books has every page of your book scanned
Google promises to protect your content “by the same security as Google.com’s search data”, but here is how it works in a nutshell:
[They] scan the full text of your book because [they] want people to be able to search all its content. But users can only access a limited number of pages to determine whether they’ve found what they’re looking for.
I am sure there will be some complainers that will think: “ooh that’s bad that they want every page - they are being sneaky and have something to gain”. Sure, they have a lot to gain, but it is a win/win situation for everyone involved in my (humble) opinion.
It’s true that the , but they have Google has to rank them somehow. , I think it’s all very interesting. I wonder how Google book search ranks the book results. I want to look at this over the next few weeks for fun.
Posted: August 27th, 2007 under Uncategorized. Comments: 2
Okay, besides my Pink Internet Marketing blog, there are a lot of great things that come in pink. And here are some great things from my childhood that came in pink.
Pretty in Pink
Rich boy meets poor girl. Rich boy and poor girl fall in love and battle adversity. A great story that proves that love conquers even the biggest barriers - including the disapproval of rich friends. Great 80s clothes and great 80s dialog. And you have to love Ducky. :D
Barbapapa
I love the - and especially Barbapapa who is the “dad” or leader of the group of funny lumpy things. It’s a French thing. Barbapapa is the word for cotton candy in French BTW. ;) Read more »
Posted: August 25th, 2007 under Uncategorized. Comments: 12
What’s a geeky girl to do on a lonely Friday night? (Truth be told, I may be going out later.) I usually look for love in all the wrong places, so here is one more wrong place to look for love: Google.
1st result in Google for “love”: Wikipedia (oooh so shocked)
2nd result: (might come in handy later)
3rd result: commemorating the Beatles (not useful to me at all until I find love because I can’t very well go by myself because I would look lonely)
So now that I know what Google thinks about love… what am I looking for?
Well, he has to be ““. There are a few personals sites that come up, but Google gets the keywords from throughout the page meaning that Google combines profiles to give me the results. Thanks for nothing. So let me be more focused and less picky: ““. Just a bunch of chicks talking about finding the perfect guy. Again, no help there. I guess I could visit one of the paid search results that will help me with ““. But I don’t want to. Google search results is not really such a great place to meet men.
Oh, and NEWS FLASH… apparently . teehee
Posted: August 24th, 2007 under Uncategorized. Comments: 4
I was extremely excited to hear recently that the book . While I don’t work in development, I work with a team of developers creating web content in ASP.NET. Search engine optimization working with static web pages is one thing, but I know now from experience that optimizing pages with session IDs and no actual text and no links just postbacks is a wholly different story.
I, along with many others I imagine, have been anticipating this book for a while now, and sometimes I thought the day would never come. But now it has, and I have my copy of SEO for ASP by and coming in the mail. Look forward to my full review when I have read it.
I have a feeling that the guys at work will be jealous of my book, and I am going to put it on my desk at work just to make sure.
Posted: August 24th, 2007 under Uncategorized. Comments: 1
I have been reading lately about the . News so often presents only one side of the story, and despite the fact that it should by nature be unbiased, we all know this is rarely the case.The addition of comments to Google News has started an interesting discussion that I wanted to continue here.
First off, it should be clear, not everyone can comment on Google News items - they must be “part of the news” being reported. To comment, they must and verification that they are who they say they are. What is Google’s mission?
… we’re hoping that by adding this feature, we can help enhance the news experience for readers, testing the hypothesis that — whether they’re penguin researchers or presidential candidates– a personal view can sometimes add a whole new dimension to the story.
There however is some because of the usual suspects: Google is now human edited? and What about Propaganda? And there is a lot of considering they will be likely flooded with comments and people will no doubt look to market and promote themselves and their companies. Some say that this will prove that journalism is not just the aggregation of information, and , while still others .
So here is a link to a news item, and here is a comment on that news item. To clarify, I don’t usually read the health section of Google News. I imagine that perhaps doctors do, health professionals of all kinds I suppose. Perhaps also people interested in health issues. Which leads me to the main question: Does including comments degrade or enhance the user experience? I would have to say it enhances the user experience to a great degree, and one would be hard pressed to deny this. The user can easily identify it as a comment, and are told of the author and their affiliations. It increases the amount of information and reliable opinion related to the news.
In the above criticisms linked, the question was asked: Will Google let people know how to process the information in the comments? Separate fact from fiction, undervalue propaganda, and summarily coddle its users? For example a news item speaks of a negative aspect of a Product X owned by Company A. The news item is then commented on by the CEO of company A. But first - they cannot flat-out lie, for this lie will be recorded for all time and immortalized. But they can sugar-coat the truth and say that nothing has been proven about Product X and that their researchers are looking into it. But next to his name will be the name Company A and the user will understand that this comment is being made by the CEO of Company A. Can’t make it any clearer, can you?
Now, what about the criticisms that it is not journalism? Of course it’s not journalism. It’s Google, which means it is links to news and journalistic works. Now with comments. I don’t think Google is aspiring to contribute to the annals of journalism here, they are looking to contribute to the user experience, to “enhance the news experience for readers”. And I think adding comments to Google News will do just that.
Personally, I don’t see what people are fussing about. Google does not charge me to read these comments. It does not charge me to access the links to the news. In fact on Google News there are not even any ads. Furthermore it does not charge newspapers for being included in Google News. It is an absolutely free news aggregation service online. Now with rebuttal. :) And I need I discuss all the “propaganda” in the news itself. Perhaps adding comments like this will help separate fact from fiction.
Posted: August 22nd, 2007 under Uncategorized. Comments: 3
I was graciously invited by and to post at , and after some initial trepidation with regards to posting on “not my blog”, I finally did my first review of a Blog We [I] Luv.
Check it out here:
I am very excited about this because I intend on exploring all the fabulous pink blogs that the blogosphere has to offer. As a result, I will be starting to PinkList blogs. As I review the blog, I will add them to my PinkListed blog list here. I will make a little badge maybe too and perhaps they will want to add it to their blog.
I am very excited about this opportunity and it should be a lot of fun reviewing great pink blogs in the blogosphere.
In Google Experimental Search Labs you search for something using view:timeline command. Here, inclusion is based not only on the relevancy of the content but also by placing that content in the time line by including dates in the content. With the unrolling of in Labs such as Google Timeline, search engine marketers must exercise a great level of adaptability.
At first glance, it is a lot of fun. I think that Google should work on excluding blogs somehow… I found my own blog listed for post dates and that seems counterproductive and will work to clog the results.
As this feature moves from experimental to possibly becoming a regular command in Google search, I wonder what will be the importance of “owning” dates in Google search. I imagine this will be a widely used feature, in any case and no doubt getting some years for very important keywords might be worthwhile.
Barbapapa
