Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft working together for the good of mankind
Okay, so it’s not quite that grand. But apparently Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft are going to be using the same sitemap format some time in 2007. Google Sitemaps that is.
Google Custom Search – Language Learning
Google just launched a clever new custom search thing. The idea is for people to create their own “custom” search engines that automatically give weight to certain sites, restrict others and silently append search terms therefore improving accuracy for niche topics. For example imagine an ornithologist searching for “a pair of great tits”..
So, I’ve created an engine for finding language learning resources. And it’s surprisingly good.
Learning a language over Jabber/XMPP
Filed under: Computers, Entertainment, Google, Languages, Technology
The language learning app of mine is still under development, but I doubt I’ll be spending too much time on it until after my trip to America (and by extension, until after Christmas).
In the meantime I’ve reading about XMPP, the protocol used by Google Talk and several others. One of the extensions that Google is largely responsible for Jingle which essentially allows voice communications. There are also a couple of XMPP clients written in PHP. So it may be possible to deliver lessons over XMPP through a chat bot.
Yahoo and MSN getting jiggy with it
It was announced a while ago, but this morning MSN Messenger announced it to me personally (well it game me a popup)… MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger users can now chat to each other using either’s client.
Read about Yahoo! on MSN
Read about MSN on Yahoo!
This is presumably a way to try and stop the multi-network clients that are becoming more popular and taking advertising revenue from the two of them. Well sort of. It’s more likely an attempt to stop Google’s attempt to spread a free and open IM network.
Google Video Ads
The very eagle eyed amongst you may notice I’ve altered the layout of the site slightly. One of the most prominent changes is switching to a smaller ad size for old posts (before I had a large rectangular ad above any post that is more than seven days old figuring that anyone visiting old content on a blog really wanted to be there and would get over it). The new 200×200 size immediately started showing video ads on a few pages.
For an example, visit my post about the cartoons of the prophet Mohamed.
Google PageRank updated
It seems Google have updated PR of their index – I’ve finally reached a PageRank of 6 for the homepage 
Google Checkout
Google Checkouts has a launched as a rival to
On the surface Google Checkout is more expensive – 2.0% + $0.20 per transaction (PayPal is 1.9% + $0.30). However Google will let sellers have $10 of free transactions for every $1 spent on
Google Mail and Spam
Google Mail account for about a week and I have to say the spam filter is really good. A couple of hours after putting my email address on the blog I was getting spam and all but two messages have been correctly marked. More importantly, none of the messages marked have spam have been wrong.
There is one slightly entertaining fact. When I read the spam messages I still get Google ads related to the content. I thought perhaps they’d treat the spam folder as a special case. Although I guess it does make sense – I read a dodgy email with “Looking for the best value in discount software?” and get a nice Google ad offering me genuine Microsoft Office for £235.
ASP.NET Atlas really is like Backbase
Filed under: Computers, Google, Javascript, Programming, Technology, Web Programming, XML
ASP.NET might not suck after all. Atlas for ASP.NET is a toolkit for doing AJAXy stuff.
Well in fact it is quite a bit more than that. It has many features of the Google Web Toolkit (except in ASP.NET instead of
Interesting it also has a lot in common with Backbase. It allows you to embed some nifty XML to define a user interface which is then interpreted by the Javascript to render real (X)HTML.
The final irony is that it’s pretty much free. Since it’s .NET, to really use it you need Visual Studio, but the Atlas part itself is free and should be perfectly usable with the Express version of the Visual Studio projects.
Confusing Google Mail
Google Mail (no longer
Ah well.