Google Drive: Why you’re a sucker if you pay for online file storage Photograph by Google. Rumors that Google would get into the online storage game have been swirling longer than some of its rivals have been in business. The first bit of evidence appeared online in 2004, the year Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook. Every few years since then, Google acolytes have stumbled upon fresh proof that the GDrive was imminent. And yet it never came. Farhad Manjoo is a technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal and the author of True Enough. Follow Eventually, people stopped waiting. Now, finally, Google is joining the party. To be fair, there are some unique features built into Google Drive. But don’t pay Google for extra space. Google, Microsoft, Dropbox, SugarSync, and box.com all give away some space for free, and then ask you to pay a few dollars a month for more. For Microsoft and Google, this state of affairs isn’t so bad. Imagine a service that kept track of all these different drives for you.
The Future of the Internet Advertisement “In only a few short years, electronic computing systems have been invented and improved at a tremendous rate. But computers did not ‘just grow.’ They have evolved… They were born and they are being improved as a consequence of man’s ingenuity, his imagination… and his mathematics.” — 1958 IBM brochure The Internet is a medium that is evolving at breakneck speed. It’s a wild organism of sweeping cultural change — one that leaves the carcasses of dead media forms in its sizeable wake. An illustration of a computer from a 1958 IBM promotional brochure titled ‘World of Numbers’ So what’s the next step in its evolution, and what’s the big picture? This article will offer in-depth analysis of a range of subjects — from realistic expectations stemming from current trends to some more imaginative speculations on the distant future. Security “Death of the Open Web”? There is a growing sentiment that the open web is a fundamentally dangerous place. Security Solutions Freedom Mr. Ms.
Negative SEO: Looking for Answers from Google It seems that we're finally starting to see more of what many have suspected for a long time. That others can indeed affect your rankings with bad links. Otherwise known as "negative SEO." And this time it's going to be damned hard to get the worms back into the can. Let's go back a bit first shall we? Over the years Google has always stated that what others did, in particular, with bad links, can't hurt your sites rankings. That's been changing though. Then there was the Google guidelines which have been morphing, as reported by Shaun Anderson From: "Can competitors harm ranking? To: "There’s ALMOST nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index." Then on March 14th to: "Google works hard to prevent other webmasters from being able to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. OK, great. See that bit there? All of that only matters if your website is hooked up to Webmaster Tools. The Game is Afoot! What's the Answer? Handy for:
When Will this Low-Innovation Internet Era End? - Justin Fox by Justin Fox | 10:52 AM April 27, 2012 It’s an age of unprecedented, staggering technological change. Business models are being transformed, lives are being upended, vast new horizons of possibility opened up. Or something like that. These are all pretty common assertions in modern business/tech journalism and management literature. Then there’s another view, which I heard from author Neal Stephenson in an MIT lecture hall last week. Stephenson was clearly trying to be provocative. More prosaically, the 15 years since the Internet became a major part of our lives has been marked here in the U.S. — birthplace of the Internet — by mostly disappointing economic growth. The most common response to such griping has been, just wait. Or, to look at it another way, until the prime example of an innovative major corporation ceases to be Procter & Gamble, we probably aren’t in a truly innovative era (Tide to Go is awesome, but it’s not exactly the transistor).
Six degrees of aggregation Of the many and conflicting stories about how The Huffington Post came to be—how it boasts 68 sections, three international editions (with more to come), 1.2 billion monthly page views and 54 million comments in the past year alone, how it came to surpass the traffic of virtually all the nation’s established news organizations and amass content so voluminous that a visit to the website feels like a trip to a mall where the exits are impossible to locate—the earliest and arguably most telling begins with a lunch in March 2003 at which the idea of an online newspaper filled with celebrity bloggers and virally disseminated aggregated content did not come up. The invitation for the lunch came from Kenneth Lerer. He was 51 and casting about for something new, having recently left his position as executive vice president for communications at AOL. He brought the book with him and Watts would recall that the copy was dog-eared, the flatteringly telltale sign of a purposeful read. 1. 2.
The Imminent Takeover of Web 3.0? Social media has literally started a revolution when it comes to advertising online or working on website promotion. There are so many affordable search engine optimization companies that can help you develop a killer social media plan that will help you establish ongoing communications with your customers, building your customer base and exploding your profits. The key is to balance out your regular SEO tactics with social media, and have the best of both worlds. The introduction, and seemingly imminent takeover, of social media is being referred to as Web 3.0. at first, Web 2.0 referred to the introduction of blogs, forums and such, which allowed the Internet user to be more present online and be more involved with marketing. Internet marketing specialists tracked user behaviors to determine what keywords would work best with their SEO tactics, and affordable search engine optimization companies sprung up everywhere to get in on the action.
Behind The Scenes In Google's Battle Against Bad Ads When new employees join the Google ad quality team that manually reviews suspect ads, they start by studying internal documentation of policies that outline examples of ads that would be approved, and those that would be rejected. Then the employees’ skills are tested on ads that don’t run, they graduate to ads that get little traffic, and finally they move up to ads expected to get lots of impressions. These are some of the tidbits revealed by Google director of engineering for the advertising team, David W. Despite many years of being tight-lipped about the AdWords ad review processes, the company has recently begun to reveal more about the efforts it’s making to prevent bad ads from slipping through. Toward More Transparency “I have been talking with my peers in different departments for about a year now about how I think Google has been remiss about being transparent about what we do,” said Baker. The company is in a difficult position in a couple of different ways. Ad Review
Bizcamp #6 - Howest, Kortrijk Invalid quantity. Please enter a quantity of 1 or more. The quantity you chose exceeds the quantity available. Please enter your name. Please enter an email address. Please enter a valid email address. Please enter your message or comments. Please enter the code as shown on the image. Please select the date you would like to attend. Please enter a valid email address in the To: field. Please enter a subject for your message. Please enter a message. You can only send this invitations to 10 email addresses at a time. $$$$ is not a properly formatted color. Please limit your message to $$$$ characters. $$$$ is not a valid email address. Please enter a promotional code. Sold Out Pending You have exceeded the time limit and your reservation has been released. The purpose of this time limit is to ensure that registration is available to as many people as possible. This option is not available anymore. Please read and accept the waiver. All fields marked with * are required. US Zipcodes need to be 5 digits.
News - Life after Firefox: Can Mozilla regain its mojo? 10 April 2012Last updated at 19:05 ET By Dave Lee Technology reporter Mozilla knows it needs to diversify its income possibilities if it is to survive Mozilla Foundation president Mitchell Baker is sitting on a ticking time bomb. The survival of her company, which pledges to make the web a better place, is at the mercy of one of its main competitors, Google. If you haven't heard of Mozilla, you almost certainly know - and perhaps use - its most famous product: the Firefox browser. Since 2002, it has been steadily gaining market share against Internet Explorer (IE), Microsoft's pre-loaded, oft-criticised equivalent. It now has about half a billion users, a huge number of which are evangelists for the software. Google likes this. This investment is believed to represent about 85% of Mozilla's entire income. Mozilla loves that, no doubt, but can they trust it? Mitchell Baker tells the BBC it is important for Mozilla to diversify its income Why would Google pull out or scale back its contribution?
Web 3.0 – what is it, how will it affect me and when will it arrive? As the web has developed, so have the buzzwords and terms that describe it. What feels like only yesterday, everyone was asking for a web 2.0 website, assuming that this instantly explained what they needed. What is actually described was a style of functionality that encouraged sharing and interaction. Although it wasn’t named as such, there was also a stage of web now referred to as web 1.0. The three ‘stages’ so far can be described as follows: Web 1.0 – Displaying and linking In the beginning the web was just a lot of content all independently hosted and occasionally linked together by hyperlinks. Web 2.0 – Social and Collaboration This is where we are now. Web 3.0 – Semantic Web This name was given to 3.0 by Tim Bernes-Lee who is said to have invented the web, but the concept around 3.0 was first covered in the media by Scientific American, a US publication in 2001. The definition of web 3.0 is still to be set as the technology that will dictate what it is has yet to be fine-tuned.
Facebook Ad Analytics Will Track More Than Clicks & Likes - Search Engine Watch (#SEW) Christopher Heine | April 18, 2012 | 0 Comments inShare41 Non-retail brands should also be pleased with the upgrades. Facebook's new analytics are designed to make paid advertisers - retailers more than others, perhaps - feel better about their spends. The social platform announced today that, in the coming weeks, its Ads Manager dashboard will no longer simply be about how many click-throughs or "likes" a paid promotion creates. Marketers soon will be able to track "any action that can be taken on Facebook downstream from an ad," David Baser, product manager for the digital giant, told ClickZ in a briefing. "The marketers will specify what actions they are interested in," he said. The stat Baser refers to includes number of likes, number of Facebook user comments involving the brand, RVSPs, "@mentions" of a brand, Facebook Places check-ins, and photo-tags. "To get down to that granular level," Links said, "is certainly something we haven't seen before in social commerce.
TOY TRENDS INSPIRED BY POP CULTURE, TECHNOLOGY, SOCIAL CAUSES Toy Trends Inspired By Pop Culture, Technology, Social Causes Melanie Shrefflereditor in chiefYpulse Essentials Archive. We were at the Time To Play toy showcase yesterday to keep an eye on the trends coming this spring and summer — and to have a little fun letting our inner child come out to play. As usual, toy makers are putting out toys that are travel-friendly for summer holidays — including Crayola’s fold-and-go Dry Erase Activity Mat and Mattel’s WWE Money In The Bank play set that all folds up into a briefcase (like the one that hangs in the center of the ring for that event). Amid all that, however, were some new trends we’ve been keeping our eyes on: Low-Tech Meets High-Tech Blip Toys actually spoke those very words — low-tech meets high-tech — when we stopped by to check out its new line of Out Of This World dolls. Wish Factory’s i-Poppin’ Necklaces also take a low-tech item, a necklace, and adds a high-tech twist making it double as retractable headphones. DIY/Self-Expression
Is Facebook Making Us Lonely? - Magazine Yvette Vickers, a former Playboy playmate and B-movie star, best known for her role in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, would have been 83 last August, but nobody knows exactly how old she was when she died. According to the Los Angeles coroner’s report, she lay dead for the better part of a year before a neighbor and fellow actress, a woman named Susan Savage, noticed cobwebs and yellowing letters in her mailbox, reached through a broken window to unlock the door, and pushed her way through the piles of junk mail and mounds of clothing that barricaded the house. Upstairs, she found Vickers’s body, mummified, near a heater that was still running. Her computer was on too, its glow permeating the empty space. The Los Angeles Times posted a story headlined “Mummified Body of Former Playboy Playmate Yvette Vickers Found in Her Benedict Canyon Home,” which quickly went viral. Also see: Live Chat With Stephen Marche The author will be online at 3 p.m.