It’s official now! Google has bought YouTube for $1.65 billion (in stock)!
This is definitively the biggest and probably the most important acquirement in the (young) history of Google. It is now Googles turn to show how they will make YouTube profitable.
See Google’s press releases here or here.
Fujitsu presented a few prototype PC designs at the Ceatec 2007. One of their ideas, a turntable PC, looks really cool!
The Turn Table PC represents one possibility for a home entertainment PC that can switch between being used as a notebook computer or as a digital turntable, allowing DJs to scratch and spin digital media files. Nice!!
The dutch government is about to approve a proposal of a Dutch copyright foundation which wants to add 25 euro of extra taxes on every MP3 player sold here. This should compensate the missed income caused by illegal MP3s. Well well well, what a great idea!
Besides the fact that it is absolutly ridiculous to let people pay royalties before even playing a song, this will also cause serious problems for the dutch electronics industry.
From january 1st 2007, every MP3 player will rise 25 euro in price. Oh no, let me rephrase that: from january 1st 2007, every MP3 player in the Netherlands will rise 25 euri in price.
So, I guess you don’t have to be a genious to understand what will happen…
Exactly: everybody will buy a MP3 player somewhere else. Belgium and Germany are only a short drive away and offcourse we also have the webshops which will be happy to deliver that new iPod to our home address.
In my opinion, there is only one solution for all the copyright problems we are currently facing: lower the price of the music! I just can’t understand why the record labels still don’t get it. Let’s get rid of the DRM and charge reasonable prices for mp3 files! That’s the only way to boost the online music sales and it will prevent a lot of people from downloading ‘illegal mp3s’.
Loic Le Meur just announced Les Blogs 3, december 11 and 12th 2006 in Paris. Last year about 450 people attended the conference, this year there is space for 900!
I can’t find any info about the program or speakers yet, hopefully that will follow soon.
If you are a SEO man (or woman), interested in search engine technology and thus the mechanism behind Google’s pagerank, you should check out the blog of Matt Cutts on a regular basis. As many know, Matt works at Google and often has something interesting to tell us.
In this post, Matt answers some questions about pagerank. I made the following selection of answers that I found interesting:
Will the data centers using the slightly older infrastructure be updated in due course, or will my PR be split by data center for the next couple of months?
The latter. I think most data centers are running the newer infrastructure for things like info:, related:, link: and PageRank, and I believe every data center that has that newer infrastructure has the recent snapshot of PageRank now. I wouldn’t be surprised if it took at least 1-2 months for the other data center IPs to get the newer infrastructure in some way. (Yes, this is smaller, different infrastructure than the stuff that made site: queries have more accurate results estimates.)
Just found a way to check which pages of a website are in Google’s supplemental index. Might be handy because if your pages are in the supplemental index, that explains why that don’t show up in the normal results.
For example, see how many pages of digg.com are in the supplemental index:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.digg.com%2F+***
So, how does it work? Just perform this query: ” site:www.domain.com/ *** “
Interesting post over at Google blogoscoped, people have found a blacklist and a whitelist which is probably used for Google’s ’safe browsing’ functionality. All that time I was thinking that Google had this ’smart discovery’ for phishing sites, now it turns out that it is just a good old blacklist!
Oh, but wait, the fact that they also need a whitelist must mean that they do use some auto-discovery. Apparently it works a bit too well occasionaly, so they included a whitelist for sites that are known to be safe. Still interesting though.
Update: more about the lists can be read at the mozilla wiki, might be handy if you plan to use the lists in your own application.
Just came across an announcement of Xtech 2007.
The theme of the conference for 2007 is “The Ubiquitous Web”. A keynote will be delivered by Adam Greenfield, author of “Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing”. Among other things XTech 2007 will cover:
- ubiquitous computing and mobile devices
- linking real life artifacts into the web
- how the web and open data is affecting communities, businesses and science
Sounds really interesting so I think I will try to be there.
According to australian research, sex and pornography are no longer the most popular search topics on the web. Professor Amanda Spinks from Queensland University of Technology’s says that business and commerce-related topics, including buying and selling on the net, are currently more popular than sex.
The research was performed in collaboration with Pennsylvania State University, together they analysed up to 30 million search sessions from search engines including Alta Vista, AlltheWeb.com, Ask.com, Excite and Dogpile. Apparently they didn’t make use of AOL’s logfiles that were are available online.
A few explanations that Prof. Spinks has:
- “More women are searching the web. Back in the 90s, it was probably young male geeks, but now the demographics are changing with mums and dads, kids, grandmas and business people all searching the web.”
- “The general population is searching now compared to the male set in the 90s.”
- “Back in the 90s, there wasn’t as much business information on the web.”
To be honest, I’m not really convinced. I would love to read a more detailed paper about how the research was performed. Looking at the statistics of one of the major Dutch search engines (where I happen to work at), I can only draw the conclusion that sex does still dominate the search topics.
So, you’ve been a crocodile hunter for most of your live. Never afraid, even not for the biggest crocodiles. Then, when you enjoy the beautyfull underwater-world of Great Barriere Reef, you get strucked by a stingray and die. What a story.
A couple of days later, Steve Irwin (the crocodile hunter who we are talking about) is almost dominating the web. His own website can’t deal with the high number of requests and is seriously offline. In all of the major search engines, “Steve Irwin” and “Crocodile Hunter” are among the most executed queries. A tribute to Steve is one of the most viewed videos on youtube. This weeks most popular story on digg is about Steve as well.
It’s also remarkable to see the huge power of consumer generated content. The wikipedia page about Steve Irwin is already completely up-to-date, where MS Encarta doesn’t even seem to know who Steve Irwin is.
So, what lessons can we learn from this?
a) never come too close to a frightened stingray
b) become a crocodile hunter and die tragically if you really (and I mean really) nead a lot of traffic to your website