October 7th, 2009, 6 Comments »
About six months ago, I wrote about seeing the Google Street View camera car drive past. When Google’s street-level photo feature was implemented in Vancouver, I figured I might show up. Unfortunately, the patio tables out front at Subeez are empty (it’s clearly much earlier in the day), so I didn’t make the cut.
Of course, I immediately became interested in other familiar Vancouver spots:
- Here’s the viewpoint halfway up Cypress Mountain, where we tried to compromise our girlfriends good upbringing back in high school.
- The construction site where my childhood home used to stand.
- The parking lot at the Reifel Bird Sanctuary, one of my favourite, lesser-known spots in the city.
- Here’s the strange, charming little plane-spotting park near the Vancouver Airport.
- This seems to be the most remote point on the north-west part of the Street View coverage. It’s a banal stretch of road north of Whistler.
Though it seems a little gimmicky, Street View is actually a very useful tool. I often remember where a business or office is, but can’t remember the name. Or, alternatively, I think I might remember the name of the restaurant, but I want to see its exterior to confirm that’s it the right one. So, despite not featuring me anywhere in the Lower Mainland, it’s super handy.
What’s your favourite Vancouver spot on Street View?
6 Comments »
October 6th, 2008, 5 Comments »
I snapped this photo while having a quick dinner at the Fernwood Inn before an event at the Belfry Theatre. It’s the lower-right corner of a TV set showing Monday Night Football. As far as I could figure, there was no sound issuing from the TV:
Interface designers never fail to surprise me in the ways they can screw up. What do you suppose ‘1/2 Mute’ means? Because, as it happens, mute means ’speechless’. So you really can’t be half-mute, can you?
I’m reminded of a story about a decade old, which I recount with affection, not mockery. My aunt come over to our house. She’d just arrived, and turned to notice our TV. “Oh,” she said, “there’s a mute on the screen.” In fact, the TV had been muted, and was displaying ‘MUTE’ in the lower-right corner.
An a related note, I tried to search for a URL for the Fernwood Inn. Claiming that I was headed for the Fernwood Inn, Google pointed me to an Australian fitness centre. The following screenshot illustrates the unusual error:
5 Comments »
April 17th, 2008, 2 Comments »
Just a quick note to say thanks to everybody who linked to Julie’s figure skating blog. She’s now in the number one spot for the Google search ‘figure skating blog’. There’s obviously not a lot of stiff competition, because Brian, Richard and I all have results in the top ten (though that may just be Google favouring newer pages).
For all you aspiring adult figure skaters out there, you can learn how to centre a spin.
2 Comments »
March 7th, 2008, 5 Comments »
This morning I was searching for news reports on the status of Aaron Miller’s shoulder injury (oh, oh, Ohlund). As I usually do, I searched in Google, and went to click the News link to switch from web results to recent news. Before I did, I noticed something new in the search results:
There’s a site-search field underneath the results for Canucks.com. That’s a handy innovation. The subtext is “we’re pretty sure we know where you want to go, but your search was too vague”. How long has this been around?
UPDATE: I note that when I search for “Apple”, I don’t get the search field. Odd. I wonder what Google’s criteria is.
5 Comments »
December 16th, 2007, 3 Comments »
When Google bought FeedBurner, I abused the power of LOLCats to complain about Google’s incredibly fractured identity system. I had at least a half-dozen different login/password combinations associated with Google-owned services, and things haven’t gotten any simpler in the ensuing six months.
According to TechCrunch, hope is on the horizon:
Google is rolling out a centralized profile system that will provide personalized information to each Google product you use. The unimaginatively named Google Profile will share information across all Google products, unifying often disparate Google systems that logins aside haven’t previously shared data with each other…
According to Google Operating System, Google profiles are now available in Shared Stuff, Google Maps, Google Reader and will be added to other web applications shortly.
Praises be! I gather this coincides with the whole “see my friends’ shared stuff” in Google Reader announcement.
3 Comments »
November 29th, 2007, 8 Comments »
One of the reasons I make projects like Get a First Life and Dear Rockers is because they’re experiments in idea viruses. What spreads and what doesn’t? What is the epidemiology of a meme? How visitors behave on the site? And so forth.
In any case, Dear Rockers has gotten a bit of attention–about 12,000 visitors–over the past couple of days. This was one resulting statistics that amused me:
That’s from my Google AdSense account (disregard the ‘187′) for Dear Rockers. It means that despite people viewing 20,107 pages on the site, nobody ever clicked an ad. I’ve only got one little block of ads on the site, in the sidebar under the heading “Pay For Our Rockin’ Server”. Still, you would have thought that at least one of those 12,000 visitors might have clicked it.
Why Hasn’t Anybody Clicked?
Obviously, it’s a tiny set of ads. Also, there’s the reason that Seth Godin often points out that ads are distraction machines. People didn’t come to the site to click the ads.
Most of the traffic came from StumbleUpon, MetaFilter, Mental Floss, Neatorama and other sites frequented by, shall we say, more sophisticated web users. Almost none of it comes from search. Of those veteran netizens, 67% of them use Firefox, and 8% use Safari. They know an ad when they see it, or they block ads and they don’t see them at all.
I’ve seen and read about similar results from the Digg and Slashdot effects (in fact, 12,000 visitors is a typical pay-off for getting to the front page of Digg). Lots of traffic, but no revenue.
The lesson? If you’re trying to make money from online ads–and I’m certainly not with Dear Rockers–don’t cater to the smart, veteran users. Seek up the newbies and the late adopters–they’ll click your ads.
8 Comments »
November 28th, 2007, 7 Comments »
Anybody who spends any time with web analytics knows this fact, but I thought I’d highlight a real world example. Three years ago I wrote about a sort of money-tracking website (I’m reluctant to name it here, for fear of Heisenberging the search results further). I’m referring here to the Canadian site–not the American one shown above.
Three years later, there are 181 comments on that post, mostly from people providing the details–their location, the bill’s serial number–of a particular bill. Lately the reports have been coming in at a rate of nearly one per day.
Why’s that? Because if you search for the money tracking website, my blog post is the first result. It’s kind of weird, like the website doesn’t really exist in Google at all.
Clearly the folks visiting my site aren’t entering the URL on their money into the address bar–they’re searching in Google. It seems peculiar to web veterans, but it’s really not. They’re trying to find something, after all. And where do you go to find something? A search engine. They just don’t seem to conceive that the www address means that they’ve already found it.
Hmm…today’s posts have been particularly navel-gazing. I’ll do better tomorrow.
7 Comments »
November 21st, 2007, 5 Comments »
Google recently announced its foray into the telecommunications space with Android, an operating system and software developer kit for mobile devices. I watched the video, which was fairly dry (and Sergey, you can afford a shirt with a collar), but I was missing the context and meaning of this announcement.
Over at Slate, Tim Wu has written a readable overview of what Android might mean to the staid telecoms industry in the US.
Nor is the problem of retailing Android phones trivial. Anyone with an Internet browser can use Google search or Gmail, but in the American mobile world the main barrier to market entry is reaching consumers. Today, more than 90 percent of Americans buy their wireless devices from their carriers. It is true, again, that Google has T-Mobile and Sprint provisionally on its side. But if only some outlets will sell a Gphone, fewer people will buy them.
Incidentally, I wasn’t super-interested in the subject matter, and abandoned it after a few episode, but I learned a lot about the early days of the telephone industry from Cory Doctorow’s reading of Bruce Sterling’s The Hacker Crackdown.
5 Comments »
October 11th, 2007, 5 Comments »
I was perusing my HitTail stream o’ referrers this morning (there’s kind of a zen calm watching the river of referrers go by). Right between searches for “saran wrap but ass” and “george stroumboulopoulos is he gay”, I found this search:
allintitle: “in films”
You can probably guess what it’s for, but here’s the official word from Google:
If you start a query with [allintitle:], Google will restrict the results to those with all of the query words in the title. For instance, [allintitle: google search] will return only documents that have both “google” and “search” in the title.
The technical writing is a little ambiguous there. Do they mean the page title, as in the phrase that appears at the top of your browser (and comes from inside the title tags)? Or do they include headings on the page as well?
In any case, I’m not sure how useful this will be, but it’s always handy to learn another search shortcut.
5 Comments »
September 13th, 2007, 1 Comment »
Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis invited me to check out his new human-powered search engine. Specifically, I installed Mahalo Follow, a kind of ’search buddy’ Firefox plug-in that pops open a sidebar when it thinks Mahalo has some content relevant to the page I’m on (mostly search engine results, but I think it’s opened on other pages as well). That content tends to be a list of the ‘best’ links associated with the content. Here’s an example.
Obviously this service is straight-out-of-alpha, and needs to be populated with much more carefully-selected content. But I don’t think it’s for me.
Like you, my dear readers, I’m a pretty sophisticated searcher. I’ve been doing it a long time, I understand how the search engines work, and so I usually have good intuition about where (and more importantly whether) I’m going to find a particular piece of information.
As an exercise in thinking about how I search, I made a little list of search queries I ran the other day. This isn’t complete, but it’s a pretty representative sampling:
- How many units did the Sony Walkman sell?
- What is the URL for iLife on Apple’s site?
- What is the URL for Google AdWords?
- When did Malta achieve independence?
- Are there any Bill Callahan videos on YouTube?
- What nationality is KT Tunstall?
- Verify the correct spelling of ‘tchotchke’.
- Where’s the trailer for ‘Atonement’?
- What, if anything, do Dennis Leary and the BC Lions have in common?
- What century was the Great Siege of Malta in?
- What’s the URL for a Malta Times article I read in the paper?
- What does the BlackBerry Curve 8310 Smartphone look like?
- Where’s the Wikipedia entry for Geocities?
- How wide is Sicily?
- Who is playing Johanna in Tim Burton’s “Sweeney Todd”?
General Knowledge About Plasma TVs
My searches are really specific. Mahalo seems to want to help me out most with general information (by providing links) on a topic.
I can imagine that, if I was seeking some general knowledge about a suject, Mahalo might be a decent resource. If, say, I wanted to know more about plasma TVs. But it’s quite rare that I want that kind of generalized information. And when I do, Wikipedia rarely fails me.
Speaking of Wikipedia, Mahalo will live and die on user-generated content. It pays contributors US $10 to $15 per page of search results they create. I might give it a try, but that money isn’t worth my time. If Mahalo agreed to share the revenue generated from that page with me, then it might eventually become a better deal.
Besides, I’d much rather contribute to the emerging collective knowledge of humanity that is Wikipedia. Mahalo, after all, is just a company.
UPDATE: In writing this article, I’d meant to cite a recent post by Seth Godin, in which he touches on the problem I gather Mahalo is trying to solve:
The fact is that search engines are very good at fairly simple searches, and very good at finding information about single products, services, people and ideas.
But they’re terrible at connections, at rankings, at horizontal results. They can’t help me find the 25 most important up and coming artists in the United States. They can’t help me find six products that are viable alternatives to something that was just discontinued. They can’t help me rank the service of four accounting firms.
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