Social Networking
American Dialect Society selects ‘google’ and ‘tweet’
The American Dialect Society (ADS) has chosen “google” – the verb – as its top word of this decade and “tweet” – a short message sent via the Twitter.com service or the act of sending such a message – as its top word of the year 2009.
Grant Barrett, chairman of the New Words Committee of ADS stated that both words are, in the end, products of the Information Age, where every person has the ability to satisfy inquisitiveness and to broadcast to a select following, both through the Internet.He also said that he had assumed the word blog would take the position in the word of the decade category, but its also true that more people google than blog.
Google only became a verb after users of the search engine began to use it to mean search. “Google” as a verb was coined and included in the Meriam-Webster Dictionary as well as the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006.
The American Dialect Society(ADS) is a collection of scholars dedicated to the study of the English language and other languages and dialects in North America. They choose the Word of Year by conducting a voting session.
Twitter Launches Geolocation Feature
Twitter will permit their members to include their latitude and longitude if they wish to do so with each tweet. The service will be firmly opt-in, with the default being set to ‘off’. Tweet-level geo tagging will be treated another way than the location data entered manually by the user in their profile. Location data in the profile will persist to be utilised to give a general idea to visitors about where a member is normally based.
One major advantage of this feature is that ,you could toggle from reading the tweets of accounts you follow to reading tweets from any person either in your neighborhood or city-irrespective of whether you follow them or not.
Twitter,is thus getting better with the introduction of this fresh opt-in geolocation feature.
Buzz 140-Twitter Unconference
This is what one of the participants had to say “Twitter is one of the finest and quickest places to obtain information”.
Twitter’s home page twitter.com displays this– Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?Whether Twitter is here to stay for long or is it just a temporary fad among users,one needs to wait and watch.
Social Media Marketing to improve sales
There is a myth that exists among several companies that SEO is meant for companies that exist in the IT field.But one company has proved this incorrect by utilizing the concept of search engine optimization in order to increase their sales figures.EmbroidMe,which is the largest embroidery franchise has succeeded in increasing their sales figures tremendously by incorporating a SEO campaign.
EmbroidMe utilized the feature of Social Media such as Twitter and Facebook to order to improve their visibility.As more and more people are actively using the search engines to obtain information in the internet,companies are turning towards SEO in order to improve traffic.EmbroidMe found that there was a tremendous improvement in branding in all of their 450 locations.
Magazines included in Google Book Search
Google has added magazines to its list of books in their site books.google.com.The magazines include a wide variety ranging from Popoular Science to Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.The best part of this addition is that we get to read the latest issues of every magazine.
Let us focus on the various features magazine addition. One can browse different covers of a magazine or move into a particular issue and turn the scanned pages.Searching within an issue is done easily. It is also possible to subscribe to these magazines.An interesting concept added is this…When we glance at the page with the covers,the places which occur in various issues of Google is mentioned in the Google maps.And the location in the map is linked to the actual location.
Cuil, A Boon or a Fiasco?
When a user enters a keyword to be searched, Cuil lists additional keyword suggestions to choose from. The search engine result page (SERP) displays the output in a 3 column tabular format with an image next to every result and an elaborate content for every display. The most appealing feature is the “Explore by Category” in the result page, containing several categories, which on further clicks, expands to subcategories.
However, a user ponders how Cuil missed out on the spell checking feature of Google, if they are striving for a neck-to-neck competition with Google. Try searching for the same keyword in Google and Cuil, the net user is still drawn to the aptness of SERP of our favourite Google. The seldom change of logo in Google, gave a refreshing feel to the user, which one could only hope to see in Cuil in future.
Though Cuil has tried to emulate Google in some ways, one cannot write off Cuil as prosaic either. It’s too early to conclude if Cuil has sailed through in making an impact to the net savvy people of today. And if your wondering if there is any relevance between the name Cuil and search engine, the answer is yes. After all, Cuil means knowledge in Irish.
Google-blogger locked user accounts suspecting spammers
Last Friday Google-owned Blogger has express regret for mistakenly locking user accounts for being suspected spammers. This happed due to a bug in data processing code, which was uncovered on Friday and soon on Saturday Google said it the access is been restored for all accounts that were wrongly identified as spammers. This bug unknowingly identified blogs as spammers even when Google algorithms believed they weren’t. So, bloggers were unable to access or edit their blogs until the bug was fixed.
On the other hand, Blogger.com emailed an apology to the users on Saturday when access was regained. One irate blogger said: “Google lost my trust yesterday. They’ll have to work twice as hard to regain it due to their lack of acknowledgment of the problem.”
Will the Cuil search result take over major search engines?
Cuil was actually founded by many lead Google engineers, comprising Anna Patterson, chief architect of the company’s TeraGoogle search index and wife of Tom Costello. Cuil further states that its search result algorithm scans through 120 billion web pages, which is actually three times the number that the giant sifts through. Additionally, www.cuil.com offers reminiscent page and Google’s has minimalist one. Cuil further offers no ads on its pages, and also claims that it would not monitor a user’s search habits so as to target advertising the method the entire major search engine like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft do and name it their goal. However, the major advantage Google has over Cuil is that it has the capability to offer better search result as it remains massive advertising platform backup.
This search engine says it would stand out due to its excellence of offering results with images in three columns and it would search the web more insistently than other search giants.
Google Knol vs. Wikipedia
Wikipedia works on the factor that an online user’s participation would generate accurate and useful information and knowledge. The contribution made by one user could be altered or corrected by any other subsequent visitor/user who believes he or she knows better about the topic. Google Knol on the other hand, offers the author the rights to control if and when any other users modify their article. If they are not satisfied with what other users have to suggest then they could just bar it. However, the user needs to pay for the getting this right and authors also need to put their name to their contributed article.
Another difference between the two is that Wikipedia publishes only one article per topic, where as Google Knol would let users post multiple items. This means you do not like the participation of other user on current article; you could just bring up your own. The most major difference that could bring real impact between on the battle is that Wikipedia works non-profit venture, which solely rely on the enthusiasm of its contributors of content, on the other hand Knol could grab more attention by being little different, they allow you to place your ads along side the article posted.
Google’s New 3D world Platform – "Lively"
Google has recently opened a new 3D world platform especially been deigned to be secure for teenagers to use. This is been named as “Lively” platform and permits the users to design and run small 3D rooms that could further be embedded into blogs and websites. It is not like “Second Life” that is adult-only and possesses a bustling adult economy, Google has promised that “Lively” would not permit explicit content.