Death of Internet Explorer 6

Internet Explorer Six, resident of the interwebs for over 8 years, died the morning of March 1, 2010 in Mountain View, California, as a result of a workplace injury sustained at the headquarters of Google, Inc. Internet Explorer Six, known to friends and family as “IE6,” is survived by son Internet Explorer Seven, and grand-daughter Internet Explorer Eight.

Funeral services for Internet Explorer Six will be held at 7pm on March 4 at Aten Design Group, 1629 Downing Street, Denver, CO 80218. Those unable to attend the funeral are asked to send flowers.

You think that’s funny ? Well, they’ve gone ahead and even put up a webpage for the event. And…you could RSVP if you’re attending the event.

Google has announced plans to build high-speed broadband networks in small trial areas across the U.S. The goal is to spur the development of higher-speed networks in the U.S. While the States have had a definite impact on Internet in terms of search and social innovation, the speed of Internet access lags behind many other developed areas of the world.

Google has long been a proponent of a national broadband plan that would extend Internet access to all Americans. I think we all know how Google could benefit from that.

In the trial networks they will build, Google will deliver broadband speeds that are more than 100 times the average 1GB/second speed that most Americans experience today.

Google hopes that a faster network will help developers build new apps that can harness the power of speed. Additionally, Google hopes to learn new deployment techniques plus create an “open access” network that offers a choice of providers.

Right now, Google is seeking out communities that would be interested in the trial. Responses to that request will be collected until March 26. Google will announce which communities have been selected for the experiment later this year.

Article taken from here.

For example this nice URL “/spidersapien/” (in bold)

gets replaced with a less clickable “Toys & Games > Robots”

On the plus side the categories in the hierarchy are links through to the category pages on the site but this isn’t clear when you look at them which could lead to confusion.

Here is how the links are generated:

The information in these new hierarchies come from analyzing destination web pages. For example, if you visit the ProductWiki Spidersapien page, you’ll see a series of similar links at the top, “Home> Toys & Games> Robots.” These are standard navigational tools used throughout the web called “breadcrumbs,” which webmasters frequently show on their sites to help users navigate. By analyzing site breadcrumbs, we’ve been able to improve the search snippet for a small percentage of search results, and we hope to expand in the future.

Certainly there are many things to consider, before you even get excited about using it on your existing machines. Among these things is of course the available of driver supports.

Another indication that this rumor might be true is the fact that Google might be rushing it, especially now that Windows 7 is starting to make some good vibes in the market.

We’re betting of course that this early version of Google Chrome OS will run smoothly as possible on netbooks. We all know that Google is gearing the OS for specific use of netbooks.

Original article can be found here.

Google Latitude’s Location History lets you store, view and manage your past Latitude locations. You can even visualize this on Google Maps or Google Earth for a more pleasant view of where you have been at some point in time. If you don’t like this service, you can always delete it from your Google Latitude account.

Google Latitude’s Location Alerts on the other hand uses your past location history to establish a pattern or routine of the places you’ve been, excluding your home or office locations. Alerts will be sent to you and any nearby friends when Latitude recognizes that you are an unusual place or routine at an unsusual time

If you want to enable this feature, check out google.com/latitude/apps. Of course, you need to have a Google Latitude account to use this feature.

Original article can be seen here.

Since the launch of the developer preview however, we haven’t heard much about it. It’s quietly been undergoing testing and tweaking. That’s all changing though, as now the developer preview of Google Caffeine has been taken down, replaced with an announcement that Google Caffeine will go live in its first datacenter soon.

The new Caffeine splash page says it all. Here’s the full text:

“Based on the success we’ve seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given. ”

While we admit that there isn’t a lot to go off of, we can discern two key takeaways:

- Caffeine testing was successful. The project is moving forward

- Caffeine is going live on Google (Google).com soon, starting with one datacenter

We’re going to dig deeper and see if we can’t find out when Caffeine will actually go live. The new Google search infrastructure is coming though, and as our previous tests have revealed, there should be a lot of subtle but important changes to search results arriving soon.

When Murdoch and other senior News Corp lieutenants have criticised aggregators such as Google for taking a free ride on its content, commentators have questioned why the company doesn’t simply make its content invisible to search engines.

Using the robots.txt protocol on a site indicates to automated web spiders such as Google’s not to index that particular page or to serve up links to it in users’ search results.

Murdoch claimed that readers who randomly reach a page via search have little value to advertisers. Asked by Sky News political editor David Speers why News hasn’t therefore made its sites invisible to Google, Murdoch replied: “I think we will.”

Although he has previously talked at length about the role of aggregators, it is one of the first times Murdoch has discussed actually removing content from the search engines.

Murdoch’s interview was one of a string of conversations he had with the various News Corp-affiliated media outlets.

Murdoch told The Australian’s media editor Geoff Elliott that the company might be join the auction of digital spectrum.

And Murdoch confirmed to The Daily Telegraph that he’d like to buy Telstra’s stake in Foxtel.

Trakken, a company from Germany has recently released a free desktop app called Trakkboard that uses the Google Analytics API to pull data from different analytics accounts. Trakkboard lets you access multiple Google analytics account simultaneously and also compare data from each of your profiles without being logged in to Google Analytics.

How to Setup Trakkboard?

Installing & using Trakkboard is fairly simple. Just head over to – http://www.trakkboard.com and enter your email address to request a your free ‘license key’. By requesting the license key, you basically accept their general T&C and get authorized to use Trakkboard. Once you receive your key, you can straight away download the Adobe AIR based app – Trakkboard.

After the installation, you will get the chance to enter your Google acocunt details. Once everything is set select Google Analytics Accounts and profiles, then choose from any of the preset report widgets (visitors/page views/source/bounce rate etc.). Your report widget will then appear on the dashboard. Simply repeat the process with other Google Analytics Accounts, Profiles, and Widgets – to build your customized analytics dashboard in a matter of minutes.

What’s very interesting about each of the different report widgets are that they can be configured to automatically pull new data from the API at a fixed interval, for example, every hour. This dramatically reduces the time it takes to see top level metrics across all your accounts.

Trakkboard Features

* Compare data of different google accounts, websites and profiles without permanently changing sites at Google Analytics.
* Opportunity to compile individually and from different portals and websites all the key performance indicators which are of a certain importance for you on just one dashboard.
* Add up to two Google Account Email addresses
* Open Tabs inside the application that will let you create as many dashboards as you want and you can arrange the data individually
* Follow current developments on your desktop or you can lock certain data from changes to have them available at all times
* Switch between the display formats, change time spans or rearrange data with one click of a button

Google welcomes innovative app developers to come up with new ways of using the Google Analytics platform. If any of you have developed a useful tool that uses the Google Analytics API, you can send a email to the analytics team to be featured in the Analytics Blog.

Inbal said:

Although we will support your current Google News Sitemap during the transition period of six months, you should re-submit it under the new format as soon as possible. For more details on how to submit your Sitemap using the new format (including how to add new tags to each entry in your Sitemap, to provide more information about individual articles), please visit the Sitemaps section of our Help Center.

Once the transition period is over, we will no longer accept News Sitemaps created using the old format and any old News Sitemaps in your Webmaster Tools account will be rejected.

We encourage you to make these changes as soon as possible in order to avoid interrupting your content’s inclusion in Google News. To get started, please visit the FAQ.

The new format looks like this:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″
xmlns:n=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-news/0.9″>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.org/business/article55.html</loc>
<n:news>
<n:publication>
<n:name>The Example Times</n:name>
<n:language>en</n:language>
</n:publication>
<n:access>subscription</n:access>
<n:genres>pressrelease, blog</n:genres>
<n:publication_date>2008-12-23</n:publication_date>
<n:title>Companies A, B in Merger Talks</n:title>
<n:keywords>business, merger, acquisition, A, B</n:keywords>
<n:stock_tickers>NASDAQ:A, NASDAQ:B</n:stock_tickers>
</n:news>
</url>
</urlset>

For more details on this new sitemap format over here.

Again, you have six months to make this change, but the sooner you do it, the better. ALso, there is a learning benefit to the new sitemap file. Any questions, join the forum.

Forum discussion at Google News Help.

The original article about this matter on Bing is as follows;

The Bing team has been talking about its new crawler (aka bot), MSNBot 2.0b, in this blog for quite some time now. We have made numerous improvements in its performance, addressed some webmaster concerns, and published detailed information on how to control the bot with a robots.txt file. Today we are announcing that the new bot is fully operational. This development will enable Bing to do a better job at gathering the information we need from the myriad of websites we index worldwide.

As MSNBot 2.0b enters full-scale production, the time has come to retire our previous generation bot, MSNBot 1.1. By the end of the first week in November, you will no longer see the following user agent in your referrer logs:

msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)

The only Bing user agent you will see in your logs from this point forward will be this, our new bot:

msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)

This event is a major milestone for the Bing engineering team, and we look forward to the positive developments that this bot will bring to our search engine index and thus to Bing customers. We want to specifically thank all those webmasters who provided us with valuable feedback as we ramped up the production of the new bot. Your assistance and cooperation was essential to making this milestone happen.

Stay tuned for more information about this and other developments from the Bing engineering team. We’ll have a lot more to talk about in the coming weeks and months.

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to post them in our Crawling/Indexing Discussion forum. Be back at you soon…

– Rick DeJarnette, Bing Webmaster Center