If you don’t already know this about me, I’m a satellite image junkie. I used to be hooked on Google Maps and then graduated to Google Earth. One day, my mother introduced me to Live Maps and it was all over. The bird’s eye view is killer. It’s like you are sitting in a helicopter at about 1,000 feet looking around.
The reason I like these types of applications so much is that I have a horrible memory for places. I constantly think of stuff I have seen and then want to see it again. If we had transporters like they have on Star Trek, I would be everywhere all the time.
Live Maps is okay, but sometimes it runs slowly and takes a few moments for the photos to load. That bugs me. Also, the bird’s eye view isn’t available for every place I want to look. I mean, it’s really great exploring through Live Maps, but I need more.
This evening, I was thinking about various places I used to visit in Atlanta, GA. I was thinking about all the roads and different stores and restaurants. I think I have a more romantic view about what there was down there than what was reality. I went over to YouTube to see if I could find some videos of the stuff I was thinking about and only came across a few not-so-great videos. I was a little disappointed when a thought popped in my head. I said, “Hey man, why not download Google Earth again? I know they updated it and now offer Street View.” How great of an idea that was.
Well folks, I downloaded Google Earth and I have to say that my socks were knocked off. The last time I checked this program out is when they were just introducing 3D maps. Now, they have 3D, Street View and somehow, I can see what’s under the ocean water. I haven’t figured that out yet.
After playing around for a little while, I decided to give my mother a call to tell her that I was looking at her front door through Street View. I haven’t been down there in a while, but amazingly enough, all of my memories came back to me through all the photos that Google Earth offered me. It’s pretty incredible.
What’s really cool is the fact that you can use Google Earth for so many things, like checking out a neighborhood if you are interested in moving there, you can reminisce about places you used to live and you can even check stuff out while you are on the phone with people to get a better picture of what in the world they are talking about. I think I am going to use this the next time I talk to my father about where he works.
Okay, enough talk. Take a look at these videos to see what I am trying to get at. Then, go ahead and download your own copy of Google Earth and start having some fun.
I knew I was on to something. It’s like I can foresee the future; it’s a gift.
I came across an article this morning that talks about how social websites can actually harm the brains of youngsters. Can you believe it? I’m just glad I got out when I did.
I think this is going to be the second and last part of my “Complaining about the Internet” series. I just need to get this one out there.
Have you ever heard of Twitter? If so, you’ll know what I am talking about here. If not, I’ll explain what it is to you. Basically, Twitter is a website that allows you to post very short updates on the happenings of your life. It can go something like this…”I have my hand stuck in the toilet.” You can post as many updates as you would like all day long if you want to. People who follow your Twitter feed can stay updated on how many times you get your hand stuck in the toilet during the day. It’s marvelous.
I hope I am describing the service correctly; I have never actually used it.
Just because I haven’t used Twitter, doesn’t mean I can’t complain about it. Please, let me know if the following is annoying to you too.
The other day, I was watching the news or something like it. Maybe it was one of those news shows, I’m not sure. There was a fascinating story on about how a few surgeons were operating on someone and another doctor was Twittering the goings on of the operation. I didn’t think too much of it at the moment. Then, later that day, I started thinking more about it. I asked myself, “Self, why was a doctor Twittering about an operation as it was in progress?” I began having strange thoughts and my mind started to wander. I must confess, I got annoyed for a while. I finally calmed down and tried to look at the plus side of the whole thing.
Let’s look at the “goods” of Twittering during an operation:
1. Comfort – a family can sit around a computer or a mobile phone reading “Tweets” about their loved one’s operation.
2. Informed – The world can get a first hand look at what goes on during an operation.
3. Progress – The doctors and hospital can glow in the limelight of their cutting-edge technology.
4. Contact – Everyone can be proud of themselves that we no longer need to have any amount of human contact.
Today, I watched the White House press conference for a few minutes. I got to the part where the Press Secretary said, “I find it humorous how many press releases have gone out and how much Twitter activity has gone on about…” I had to stop watching. Are you serious?
Okay, I love technology just as much as the next guy, but at what point do we implant “Borg-like” cybernetic enhancements on the sides of our heads and call it a day?
I thought it was great when email arrived on the scene. What a time saver. Then, when I could read the news online, I was thrilled. When I could finally keep up with friends and families through their blogs, I just loved it. When people started broadcasting every heartbeat that occurs inside their chest cavities, I thought the line was crossed.
I tend to think that this modern computer age is a “tool” to assist us in our “real lives.” Did you read that? A “tool” to “assist” us in our “real lives.” I might be over-quoting here, but I believe we are headed towards a place that is quite the opposite of what I just said. It’s going to be like, “Oh man, I have to go out in the sunshine today? Can’t I just twist the knob on the side of my skull and relay all my thoughts to everyone who belongs to the collective? Well, if I must go outside, I am going to need some sunglasses.”
Exercise? Family time? Conversation? Hiking? Looking someone in the eyes? I don’t think so folks…I’ll just go to YouTube and watch a video of someone else exercising, email my family about what I did today, use Skype to have a face-to-face conversation, get a treadmill and call it a hike and email someone a picture of me. I think that about covers it.
As I am finishing up this post and re-reading it, I am seeing a theme among this post and my prior one about Facebook. It appears that I get most agitated at the constant updating of our lives. With my blog, I write every so often to give you folks some information about me. I do it with thought and care. I plan it, write it and then proof read it. I don’t do it randomly and I certainly don’t do it 30 times a day.
Let’s go back to the Tweet, “I have my hand stuck in the toilet.” I think many of us might ask, “Who cares?” Seriously, “W-h-o c-a-r-e-s?”
To think, I thought I was alone. This guy sums it up nicely.
I have been sitting back for some time now, watching and listening to people’s opinions of Facebook. They are wide and varied, but lately, I have been hearing some grumbling. I have heard it from friends and I even heard it on the radio this morning. That’s what prompted me to write today.
For those of you who don’t know what Facebook is, it’s a social networking tool intended to connect you with anyone and everyone from your past, present and future. It’s pretty powerful and pretty awful at the same time.
I am going to give you my experience with this website and let you draw your own conclusions.
A few months ago, I opened a Facebook account. I did this with the intention of placing my blog link on the “Info” page, to drive visitors. You know me, I am always trying to hook new readers. At the time, I had been reading so many articles online about the value of marketing your website, business or service on these social networking websites. I really didn’t think it was a bad idea. Now, being a few months later, I am seeing the value of it, but the good comes with the bad.
A few weeks after opening the account, I began getting friend requests. The friend requests were from people that I completely forgot about in my life. They were from all sorts of nooks and crannies…you know, like from that classmate who moved out of town during nursery school. It was remarkable. I started making friends. As time went on, and I made more and more friends, I started reading these little messages that my new friends would type in their profile. It went something like this – “John Doe’s is rubbing his foot” and “Jane Sue smells something weird in her apartment.” It was cute in the beginning, but then as time went on, I started feeling a little strange about reading things from people who I really didn’t know. I began to realize that I might be going down the wrong path by knowing too much about the guy who moved away when I was three years old. First, it was getting annoying and second, it was a little creepy.
I decided to take action. I logged into my Facebook account one night and decided to delete about 25 of my “friends.” I got rid of the people who I didn’t care for all that much, or never actually talked to in the first place. It was like a weight had been lifted off my chest. My life went on.
A few days later I started complaining to a good friend that I was beginning to feel uneasy about the whole Facebook experience. I knew that I was merely trying to market my websites and that I needed to “network” and gain “friends,” but the little voice in the back of my head started telling me that this whole experience was more difficult on the mind than it was worth.
Let me give you some background about my personality – I like to maintain a low profile. You might think that’s amusing because I write so much on this blog. You might ask, “Jay, if you like to keep a low profile, why do you put yourself out there so much?” I would answer, “Because I like you guys. I also get to choose what goes on here and there isn’t much that I don’t have control over.” Also, if there is someone reading this blog that I’m not necessarily fond of, I don’t know it. If I don’t know it, I don’t care about it.” You see, with Facebook, everyone is right in my face and I don’t like that.
I am fairly satisfied with where I have come in life. I’ll admit that when I re-connect with people who I sat next to in my elementary school lunchroom, it brings me back to the not-so-comfortable days of my existence. I’m sure we’ve all had them. It’s when the white milk cost five cents and the chocolate cost six. Those days were strange and hard to remember, but one thing is for sure, I don’t really want to relive them. One of the things Facebook is really good at is offering you the chance to relive your whole past. Since much of our experiences have to do with old friends and acquaintances, Facebook puts your past front and center.
If there is one thing I like about where I am now is that I put myself here. If I wanted to be back where I used to be, I would put myself there. Since I haven’t, I think I am saying something. I don’t want to relive my past. I would actually like to move on from it and never look back. Don’t get me wrong, I had a great childhood and met many fantastic people along the way, but I think there comes a time in life to move on from those relationships to form new ones. It’s called being mentally healthy. Maybe we should call it the “shedding of time.” It’s been going on for thousands of years and for it to stop now is wrong, in my opinion.
If you are a member of Facebook, you might have had some of the same thoughts. They might not be as prevalent as mine, because I am quite sensitive about these types of things, but they may have popped up from time to time. Admit it…you have winced at the computer screen at least once while seeing someone’s name pop up asking you to be their friend. You may have been tempted to write back telling them that, “No, you don’t wish to become their friend because you were actually hoping to never hear from them again. But thank you for the offer.”
For the past few weeks, I have been threatening to delete my Facebook account. I think it might be time for that to become reality. By dumping this reminder of my entire history, I can move on the way I had been for so many years. I mean seriously, if I wanted to be reminded of my life while growing up, I would go put an offer on the house I grew up in, buy it, put down some shaggy green carpet in my old bedroom and live like I had for 22 years. I think you’ll agree, that’s just not cool.
The number of people on the Internet surpassed one billion in December, according to comScore. The actual number is probably higher than that (Internet World Stats counted nearly 1.5 billion Web surfers worldwide as of June 30, 2008). In any case, only between 15 and 22 percent of the world’s population is on the Internet. We have a long way to go.
Trees in western North America are dying at faster and faster rates, and climate change is likely to blame. The mounting deaths could fundamentally transform Western forests because tree reproduction hasn’t increased to offset losses, according to a new study published Thursday in Science.
There is fierce debate over the direction humanity should take when exploring the solar system. Plans for human exploration of the solar system and beyond often polarize opinions among the public and scientific communities.
Nobody pretends that polluted air isn’t terrible for your health. Clean up the skies over any dirty city and the people who live there will all but certainly become healthier. That, at least, has been popular wisdom, but until now, no one had ever put it to the statistical test. Now someone has and the results are striking.
Mars and Mercury were formed from the scraps of Earth and Venus, according to a radical new theory of rocky planet formation. The model could explain some characteristics of Mars and Mercury that have long puzzled scientists, said Brad Hansen, an astronomer at the University of California, Los Angeles.
President Barack Obama is a smart guy. Where others zig, he zags. It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that he’s been asking around about the benefits of open source, according to Sun Chairman Scott McNealy, who has been asked by President Obama to author a white paper on the benefits the U.S. government can derive from open source.
On March 4, 1901, a lone cameraman in the employ of Thomas A. Edison was dispatched to capture the swearing in of William McKinley. To posterity he delivered a total of 44 seconds of grainy footage showing a white-haired man on the Capitol steps solemnly, if indistinctly, raising his right hand.
Second semester has started and many students went back to college. If you are one of them check out this list of tools, it might help you with your studies. All applications are web based, simple to use and free.
As I was waiting to get going yesterday, I sat at my desk, kind of bored. I decided that playing some online games might pass the time a little faster.
I did an internet search for “online games” and came upon a pretty entertaining website called Motorcade.com. This website is full of very addictive 2 dimensional car games. You really have to give it a shot.
Car games online
I think these games give new meaning to the phrase, “Okay, I’ll give it just one more shot.”
You know, I have been looking for an industry magazine for about a century now. It’s amazing how difficult my search has been.
One would think there would be hundreds of magazines out there geared towards people who work on the web. I mean, jeez, Google figured out how to target the “webmaster” community about 10 years ago and I think they hit the nail on the head.
For the uninitiated, the webmaster community is the group of people who have a lot to do with what goes on the web. If we didn’t have these folks, we would have a bunch of sales guys and a bunch of programming geeks getting a whole bunch of nowhere. The webmasters are those “middle of the road” folks who have some social ability as well as some technical ability and are able to speak to both the business side and the technical side. It’s a huge market and the population is growing every day.
For years, Google has had the good sense to target these individuals with all sorts of web tools and products. I can go on forever about who does well and who does not so well on the web, but my point here is that if Google has done it, where the heck is everyone else?
As a web guy, I get advertised to for a few things. Mainly hosting companies, domain names, software, etc…It’s most likely a heck of a lot more than I realize.
One thing I have been trying to do for the past few years is to really get involved with reading about the industry. I have been looking for a magazine. I mean, they have magazines that target butterfly catchers in Brazil. I thought a magazine for people who work on the web would be a no brainer.
A few years back, I almost got lucky. I found “Revenue Magazine.” This has been a pretty good magazine, but mainly targets the affiliate side of things on the web. It’s almost there and they do include many areas that I am interested in, but they are also lacking in many. I think they come out with a paper magazine about once per quarter, so there certainly is some downtime in between.
I recently discovered “Website Magazine.” Now, this is much more up my alley. Website Magazine is for the web guy or gal. If you like to get your hands dirty, this might be a good fit. I get emails about once per week with some pretty good articles and I just received my first paper magazine yesterday.
Website Magazine
I must warn you, this is a fairly new magazine. The pages are quite thick, so you think there is more packed inside. I flipped through a few pages and soon realized that I was about half way through the whole thing. I am sure that more content is forthcoming though. I am patient.
In the meantime, I am at least satisfied that someone with a brain out there decided it was time to actually give a very hungry market what they are looking for.
Now, if I could just get someone to start delivering wood pellets…
For eight years the US has been seen as a global outlier on climate issues. Now, with just 12 months to go until the world decides on a new Kyoto protocol, it is catch-up time for president-elect Barack Obama. What can he reasonably achieve in that time?
A new study by sociologists at the University of Maryland concludes that unhappy people watch more TV, while people who describe themselves as very happy spend more time reading and socializing. The study appears in the December issue of the journal Social Indicators Research.
The online image editing space has grown rapidly in the past year, providing great free and subscription-based options for users of all levels. These well-rounded services let you import images from your social networks, touch up photos, promote your work, and more.
This is the dilemma that 30 years of Reaganomics (the real Reaganomics — keeping the economy overstimulated with huge deficits and irresponsible consumer borrowing — not the fantasy Reaganomics of government run like a family and tax cuts that pay for themselves) has left us with. So what do we do?
This is a follow up post to my previous posts about my friend’s Google ranking drop. As you may remember, his Google ranking was restored a few weeks after he blocked the proxy website from copying his entire website and submitted a Google reinclusion request. As you may have guessed, he was quite thrilled to see his SERP ranking shoot up again.
Well, as luck would have it, I received a phone call last night from my friend telling me that his website was bombing again. I Googled his favorite keywords and they seemed to rank fine over at my end, but he explained that he traffic stats from Google was flat. They nosedived a day or two ago. I chalked up the results I was getting to Google adjusting the results.
This new twist got me thinking. What in the world could be making this website’s ranking bounce around like this? Looking back, the proxy website may not have been 100% at fault. There has to be something else.
I began doing a little research and learned about few things about duplicate content. The reason I looked at that particular area is because there is absolutely nothing else I can find wrong with this website. Duplicate content seems to be a rather popular culprit.
I came across a pretty well laid out website called “Google Rankings Diagnostics” that describes a whole heck of a lot of issues you might be having with your website. This website validated what I pretty much already knew…that if you have multiple URLs (on a domain) with the same exact content, Google has trouble figuring out which page is the original and may throw all of them out.
I took a very close look at my friend’s website. Again, I took a unique line of text from his homepage and searched for it in Google (inside quotes). A funny thing happened. I saw the homepage result, but there were a few extra results as well, all on his domain. There were about 5 extra pages in total.
Now, some of these extra results have been there for years, so I don’t attribute the issue to those pages being duplicate content. What struck me was one of the extra pages.
A few months ago, my friend moved one of his pages. He put a 301 redirect in his .htaccess file, which was the correct thing to do. So now, the old directory where the page was held forwarded to a new page. It looked something like this:
The redirect worked fine, but here is what that extra page in the search results looked like:
http://www.hiswebsite.com/newpage.phpoldpage.php
Guess what page was showing at that URL…yup, the homepage. The dynamic nature of his website sends unknown page results like this to the homepage. This was a fluke. My friend forgot that there were pages inside the old directory he redirected to the new page. Every old page in that old directory was tacked on to the new page, like you see above. To make matters worse, there were a bunch of links from other websites pointing to the old pages in the old directory.
I am not sure if this would cause the ranking drops that he is experiencing, but the timing certainly lines up with when the issue began. It is also certainly considered duplicate content.
So, here is what I did to deal with the issue this time. I deleted the redirects in the .htaccess file and blocked the URLs of all those extra results in the robots.txt file. Hopefully, this will tell Google to not spider or index those pages and it will also tell Google that those links into the site are dead.
Now, we have to wait. I am not going to submit another reinclusion request to Google because I want to see if the ranking returns naturally. If it does, this was the problem for sure.
