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Tag Archives: Google

Aussie Geek Podcast – Episode 46

The latest episode of the AGP is in the feed. This week Dave and I go over a few things that took place during our long absence and discuss news from Google, Twitter and Linux. We also have some fantastic apps for mobile, tablet and web and an illuminating story of recycling and ingenuity.

Dave and I had a great time putting this show together, and I had the opportunity to produce an episode of the AGP for the first time in well over a year. It felt good to get my hands dirty again, and I think Dave appreciated the break. ;)

 

Google Docs Adds Cloud Storage

Google Docs today expanded the functionality of the service by offering 1GB of cloud storage for any type of file you want to upload. The only restrictions seem to be the 1GB cap on storage (you can buy more at $0.25 USD / GB) and the limit of 250MB per individual file.

Though it doesn’t quite match some of the other features we’ve become accustomed to seeing in cloud storage like an OS client with drag & drop functionality, it certainly provides a reliable place to store some of your larger files that won’t fit under the smaller 20MB cap that Google places on email. This is quite possibly the precursor to the much lauded and speculated about G-Drive cloud storage service.

via LifeHacker

Google Goes Gold – FINALLY!

GmailGoogle finally scraped the five-year-old “beta” tag off it’s popular Gmail service. From being perpetually in beta, to becoming a set of enterprise tools Google’s App suite has finally gone gold.

The collection of technology (some built in-house and some acquired from other service providers like writely back in 2006) has become a key part of Google’s strategy to index the world’s information by providing a way to make Google a first-hand provider and storer of that information.

There were no real major releases with the removal of the beta designation, just a feeling from many that the big “G” must be working on something else at their Mountain View, CA campus.

Applications a Go-Go – Apps on the Flip 8230

This is the fourth post in my series of reviews of the BlackBerry 8230.  These were originally written in April, 2009 on an internal blog and are being reposted here.

004-black-pearl-flip-thSince I wasn’t overly impressed with the email functionality built-in to the Flip’s mail program, when it came to Gmail integration at least, I thought I’d come back and talk about something quite a bit more cheerful: running applications on the Flip. The newer operating system on the Flip has a new application gallery called the BlackBerry AppWorld. The AppWorld, at the time of this post, has over 260 applications ranging in price from free through about $50… at least that’s the most expensive one that I saw.

The installation and setup experience is quick and easy. I was able to find several interesting apps to help me through my final week with the Flip. I had the opportunity to play with a number of different apps and explore some functionality that I hadn’t tried on my other BlackBerry.

Having access to the BlackBerry AppWorld is a great step forward from previous methods of getting apps on the BlackBerry. They’ve made great strides in usability and ease of installation, and the new method is similar to the experience on the iPhone , with one major caveat – the number of available applications. The BlackBerry OS is not a new platform for developers, but it hasn’t gained the same following with application developers as Apple’s rival platform.

In addition to downloading from the application store, I’ve also installed the Gmail application from Google. This provides a more seamless experience than trying to use the built-in mail settings as it takes advantage of Gmail’s secure IMAP protocol to exchange messages with the server. This helps to keep the mail on the BlackBerry synchronized with the mail on the server including whether or not messages have been read. IMAP compatibility is something that I’d really like to see RIM implement in future revisions of the BlackBerry OS.

Goodbye Grand Central, Hello Google Voice!

google_voiceGoogle today announced a new service to (some of) it’s customers called Google Voice. The service works very similarly to Grand Central (which the big G acquired back in 2007).

The system allows you to create a single phone number, to which you can aggregate other numbers to have a unified system for voice and messaging.

I’ve been trying to get myself a Grand Central account for several months, but I guess with the lead up to the Google Voice launch they haven’t been creating new numbers for people.  It looks, from a post on the Google Voice help site, that the service will be rolling out over the next few weeks.  The service will first be made available to existing Grand Central users, and rolled out to the rest of the great unwashed as it matures in the next few months.

There’s no indication at this stage if the service will be geographically limited but I suspect that, intitially at least, the service will only offer US-based phone numbers at launch.

Google Launches Tasks for Gmail

GmailToday Google announced on the official Gmail blog that it had added tasks to Gmail Labs.

The new feature provides a simple task list that can be activated using the labs menu.  To activate this, click on the green beaker at the top of the screen.

The task list in and of itself is basic, and provides a point that Google can use to extend its functionality in the future… features like integration with Google Calendar (yea, they left that out) and the ability to collaborate & share tasks through Gmail.

While this won’t likely satiate the desires of the Getting-Things-Done crowd, it’s a decent to-do list for keeping track of a non-complex list of items.  The most functional advantage that this has over desktop-based task solutions like Outlook is the ability for it to be accessed anywhere you can hit-up your Gmail.

Overall I’m a big fan of Google’s “Labs” concept. Pre-releasing new functionality in an opt-in manner is the hallmark of open-source and the web 2.0 community, and is a principle that the search giant seems to have embraced wholeheartedly.  Here’s hoping we see more useful features coming out of Mountain View.

PageRank Experiment Update

Well the one week deadline to try and get the site ranked in Google has come and gone, and not to anyone’s surprise the site still doesn’t carry a PageRank.  But, not to fear, I’ll be continuing to write content for the site reviewing everything from software to hardware in hopes of landing the odd paid gig some time in the future.

If you’re interested in some background you can check out the original post I wrote explaining the experiment.  The key lesson with all of this however is that Content is King (or at very least a Duke) and you need to respect that above pretty much all else if you ever expect to get ranked.

The One Week PageRank Experiment

I’ve decided to start a little experiment.  Over the next 7 days, I’m going to try to get a new wordpress blog on a new domain from a PageRank of 0, to at least a PageRank of 1.  If I can get this done, I’ll renew the domain.  If not, I’ll probably let it lapse.

It’s a pretty simple proposition really, I’ll put together what I know about SEO with regular posts to the site.  Hopefully between now and next Friday night I’ll be able to get the site on Google‘s radar.

What are my chances?  No idea, but you can check out the post explaining the Google – WordPress experiment on the new site at kickjoey.com.

Explaining the Google – WordPress Experiment

Here’s the relaunch of KickJoey!

I’m relaunching with a bit of a project in mind: get this site from a PageRank 0 to a PageRank 1 in 7 days.  Impossible? Probably, but I’ll try it anyway.

Why PageRank? Because I’d like to start doing reviews here that I can collect on. Yes, paid blogging. I didn’t really want to to advertorial posts on kdmurray.net, but it’s something I’ve wanted to try out.

What next? Well, time to find some content to do reviews on over the next 7 days, and try to get some links pointed here from some other websites.

Let’s see if we can get this site on Google’s radar in only 7 days.

The Gmail Effect

The Gmail EffectWell it’s not quite as staggering as the Digg Effect that can take down web servers in a single afternoon, but I experienced my own little spike in traffic this week.  When Gmail went through their little bout of difficulty last week I let you know about the post-mortem entry on the Official Gmail blog.

I saw a rather significant spike in traffic as millions of Gmail users checked out the blog, and a few hundred of them clicked through on the trackback which showed up as a result of the post.  Go figure.