Web Blog

Hitwise, an Internet metrics company, has just released the latest statistics in search engine usage for the US and UK. The data was collected from a sizeable sample of 10 million users. As expected, Google is leading the pack, even posting slight increases that help it pull farther away from its main rivals.
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Google Gears is aiming to change the online landscape, and there’s a good chance that it will. If you haven’t heard of it yet, it’s a browser extension that primarily allows web application to work offline. If you use Google Docs, for example, Google Gears will create a database on your hard drive where it store your files, and these will always be synched with the Google Docs database when you go online. For people on the go who sometimes find themselves without an Internet access station, this add-on is heaven-sent.

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There’s a buzz spreading through the web design community like a virus. It’s called sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement). What is sIFR? Essentially, it’s a technology that replaces short passages of plain browser text with text rendered in the typeface of your choice, regardless of whether or not your users have that font installed on their systems.

It accomplishes this by using a combination of javascript, CSS, and Flash. Here is the entire process:

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There’s been an explosion of resource, recruitment and tutorial sites, in Part 2 we continue our review of the biggest and the best of them, analyze their brands and make suggestions for their growth. Make sure you read Part 1 before continuing.

05. PSD Tuts (Tie)

Founder(s) – Unknown
History – PSDTUTS is a blog/photoshop site made to house and showcase some of the best Photoshop tutorials around. We publish tutorials that not only produce great graphics and effects, but explain in a friendly, approachable manner.
About the Brand – A strong thematic cohesiveness throughout their family of websites.
Alexa.com Ranking – 14,664
Other Properties – audiojungle.com, flashden.com
Ideas for Growth – Their team has successfully created a design and tutorial blog, the audio search engine and a monetized flash resource site. They should take the business model they used for Flashden.net and apply it to resources for AfterEffects or Premier. Alternatively they could create a portal for scripts like Hotscripts.com

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While recently experimenting with charting for web applications, and the various charting libraries popular among the PHP community, I came across the Google Chart API. I’ve since decided to outsource, as it were, all my charting needs to the API, a service provided by Google to generate just about any graph you could possibly need in your web application; after the jump, here’s why you should do the same. (more…)

A few weeks ago, a team of Google researchers presented a project that may just revolutionize image search. See, during the last few years, image search has been rapidly growing in popularity. Development in this field, however, has been slow at best. Right now search results are still dependent on textual clues like filenames, image title, and the accompanying body text on the webpage. The new research tries to improve on this by allowing key features of the image itself to be part of the search criteria.
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Google just launched a preview of their newest social networking effort called Friend Connect. In a nutshell, Google FC is a free service that allows owners to turn their sites into a community – without having to install any applications or perform programming. With a simple copy-and-paste of Google-generated code, one can have the ability to let visitors sign in and become part of the site’s user group. Once in, users can post reviews/comments and their own pictures on the site via widgets, enriching the site’s content and making it more dynamic. Other “social” functionalities are available via code snippet, all based on the OpenSocial platform.
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If Abraham Maslow were alive, he’d tell us, “Told you so.” Social media’s rise to prominence in the Internet Age just confirms what the famous psychologist theorized in his Hierarchy of Needs many decades ago. Human beings have an overwhelming need to belong. Communities are popping up everywhere, and rapidly growing in numbers. People are sharing and interacting more and more with each passing minute.

Naysayers who pronounced that social media is nothing more than a fad may have to think twice. Universal McCann released a report on social media trends based on their worldwide survey. This is the third wave of this ongoing study of active Internet users (those who go online everyday or every other day), and the results show that from the first survey in 2006 to the latest one earlier this year, key markers have gone up across the board.

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Google became an OpenID provider. All blogger users can use their blogger URL as OpenID to log into many OpenID supported websites or services. This is a good news. When Google first started to expend their business by introducing new products, they had a vision to provide a single ID for every computer users. But keeping the service limited inside the company is not a good solution, because LiveID (AKA MSN passport ID) was doing the same and if Google wants to grab more market share than MSN and that is why they had to introduce more and more better products.

Well, if I want to write a sort introduction to OpenID, then I must tell you one thing. People are getting tired of creating a new account on every website they use. They are getting tired of keeping track of the password they are using in different sites. Well, OpenID is an open technology standard that solves problems like these. The OpenID technology will allow users to use one account to sign in to hundreds of websites! And this list is growing every day!

Once you get and OpenID, you can simply tell any OpenID enabled website that you are a OpenID user. You will be sent to OpenID provider to verify your ID and password and then signed in to the website.

Yahoo joined the OpenID project long ago and Yahoo users can use Yahoo IDs as their OpenID. Now Google starts offering an (automatic) OpenID URL for each existing google account, thus allowing the google accounts to be used on any OpenId-enabled web site.

After launching it, some users are saying that Google realized that allowing the google users to use their same (google) ID on other (non google-affiliated, independent or rival) sites, (while maintaining the single google logon) is something that the users want.

Visit OpenID homepage.

My friend and co-author of this blog Scout would be very concern now and will try a lot to find and share ideas on how to make your images search engine optimized after Google announced about image ranking.

Well, Google is Idea Giant, because users likes the ideas they brought to us so far and hopefully it will happen for Google’s future ideas too. So Image Ranking idea is the latest brainchild of Google. Recently two Google scientists presented a paper at the international World Wide Web Conference in Beijing describing what the researchers call VisualRank, an algorithm for blending image-recognition software methods with techniques for weighting and ranking images that look most similar.

Honestly I like the idea, because when people look for common image titles, most of the time any image with that title comes as a result and I believe this new technology by Google will change that.