Internet

Google Buzz : Google’s One More Attempt @ Social Media

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I just woke up this morning and was amazed to see lot of tweeple tweeting about ‘Google Buzz’.The most recent Wave is yet to be received well by people, then what’s all this buzz about ‘Google Buzz’, it was my initial thought.

But you know, my big brother Google is crazy always, keeps giving me surprises every now and then and I have had lot of them in the recent past.Launch of Google Chrome, Andriod, Chrome OS, Wave, Nexus One are only some items of the big list.

Google officially announced Google Buzz, a social networking/ sharing tool built right inside the Gmail.So you need not signup for it again like as you do for Orkut.If it’s enabled for you, you’ll find it inside your Gmail, within the Gmail labels section.

Google Buzz Logo

Google Buzz Official website: http://buzz.google.com/

Google buzz features in short:

  • Lets you automatically follow people that you chat or email most
  • Replies to your posts will be delivered to your Gmail inbox with ‘real time comments’ enabled
  • You can connect with other Social sites like Picasa, Flickr, Google Reader, and Twitter.
  • Buzz on your mobile

The most sensible feature according to me is Google buzz on mobile, oh yeah !! I have already checked it out on iPhone and it’s really looks cool on it.If your phone has GPS, then you can’t miss this one as it shows updates from people nearer to you.

How would it help you, anyway?

Consider a situation that you are driving in your car and there’s a big traffic jam just some distance away from you.You can get this info from this updates from people nearby section (What people are saying in the area).

I think we need to explore it well, before coming to any conclusion that it’s another #Fail.As always, this time to, they have added some intro video of Google buzz, go check it out, if you have patience:

BTW, have similar name to one of their services called Yahoo Buzz, but it’s about just content sharing.And more interesting is that Yahoo has a similar service called Yahoo Updates (from last year) about which hardly anyone of us is aware.Google is strategic announcing Buzz just days before the ‘V-Day’ during which we can expect lot of social media/sharing activity from the youth section of the worldwide internet users.

If anyone got access to Buzz in their Gmail, leave a comment here about your experience with it.Did you like it?

Is Your WordPress Internal Files Structure Coming In Google Search? Read On…

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If you are a webmaster or managing a blog, some day or the other you need to sit and dedicate time to optimize your website, and you start it with it editing core internal files and if you are unlucky,  you may end up messing up things without being really aware of what you are doing.

This happened to us yesterday, we were editing some internal files of this blog’s WordPress installation files with an insight to optimize the loading time of our blog.We sat for hours and did edit some files.We could at least do something and slept peacefully with some satisfaction.

Then the next day BANG !! we were astonished to find some of the WordPress internal files that otherwise shouldn’t be publicly visible were all over the Google.That’s the moment we spotted the mess (look at the screenshot below) that happened while editing our site files yesterday and started working to fix them.You understood what the problem was, right? Don’t panic, there are lots of people like us, who are unknowingly keeping their site internal files open (see examples).

Wordpress internal files in Google search

How To Fix This?

Step 1: We tried to understand why this is happening?

Reason: The permission properties of inner files of the site are site to ‘public’ that means anyone can see the internal file structure of your blog/site.

Step 2: Having found out the mistake, the solution is simple (at least as it seems):

Permission properties of these files/directories should be made ‘private’ and indexing of these files should be disabled

Step 3: There are two ways to do disable the indexing of files so that other people can’t see what’s inside your internal directories:

# 1 You can place a index.html file in all the folders which are coming ‘index of..’ structures.

# 2 Edit your .htaccess file to disable private indexing of the folders.

Step 4: While the 1st method is relatively simple one to follow, but it takes time as you need to put index.html files in all the directories that are visible in indexing.

Step 5: The optimal method according to us is editing your .htaccess file to disable indexing of folders.

Options All –Indexes

Just add the above code in your .htaccess file (edit through notepad) which is your site’s root folder save it and write it back to your root folder.

Options ALL Indexes in htaccess

Step 6: The problem is solved, now open your Wordpres internal files wihtout logging into the site and you’ll notice the 403 error being returned to you.

This solved the problem in our case.I’ve decided to post this because someone who finds themselves in the same situations as we were yesterday would find it useful to some extent at least.

Watch Super Bowl XLIV Online

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Super Bowl XLIV kick-off just happened yesterday (Feb 07, 2010) and it’s the hottest sporting event happening in Florida.If you are somehow missing the action live, don’t worry we are here to give you the NFL feast live streaming links of the pre-match coverage collection in this post.And we know that people do watch NFL Super Bowl for the mid-break ads (Super Bowl commercials) ads from the big companies.

Super Bowl XLIV (Super Bowl 44) online streaming links:

NFL Official Site (Who gives better coverage than National Football League official site itself?)

CBS.com (Columbia Broadcasting System) [Update: Link expired]

BBC Live Coverage (British Broadcasting Corporation: Hmm..of course NFL Super Bowl has fans in the UK too !!)

Striker : First Bollywood Movie To Be Premiered Online

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Striker, the latest Bollywood (Hindi) movie produced by the Indian Film Company in association with Studio 18, becomes the first ever Bollywood movie to have its World Premiere on YouTube.The movie was released on February 5, 2010.

One of the partners in the movie productions, Studio 18 has announced earlier that the movie will have international premiere on YouTube.The movie is made available to all the viewers world-wide except in India, where it’s having theatrical release.The movie is available for free to all the Non-US internet surfers, however US viewers will have to watch it on a rental basis.

The movie, starring Siddarth in the lead role  is available via Studio 18 official YouTube account: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5f-jUpUp8o]

Well, the full movie video in YouTube was taken off from online yesterday after they had experienced some technical glitches but finally managed to get back it online only on the next day (6th Feb 2010).All though the reviews aren’t really good, it’s certainly a thrilling experience to watch the DVD quality version of the  just released movie in YouTube like I did.

Striker movie full online

And the guys in India, I’m sure lot of you guys know the trick to to watch it, right? Anyway its really something new that the producers of the movie has tried and it’s worth appreciable and I’m sure there are lot of movies to follow this.

The movie is released in Indian theaters in Hindi and in Telugu (dubbed version) on Feb 5, 2010.

Studio 18 Official channel:http://www.youtube.com/user/studio18

Now IPL 3 would be the next biggest thing that I’d love to watch LIVE.

GreaseMonkey Gets Official Support For Google Chrome

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If you are an enthusiastic fan of  GreaseMonkey user scripts in Firefox browser and haven’t switched to Google Chrome for the only reason that Chrome doesn’t support GreaseMonkey user scripts, well probably you need to think again.

Either you have missed our elegant tutorial on how to enable GreaseMonkey user scripts in Google Chrome, or you haven’t been following the news off late.

Well, Google Chrome 4 now officially supports GreaseMonkey, according to Chrome official blog.If you still use an older version of Chrome, may be it’s the right time you should update your browser to the latest version.

Google Chrome Greasemonkey According to Aaron Boodman, Software Engineer in Chromium project, (who is also incidentally the original author of Greasemonkey Firefox add-on),  as of now there over 40,000 scripts available on userscripts.org alone.Keep in mind that Google Chrome may not yet support all the user scripts, he expects that 15%-25% of scripts may not work in Google Chrome browser.That’s understandable since Chrome is no Firefox and that most of the scripts are written for use on Firefox.Install Greasemonkey scripts normally as you do in Firefox and enjoy the browsing in your own style.

How To Disable Orbit Downloader 404 Error Redirect Page

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If you have installed Orbit Downloader in your browser as built-in download manager, you might have observed Orbit downloader 404 redirect page appearing whenever any webpage you open returns a 404 error.This may  be annoying at times and you may want to disable this unnecessary redirect.The redirect page automatically opens up whenever browser navigation error occurs.

 

 

 

 

Orbit Downloader 404 landing page

Let’s see how to disable this Orbit redirect page in your browser (Firefox, Chrome, Netscape,Opera, Maxthon)

Solution:

  • Open Orbit Downloader Preferences from the menu.

Prefences in Orbit menu

  • In The Preferences, go to "Monitoring” tab, and uncheck “Let Orbit suggestions on browser navigation error”.

Uncheck Orbit Browser navigation error

  • And Click ‘OK’ to save your preferences.

Google Chrome Gains Market Share To Stand @ #3

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According to the published by web metrics company NetApplications.com, Google Chrome managed to gain market share both from Internet Explorer and Firefox.

The superfast browser from Google has a market share of 5.20% as of January, 2010 overtaking Safari (4.51%) and Opera(2.38%).Remember Chrome has a share of just 1.62% in March 2009.

The following table shows the comparison of market shares of different browsers as of March 2009 and January 2010.

Month IE Firefox Chrome Safari Opera Opera Mini Others
March 2009 68.46% 23.30% 1.62% 3.63% 2.12% 0.23% 0.65%
January 2010 62.18% 24.41% 5.20% 4.51% 2.38% 0.59% 0.72%

image

The worst affected being the IE, which lost almost 6% of market share since March 2009 to 62.18% in January 2010, whereas Firefox ended up at 24.41% even though Firefox lost its share slightly by 0.2% as compared to 24.61% in December 2009.

Full data:Link

Remove Google Analytics Tags In Your Blog Posts and Feedburner URL

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Feedburner is an amazing tool for managing RSS and atom feeds. Many of us use this service for burning our own feeds, may be from our own sites and blogs.  We can also use the email subscription feature and integrate the feeds with Google Adsense.

feedburner logo

Recently Feedburner has enabled Google Analytics to analyze the feeds, clicks and track them.  But when we use this feature to track the feeds, we have found out one problem. We had enabled this feature in our Blog and the URLs of our posts included the Google Analytics tracking tags like “utm_source=feedburner &utm_medium=feed &utm_campaign=Feed%3A “ . An example of such URL can be seen below:

Original URL:

http://www.techrena.net/internet/google-nexus-one-launch-jan-5-price-530/

URL indexed in Google after enabling tracking:

http://www.techrena.net/internet/google-nexus-one-launch-jan-5-price-530/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TechrenaDotNet+(TECHRENA+dot+Net)

There are some problems incorporated in such kind of URLs. The main problem is that the Search Engine Optimized(SEO) URL has been changed and indexed. Another thing is that duplicate URLs of the same content may be indexed and your Google ranking may decrease or may stop crawling of your posts.  It may lead to a broken link also.

SOLUTION:

The solution is very simple. Follow the steps below:

Step 1: Login to Feedburner.

Step 2: In the Analyze tab, click Configure Stats

feed burner configure stats

Step 3: Uncheck the Track clicks as a traffic source in Google Analytics Check Box

feed burner track clicks

Step 4: SAVE it.

Now you have successfully disabled Google Analytics tags in your post URLs.

If you are done with this, you can read our previous post about finding number of email subscribers to your feeds.

New Launch: Click-To-Call Phone Numbers In Google Mobile Ads

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Google Mobile Blog has announced the launch of new feature in Google mobile ads (ads under Google mobile search results).

Phone numbers that come in the web search results under the mobile version of Google search are now made clickable.This means that you can directly contact the local business people that you are interested via a phone call directly from Google search results.

Click to call phone numbers in Mobile ads

This feature now makes sense because Google search results are now “Location based” .What it means is that suppose if you are interested in contacting a restaurant that has several branches, you will only see the phone number of the branch that is most nearer to you from the data based on your location (Otherwise,what’s the point in calling the restaurant branch that is in another city ?).

This I would say definitely a nice implementation from the ‘G’ engineers.

If you are an Adwords advertiser for mobile ads and want to include clickable phone number of your business in Google mobile ads, read this post from Adwords blog.

P.S:This feature is cuurently available only in smart phones like iPohone, Andriod etc..

[Read about my post on Google IME which was released yesterday.]

Google Transliteration IME In 14 Languages (Exclusively For Indian Languages)

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Now you can easily type text in your own language in a more simpler fashion using Google Transliteration IME (IME- Input Method Editor).Google has officially launched the Google Transliteration IME in fourteen (14) languages, most of which are Indian languages.

[See the complete list of supported/available languages at the bottom of this post]

From now on, you don’t need softwares like Baraha, Lekhini or Aksharamala to type in your language.

With Google Transliteration IME, the user needs to download a very small piece of software for any if the 14 available languages and this opens up a the language tool bar for the desired language.Great thing about this is that you just need to type letters in English and it’ll automatically translates (or suggests translation) into your preferred language.

You can select the input language from the language tool bar as shown in the screenshot below:

Selecting Telugu from Language Toolbar

Now open any application (ex. notepad) and type in English and you can see the word being translated to your selected language or showing list of possible words with your input.

[Here I have used Telugu as the input language, by downloading Google Transliteration IME for Telugu]

Google Transliteration IME Telugu input Techrena

The same procedure can be followed  for other languages too.

IME edit in Hindi screenshot

[Sorry folks, I know only Hindi and Telugu other than English 🙁 ]

Download Google IME (For Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 , 32-bit only)

Supported Languages:

Arabic,

Bengali,

Farsi (Persian),

Greek,

Gujarati,

Hindi,

Kannada,

Malayalam,

Marathi,

Nepali,

Punjabi,

Tamil,

Telugu,

Urdu

You can also use bookmarklet to directly type in your language in your web browser, which I’ll cover in a later post.For now, you can read about Transliteration feature in Gmail.