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Google TV Announced, Joined Hands with Sony, Intel and Logitech

May 21, 2010 by dennis

Google has come up with the technology to unite Web surfing with channel surfing on televisions. Google has joined hands with Sony, Intel and Logitech International to bring their dream to reality. They have unveiled their much-anticipated Google TV.

Google_TV

For those who already have a flat-panel TV will be able to plug into the new technology by buying a set-top box made by Logitech or Sony. Both devices will contain the same software and microprocessor as the new TV sets.

Problem during the Announcement of Google TV

The demonstration wasn’t smoothly at a Google conference for about 5,000 software programmers. Many people in the audience were using the conference’s wireless access network that created problems while Google showing how its technology is supposed to toggle seamlessly between the Web and television programming. Ironically Google had to plead with the attendees to disconnect their smart phones from the wireless network.

Google Now Shows Short Answers To Your Questions

May 14, 2010 by bharath

For people like me Google isn’t just a search engines, it’s more than that.I bombard it with lot of innovative queries/question to find accurate answers.This accuracy will only get better in Google, as they have announced a new feature in Google search that shows the short answers to your questions on Google, queries that you perform to find some basic facts.

For example, if you search for independence day of india, this is what you’d see as the first result.

The first result August 15 is the short answer to your query here.

If you expand Show sources,you will see the list of sources from where the result snippet has been taken.For example, try searching Sachin Tendulkar Date Of Birth:

I guess this would be a time saving feature in Google search.You need not read the entire web page to get your answer just the result page would suffice.Remember that Google may not show these short answers to all types of your queries.

Disable Facebook Notification Emails

May 12, 2010 by bharath

Many Facebook users while signing up, normally ignores to setup their notification settings that they normally ignore to setup notifications settings and as a result, they start receiving too many emails for various actions taken on Facebook involving that particular user.This at times may be annoying for those who usually spends good amount of time in Facebook involving in many actions in the social networking site.If you want to disable such notifications from Facebook, this is what you must do:

1. Login to your Facebook account , under the Account menu on the top right screen, click on Account Settings.

2. Now under the My Account, click on the Notifications tab.

3. Check against the notifications for which you want to notifications via email or SMS.Uncheck against all to stop receiving all email notifications.

That’s it, you will now be able to control your email and SMS notifications as you wish.

You might also want to read our guide on how to setup Facebook page for your site.

Convert YouTube Videos To Animated GIFs

May 10, 2010May 10, 2010 by bharath

youtube logo

GIFs are always the preferred choice if you want to embed any short video (length typically less than 10 seconds).This allows users to quickly watch the video as animation instead of waiting for the video to load fully which also requires a user’s click to start streaming.Also these GIFs can be used as avatars for your profile on web forums.

You can easily make an animated GIF from any video on your computer using desktop programs like Adobe Photoshop or Camtasia Studio or VirtualDub.

Even though you can download any YouTube video and save it to your PC and convert it into a GIF, but then you may want a direct conversion tool that doesn’t require you to download the video and do the conversion for you online, right? Here’s a website GifSoup, that will do this for you for free.

1. As a first step, register yourself for GifSoup.

2. Now go to GifSoup and enter the YouTube video URL in the box and click “Create Gif”.

Enter YouTube URL in GifSoup

3. Now you will be taken to the customization page, where you can preview the video, and also enter your custom parameters like custom video length etc.Click Finish to complete the conversion process.[Note that there’s a 15 second limit on the length of the video, as the output file size will increase upon the increase of the video length].

Custom GIF conversion settings in GifSoup

4. Now your converted GIF will be shown on another page.Click on the image to download the GIF.

YouTube Video Converted using GifSoup

Sample Output:

Here’s the converted GIF of a YouTube video that I have got after conversion.

Check & Compare Your Video Streaming Speeds At YouTube Video Speed History

May 7, 2010 by bharath

youtube logo

Have you ever checked out this new YouTube Video Speed History Page? If you haven’t, go and check it now.It actually gives you some idea of the broadband speed (at what YouTube videos could load over a period of time) with comparison to your neighbours ISP speed.

By looking at the graphs, you can easily decide whether your ISP is justifying the charges you pay for them by providing the speed as promised.

Look at the following screenshots taken by me, I’m at least happy that my ISP is providing me a speed which is slightly greater than the average speed of my City (Hyderabad), and the country, even though we are far behind the global average speed Sad

Go to YouTube Video Speed History page and check your ISP’s performance now.

ScreenShots:

YouTube_Video_Speed_History

Pic-2

YouTube speed comparision chart

Also the sudden small dip in speeds around the end of April and beginning of May 2010 is possibly due to the SEA-ME-WE 4 Undersea Cable System Outage and the repair that was going on at that time.

How To Report About Third-Party Adsense Ads Distributing Malware

May 7, 2010 by bharath

Google Adsense Logo

Earlier this year, Google has made Google-Certified ad networks available to all publisher by default.It is intended to benefit the users who can now attract additional advertisers from third party ad networks to their site through Adsense.This was really an impressive move by Google to benefit its Adsense publishers.

But off late, we have been hearing various complaints about the ads from these third party networks circulating malicious code through Adsense.

For example, quite a number of Adsense publishers with a good anti-virus program installed on their system have figured out that the following virus alerts protruding from their program whenever they open the page containing that particular ad:

http://curves.com/?=345 contains a trojan

Are you one of those publishers experiencing the problem? have no clue about how this is happening ?

Google-certified ad networks who want to place ads in Adsense publisher sites must adhere to all AdWords policies in general.But in this case, the particular ad network which was already certified by Google, started spreading malware later on and as a result some Adsense publishers who were displaying ads from these third party ad networks have been recieving the reports of attacks on their website readers computers through Adsense code.Google however has revoked that particular network’s certification.

We recently learned of a malware-infected creative that came from Aggregate Knowledge, a third-party ad network that was certified by Google at the time. As a result, we revoked that network’s certification, and their ads are no longer eligible to appear on any AdSense publisher sites.

How To Report If You Face Similar Problem?

You need to report through AdWords ads feedback to report about ill behaviour of a particular ad network from this page.

You need to note the URL of the webpage that this particular ad takes you to when clicked (Warning: Don’t never click on your own ads, instead ask your readers who had faced the problem to pass on the URL to where they were being taken by the ad).Also you need a screenshot of the ad to submit to the AdWords team for analysis.

The report from would look like this one:

AdWords feedback report

Embed A Tweet In Your Blog Post

May 7, 2010May 7, 2010 by bharath

Twitter has recently added a feature that lest us to integrate or embed any tweet in to the web pages by generating HTML code for that particular tweet.Blackbird Pie lets you embed tweets into any web page by generating static HTML tweets for posts.

1. Go to Blackbird Pie and enter the full Twitter tweet URL there (as you see in the screenshot) and click Bake it.

2. It will now generate an embeddable HTML code along with a preview to show how that particular tweet will look on your site after embedding.

If you are not familiar with working on HTML code, avoid editing the code as far as possible.Just use copy and paste.

Don’t forget to follow @Techrena on twitter.

In Pictures: Google’s New Design

May 7, 2010 by bharath

google official logo

Back in April 2010, we have notified all our readers about the changes to the then current Google home page version.This is now being officially announced by Google and has been rolled out to the most of the users worldwide.Previously the users used to get the new version (while in testing) only when they were using Google Chrome.But now it has been expanded to other browsers as it gets official status.We are posting some of the pictures of Google’s design depicting what’s has been changed.

Official Pictures:

Logo design: Old Vs New

The new Google logo compared to the old one is much lighter, brighter and simpler.

Google new official logo

Search Options Panel:

The left Search Options Panel is now more or less a visual treat.The font size of the items has been increased and small thumbnails have been added before each item in the panel.Clicking on More search tools would expand the panel and bring in more search tools.

Google left panel comparision
Footer:

The blue shading and the underlines under the links have been removed and the width of the search box has been increased while lightening the color.

Google footer comparision

Varying Search Options:

The categories in the left hand side Search Options panel would be different for different types of search queries.For instance, as shown below, the categories appearing would be different for a search query like “T20 World cup” than when you do a search for “Levis 501”.

Here’s an example of how Google search result page turns out for the above said queries.

Google would more likely return news results for these sort of sports or events related queries.
Google result for sports query

You would be more likely to see images/videos and shopping results for these sort of queries.

Google results fot shopping query

Do you welcome these changes? how do you feel about these new changes?

Wake Up, Google !

May 4, 2010 by bharath

Google Adwords logo

Before you read this, I want to let you all know that I’m a big fan of a Google and I can’t even imagine the life without Google, so much is its impact on the worldwide netizens.As an avid internet user, Google works great for me and it saves my time, warns against visiting sites that are spreading malware, offering me a free mail and what not, I enjoy every bit of their services.

Now as a webmaster/blogger too, I reiterate the same what I have said in the above paragraph.Majority of the websites or blogs on the internet are still surviving on Google’s SE traffic.

Unfortunately people there are some people who are trying to exploit the Google’s services which have got a tremendous global internet reach among the internet users.The most exploited services being Adsense, Adwords.I’m afraid Google is just relaxing a bit allowing off late.Google is just becoming the toy in the hands of the bad people.Adsense arbitrage, MFA sites all these are just small examples of the dreadful exploitation.

I just observed two things today while browsing (screenshots added) today and here is why I think it’s for Google to wake up and tighten the screws.

#1. Link selling or link buying is completely against the Google Webmaster guidelines but still valid according to Google Adwords/Adsense, funny? Why should Google be promoting the link selling websites through Adwords and Adsense.Look at the following screenshot that I’ve taken from a leading technology blog.Obviously the author of the blog has no choice to block them until he really sees such ads himself.

Backlink selling ads in Adsense

#2. Try Googling for “adsense” (in Google.co.in).Just notice what you see in the sponsored links on the right hand side of the page.

Buy an adsense account ad

Adsesnse account for Rs.500/- ($10)? WTF? I went and checked out to find out what that site is all about.Well, it is violating every rule in the Google’s book.Even one of my friends blogged about this adsenseindia.tk scam last week, consider someone who just wants to know about Adsense lands up on this page through the sponsored links and pays them for an Adsense account? He gets cheated right? It’s a complete scam and even if you get an account from there, it would be banned sooner or later.

I know that anyone can create a Adwords or Adsense account and setup ads like these.But keeping such advertisers in the network will definitely going to haunt Google in the long run.Go clean the mess, Google.

Create A Facebook Page For Your Website [How To]

May 3, 2010 by bharath

Facebook is undoubtedly the no.1 social networking site in the world.According to Alexa data, it’s next only to Google.It is very much true that majority of the traffic to the most of websites on the internet comes through Google mainly.Similar it is always essential for the website owners to look at sites like Facebook also as traffic sources for their blogs, provided they offer pretty good lovable content that the users on the Facebook like to read.Facebook has made it easier for all the webmasters to integrate Facebook into their sites easier courtesy the Facebook “Like”.

If you are a webmaster the you may be want to know how to create a Facebook page for your website or blog.So we are coming up with thus tutorial that will guide you to create a page for your site in Facebook in 10 simple steps.

Steps:

#1. Go to Facebook.com and login with your ID.If you don’t have an account yet, you must be living in another world, just come back to our world and signup for Facebook now.

#2. Go to Facebook create new page link.

#3. You will now find 3 options:

Local business
Brand, product, or organization
Artist, band, or public figure

Choose the 2nd option, and select “Website” from the drop-down menu.

#4. Give your page a name and click “Create Official Page”.

#5. Now you have created a simple page which is just having name nothing else.So we need to start editing the info about your website.

#6. Add a picture to your website page and edit other information as well from the Info tab.

#7. Go to page settings> find a section Notes under Applications.Click on Notes to open and edit notes.

#8. Under the Notes settings, click on Import a blog.

Enter your blog URL in the Web URL field (you can even enter your blog’s RSS feed address) and click Start Importing.

#9. Now you will be shown the preview of the imported blog.Click Confirm Import to finish this step.

#10. Now you are done with creating a page for your blog.You can also click on “Write Something about your page” link as shown in step #6 to write a brief introduction to your site page.Now your page looks like this, add yourself to the Facebook page by clicking the Like button.

May be you should also start following our blog in Facebook by clicking the Like button or by visiting Techrena Dot Net Facebook page.