If you were watching BBC2 last night you may have noticed that PC Pro was mentioned on a little show called Dragon’s Den. This has done interesting things to our web traffic, which lets us see just how watching TV has changed.
A couple of months ago I wrote a story about how people now routinely surf while watching TV. It seems that 70% of us now split our attention this way, for a variety of reasons; TV shows are generally slow-paced and dull, for one, and the internet lets us research what we see in real-time and add to the experience. Thanks to this unique opportunity we can dig a little deeper to see if this is true.
Between 9pm and 10pm last night – when the show was broadcast – we experienced a jump in traffic of around 1,100 new users. This is down to the fact that my review for the Very PC Treeton is the second result for “Very PC”, the company who kindly plugged us by waving its PC Pro award around, on Google. Clearly, people were searching for the company while watching the presentation.
However, if you assume that most browsers would click on the first link – 90% perhaps - then you only have a figure of 11,000 people “two-timing” their television with their laptops – a tiny percentage of its total viewers.
Mind you, PC manufacturers aren’t going to grab the attention of the average viewer, so perhaps the jury is still out on this one.
A new search engine launched this week, prompting a surprisingly huge response online. To be honest, I was just as guilty of getting excited as anyone else.
Whether it was the David-versus-Goliath appeal of a tiny startup going up against a company that can boast to be both a household name and a verb, or whether it was the pure controversy - several Cuil engineers have come directly from Google, after all - I don’t know. But one thing looks certain; we want the search monopoly to be toppled.
You may not have noticed this, but Google is quite a dominant company. Chances are that almost everyone you know has a Google email account, a sign-in for Google Docs, and uses its search engine every day. So you do have to wonder how anyone is going to break its stranglehold - something I asked one of its email competitors today.
The chances are that you will have heard of GMX, but the chances are that you also won’t have used its services. (more…)
Google’s motto may be “do no evil”, but the company can do no wrong in the eyes of tech investors and the mainsteam media. However, I suspect the day it decided to lavish some of its pocket money on YouTube may prove to be one of the biggest mistakes the company ever makes.
The $1.65 billion it paid for YouTube may be small beans to the search monolith, but Google has publicly admitted that it can’t find a way to turn a profit from the millions of eyeballs that are watching video on its site every day. Hosting terabyte upon terabyte of video doesn’t come cheaply. Charging users to watch videos is a non-starter, so either Google finds a way to make YouTube more attractive to advertisers, or it’s going to continue to bleed money.
First off, I’m not paranoid. I don’t have a tin-foil hat, subscription to conspiracy weekly, or a pressing need to take a different route to work every day to stop people following me. I genuinely believe Diana died in a car crash, Elvis died on the toilet, and the lone gunman actually did it. I understand that Governments cover things up, and I’m happy with that because I suspect their secrets are either a) boring or b) terrifying - both of which are covered in my life by a) tax returns and b) overdrafts. There’s no such thing as aliens, and even if there were, I certainly wouldn’t believe they travelled all this way to stick something unpleasant up my bottom. And if they did, why is everybody in such a hurry to meet them?
But I am scared of Google. Not because of the conspiracy theories, or because it’s fashionable, but in the same way I’m scared of the sea. It’s huge, mostly benevolent, and unpredicatable - and the vast majority of us depend on it far too much.
A museum has opened in Mons, Belgium, with an exhibit to internet pioneer Paul Otlet.
No, I haven’t heard of him, either.
Although,after reading about him, he seems like one of the most brilliant minds of the past 100 years - and one of the nuttiest.
In short, he proposed the Internet as we know it - and Wikipedia - and begun to develop his ideas into a feasible system. Except he started work in 1934 - a damn site earlier than Tim Berners-Lee and his pals started putting together the modern Internet.
Look, everyone who has ever read any of my PC Pro columns over the years will know that I am something of a Firefox Fanboy, just like anything that makes my web browsing more efficient and effective. Which is probably why I think the whole Yahoo SearchMonkey thing is just simply bananas.
It’s emerged today that some supposedly ‘anonymous’ criticism of eBay’s proposed monopolisation of Paypal actually came from the bowels of Google. The information was found in some meta-data - the information that links documents to where they’ve come from, among other things - with the name of the document listed as ‘Microsoft Word - 204481916_1_ACCC Submission by Google re eBay Public _2_.DOC’. Pretty damning, it seems, when the submission was supposed to be anonymous.
Google is a company that prides itself on doing things quickly. Bloody quickly.
At a briefing last week, Google’s head of mobile engineering, Ann Mei Chang told us: “Even on the desktop, shaving milliseconds off search times makes an appreciable difference to usage”.
So why, I wonder, has a progress bar started appearing every time I log into my Gmail account? It may not be any slower than it was previously and it’s good to have visual reassurance that the browser’s not crashed and Gmail is actually doing something, but for the first time I’ve begun to notice just how long Gmail takes to kick in.
From millisecond search to loading bars: not exactly progress, is it?
Any Google Earth fans out there? Good. Now how about Google News fans as well? Excellent. Ever thought how cool it would be if you could combine the two? No, neither had I to be absolutely honest. However, this kind of maps and events mashup is something that has been happening for some time now. Myself and a mate even created something using Google Maps and BBC traffic news a couple of years ago that did just that, overlaying traffic reports onto a Google Map of the UK. All quite cool and interesting at the time, although now a long since forgot about project. Oh yes, back to the point of this posting. Well now it seems that Google itself has gone and produced a Google News layer for Google Earth.
