Geoff Jones » Google

Dumb Google

Geoff — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 13:34:37 +0000

With all the information that Google has about me you would think they would know better than this:-

Obviously they only take in the fact that my computer is sitting on a French network rather than my Google account which shows my address/bank details etc are in the UK. All stupid really when I could easily spoof the network address with a VPN.

So much for local intelligence.

Eating in or out?

Geoff — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 22:30:58 +0000

Spurred by reading this on CNET “he heard Google’s Marissa Mayer whisper that in these times of infinite woe, more people were googling “recipes” than “restaurants.” I thought I would give it a try using Google Trends, and for the UK it seems correct:-

As you can see there a been a definite reduction for the search term restaurants compared to recipes commencing around 2008 for the UK

Spam and overnight success

Geoff — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 19:42:24 +0000

After reading the excellent post “Overnight success takes a long time” by Paul Buchheit on the history of gmail it stirred my memory into why I use gmail. The answer is this prominent button:

Before gmail came along. Spam was a real problem for me, as you can see from the last 10 MINUTES worth hitting the gmail spam filter.

and its totally relentless, a 10 minute snapshot any time day or night is the same!

So full marks to Google for letting me use gmail on all my email accounts and also to be able to access them by IMAP and POP so I can read them on my iPhone and Thunderbird.

Oh and I’m sure FriendFeed will eventually be a huge success! Follow me there as geofones.

Computing the future

Geoff — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 22:53:06 +0000

Computingfor the future - Andy Hopper

Interesting talk by Andy Hopper tonight on Computing the future.

I especially liked his comments on setting projects for his PhD students. they have to be more advanced than what Google or Microsoft are doing but not totally science fiction stuff – A hard job these days I reckon.

Other interesting points was that 2-3% of the worlds energy is consumed by server farms. So the proposal is to put the server farms by the windmills and solar plants since data is so cheap to transmit. Servers need to get more intelligent so that they run closer to 100% utilisation (rather than current 30%) by switching themselves off etc.

He forsees the world running on simple low power terminals. Yep. bring back the Wyse50’s But more likely to be mobile phones! Especially after his trip to Soweto to see how they are using phones there.

Also discussed the idea that every moving object would have a sensor hooked into a vast database so your phone could be measuring CO2 etc.

Digital Alternatives

A revealing chart showing global hectares available per person and current usage levels with the USA standing out as usual.

UK Poker Ads on Google

Geoff — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 17:17:00 +0000

Google ads for Poker – American viewers please look away

UK Google search for Poker

The Google monopoly!

Geoff — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 12:47:51 +0000

Just looking at my Google Analytic figures for the past 30 days:-

Search Engine referrals Sep15 - Oct15 2008

Looks like Google has a bit of a monopoly to me!

The real reason for looking at my analytics was to see if the link Steve Pavlina gave me has made any difference to my readership.

Referrals from stevepavlina.com

Looks like about 160+ folks wandered over to see my Wordle review of Steve’s new book. So not as many as I thought would.

Will be interesting to see if the link from such a high PR (Page Rank not PR like Ellee does) page will make any difference to my Google rankings for Geoff which has been suffering lately

Here is the corresponding data from Sally’s site. She gave me 7 links last month resulting in 47 visits.

Referrals from SallyInNorfolk.com

Steve Pavlina on Truth, Love & Power

Geoff — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 10:02:47 +0000

I originally discovered Steve Pavlina’s blog when searching for public speaking, several years ago using Google. His blog led me to Toastmasters which I then discovered met in a hotel literally 100 yards from where I live in the UK!.

Since then I have followed his experiments with great interest using his blog as a model for everyone I meet who is interested in blogging (I have now introduced over 20 folks). A lot of what he says resonates with me particularly his attitudes to food (I became a vegetarian about 10 years ago) thinking and life in general (My favourite experiment was his experiments with polyphasic sleep, I’m convinced it drove his wife, Erin, nuts). Some things I disagree with like his attitude to mushrooms which he doesn’t view as a fruit and somehow considers them undesirable, this to me is weird for someone who is a convinced raw foodist.

I jumped at the chance of getting a free, prepublication, copy of his new book, Personal Development for
Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth (Hay House;
October 15, 2008), in exchange for writing this review. I was dismayed when the book arrived in pdf form rather than as a hard copy. So in true Pavlina fashion, how could I turn this setback into a positive outcome. The answer; do an electronic review, here it is:-

This is the full text of the book, 101,365 words according to wc (excluding external quotations), as processed by Wordle. I then ran the full text through a text analyser to discover the most frequent phases etc which is where the post title of truth love and power comes from, it is used in the book 111 times! The top two individual words are to, you.

The wordle sums up the book beautifully and is for me an excellent review. The book itself looks a good read (although without its physicality its impossible to review since a lot about buying a book is the form as much as the content) and I’m sure it will be succesful, although for my part its more interesting following Steve on his journey through life.

Note to publisher: None of the text files used by wordle etc have been stored

Geoff potential guests being led astray.

Geoff — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 21:44:47 +0000

I get an enormous number of 404 errors on this site (269 in last 10 hours), they stem mainly from when I migrated the old blogger posts to wordpress. On blogger the post url’s ended with .html when I transferred them to Wordpress the .html was stripped off

So now if you click on an old google search term it comes up with File not Found (404) error. Not good for ones rankings.

I am using John Godleys redirection plugin but to make full use of it I need to learn how to create regular expressions, so far with no luck! (anyone out there willing to help, please). I have created a help topic on the regex advice forum and also asked John Godley for advice too.

Today Google came to the rescue with a neat 404 webpage that is customised to your site if you use Google Webmaster Tools. So now you get this useful little page:-

But I really need to get the hang of \b(http://geoffjones.com/2.*?)\.\w+/(?!\w) and its ilk plus how to add them to a .htaccess file….

Twitter beaching the whale

Geoff — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 11:57:54 +0000

Very bad news from Twitter,. Twitters USP here in the UK was the ability to send & receive tweets by SMS (Text messaging) as of today, with no warning whatsoever, they have cut of receiving updates here in the UK by text.

Their so called UK number, actually its a number based in the Isle of Man, was outside most UK users calling plans (O2 it was included in the free texts) so most folks would not update their twitters at 20p or so at a time. However, incoming texts in the UK are free so Twitter was a neat way of sending texts to mobile phones from a PC. and also a way of amplifying texts 1 text to many. Alas no more.

The reasons given are cost they argue “Even with a limit of 250 messages received per week, it could cost Twitter about $1,000 per user, per year” Which doesn’t add up to me as Bulk SMS’s seem to cost between 2p and 1.3p according to Bulksms.org

Its interesting that they did not even offer an option to pay for receiving texts or even severely limit the number of texts per user? We are not all Scobles with thousands of followers.

Their alternative idea of using the internet on your phone is not so hot either, although Twinkle and twitterific work OK on the iPhone they cannot run in the background or alert you in the same way that texting does.

I think they have now left the market wide open for Google to come in with Jaiku, although the omens don’t look good on that front.

I guess the good news is that the twitter service may now be more reliable as users flood away leaving the fail whale beached rather than suspended.

Update:

First people trying to bridge the gap with tweetsms

Meanwhile over on AVC, Fred Wilson an investor in Twitter, wrote in reply to my comment:-

geofones 9 hours ago 1 point

Pity that Twitter has just hammered us in the UK. Just as i was getting my social circle to start using it via text on their phones
Also very poor customer service just chopping of SMS with no warning at all. Perhaps they hadn’t paid their texting phone bill!

fredwilson 7 hours ago 1 point

It will be back. The costs of supplying effectively free texting in the UK just got too high. People were abusing it with DMs

reply edit

My relationship with Google..

Geoff — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 21:34:59 +0000

Decided to look at my Google web history. Here are the sad graphs of my life with Google:-

It says my total number of Google searches is 12,418 with its first entry in March 2006 (14 searches a day on average). Interesting to see the winter peaks and Summer lows. I like the peaks at 6pm and 10pm

Top site searched was Wikipedia, top clicks were on Google maps. Least used Google service is Google News & products.

All fascinating stuff.