精文斋

Google informed me that they banned showing AdSense from my account on Google.blogoscoped.cn (a site which I don’t run, but they are nice enough to rotate my AdSense code every couple of times as they’re translating posts from here). They pointed to a specific sample page in their notice which contains photos I shot at the Google Hamburg office (including a photo showing the Google logo, with permission from Google).

Asking Google support why specifically AdSense is not allowed on Chinese Google Blogoscoped they didn’t mention that photo, but instead replied (my emphasis):

<<Publishers are not permitted to make prominent use of “Google Brand Features” on sites showing Google ads. Google Brand Features include Google logos, product screenshots, or other distinctive features. Additionally, publishers may not place Google ads on sites incorporating Google trademarks in the site URL or on sites that frame Google pages, including search results pages. Which means in your case that the word “google” in the URL is not okay for showing ads, hence we had to deactivate serving to the site.>>

Also, Ionut Alex. Chitu’s blog Google Operating System – an unofficial blog, but one that uses the URL googlesystem.blogspot.com – got AdSense-banned for the second time… even though Ionut already went through a “re-inclusion” process once, and his blog got approved before. Now he’s experiencing deja vu, and he’s not getting back any reply to his questions so far – guilty until proven innocent.

Google in their general (non-AdSense related) trademark guidelines state that it’s OK with them if you use the word “Google” provided you…

<<… distinguish the trademark from the surrounding text in some way. Capitalize the first letter, capitalize or italicize the entire mark, place the mark in quotes, use a different type style or font for the mark than for the generic name.>>

(Google’s trademarks guidelines have a lot of rules – like “Don’t frame or mirror any Google page,” something which they do with every page you click on in Google image search results! – and also mention: “One of the conditions for all uses is that you can’t mess around with our marks. Only we get to do that.”)

Further than requiring capitalization, Google also suggests to use the ^TM letters in superscript next to their name. How any of this is applicable to URLs, on the other hand, which just don’t contain any rich text formatting, I don’t know. The trademark guidelines also contain the bit “Don’t register Google trademarks as second-level domain names” though there is no mention of sub-domains, which are third-level domains.

Why does Google even cross-connect departments’ needs when there is no real connection? What does the Google trademark/ legal department have to do with AdSense, except of course AdSense being another way to pressure webmasters (by including special AdSense ToS or else your AdSense revenues are stopped)? Is there a difference to Google telling you “we penalized your site’s PageRank because you used the Google trademark in an inappropriate way”?

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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The Mozilla guys aren’t just working on Firefox 3, but also on a technology called Prism which is supposed to further blur the border between desktop programs and web applications. “Prism is an application that lets users split web applications out of their browser and run them directly on their desktop,” the Mozilla Labs blog states.

If this takes off it might help all kinds of web apps – including naturally the Google office suite – though my first impression of some of Prism is that these are basically browser windows with the back button, address bar and so on removed… think pop-ups. And that doesn’t seem like a good idea at all in terms of accessibility & usability (and could pose additional security problems when you don’t always know which domain you’re on; note you can enable navigation & address bar though, and the domain is sometimes shown in the bottom right of the Prism window, but not always).

If you want to give Prism a try yourself, download & run the Prism setup for Windows [EXE]. You will then find a new Prism entry in your start menu, and when you launch it, the following dialog appears – I’ve entered some information already to turn Gmail into a pseudo desktop app:

Depending on the options you checked in above dialog, your desktop or start menu will then have an icon like the following (Mozilla’s Alex Faaborg describes a cool way to turn Favicons into larger desktop icons, though that feature isn’t available in the current Prism prototype):

Clicking the icon will launch Gmail in a window as shown below:

You can run Prism over any web site, not just applications, so you can even “convert” a blog.

Now, I think the Mozilla guys (partly paid by Google) identified the right problem – web apps miss some of the good stuff desktop apps have – but I’m not sure they identified the right solution, too. Traditional desktop programs had, and sometimes still have, a couple of pros which web apps are missing. I’m talking about things like:

• Being able to drag & drop stuff from one window to the next (imagine Gmail, Google Calendar, Spreadsheets etc. supporting this 100%… drop an email’s recipient name into a calendar event and they’ll get invited, etc.)
• Being offered the same navigation, interface, interface gadgets, shortcuts and so on across all applications on the system (meaning e.g. Ctrl+Z always undos the last operation, and the application menu is always in the top left; while this bonus mostly isn’t even true anymore for at least Windows desktop apps, it was once a design guideline)
• Having a consistent place to save your data, and consistent dialogs to retrieve it. Being able to access the same data from different applications (imagine you’d click “add attachment” in Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo Mail, and independent of which services that individual email application decided to support – and that’s often a political decision – you would now get the chance to locate a Flickr image of yours to attach)
• Being able to connect file types to different applications (partly possible in a browser too, but not fully; a “Google Docs document” is not a real file-type known to say my Zoho web app account)
• For developers, the ability to reuse components like calendar pickers, editable drop-down boxes and so on (even when you found a great, free-to-use JS library, you’d still need to push it to the client as additional download, and the user may still not recognize and immediately understand that component’s layout)
• and more

Maybe the web at large is too diverse to ever bring any of that to (virtual) reality. Some harmless previous attempts at unifying the navigation metaphor for websites, for instance, have failed (the “link” tag in HTML, which theoretically allows consistent pagination/ home/ help buttons, is basically unused these days for that purpose). But perhaps we can at least try to achieve some of these… only that Prism-style desktop icons and navigation-less browser windows don’t seem to be helping with that.

[Via Reddit. First image by Mozilla.]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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Google’s experimental time line feature shows that the development of the Linux operating system started back in February 1911. Then from the late 1920s onwards Linux development came to a halt, only to be continued in the 1970s.

Obviously, this is a data hiccup. The explanation? Google is misunderstanding the string “2.6.11” – the Linux kernel version number, mentioned on a Wikipedia page – to be a date, causing this false positive.

[Via Reddit.]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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I don’t know if this is new; when you currently visit the YouTube video channel homepage you are being offered to try out a preview of an upcoming design. In the new version, things are a bit larger, a bit more red, and the left-hand navigation bar is removed. YouTube asks you to send feedback on this design to browsefeedback@youtube.com.

I like the new design a bit better, but then again I liked Google Video’s layout better than YouTube’s. However, compared to the old design, especially the red color gives the page a stronger identity of its own… which may be a subtle hindrance to allow diverse communities to evolve. The less you express, the more room you leave for interpretation, and if you are able to freely interpret what a site “means” the barrier for identification (and thus loyal interaction) is lowered. Along the same lines, it takes away focus from a video if the red color is supposed to be consistent… a video should be the “star” on a YouTube page. Plus, by cleaning up parts of the navigation, maybe YouTube also removes some of the “cozy clutter” that helps community building on “graffitti”-style sites (the ones like MySpace, which often have amateurish-looking, seemingly homemade designs). But that’s just speculation, and it might well be it’s more about (community) features & marketing than design when it comes to communities…

[Via Google Discovery.]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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由于阿坑不幸患上了腰椎间盘突出，需要治疗和静养，所以 Google 的消息可能会落下了，考虑了一下，准备和 riku 在阿坑不在的时间里尽量补上一些关于 Google 的重要消息，直到阿坑回来。

继续.

已经有不少朋友和工作拍档在 Skype 上跟我提及了，不少人最近给 HUNG 的 Hotmail 发来邮件多半会被退信，包括发送到 CW 的邮箱，其中大部分都是 Gmail 发送出来的邮件，不清楚到底怎么回事，正在找微软的老同事问呢。一时半会儿，还是一头雾水。

继续.

- 种天快成了信噪比催化剂了
- Mediox: Fast Food Service
- PetSugar: Girlie Dogs
- Clearspring Launches Mobile Syndication Widgets
- Joborate is another job search engine presenting a new way of approaching the tedious task of finding a job. The process on Joborate aims to be simplified for both employers and those seeking jobs. If you’re posting a job, you’ll see that a preview of the job post is created in real time as you complete the submission form.
- EditGrid 发布 Excel 增强插件：EditGrid Excel Plus
- Web 2.0 Invites for October 22nd, 2007
- Web 2.0 Marketplace Listings for October 22nd, 2007
- LoomTV: New Way of Watching Videos on the Internet
LoomTV grants you full video entertainment combined with a fast growing online-community that provides you with the freshest video stuff - and yet better: LoomTV runs smoothly, is commercial-free and also free of charge. You can search easily for your favorite videos, collect them in your own channels and discuss them with your friends.

继续.

Yahoo 在官方 Blog 中已经提到了这一个消息，Yahoo 相册，Yahoo 拍卖等等频道关闭之后，Yahoo! 360° 也将关闭。不过关闭的期限还没确定，大致时间是明年年初。而目前，Yahoo! 360° 已经进入了”过渡期”，在明年年初确切公布关闭（或者转型）的消息之前，Yahoo 保证目前使用 Yahoo! 360° 的用户的权益：

继续.

本来 Rupert Murdoch 说，Hulu 应该在夏末初秋的发布，不过很可惜，直到 9 月份 Hulu 以 1000 万美元价格收购魔击体的时候，连私人内测还是遥遥无期。不过，今天有消息表明，Hulu 将于下周一开始邀请一部分用户参与封闭性内测，对于关注 Hulu 的人们来说，终于盼到头了。不过，官方有消息表明，这个时限有可能还会在最后发生变动，最迟将会在下周三之前，”铁定”会发送一部分测试邀请了。

继续.

Yappd 是两个月之前发布的一款 Twitter Clone 网站，Wappblg 当时介绍过，有点特色的是支持图片发布。不过今天在其首页上已经贴出了公告，宣布将于下个月 5 号关闭站点：

继续.