Is Google the new Microsoft?

October 31, 2007 at 11:59 am · Filed under Uncategorized

Not yet, at least in terms of market capitalization. By that measure Google now ranks as the 5th largest company in the United States. Microsoft is the only other tech-centric company in the top 8, and ranks third with a market cap of $333 billion.

Source: Silicon Insider

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Microsoft’s Analytics Offering (Gatineau) Goes Beta

August 31, 2007 at 2:43 pm · Filed under Web Applications, Analytics, Beta

Joshua Allen blogged on the MIX07 web site this morning about Gatineau, Microsoft’s web analytics offering, going beta. Microsoft is touting its ability to apply its own demographic information to your web traffic data. From Josh’s post:

In addition to all of the standard analytics features, Gatineau can correlate your web traffic data with our massive database of demographic information. This allows you to slice your logs based on gender, age and other characteristics of your visitors. The service is free.

Read the whole post on the Visit Mix web site, or go directly to the Gatineau beta sign up.

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Live from Red Bull Flugtag Texas 2007

August 25, 2007 at 1:35 pm · Filed under Events

Flugtag’s first U.S. night flight in Austin! The Flick’r set below includes pictures of team crafts and the setup at Auditorium Shores. I’ll be posting more pictures throughout the day and night! If you’re coming to the event and need more information, visit the Red Bull Flugtag USA web site!

These Flugtag pictures are a few of a larger Flick’r set of Flugtag Texas 2007 pictures.

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Operation Gain Google Respect: What is with my PageRank?

August 19, 2007 at 10:07 pm · Filed under Content, Analytics, Online Marketing

I blogged awhile back about Google being less than excited about my blog. Since then, I’ve gotten some great advice, done some observation, and will continue to utilize my blog as an open mic as I hope to regain some respect in Google’s eyes. First things first-what’s with my incredibly disappearing PageRank?Maybe I’m overreacting to my loss of PageRank. To refresh everyone’s memories, I’ve lost my page rank for every page on my blog except my homepage, which, has the horrific rank of 2. It’s better than being blacklisted, but I’m certainly not on Google’s list of cool places to hang out. But, let me reiterate-although I’m in PageRank purgatory, I still receive the strong bulk of my traffic from Google. It’s not a lot of traffic, but the search traffic that I am receiving is highly relevant.For those of you that are new around the search engine landscape, here’s a bit on Page Rank straight from Google:

PageRank ExplainedPageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.

Sounds like PageRank is the juice—I’ve gotta have it to drive relevant traffic to my blog, right? From everything I’ve read (including claims that PageRank is actually almost completely irrelevant) I’d say, yes, PageRank is still absolutely important, maybe it is just harder to determine what my PageRank is at this exact moment.Let’s back up. How does one arrive at knowing what PageRank is assigned to any given page on a web site? Like many online marketers out there, I use the Goolge Toolbar (or a Firefox or IE extension) which pings Google HQ and reports back the PageRank of the page that is currently being viewed in the browser. This is where I’m getting the abysmal PageRanks for this blog. It’s straight from Google. I’m screwed, right? Maybe not. The quote below is allegedly straight from a Google Rep.

“The PageRank that is displayed in the Google Toolbar is forentertainment purposes only. Due to repeated attempts by hackers toaccess this data, Google updates the PageRank data very infrequentlybecause is it not secure. On average, the PR that is displayed in theGoogle Toolbar is several months old. If the toolbar is showing a PR ofzero, this is because the user is visiting a new URL that hasn’t beenupdated in the last update. The PR that is displayed by the GoogleToolbar is not the same PR that is used to rank the webpage results sothere is no need to be concerned if your PR is displayed as zero. If asite is showing up in the search results, it doesn’t not have a real PRof zero, the Toolbar is just out of date”

Too broadly paraphrase the Google Rep: don’t necessarily trust the PageRank indicator in your browser. Which, in my scenario, does feel right. Google has likely raised its eyebrows at me for moving the blog from a hosted Blogger to a hosted Wordpress blog—not because I went away from a Google product (although it did cross my mind), but because I made slight changes site-wide (including utilizing a completely different presentation template, changing the permalink structure, and moving pages—301′d or not… and I get a B- in that department, but that’s another story).For now, I’m going to move my PageRank concerns off the critical list. It would seem the PageRank tools are likely reporting well out-of-date data, so how much credence can I give it in the short-term anyway?The good news: Google reports that I’m indexed well. I am coming up in the search results. So, I’ll take that as a nod that things are OK for now. If things go south insofar as incoming traffic from Google, I’ll definitely reignite my concerns. There are, however, other things that come into play that can help my blog get more respect from Google. I’ll continue to blog about about this subject under the “Operation Gain Google Respect” heading and tag.

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Macintosh OS X Disk Utility: “The underlying task reported failure on exit”

March 21, 2007 at 9:35 am · Filed under Uncategorized

My old PowerBook (G4, Tiger 10.4.9) started running very slowly after I installed the last set of Software Updates. I attempted to do a Verify with Disk Utility, after which I was going to run a repair. Upon running Disk Utility’s “Verify” function, I got the following error: “The underlying task reported failure on exit” and the “Repair” button was still disabled.

After poking around on the Apple Support site, I found a knowledge base article describing how to perform ‘fsck’ by booting into Single User mode. Here’s the drill. And, don’t use this method unless you absolutely need to; if Disk Utility is available and will perform the functions you need to, go that route. It took a bit longer to find this than I thought it would; hopefully it will help someone else out there get their Mac back up and running.

1. Reboot in Single User Mode
   a. Shut down your Macintosh.
   b. Restart your Macintosh by pressing the on/off button. Immediately depress and hold the Apple key + the ’s’ key.
2. Your computer will boot into Single User Mode. If you’re not used to this, it will be a black screen with white text. It looks nothing like OS X.
   a. As the computer boots, it will spout out some information about its startup sequence.
   b. When it has completed booting, you will be left with a command-line prompt that should look like this:localhost:/ root#
   
   At that prompt, type:
   
   /sbin/fsck - fy
3. The above command will start the File System Check.
4. When it is complete, you will get a response. If you get a response that includes “***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED *****” repeat the fsck command until fsck tells you that all is well. The all is well message will look something like this: ** The volume [name of volume] appears to be OK

   As soon as you get the above message, reboot by typing this at the command prompt:
   reboot
   

That did it for me - I was back up to full speed again. This article on the Apple Support site would be the place to start.

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