The Googleplex Blog: Harold Davis's Blog

Blogging the Family

Blogs can be (and often are) so very personal. It's a natural to use one's blog to write about your kids and family. Particularly if you have young kids, they are likely the focus of your life, and the generators of much stress and joy!

Perhaps this explains why there are an estimated 8,500 Web logs people are writing about their children. Some high profile weblogs written about kids by their parents:

• Her own woman: Same sex parents in Australia


• Heather B. Armstrong's "This is my Website" Unleashing the inner monologue: "...there were kids, in my living room, EATING ICE CREAM ON MY PERSIAN RUG WITH THEIR HANDS — that Jon and I made it through the day without experiencing cardiac arrest or any ruptured blood vessels, well, people, this TOTALLY means that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ is nigh unto us."


• Mimi Smartypants: "I don't care if you are the Dark Lord of the Sith, young man, you are still getting a time out!"


• Bad Mother: Something to distract my neighbor here in Berkeley, Ayelet Waldman, from her presumably already too-busy life as novelist, mother to four, and wife of Michael Chabon (bless him!)


• Hot Moms: "Writing our momoirs" (links to more than 600 mom and dad blogs)


• finslippy: Alice Bradley writes about two-year-old Henry

Now, to state the obvious, my blog is not about parenting and kids or is only obliquely about it: since in some fundamental way my life is about my family and kids, they do seem to creep into this thing even when I am writing about Google. But my preference is to not to blog Julian, Nicholas, and Mathew. Rather, I keep a kind of photo album on our personal Website. As someone observed to me, this in itself constitutes a kind of extended blog. It is this (not surprising) characteristic that pictures never get removed, only added. And the pictures of Julian, our oldest, are the most extensive. (But then, since Julian was a 28 week preemie, we had our reasons. That's a whole other story.)

Anyhow, I think this use of blogging to rend a hole in the isolation that the joys and terrors of parenting imposes upon us is a great thing! Keep it up, mom and pop bloggers!

Slurpware

Add a new one to the dictionary: slurpware.

Slurpware describes a multi-faceted, nefarious, and probably illegal, attack on an asset-rich Web property such as Amazon, eBay, PayPal, or the Web affiliate of a financial institution such as Wells Fargo.

The best slurpware targets have large communities of users (eBay, PayPal). Only large (and criminal) organizations have the assets to deploy slurpware. Slurpware elements almost always include spoofing (also called "phishing," spamming email with fake origins), software that can track keyboard entries in wireless online contexts to determine passwords, in some cases stolen hardware security devices, massive computing power, and sponsorship of extensive criminal organizations -- such as the Russian mafia.

There's a great deal of creativity involved in a successful slurpware campaign, although we might wish the creativity were deployed to a better purpose.

Google Adwords API

Google has a new beta API, the Google Adwords API. This API lets Google AdWords advertisers do all kinds of potentially very cool things in terms of managing their AdWords campaigns (and getting various kinds of reports about AdWords costs and results). Simply the idea that you can integrate internal systems with AdWords campaigns is startling, perhaps pulling ads for specific items when inventory gets low, or cost gets high. I can't wait to build some apps with this!

About RSS

Here are some questions and answers about RSS from Googleplexblog.com's RSS FAQ.

What is RSS?
RSS - Really Simple Syndication - defines a specification that is used for distributing "feeds" of information. RSS itself is a form of XML (eXtensible Markup Language), and complies with the XML 1.0 specification.

The feed defined by an RSS XML file contains structured information about content items, such as the information title, an HTML link to the full information content, and an excerpt from the content.

Where can I read the RSS specifications?
There is no single RSS specification. Instead, there are different versions and variations of RSS. The most important RSS versions are RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0, but within these major versions there are minor variations. And even feeds that comply with the RSS 1.0 or RSS 2.0 specification may name specific fields differently from one another (for example, Date or pubDate). You can learn more about the various RSS specifications at Harvard Law RSS Specification information site.

What software do I need to view an RSS feed?
The RSS XML file used for syndication is pretty structurally simple, so you can actually look at one manually and get a pretty good idea about an RSS feed (what it is called, what the first few content items are, and so on). This means that writing software that can "read" and RSS file is an easy and straightforward proposition. It's easy enough that many people and companies have done so, and many people use this kind of software. According to a
recent survey, more than 6 million Americans get news and information using RSS software. Software that you use to display RSS feeds is often referred to as an "RSS aggregator" -- "aggregator" because it is intended to combine more than one RSS syndication feed. You can download software that lets you view RSS feeds in your Web browser, as part of an email
program, or standalone on your desktop. You can also
view RSS feeds using any Web browser with no special software on this site. There's a very complete list of RSS software on the O'Reilly XML.com site. If you are interested
in adding an RSS reader to Internet Explorer, Pluck is a good choice. I enjoy reading RSS feeds along with my email. If this appeals to you, you may be interested to know that the
Mozilla Thunderbird email program is also an RSS reader. Enewsbar is a standalone Windows desktop program that presents RSS feed items on a scrolling ticker. Obviously, there's a great deal of variety in software that can be used to read RSS feeds. You should experiment and find what suits you best!

How can I find RSS feeds that interest me?
That's a very good question. There are tons of great RSS feeds out there. There are certain to be some that interest you. But finding
them is not always easy. It is likely that the RSS software that you use to read syndicated feeds will offer you some suggestions about RSS feeds that are available. You can also find RSS feeds using Feedster, with is an
RSS search engine. Tara Calishain of ResearchBuzz has some interesting ideas about how you might find RSS feeds automatically. I've added some of my favorite RSS feeds as presets to the
Googleplex RSS Viewer page. Here's the link for the RSS feed for
the Googleplex Blog.

Finally, keep your eyes open while you search the Web. More and more RSS feeds are cropping up. If you see a link to a feed while you are browsing pages
that interest you (many RSS feed links are marked with small orange buttons), add it to your RSS viewer before you lose track of it.

How can I add a feed I see on the
Googleplex RSS Viewer page to my own RSS reader?
Here's how:

1. Open the Googleplex RSS Viewer
   page


2. Select an RSS feed that interests you from the list, for example, BBC World News


3. Click Display Feed. The RSS feed items will be displayed on the page


4. At the top of the feed, you'll see the words "Syndication Feed" followed by the feed's title in a hyperlink. Click the hyperlink. This will
   open the home page for the site that sponsors the RSS feed in your browser


5. Look for the RSS feed or feeds offered by the site (you may have to search the site for them)


6. Click the RSS link to open the XML feed in your browser. You can read the full address for the feed in the Address Bar
   of your browser.


7. Copy and paste the address of the feed from your browser's address bar into the RSS Feed managemant system of your RSS reader software

Why do I see XML when I click the link to a feed?
An RSS syndication feed is an XML file. You are seeing the contents of this file when you open it in your Web browser. To view the RSS feed normally,
it is necessary to open the link in software designed for displaying RSS feeds (see "What software do I need to view an RSS feed?").

How can I display an RSS feed on my Web page?
See the Googleplex Blog about page for information about this.

How can create my own RSS feed?
Almost any modern publication or content management system will either optionally or automatically create an RSS syndication feed based on the content you supply. In particular, it's natural to combine blogging with syndication, because by creating blog entires you are also potentially creating syndication feed items. So most software used for creating blogs also publishes RSS syndication feeds of the blogs, almost as a by product. MoveableType is probably the best of these blog creation tools, and it provides a template-driven automatic RSS feed creation facility.

If you look through the list of RSS software on the O'Reilly XML.com site you'll find many tools for standalone creation and management of RSS feeds.

Why should I care about RSS?
What am I? Your mother? Why should I tell you what to care about?
Here are some of the reasons to care about RSS:

• Lots of people use it: according to a
  recent survey, more than 6 million Americans get news and information using RSS software. If you don't syndicate with RSS, you are missing an audience and a market.


• RSS is a great way to find timely information in a manageable form: the information is "pushed" to you, but you can control when and how you view it


• RSS is one of those apparently simple technologies with powerful implications: the combination of RSS and blogging will change the way information is published and read

Dr. Dobson never said that SpongeBob Squarepants is gay!

Dr James C. Dobson, founder of the Focus on the Family ministry, says that he never said that Spongepants Squarebob (well, you know who I mean) is gay. More precisely, he says that he never said that the sponge-like square fellow has homesexual characteristics. To quote him: "I said no such thing."

The problem, it turns out, is not with the spongy critter but rather with a video featuring a whole host of children's characters, including Big Bird, Barney, and others as well as that gay sponge. This "We are family" video attempts to send the somewhat bland message of practicing unity while respecting diversity.

I'm not a fan of Squarepants, and I don't let my kids watch the show. (Julian and Nicholas are active enough without the frenetics in this particular cartoon.)

That said, Dobson's critique of Squarepants and other kids characters as encouraging homosexuality would be funny (actually, it is funny!) if Dr. Dobson weren't a close spiritual adviser to President Bush and quite influential on public policy matters. There's been quite a bit of commentary about this, see for example this Slate article and the book James Dobson's War on America. According to one estimate, he controls 7,000,000 votes.

Dobson got his start as a pediatrician and author of Dare to Discipline with the agenda of rehabiliting spanking as a parental tool.

As I said, his fruitcake comments would be grimly amusing if only those in power in America didn't take him so seriously. The extension of the kind of "blunt power counts" ideology you see in "Dare to Discipline" justifies first-strike displays of brute force such as the Iraq invasion and the potential bombing of Iran.

In his book for parents about spanking, he recounts many of the beatings he received as a kid, including with his mom's corset, buckles, stays, and all. My diagnosis is permanent psychological damage. But you gotta wonder what we are doing as a country taking this man seriously. Something has gone badly wrong, someone should be spanked -- and the someone isn't the cartoon character with a rectangular rear-end.

I've written a cute little RSS Viewing app in PHP

Hey! I've written a cute RSS Viewer using PHP scripting and posted it to my Googleplexblog.com site.

This Web page lets you view RSS syndication feeds without special RSS Reader software. In effect, it acts like a Web portal, or aggregator, for RSS feeds, converting the XML syndication feed for display as HTML.

I've provided a bunch of preset feeds, mostly about Google and research, but also the BBC World News and Interactive Dad. Users can select a preset or enter the URL of any syndication feed they'd like...all in a morning's work!

Alas, poor Usenet!

Alas poor Usenet I loved thee well! The early history of the Web is intertwined with Usenet. Here's Google's 20 year Usenet timeline beginning in 1981 with the earliest Usenet message archived by Google Groups.

Within Google Groups you will also find messages of historic importance, including Tim Berner-Lee's executive summary of the Web to be in 1991, and Linus Torlvads's words about a "pet project": "This is a program for hackers by a hacker."

In the face of this august creative heritage, where is Usenet today?

The answer, Yorick, is not much of anywhere. In large part, today's Usenet messages are spam, about sex, and some carry malware payloads in their links. In other words, a backwater waste of time -- although not everyone agrees with this characterization, and at least one of my colleagues says that Usenet archives are the best way to find out the real scoop on technical equipment before purchasing it. AOL is cutting Usenet access for its members, and Google Groups seems to be the closest thing to a reasonably accessable current version of Usenet, consisting of the DejaNews portion of the original Usenet archives with technology updates grafted on by Google. Google bought the DejaNews Usenet archives from eBay, which had originally acquired it for Half.com.

It's most nice of the rich folks at Google to carry a torch for Usenet -- probably we all still have some fondness for the days when the Web was a small community of enthusiasts in our heart of hearts. But will Google Groups bring this backwater back to its glory? We think not.

Hotdog: It's Google Video

New from the labs at Google is...roll the trumpets...Google Video. Once again on a new frontier of online searching, Google Video lets you search recent TV shows (as if you don't get enough of them on your TV itself). Does this count as "information?" -- maybe so, but I think it is more noise on the line than information.

Google's mission is to make available all the world's information, and I guess they must think intermittent and sloppy transcripts of bad TV is information.

Right now, Google Video is pretty limited: it just shows a few stills for the shows it has catalogued, along with a text transcript. Channels covered are very limited, but obviously this thing will expand, and I suppose ultimately it will get connected with your TIVO-style video recorders. You don't need to be a weatherman or hotdog vendor to see where this thing is going.

The park rangers used to say in Yellowstone in a vain attempt to keep the tourists from feeding the wildlife, "It takes a smart bear to know where the hotdog ends and the hand begins." In a similar spirit, it takes a tough and neurotic Web surfer to know where the static ends and the information begins. I'm not sure which camp Google Video falls in, but it sure is hotdog cool of Google to do all this stuff for us!

20,000,000 Firefox downloads

Twenty million Firefox downloads can't be wrong -- this is a great Web browser. What's really, really, really cool is how it can be configured in just about any way you'd like. Come on, give it a try: there's nothing to lose but your shackles!

Wondering about eBay

You gotta wonder about eBay. The stock was down about 20% last week amid concerns about slowing growth. Still a hugely profitable and growing company, but also still very richly valued. But the financials are not what makes me wonder.

What I think is odd are the listing that have started to appear on eBay for what can only kindly be called intangibles. Examples range from toasted cheese sandwiches to a cane with a ghost of a grandfather in it to a "happy midwest childhood."

Taking the last of these as an example, the "Happy Midwest Childhood Age 5 to 18 Teddy Bear Included" went for $267 with 44 bids. This kind of success leads to me-too listings for more bogus stuff. Are some or all the bids the result of shilling? Who can say.

But there's a fundamental problem with eBay's hands-off business model. If their growth metrics are based on statistics that include this kind of thing, then the metrics are themselves bogus. Ultimately eBay will need to do a better job of policing their listings, because a listing service per se doesn't add that much value.

Now! Google AdSense Preview Tool

If you are thinking of running Google AdSense ads on your site, but worried that the ads Google serves won't be relevant (or will decrease the value of your content), Google has a new tool for you -- the Google AdSense Preview Tool. Here are the installation instructions. Note that it only works in Internet Explorer (so forget about it, you Firefox fans out there!)

Besides using it to get an idea of the ads Google will serve up for you, there are some other benefits as you construct your pages:

• You can try out color schemes


• You can try out different ad formats


• You can click on the ads and visit the sites without violating your TOS. This is importanrt because it really lets you get to know your advertisers

Make Lay Pay

Kenneth Lay says that he didn't know about any of that hinky stuff going on at Enron, that he is the target of an over-zealous prosecutor, and that he is a thoroughly admirable pillar (or ex-pillar) of his community. Lay wants you to hear what he has to say so badly he is willing to pay.

According to Houston's Channel 7 KLTV, he is buying sponsored links on Google, Yahoo, and AOL search engines. This means that when someone searchs for Kenneth Lay on any of these engines, an ad in the sponsored link area for Ken Lay's web site appears. According to the report, Kenneth Lay pays between 5 and 12 cents per click everytime someone clicks the sponsorer Kenmneth Lay link.

What I say is lets make Kenneth Lay pay. So go ahead, search for Kenneth Lay. And click away on the sponsored link to make him pay!

Click Detective

In my dreams about click fraud, I'm lying on a tropical island drinking, well drinking one of those drinks with an umbrella, and psychically encouraging all my friends to click multiple times on the ads on my site, particularly the high yield ones for expensive keywords. Or even more devlishly, I've created a bot that does automated click-throughs for me and cannot be detected by those oh-so-smart search engine managers.

This is not the kind of "click fraud" that Click Detective has in mind. Click Detective wants you to worry about the ads you've purchased with Pay for Click programs such as Google AdWords. Are they being clicked by foul, villainous competitors with the goal of driving up your cost of advertising? (Or even of driving your ads off the Internet if your costs per keyword exceed your maximums...) Have those nasty competitors started a spamming campaign, or are they using technology? The search engine companies are pretty good at catching this kind of fraud, but they don't get everything, so...be paranoid.

There's nothing very complicated about the way Click Detective sets up. Once you sign up (they have a free trial), you register your "landing pages," add a small script to each landing page that calls a program on the Click Detetective server, and modify the destination URLs (but not the URLs that users see) in your Pay for Click program. The modification to the URL adds a token that the script added to your landing page picks up, so that only traffic coming from the Pay for Click ad is monitored by Click Detective.

Two questions arise: what kind of analysis does Click Detective do with the information, and what can you do with it? Good questions. The first, of course, is proprietary, but no doubt involves analytic tweaks on IP logging. (You know the IP the click came from, if you get a lot from the same IP it looks funny.) Does Click Detective add a cookies for tracking purposes? I don't know, ask them. (If they tell me, I will post the info.) You could do this stuff yourself without having to pay a monthly fee for the service, and without executing an offsite black-box program.

Suppose Click Detective comes back with the goods, there's this user that's been clicking many times on a Google ad to get to your site. What then? Well, you can pursue the panoply of legal resources, notifying Google, ISPs, etc. Google does take this kind of thing very seriously.

If you want to deal with the spamming user who is visitng your site yourself, using the tools that Click Detective provides (once again, there's nothing here you couldn't do on your own), you can send them a message telling them you know they've been here before and asking them to bookmark the site. Messages increase in severity until they can't open the page without actually typing in its direct URL. But suppose I don't want to bookmark your site, I just want to visit it via the ad I know about? Well, if you are a Web merchant, that's your call -- it is kind of like people hanging around a candy store to read the magazines. Eventually, they'll buy something.

You can't blame this concept on Silicon Valley, it is based in the United Kingdom, but I sure wish I could: there's got to be a better place to put all this effort.

URL Channels in Google AdSense

There's a great new bit of functionality in Google's AdSense: URL channels.

Channels are used in Google AdSense to understand on which of your pages Google ads are being clicked. Before these new URL channels (which were added in the last couple of days), here's how the process of using channels worked: You'd create a channel in advance, and each of your channels had slightly different underlying code. In the Google AdSense publisher interface, you could then display reports on a per channel basis (or on the aggregate). Per channel reports showed you where your hits were coming from.

There are some problems with this way of reporting channel data:

• You have to set the channel up in advance.


• What if you didn't realize beforehand that an area of your site was going to grow and needed its own channel? You'd have to change the code in all the pages in the area to add them to the channel.


• What if you are using a mechanism for replicating the Google AdSense code across an entire site or sites, for example, server-side includes (SSI). An automatic replication method like this won't work with channels that require differing internal codes.

URL channels solve these problems, and demonstrate concretely Google's ongoing commitment to improving the usability of its services.

To start with, you don't need to set up a URL channel in advance. You can wait and see how your site grows.

All the Google AdSense code on your site can be the same, so you can use a cross-site replication method like server-side includes.

When you are ready to create a URL channel, you just specify a URL. For example, www.braintique.com/research. All pages and directories "below" the specified URL become part of the URL channel. There's nothing else to do, and you can change URL channels as you need depending on how your site changes or grows. You can generate aggregated reports, and when you need more analysis (to show which AdSense pages are working, and which are not) you can create reports to view the click-through results from one or multiple URL channels.

Nifty!

Collapse

I've been reading Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond who also wrote the best-selling Pulitzer prize winning Guns, Germs, and Steel.

Collapse is fascinating reading, but a touch on the didactic side. It also seems a bit arbitrary. Why did Diamond chose to focus on the problems of the Bitterroots in Montana (where he vacations and fly fishes) rather than those (much more overwhelming) ecological problems of Los Angeles (where he lives)?

The didactic tone is a touch off-putting, but the conundrums and tragedy are very real. Easter Island was lushly forested when it was first settled by Polynesian peoples; civilization went from populous to almost gone, and the island became totally bereft of trees. This was an ecological nightmare that took place in isolation, pre recorded history. The causality was the very success of the society. Could the Easter Islanders have avoided their dark destiny? Can we?

Google Desktop Search

I just found a piece of information I needed thanks to Google Desktop Search. I just totally doubt I ever would have found it on my computer without Google Desktop Search. It didn't take very long, I set the Desktop Search going while I did other work, but the info I needed turned out to be in a Web page that had been deleted. Google's cached version of the page gave me what I needed.

Now, as I say, I never would have found it without Google Desktop Search (it wasn't information in a form that the Windows search function would have located easily or at all). For me this is a life saver, but then I spend my life doing instensive projects that involve tons of information -- like Building Research Tools with Google for Dummies and then "filing" the info in a helter-skelter fashion. Google Desktop Search lets me be a little less than perfectly organized, and still retrieve stuff I've found before without having to re-find the wheel each time.

Martin Luther King

"All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality."--Martin Luther King Jr.

I work with fools

Of course, I watch the Google AdSense ads that show up on Braintique with interest. What kind of content will the Google engines think is aligned with our site using keyword analysis? Much of the time, the ads seem very targeted and appropriate.

Other times you get some really weird stuff. For example, on our blogging pages, iworkwithfools seems to turn up a great deal. Now, the URL of this site may speak to you, beause many people do indeed work with fools. (Since I work basically with myself, if I work with fools I have only myself to blame, but that's a different story.)

Seriously, folks, what is iworkwithfools after? What is the business model here, assuming there is one? (Unless you want to say that iworkwithfools is foolish, a distinct possibility.)

The mission statement isn't a whole lot of help providing such generalities as #2 ( of ten points): "To rant since we all love to rip someone a new one."

It seems that iworkwithfools is a genuine example of an AdWords/AdSense model: drive traffic to a site by paying for targeted keywords with AdWords, monetize the traffic by displaying AdSenses ads. When I looked into this kind of scheme, it made no sense: the cost of the AdWords was more than I'd make in revenue. (If you think of Google's model in the aggregate, this would have to be true: otherwise Google gets no piece of the pie.)

In fairness, iworkwithfools also tries to capture revenues through displaying non-Google ads, and maybe they have a business model in mind that isn't yet apparent. Or maybe they've put the site up for the pure love of the thing, which is a great motivation and an antidote to working with fools!

Lord of the Rings

We bought ourselves the extended DVD set of the Lord of the Rings as a Christmas present (my precious!) and have been working our way through the "bonus" material. Perhaps not of interest to everyone, we find it fascinating for a number of reasons. Some of these have a research perspective (since I seem to see everything these days that way):

• How is such a vast amount of material organized? The answer is heirarchically. There is nary an index in sight, which makes keeping track of what is where on the DVDs a baffling proposition.
  
• The movies themselves were shot totally out of time sequence, and also (using blue screen and myriad other CGI techniques) partly of reality and partly of made-up elements. Peter Jackson and company must have hade superb organizational tools to keep track of all the material. It's mind boggling.
  

Just as a comment on the movies themselves, I've been a fan of Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings since I was almost my son Julian's age (he's seven). I have a few misgivings about the films (there's a little too much B-grade blood and guts for my taste, I miss Tom Bombadil, and the character of Treebeard doesn't quite do it for me), but quibbles aside they are an incredible achievement and a remarkable extension of the original works. Which themselves have some problematic aspects -- isn't there even one good Orc in all the hordes of Urak-hai and Shagrats?

Firefox

Firefox is a great Web browser. I really like it. I am trying it out as my default browser. The tabbed windows feature makes the kind of multi-editing I do in maintaining our web properties much easier. For example, I can add or edit this entry in one tab of the browser, and check out how it looks after it has been posted on another tab, without dealing with multiple browser instances.

I'll report back after I've used it more extensively, but for now sign me -- I've switched from IE.

I am also trying out Thunderbird as my email client, so far it seems good at cutting down on Spam.

Google Publisher

Google has a new program, Google Publisher, which would seem to be great for all us authors who have out-of-print books that (at least in our opinion) are still of interest to readers.

The idea is this: suppose you own the copyright to a book that has gone out of print. You still get plenty of questions from readers about it, and people want to buy it (it's a good thing you still have some in a carton in your basement!).

Google scans the book (you have to send them a copy which you won't get back), hosts the scanned pages, and indexes it. AdWords ads go on relevant pages, and you get a portion of the AdSense revenue. In addition, Google provides a link (that you supply when you register the book with the program) for people to buy the book.

This seems like a great way to monetize out-of-print and/or under-marketed books that you own the rights to (and might even work with print-on-demand).

I've placed a few books in the program, and will let you know the results in the due fullness of time.

Braintique Press Release

Here's the link to the Braintique Press Release. Also, check out all the releases scheduled for the same day (1/15/2005). Braintique is about 30 down the list!

More on PR Web

One other comment about PR Web (see previous entry).

From a researcher's perspective, how valuable are all those press releases on the PR Web site? It's a little like wading through a blizzard of home pages: interesting stuff that you could spend hours going through, but little information of clear quality. Some kind of high-level analysis tool using this stuff as raw data might really be cool, though.

Press Releases

In the bad old days before the Internet and the Web, it used to be a relatively expensive proposition to submit a press release for distribution, running into thousands of dollars for an account with a wire service.

These days, it's easy to get a press release distributed for free using a service like PR Web. There are some gotchas:

• You must know how to write the press release in press release format (you can check out the PR Web FAQ or Google "writing press release" if you are unsure about this).

• PR Web tries hard to upsell you on increased distribution services (cost about $30 per release) to get your release out there.
  

It remains to be seen how effective this "vanity" press release system is: will my (or your) press release get any notice amid the thousands of daily releases that are now available? In theory, PR Web releases should get picked up by wire services, some news media, search engines, and online news services such as Google News. But of course the job of online news services is to only pick up items that are really news worthy, not someone's home made press release touting a dubiously better mouse trap.

I've submitted a press release to PR Web noting that Braintique is open for "business" and plan to use this as a test to see how effective the mechanism is. The press release should get posted in the next few days, and I'll provide a link to it then, and also let you know how well it works out.

California Pioneers

Phyllis and I drove across the Bay Bridge to MacWorld at the Moscone Center in San Francisco today. We had six-month-old Mathew with us, so (as three people) we got to use the car pool lane, which was very nice, scooting around all the traffic at the toll Plaza. MacWorld was really hopping with enthusiastic people and great gadgets, but that's not what I want to write about.

Just a block or two from Moscone Center we passed the Society of California Pioneers. Turns out that it has a research library. the Alice Phelan Sullivan library.

Alice's library features diaries from the 1848 Gold Rush, photos, old sheet music, holographic autobiographies of California pioneers, and much more.

Here's where I'm going with this. Google's recent announcement that it will be digitizing portions of the Stanford, Michigan, Oxford and NY Public libraries is just great, and a good start. But what about all the little, specialized archives in the world? There's no research substitute it seems -- at least yet -- to being there in the physical sense. If you want to really look at the primary source material at the California Pioneer Society, you have to go there (and, yes, it is only a couple of blocks from San Francisco's Moscone Center).

Adding language translation

See the entry below about Japanese, Korean, and Chinese automatic translation services. If you are interested in adding translation via Google to your own web pages, see Chapter 13 of Building Research Tools.

Japanese, Korean, and Chinese

Google has added Japanese, Korean, and Chinese to its automatic translation services; see http://www.google.com/language_tools?hl=en. This is way, way cool! Admittedly, these translation services are in "beta" and the Chinese one is "simplfied" -- but still this seems great and I can't wait to experiment with it.

Getting started!

This is my first Googleplex Blog entry. Building Research Tools with Google For Dummies is more or less "in the can" -- so I can catch my breath and get to work on this blog. I plan to use this blog to answer questions about research, Google, and using the Google APIs. Also, as I come across interesting items related to these topics, I'll post them here!