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Chris Knight's avatar

This is probably an issue I should have addressed ten or so years ago.  It angered me then but now, it’s absolutely infuriating.  Not that I actually expect anything proactive to be done, of course.  But hey, avalanches start with one pebble rolling into places that a pebble doesn’t belong.  So who knows?

It’s about Google’s AdSense program.  And how it’s impossible to regain monetization if you so much as look at a YouTube video the wrong way.

For a few years this blog took part in the AdSense program.  And it made a little bit of money.  Enough that I used it to purchase my first iPad.  AdSense was very easy to implement and it really livened up the blog, which was the main reason I wanted to take part in it.

So it was a pretty good relationship, I thought.

And then, a little over a decade ago, ...

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Some
of Google’s ”doodles” either fly over my head or make me cringe in
disbelief.  A lot of them are about historical events and people that at best are extremely obscure or else make me wonder “What the hell are they smoking over there?”

But the one they have for today is as good as it gets and I
recognized it immediately.  Give credit where credit is due: Google was really thoughtful about this one and how to convey it:

A depiction of the four North Carolina A&T students who sat down at the segregated lunch counter at the Woolworth’s in Greensboro (the big
city near where I’m from). That was sixty years ago today.

 This is how to SERIOUSLY
protest a wrong. Peacefully and respectfully. Nobody was hurt, nobody
was insulted, nobody was arrested because of violent behavior. These young men simply went in, sat at a whites-only ...

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People of Aberdeen, Scotland: the Horseboy is on the loose in your town!!

IT manager Russell Moffatt was using Google’s Streetview feature to locate an optician’s shop so he could get his eyeglasses repaired. But while doing the search he found something else: a person, apparently male, wearing a horse’s head mask along with a purple shirt, standing on the side of a street in Aberdeen.

This mystery individual has quickly become known as “Horseboy” and as such things go on the Intertubes, has quickly acquired a herd of fans and well-wishers.

Horseboy is just the latest in a string of odd sights found by users of Google Streetview. Among other things people dressed as Japanese warriors, Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Emmett Brown have been picked out of Streetview’s data.

If I knew when a Google Streetview car would be coming past my house, I’d probably be waiting ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Of all the clever logos that Google has done to mark various occasions and moments in history, this is by far the kewlest. Tomorrow is the thirtieth anniversary of the debut of Pac-Man, and Google has a fully-playable Pac-Man logo up!

Use your keyboard’s arrow keys to move Pac-Man around the maze. Other than the customized Google design it plays EXACTLY like the arcade original: including 255 screens and the 256th “kill screen”. It even has the act breaks!

Thanks to Chad Austin for the heads-up! And hey, while we’re on the subject of celebrating video gaming’s first bona-fide hero, how about we also play “Weird Al” Yankovic’s never-officially released parody of The Beatles’ “Taxman”? Here’s a homemade music video of “Pac-Man”!

...

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This is gonna be a helluva fun thing to watch. I’m getting the popcorn ready even now…

Media conglomermonster Viacom – which has tied up the video hosting service in litigation for the past three years over “copyright infringement” – is now said to have been secretly uploading its own videos to the Google-owned website!

From the statement on the official YouTube blog, pertaining to court documents made public earlier today…

Because content owners large and small use YouTube in so many different ways, determining a particular copyright holder’s preference or a particular uploader’s authority over a given video on YouTube is difficult at best. And in this case, it was made even harder by Viacom’s own practices.

For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its

...
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The nearby town of Greensboro has already been competing hard to be the “test bed” city for the Google Fiber ultra-high speed Internet. Now Winston-Salem has entered the race. All over the country medium-sized cities are doing things like changing their names to “Google” and other stunts so as to win the bid.

Ummmm… why?

Even if Google Fiber is 100 times faster than regular broadband, what good will it be? Within the winning city the Internet might work at blazing-hot speed, but the “normal” speed of the outside world will be a debilitating bottleneck. At least until Google Fiber gets rolled out sufficiently enough to take on a bulk of the data traffic.

It’s like trying to win a contest for an SR-71 Blackbird without having a runway to launch it from. No doubt that it’ll look real purty sitting in your backyard, but what’s the use if ...

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And they do it the only way that those sly minds at Google could do it: by rendering “Google” into a UPC symbol for the day!

Scan here for more about the history of the ubiquitous barcode.

But of course, this day couldn’t go by without a mention of what remains, more than thirty years later, the funniest/most spiteful UPC symbol of all time: the cover of MAD Magazine #198!

...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Yours Truly has gone hogwild with the labels feature ever since I first started using it about two years ago: Blogger has told me that there’s a 2000 labels limit and I’m all out.

C’mon Google, we expect better from you! Fix this, please 🙂

EDIT 09:32 p.m. EST: Taking a looksee around the blogosphere, many users of Blogger are reporting problems with labels. I’m hearing that Google/Blogger implemented some “improvements” and that a restriction on labels is supposed to be one of them. Uhhhh…

If Google is in the business of locating data quickly, then limiting labels for its own blogging service seems an awfully big step in the wrong direction....

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In an effort to encourage “a more carbon-friendly, less polluting alternative to lawn mowers”, Google has turned to employing goats to chew down the excessive vegetation on its sprawling California campus.

Here are the Google Goats hard at work…

The idea isn’t entirely without precedent. During the World War I years First Lady Edith Wilson kept the White House lawn “mowed” by letting her family’s sheep graze freely on the grounds. Maybe Obama could follow Google and the Wilsons’ example and demonstrate some real environmentalism at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? 🙂

Well anyway, I think it’s a pretty neat story. Having grown up on a farm with a number of goats I can attest that they can eat anything, and will faithfully keep the grass and weeds at bay. Who knows: maybe with some good PR, goats and sheep can become the next “cool” pets to own.

(And as ...

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