My writing gig at Google Tutor is starting slowly. Check out my first two posts (and of course subscribe to the RSS feed!). Maybe you'd even like to leave a comment on each post?

YouTube makes its debut appearance on Google News

Google advertises on Facebook - so what?


If you have any Google news stories / leads you'd like me to follow up on Google Tutor, just send them onto me and I will see if I can make a story out of it. I am of course looking for stories on my own but I can't cover everywhere. So if you see anything, drop me a line and if the story makes GT, I'll credit you.

As well as writing for MakeUseOf.com, I will now also be writing for Google Tutor. I am a big Google follower and so I am excited to be working with Google Tutor, so I can follow and report on Google news and developments.

Advertisers also seem to take notice of PageRanks - the higher the PageRank, the more chance there is that an advertiser will want to do business with you.

So how do you make your PageRank higher? Well, writing lots of good relevant content on your site is always a good start. Keep updating your content and tweak your meta-tags. But I was speaking to someone online the other day who advocated getting a list of the sites with a PageRank of either 10 or 9 and link to them by leaving comments on these sites' blogs, forums and so on. That then creates a trackback so you will end up having a link to a PageRank 10/9 site. That apparently pushes up your PageRank finally.

I'm not sure of the ethics of doing this (in fact my gut tells me it is not allowed). Can anyone clarify the rules on this? Is it ethical / allowed to try to link to a high PageRank site in order to boost your own site's PageRank?

But just out of pure interest, I Googled to see if anyone had posted a list of websites with a PageRank of 9 or 10. Lo and behold! We have results!

The net is buzzing over Garett Rogers' post on ZDNet about the possibility of a new Gmail interface being developed. This is quite interesting because it opens up the possibility that some of the things that Gmail is missing, or is currently doing badly, may soon be fixed.

In this blog, I want to try to concentrate also on productivity and how to have a more relaxing / stress-free life. As someone with manic depression, I have to watch my stress levels very carefully so I am always on the lookout for ways to stay calm, ways to have a really great day and so on. I am also reading some productivity blogs such as Zen Habits which I am already totally addicted to. Thanks Aibek for recommending that one to me.

One of the ways that I am trying to be productive and organised is in my online life. Last week, I deleted 75% of my website, and I also deleted 3000 emails from my Gmail account which was actually very liberating (Gmail is so fast now, it feels as if it is on steroids!). I unsubscribed from about 15 different email newsletters, set up filters to send the crap straight to the email trash bin, and today I decided to uninstall Google Talk and only check my email no more than once a hour.

Being honest with myself, Google Talk was a serious impediment to my productivity. With its new mail notification feature, it was disturbing me constantly with its pop-up window and it was chaining me to my email all day. Now with it gone, and my determination to check email only sporadically throughout the day, I feel I can now concentrate on more important tasks - such as things that bring in money - REAL WORK! ;-)

Now I just have to tackle my huge RSS reading list! At 200+ feeds, that will take some serious pruning......

Being a guy who values his personal privacy, I don't like to answer phone calls from numbers I don't recognise (thank the Lord for caller-ID!). I normally let the caller talk on the answering machine and if I decide to talk to them, I will pick up. But often, I get calls from people who don't leave messages (mostly sales people) and in these cases, I double-check who the caller was by entering the phone number into Google which will then tell you who it was.

I used to be a lifelong addict of Yahoo Mail until Gmail lured me away with lots of space (2.9GB at the time of writing this) and lots of other cool features. But in the past few weeks I have procrastinated over whether to return to Yahoo Mail. Gmail is starting to annoy me partly because it is so damn slow and partly because I am deeply shocked that Gmail's response to Yahoo's unlimited email space was to.....charge users for more email space! Yahoo offers unlimited FREE email space and a very reasonable $25 a year for unlimited Flickr space, whereas Google is demanding $500 for 250GB of space for email and photos. $500! The very thought makes me sick.

If you can get free unlimited space at Yahoo, what makes Google think that people will shell out up to $500 for 250GB? The brand name? The Google "coolness" factor? I don't think so. I sure as hell won't spend that kind of money. Gmail already makes money off me by shoving adverts in my email space. In fact it downright pisses me off that Google has the nerve to charge like this when their direct rival is giving it away for nothing. At the very least, Google could put their prices down significantly. But $500? That's just really greedy. Especially for a product that is STILL not out of beta after 3 years (or is it 4 years?). I am not advocating for one moment that everything on the internet should be free but where is the marketing sense in charging users for something that your fiercest rival is giving away for nothing? I'd like someone at Google to explain the logic behind that one. Let's be honest - if two shopkeepers, side by side, offered the same product and one was free and the other was $500, which one would you take? It's only human nature to be drawn to the free one.

So partly to get this all straight in my head, here are the pros and cons of each service. I'd appreciate your thoughts and opinions.

Gmail : http://mail.google.com

Pros :
conversation views
labelling
good search functions
excellent filters (especially the spam filters)
ability to add photos in contact book
tight integration with calendar and Google Talk
lots of add-ons and user scripts that integrate Gmail with calendar, RSS reader, and Google IG.
built in Google chat and chat logs archived & searchable.
the best one though is the ability to collect email from other email services and send email from those addresses INSIDE Gmail. Plus the keyboard shortcuts are excellent.

Cons :
at times, Gmail is unavailable or really slow.
Gmail also claims their spam folders and trash folders auto-delete after 30 days but I checked those folders the other day and there are emails in there going back to June (which for all you mathematically challenged people out at the Googleplex is 90 days, not 30).
My biggest concern though is that it takes ages to open an email or to show emails under a certain label (if you click on that label). The more emails you have, the longer it takes (so giving you more space kind of defeats the purpose if you have to delete some emails to make it go faster).
Speed is definately the biggest problem for Gmail. Before you ask, I have no Greasemonkey scripts for Gmail to slow things down - only a Better Gmail Firefox extension from Lifehacker (and I don't even use half of the features that Better Gmail offers).
Hardly anybody uses Google Talk, making the whole in-built chat thing redundant.
Oh and one last thing, Gmail shows up as a complete mess on the Opera internet browser. The Gmail interface is like a dog's dinner and totally unreadable and unusable.


Yahoo Mail : http://mail.yahoo.com

Pros :
An excellent Instant Messaging client (which millions of people use) which is integrated into Yahoo Mail.
Completely free unlimited email space which means I can back up my files and MP3's.
A drag and drop interface.
Since my website and business email is with Yahoo (currently being forwarded to Gmail), I can have all my email together in the one place.
One click links to empty spam and trash - without having to go into those folders first (which I wish Gmail would hurry up and do).
More reliable than Gmail and virtually 100% uptime. I have rarely seen Yahoo Mail crash.
A search capability to find emails again.
The contact book has spaces to record Skype ID's and other instant messaging ID's.

Cons :
The interface is a little on the clunky side. Too much on the main page such as news headlines and weather.
As far as I can see, I can't export my Gmail filters and labels. I also can't export my Google RSS reader subscriptions. So I would have to start them from scratch (a major pain in the ass).
If I use up a lot of space, will Yahoo Mail slow down significantly, just like Gmail?
No ability to add photos to my contact book, so the contact book lacks personalisation.


The biggest inconvenience though is one of my own making in that I have completely married myself to the Google concept - so I use Google Docs, Google Talk and this blog is hosted on Blogger. All of these things are connected through my Google Account. So if I were to break away and use Yahoo Mail, I would have to either stop using Google Docs, Talk and Blogger, or maintain both the Yahoo account AND the Google account.

I guess some more procrastination will be needed! Any opinions and thoughts would be appreciated in the comments.

Google has FINALLY added a search feature to their RSS reader, thank God. In the greatest of ironies, the company that claims to be the world leader in search engines didn't have a search function for their own RSS application! They have it in regular search and they have it in Gmail, but until today, Reader didn't have one at all.

For the first time that I can remember, Google went down for 10 minutes today (a little over a hour ago). Google.com and Google services such as Blogger, Gmail, Google Browser Sync all went offline.

Don't believe me? Here are some screenshots taken from my Opera browser :

At first, I thought someone had hacked into my Google account and changed the password as things began to slowly become inaccessible. Then Firefox started screwing up and I thought it was a Firefox problem. So I changed over to Opera and it was the same there. But after ten minutes, everything sluggishly started to come back.

Did anyone else experience this? Can anyone remember the last time Google went offline?

Have you ever considered that Google perhaps looks a little bare, like Mother Hubbard's cupboard? Well, with the use of a Stylish script, Firefox users can now change the background colour of the Google homepage. Not only do you get a new background colour but the Google logo also reflects back on itself!

The dark blue colour which I have chosen also makes the Google logo look a lot brighter and a lot more sharper.

The only drawback is that it doesn't seem to work on the Google IG personalised page.

I really like it - aesthetic candy for the eyes! But no doubt, knowing my restless nature, I'll change it back after a few days......

I was reading a very interesting post today about Google Talk and a previously unknown (at least to me) feature that allows you to set up group chats with multiple users. This has got me thinking about Google Talk in general.

I really like the Google Talk application but I only have three contacts on it. Not due to having no friends (!) but simply because I only know three people that use Google Talk for their instant messaging purposes. I think part of the problem is that Google does not really make much of an effort to publicise its chat program. I mean, it's there and it's freely available but Google's sparse main page ensures that there is no banner advertising urging people to use Google Talk. You can use it on Google Docs to collaborate on projects but do you see Google screaming from the rooftops about it?

Whereas in contrast, MSN and Yahoo both openly advertise their chat programs on their main pages and they have a much bigger user-base. They spend more time and energy promoting and pushing their chat programs and as a result, they have got further ahead in the instant messaging market.

I think it was a master-stroke by Google to integrate Google Talk into Gmail and to have Google Talk conversations stored in Gmail accounts as searchable messages. Notice how fast Yah00 copied this feature for Yahoo mail owners. But I prefer to use the standalone Talk application which has a nifty file-transfer capability, new mail notification (for Gmail accounts) and thumbnail photos of Gmail users who are on your contact list (assuming they have put a photo of themselves on their Gmail accounts). I also like the simple and sparse design (a famous Google trademark). Hell, they don't even have emoticons!

One thing has really irritated me though - I tried putting Google Talk onto Pidgin and it worked OK. But the problem was that everytime I emailed someone, their name would instantly appear on my Google Talk contact list (even if it was a newsletter that I had emailed to subscribe to)! So in the end, I had to uninstall GT from Pidgin and run GT separately. If you run the standalone GT program, you can choose to hide people who are not approved to be on your contact list. But if you attach GT to a Jabber chat client, then you will get everyone that you ever email popping up on your contact list. Rather annoying.

I've been following with very close interest Google's latest experiment. They are now offering people the chance to comment on stories in Google News (here is Techcrunch's story on it). I know this is not exactly breaking news but I am a few days behind with things and I am catching up! ;-)

My first thought is instinctively - has Google bitten off more than it can chew here?

As Techcrunch points out, this is not something that can be automated. The only people that can comment on stories are people connected with that story. So that means that Google staff (real people who have to be paid and looked after, not little anonymous GoogleBots in cyberspace) have to check each comment. They have to (somehow) verify that person's identity, verify (somehow) that they were indeed involved in the incident, check the comment for anything libellous and / or inflammatory and then post it. Can you imagine the amount of work that would involve? What would be the turnaround time for each comment? What if someone disputes that person was really involved? Does the comment get pulled? Does Google investigate further? Would the news story still be a valid news story by the time the comment got out of checking status or disputes? These are all valid questions and I would love to hear answers to them.

With a scheme like this, Google News has gone from being an effective news story aggregator to being little more than a glorified blog!

Don't get me wrong, credit goes to Google for giving people in a story the right to give their side of the story online. But the sheer logistics of the operation will probably ensure that this Google experiment will never get rid of its beta label.

In this situation, they have a grand vision but the vast resources required to carry it out effectively borders on sheer lunacy.

Power users of Google Reader rejoice! Someone has finally grown tired of waiting for Google to get its act together and has written a Greasemonkey script putting a search box in Google Reader.

Of course to have Greasemonkey, you need to have the Firefox browser. Then just download the script and refresh your Reader page.

I wonder what millenium Google will finally bring out their own official search engine for Reader?

When I was making some Google Toolbar buttons on Monday, I made one for one of my favourite websites, Lifehacker.com and I sent it into the Lifehacker editors as a little gift (since I am a nice chap). Just now, they put it on the Lifehacker website for other readers to download and use!

My 30 seconds of fame! :-)

I recently blogged about Google Browser Sync not installing on my Portable Firefox on my USB stick. Well if it was only GBS not working then I would have just stopped using it and forgotten all about it. But ALL my Firefox extensions were not working on my Portable Firefox and that obviously needed to be fixed. Firefox is not the same without my extensions. I spend a lot of time customising my Firefox browser so I would like to be able to take it on the move with me.

At first I thought that it was the fault of the USB stick not reading the information properly. But then I was looking at the development website of John Haller (the man who developed the Portable Firefox application, as well as a whole host of other portable apps). It turns out that each portable app has its own FAQ and forum board and it was on the forum board that I found out the fix for getting my Firefox extensions to work on my USB stick.

All you need to do is go into your profile folder in your Portable Firefox and delete "extensions.rdf" and any cache files and any "ini" files. Delete them from the trash bin and then re-start Portable Firefox.

Bingo! My extensions started working and Google Browser Sync is good to go!

I love it when problems finally solve themselves and things start working again. You just can't beat that feeling.

OK, I admit it. I am addicted to RSS feeds. They're really useful for monitoring multiple websites and I wouldn't get my daily fix of news if I wasn't subscribed to the CNN feed and the BBC feed. I used to spend an inordinate amount of time each day reading them so I cut out all the non-essentials and outright crap and came up with my best "must-have" 50 feeds (although sometimes that creeps up a bit if I have a run of good luck finding interesting blogs).

But quite often I am too busy to check my Google Reader app and when I do log in, I find 150+ new posts waiting for me. So when I was reading Steve Rubel's excellent "Micro Persuasion" blog, he mentioned that he has the same problem and he uses a service called RSSfwd to have new blog posts emailed to him. You still have the original posts sitting in your RSS reader but copies are emailed to you, free of charge.

What are the benefits of this service? Well for a start, I check email much more than I check RSS feeds. So if an interesting / important post is put on a blog, I am likely to see it faster if it is sent directly to my email inbox. Second, using Gmail's filters, I can have the email automatically labelled and, once it's read, archived so I end up with a database of posts from my favourite blogs. So if I need to find a certain post in the future, I can simply search my Gmail archive for it (Google Reader still doesn't have a "search" capability which, considering that Google is a search engine company, is really perplexing!)

The best way to set it up is to do what Steve suggests and set up a separate folder in your RSS reader (mine is "favs"). Then label the RSS feeds you want sent to you with the "favs" label and give the RSS links for your "favs" label to RSSfwd. That way, if you want to add or remove feeds from your RSSfwd mailings, all you have to do is add or remove the "favs" label, which is a lot easier than separately unsubscribing from each feed.

How do you keep on top of your RSS feeds? Can anyone suggest a better idea?

Despite the fact that it has a nasty habit of slowing down my PC to the point that the CPU is at 100%, I am nevertheless starting to become a fan of Google Desktop's sidebar feature. This comes as a big relief to me as I was looking for some kind of desktop widget and I had finally run out of patience with Yahoo Widgets which was malfunctioning on a regular basis.

There are two apps which I have on my desktop sidebar which are rapidly proving invaluable to me in my quest to be more productive with my time. One is a notepad which I am using to jot down random tasks / thoughts. Up until a couple of weeks ago, I was using Todoist and that worked well enough. It even had a Gmail integration and an iGoogle module. But the reason I ultimately gave it up was the fact that I had to open an internet browser to use it. Sometimes if I am running another program, I first shut down all non-essential programs, including internet browsers. So if an idea comes to me that needs to be noted down, I want to be able to note it immediately. Not wait until the current task is finished and hope that I then remember to open Firefox then Gmail then write whatever I was thinking up to a hour before. So having a notepad on the desktop is extremely useful.

The other app that is rapidly proving its weight in gold is the ability to access my Google Calendar also without having to open my Firefox browser. I can add appointments via the Google Desktop "Quick Add" function and view my appointments on any day I choose, with the aid of a very cool looking pop-out window. The only downside to this feature is that I can't delete appointments from my Google Calendar using Google Desktop. For that, I have to open the browser and do it directly on the calendar website. I hope that Google offers a delete function in the future for users of the calendar app on Desktop.

Now what would be really good would be a Gmail module where you can send emails from the desktop without opening a browser. You can already view your emails on Google Desktop but the whole module is in a real mess. Old emails come first with new emails at the bottom (when ideally it should be the other way around) and emails that I normally have sent straight to archive appear in the desktop module with no apparent way to make them disappear. Can somebody please make a much better Gmail module for Google Desktop? I promise I'll be your pal forever!

The other day I realised that I hadn't updated the Portable Firefox program on my USB stick for quite some time so I went ahead and did that. It was then that I thought about installing Google Browser Sync on the portable Firefox so I can take my Firefox settings with me. But GBS stubbornly refuses to install.

GBS works fine on regular computers but on USB sticks, it kicks up a hell of a fight. First you have the battle to get it onto the USB stick in the first place (it seems impossible to download the "xpi" file directly to your computer and then drag it to the USB stick which would be the easiest solution) and when it finally gets on the USB stick, it says it won't properly install until Firefox has been re-started. When you do that, it tells you that Firefox didn't close in the first place! Several re-starts later, it sits there uninstalled as if to ask "so when are you planning on re-starting Firefox then?".

Does anyone have any clue how to make GBS work on a USB stick? If I can't get it to work, I may switch to Foxmarks.

Following on from the previous post on Gmail labels, I have come across a problem and I am wondering if anyone can help.

Every day, I have a lot of stuff automatically emailed to me as backup copies - backups of my blog posts, copies of news stories, photo backups, and so on. When these arrive in my Gmail account, I have a filter set up to automatically divert this stuff from appearing in the inbox, as they don't need to be seen right away. They are automatically archived with an appropriate label so I can find them again later if need be.

But what really irritates me is that these emails are archived as "unread" which means I have to find these emails on a daily basis, tick them, mark them as "read" and untick them. OK, it only takes a few minutes but it gets really tedious after a while.

From what I can see, there's no option in the filter set-up to have the email automatically marked as "read" before it is archived. So I am wondering if anyone has a hack / workaround solution to this problem. How can I tell Gmail to automatically mark certain emails as "read" before they are archived?

First one to give me a good answer gets the first prize of "my eternal gratitude". I'll also make sure your place in heaven is guaranteed.

Listen to this post by podcast! Download original mp3 file

It always amuses me when I read yet another online rant about Gmail abandoning the folder structure in their email application, in favour of labels. Whenever Gmail asks their users what features they would like to see, one of them is always "give us folders!". But answer me this - what precisely is the difference between a folder and a label? Answer : absolutely nothing at all.

A folder is basically a place-holder for you to find something again when you need it. A label performs the same function. By labelling something in Gmail, you are assigning it to a certain area of your email app and if you need the email again, you will just click on the label name and up pops the email in question. A folder does exactly the same thing.

So to all the anti-Gmail whiners that ridicule Google's decision to employ labels instead of folders, why don't you tell me precisely how a folder differs from a label?

I bet you can't.

I have been spending the last few days reading the excellent book "Lifehacker - 88 tech tricks to turbocharge your day" and it has a big email section. One of the things the book advocates is an empty inbox and immediately assigning each incoming email to a certain label or action. Unimportant low priority mails get archived with a label to be read later while highly important emails immediately arrive in the inbox to be dealt with.

It's reading this book that has given me so much insight and appreciation to the labelling and filtering system that Gmail offers. Thanks to the new filters that I put in place yesterday, I haven't been interrupted by a single email all afternoon today. This has allowed me to get some tasks finished which have been sitting around idle for days and even weeks. Absolute bliss.