Happy pongal

Skynet Technologies Text

Wish you happy new year

Google Maps Integrates Video, Book & Photo Results

A Google Maps search may now return location markers showing videos from YouTube, books from Google Book search, or geo-tagged photos from Panoramio*. Try the query google geyser, for instance, and you will find the blue placemark’s info window will embed a YouTube video for direct playback... possibly retrieved because the description, tags or title of the video contained the keywords in question as well as location information (the description reads “Drove by Google’s Mt View corp campus today found a Geyser,” and tags include mountain view).

The integration of the YouTube results looks very half-baked, as the screenshot shows (there’s not enough padding between thumbnail and description, the thumbnail is redundant in the first place because the embedded video contains a preview still already, the embedded video is too large for the info window, etc.).

AdSense Ad Review Center Announced

Google will be rolling out a feature called Ad Review Center to AdSense accounts over the coming months, they announced. This service seems to be aimed at webmasters who find some of the ads Google chooses for their sites too annoying and irrelevant (think blinking “find a partner” Flash ads on a news site, for instance). However, you will not be able to review every ad, but only those which are placement-targeted to your site.

If you do block an ad – and lose revenues that ad may have generated otherwise (or if you’re lucky, free the spot for better, more successful ads) – you will be able to select some feedback in regards to your reasons, Google says, which in turn can be check by the advertiser. Note with the Ad Review Center, you may also optionally choose to pre-moderate any new placement-targeted ad.

To see if you have this feature already, log-in to AdSense and switch to AdSense Setup -> Competitive Ad Filter. That much is old, but on that page you may one day find a new, green box with a link reading Ad Review Center (I don’t have it yet).

So, more choice is good, I guess. It might also be nice if Google would allow webmasters using AdSense to perhaps describe, in general terms, the kind of ads they want to allow on their site. Right now you can only determine the ad size, and whether or not you accept images, but you cannot, for instance, toggle options like “Flash allowed” or “animations allowed.” (And once the Ad Review option collects enough feedback from webmasters, Google could even offer an option in the style of “automatically block all ads which get blocked manually a lot”... sort of like a spam filter for advertisement.)

Safari Browser for Windows

Apple announced that their Mac Safari browser is now also available on Windows. Apple calls this “the world’s best browser,” though Ionut Alex. Some user says the warning that “Safari/Windows uses a lot of RAM and it’s extremely slow. It also crashes every 3 minutes.”

What’s interesting is that the Windows version has the look & feel of the Mac version even when it comes to elements which are traditionally left to the operating system (less interface surprises = better usability). For instance, when I maximize the browser window on Win XP, then move my mouse towards the far top right to click (this is usually the position of the close button “x”), the program currently behind Safari will be closed (apparently because there’s a tiny pixel not covered by the maximization; surprise!). As another example: I always set my Windows task bar to auto-collapse to the left-hand side; with Safari open, it won’t expand anymore, a barrier to switch between different program windows... another surprise.

Maybe this is all to be excused as the program is still in Beta. Then again, thanks to Google and others the word “Beta” pretty much lost its meaning these days.