Irelands(i) » News

Google Maps – Street View Coming to Ireland

Tom — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 23:07:34 +0000

Google have now got a car on Irish roads to capture street views for Google Maps. It’s a black car with a great big mast equipped with GPS and cameras to capture street view images of Dublin. The street view feature is already live for parts of the US and the UK although it will most likely be a few months before we see the Irish street views in Google maps. Peoples faces and licence plates will be blurred out to protect the privacy of people and vehicles captured on camera.

Google Improvements to Search Results

Tom — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 10:45:22 +0000

Google recently rolled out two new improvements to their search engine results. The first of which is better related searches, these are the links that sometimes appear at the bottom of search results and can sometimes help you refine your searches. The second improvement is longer snippets for each result when you search with longer queries, this basically gives you more text to read off the website before clicking through. You can read more about it here on Googles Official Blog.

IRMA Threatens Irish ISPs

Tom — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 11:14:57 +0000

Michele Neylon from Internet hosting company Blacknight has posted a disturbing letter recieved from solicitors representing IRMA (EMI, Sony, Universal Music and Warner). The letter threatens legal action in regards to filesharing and illegal downloading of music. The letter which targets Irish ISPs like Eircom (who seemingly have agreed under preasure to block websites) requests them to block websites thought to be infringing copyright including thepiratebay website and similar. The letter also instructs ISPs to take action on customers with IP addresses detected infringing copyright. Read more about it on the Blacknight Blog and theregister.co.uk

IE 8 – Release Candidate 1

Tom — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 13:51:59 +0000

Microsoft have released Release candidate 1 of Internet Explorer 8 which can be downloaded here. New features include domain highlighting in the address bar so you can quickly and easily identify legitimate or fake websites and private browsing options so you can secretely buy that special gift for someone or just use it to browse porn more privately.

Click Fraud up to 17.1%

Tom — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 12:59:34 +0000

Looks like click fraud and botnet activity is on the increase for ppc advertisers. Read the report from Click Forensics for a detailed breakdown.

Botnet activity

Google SearchWiki goes live

Tom — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 01:12:15 +0000

Google launched a new (Digg like) feature to their search engine earlier this week that allows users to promote and comment on search results. You’ll need to be logged in with a Google account to use the new feature.

So what does it do? Well if you find yourself searching the same keywords regularly through Google for one of your favorite websites you can now promote it to the first page of results making it easier to find in the future. Comments will be visible to other Google account users too so you’ll be able check out other peoples thoughts and opinions on websites before clicking through to them from Google search.

This should be very interesting to say the least!

View Googles announcment on the new SearchWiki.

Geansai Gorm SEO Competition

Tom — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 10:12:31 +0000

Do you think you’ve got what it takes to optimise a website to rank high in Google?

Well if you’d like a chance to prove your search engine optimisation skills Damien Mulley has an SEO competition running where participants must create a website on a brand new domain name and try to get it to the number one spot in Google. The keyphrase to rank for is geansai gorm which is blue jumper in Irish. For full competition rules check out Damiens blog. And if that doesn’t sound like a fun enough challenge Blacknight have made things even more interesting and are offering prizes to winner.

Good luck to everyone who enters!

Firefox 3 sets Guinness World Record

Tom — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 11:14:16 +0000

Firefox 3 has set a new Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in 24 hours. 8,002,530 downloads were logged on the day it was released. I guess this means I’m part of a Guinness World Record, along with 8,002,529 other people, yipee! I wonder if that’s also the most people involved in a record?

Top level domains open for registration

Tom — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 10:02:17 +0000

Icann announced the opening up of top level domains for registration this week allowing anyone to register a tld of their choice. A tld or top level domain is basically the .com or .ie etc. that you see on the end of URLs. This means that any person can now register a tld such as .mytld for example.

However to register you’re going to need some deep pockets as the price to register a tld is at least $100,000 and applicants will need to meet certain criteria and have the technical capacity to qualify.

Certain tlds are bound to gather interest such as location based ones .newyork .dublin and others such as .web .xxx for example. It will be intersting to see what new tlds pop up in the future.

Firefox 3 Released

Tom — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 22:43:47 +0000

Firefox 3 Internet browser was officially released today at 6pm GMT and can be downloaded from the Mozilla website.

Most notable new features and improvements include:

Improved performance with faster page loads and less memory usage
New smarter location bar
New page zoom
Better password management

A full list of the top new features can be seen here.