Irelands(i)

Video tour of Googles Container Data Center

Tom — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 16:14:35 +0000

The video below gives a tour of a Google Container Data center. Lot’s of exciting pipes and cables.

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

SUMO Paint – Online Image Editor

Tom — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 16:23:30 +0000

Need an alternative to MSPaint or another image editing program? Well SUMO Paint looks like it might be a nice alternative. It’s a flash based application that runs through your browser and for a free online application it has an amazing amount of functionality. It has layers, filters and load of other useful tools to draw, edit and paint with. Very nice indeed.

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!

Search Dublins 1911 Census

Tom — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 13:26:49 +0000

If you have relatives that lived in Dublin in 1911 you can search for them through the National Archives of Ireland website. At the moment only the Dublin 1911 Census is available online but there are future plans to include other parts of Ireland and census records for 1901. If you’re researching your Irish family tree it’s a good place to start and you can even view scans of the original hand written documents.