Stephen Bolen » google

Cyberduck plays nice with Google Docs & Spreadsheets

Stephen — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 18:43:00 +0000

Go, Cyberduck, go!

Data Liberation

Stephen — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 02:21:00 +0000

This is my favorite feature of Google+. If Yahoo opened up Flickr and allowed me to download all who-knows-how-many GB of photos in a .zip file, I’d probably geek out and write a script that’d back things up monthly to an external drive.

I love the cloud, but I also love having a physical backup.

Google Web Fonts Directory update

Stephen — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 15:38:00 +0000

Very nice update. I have a feeling that Google is gunning for Typekit, and competition is always a good thing. But, as long as Typekit has the Adobe foundry and The League of Movable Type, I’ll stay loyal to my homeys.

What sbolen.me looks like on an Android phone

Stephen — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 15:07:00 +0000

I was able to borrow my sister’s HTC Android phone yesterday to see what the browsing experience was like on this website.

The verdict? Not so great. I may need to do some browser sniffing and direct Android users to a different stylesheet.

Thank you, Google

Stephen — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 20:00:00 +0000

I’m glad to see that Google is assisting the victims of the Joplin Tornadoes with map overlays. And, while I’m writing about wild Missouri weather and large corporate responses, I was pretty impressed to get a postcard from Mazda American Credit asking if I needed to delay payments on my 2007 Mazda 3 loan due to hardship from the summer storms.

Are we in the early stages of another dot-com bubble?

Stephen — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 20:45:00 +0000

Interesting analysis from The Guardian. Facebook has a higher valuation than Ford and Twitter is valued at $10bn while not being able to generate revenue.

The leaps in valuation are dizzying. At its current on-paper price, Facebook’s value is somewhere between that of Ford ($55bn) and Visa ($63bn). But that’s still less than a third of Google’s value, Facebook’s arch-rival in the battle for domination on the internet.

This is as good a read as you’ll find about the current state of start-ups.

JC Penney’s tries on a black hat

Stephen — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 20:25:00 +0000

Wonderful article in the New York Times about JC Penney’s black hat SEO techniques to dominate the #1 position on a bevy of search terms. Penney’s denies it had anything to do with it, naturally.

Last week, The Times sent Google the evidence it had collected about the links to JCPenney.com. Google promptly set up an interview with Matt Cutts, the head of the Webspam team at Google, and a man whose every speech, blog post and Twitter update is parsed like papal encyclicals by players in the search engine world.

“I can confirm that this violates our guidelines,” said Mr. Cutts during an hourlong interview on Wednesday, after looking at a list of paid links to JCPenney.com.

He said Google had detected previous guidelines violations related to JCPenney.com on three occasions, most recently last November. Each time, steps were taken that reduced Penney’s search results — Mr. Cutts avoids the word “punished” — but Google did not later “circle back” to the company to see if it was still breaking the rules, he said.

The Scrollwheel

Stephen — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 18:36:00 +0000

This is why Reddit is the best community on the internets, bar none.

Google’s Cold War with Apple

Stephen — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 22:08:00 +0000

In regards to my previous post about Google pulling support for H.264 in favor of WebM and Theora, one of the commentors in the Chromium Blog post hit it out of the park:

Make deal with Adobe to include closed-sourced Flash in the browser in furtherance of your cold war with Apple
Under the guise of supporting an open standard (of which nobody really cares about at this point, and is not in widespread use), remove support for the most realistic competitor to Flash from your browser (because after all, H.264 and WebM are mutually exclusive and will cause your computer to blow up)
Profit!

Google Chrome to drop H.264 support in future versions

Stephen — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 21:57:00 +0000

Looks like Google is trying to be (more) evil again.

Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.

Really, though… is anyone surprised that Google is pushing their own self-interest with the WebM Project? This should set back the HTML5 transition quite a bit. Moreover, arguments about H.264 being ‘closed’ are even more ridiculous when you consider that on August 26, 2010 MPEG LA announced that H.264 encoded internet video that is free to end users will never be charged for royalties. Sounds pretty open to me…

But hey, Google wants to push WebM and Theora. So they will.