Sometimes I’ll go for a day or so and forget that I have a blog. 
I wanted to crunch through some stuff at work, so I missed a few things. Let’s see.
Microsoft officially launched live.com. Yahoo officially launched their new take on email and signed a deal with Acer. Microsoft opened Zune up for more people to see. Apple launched new iPods, new Nanos, iTunes 7, a new Shuffle, and a streaming TV gadget. Google announced a partnership with Intuit in QuickBooks. Battelle launched SearchMob, a digg-ish site for search-related news. HP’s chairperson may have authorized detectives who pretexted to get HP board members’ private information on the web. Hitwise said that Google’s market share numbers were up again. Someone from Angelides’ campaign poked around on the governor’s website and found a directory with audio files where Arnold Schwarznegger said unfortunate things. Lonelygirl15 isn’t real.
Anything else? So, um, quiet week, huh? What did I miss?
{ 54 comments… read them below or add one }
Microsoft revealed Zune…I would be interested to see how it competes with the iPod
Amazon launched Unbox!
googs quietl lunched tabs for hompy ??
-
What do you think about all the new iPods released few days ago?
An exploit was found and patched in the Plone CMS that was allowing hackers to create thousands of javascript redirected and cloaked pages and flood the Google SERP with them…
Most of the Plone sites have upgraded and installed the patch but there are a bunch that have not so the SERP that I watch is currently filled with Plone 404’s and javascript redirects.
Hey there’re many others things !
(I think there’s others for others firms, but google allow me to show so much !)
- Google IG allow his users to set up tabs, to add many more modules.
- Google foundation seems to work in collaboration with laboratories to build an ultra-fuel-efficient plug-in hybrid car engine that runs on ethanol, electricity and gasoline.
- There’s an easter egg on picasa. enter Ctrl + Maj + Y and see …
And there’s many more … But I think I said the most important (or fun)
RE: “Apple launched new iPods, new Nanos, iTunes 7, a new Shuffle, and a streaming TV gadget…”
========================================
Ooooooohh! Will have to get my CC out and go look
You missed the Matt Cutts Doll’s new wardrobe. You now have a Yahoo! T-shirt, a Playboy robe and pipe, a ninja outfit, and “search me” spanky pants. Most of the new items were inspired by Danny Sullivan’s podcast where he suggested that I make some improvements to your gear.
http://www.cartoondollemporium.com/mattcutts.html
Enjoy!
>>>”…the Matt Cutts Doll’s…”
Now that is just friggen weird and very very creepy.
Nintendo leaked a price and launch date for wii.
Google had an xss vulnerability in their /u stuff…
and Ryan launched FeedButton …Phillipp blogged about it.. (ok ok last shameless plug I’ll ever do, I promise)
Hmm, that’s all I can think of.
lots0, I think we’re looking at Plone more closely ourselves.
Evan, I hadn’t seen cartoon Emmy! That’s awesome.
Tricia, I’d be happier about the new iPods if I hadn’t bought a Nano about two weeks ago, just before they announced the Sept. 12 meeting.
Ryan, that’s really nice! Can you also make it submit to digg/reddit type stuff too?
Nothing. Really. I have a lot of allergi this morning, but nothing in search-related news.
Nipplr was released into the wild
Nice easter egg at picasa! great finding kazhar.
Matt please go ask Picasa Team about that lovely bear
>WLM launched their 8.1 beta and got leaked 4 hours leater.
yeah matt.. that’s underway.. i got the domain “sharebutton.com” too.. expect that sometime next week..
giving feedbutton a week or so to work out the bugs first… so i can reuse all the same code.
Yeah I can relate Matt, I love forgetting my blogs, spent nice mornings outside in the cooler weather, kicked a ball around in the park with my son, pruned a few vines that had turned into monsters in my neglected backyard and blah blah blah.
9/11 is what went on, and it forces many of us to focus on things that matter, living.
Hold on thar a minute, Matt…
LonelyGirl15? Dude, WUSSUPWITDAT? Everyone knows that LonelyGirl15 is either FatassBaldGuyInAStainedWifeBeaterEvenThoughHeIsPerpetuallySingle40 or UndercoverCopTryingToFindThePeteTownsendsOfTheWorld33.
In any event, why you after that?
Google updated backlinks 2 days ago !
Matt, was there a data refresh in the past day or so?
Matt, can you also tell why the pagerank indicator is dropped from the new Google toolbar ?
Hi Matt,
You miss this: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3070792.htm
I believe “pretext” is a simply euphemism invented to avoid using the standard English “false pretenses”. It is too bad that journalists have avoided clarity by perpetuating this euphemism.
nah, “pretext” is a nice word invented to avoid the use of “identity theft” because the latter sounds like something that somebody should be held accountable for… and heaven knows we don’t want that.
really can some one named matt cutts forget that he has a blog
?
The big news on Picasa was not the Easter Egg – I just happened to write that up because I was looking for something fun to talk about.
The real news came a day or so later, when Picasa 2.5 silently left beta, and started to roll out via automatic update to Picasa 2.2 users.
Matt, if you do go and talk to the Picasa team, ask them why they don’t have a blog, and why a major upgrade like this slips out silently.
Do I still get to post it if takes me a minute to add up the numbers for spam protection. Doh. Just playing, but anyways..
What are your guys thoughts about the Microsoft Office Live beta? Basic and Essential are currently free, but after the beta Essential goes up to like $30 a month. Thats alot for a web site which you can only access with their *very* editing software and frontpage ($200).
I went and signed up since they will purchase your url of choice (if its open) for you, and you are only required to keep it with them for two months before transferring it. I will probably end up doing that, because I don’t want to work in frontpage and their software just isn’t cutting it. Anyhow, it is nice to have them picking up the tab to buy beta testers their own domain.
Just wanted to say as I see it currently, the tools for Office Live so far don’t justify the essential monthly pricing that they are talking of charging. Perhaps they’ll spice it up a bit.
Justin
you also missed the new “update” that happened yesterday with even more sites going into the black hole of Googles stomach.
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3085485.htm
Is this ever going to stop? I don’t think Google will get rid of spamsites since Google itself creates these monsters! How? By allowing everybody to sign up for AdSens and put it on any site anywhere in the world without any kind of quality check! It wopuld be easy for Google to check the adsense code against a url and if the doesn’t match, don’t show any ads. Right now anyone can open up an AdSense account, put it on any crappy site with scraped, stolen content, get indexed in a few days in Google and make thousands of dollars, money that they “steal” from legitimate businesses, hence click fraud, copyright infringement and whatever else you can think of when it comes to these parasites!
So yes, Matt, you forgot to mention that
Precisely that is what is happening in the new ‘update’. I was a big fan of Google, as it showed relevant results to my search queries – but no more. At present, I feel, MSN fetches much more relevant results than what Google does.
JayDee – Adsense doesn’t create spamsites, webmasters do and for those who make good websites, adsense is great in the early stages of site development. I am going to save for my childs future education with a couple of my hobby sites that cleanly display related adsense text links.
And you know something? I have not see a single decrease in the value of any of my websites in over a year in Google, you want to talk about Yahoo? Now that is one messed up freakin’ engine, it plays turns with your content. Oh look, it’s my turn again, I got one page on the first page of Yahoo again this month, wheee how gay!
why is there no way to totally UNDRESS this Matt Cutts doll??!
if there was no adsense, there would still be spam websites. They’d just have affiliate programs, or banners, or whatever else was paying.
have you ever seen a spam site for a popular term show up in the search results for an extended period of time?
I haven’t. They usually get weeded out.. why? Nobody links to them, and they usually only take advantage of one or 2 factors of an algorithm update… so next update, they’re gone again.
Sure they work, temporarily… but they don’t make thousands of dollars. I know, I’ve tried it.
The more likely scenario is that the site manages to get you 1 or 2 ad clicks / day.. and over a year makes you a few measley dollars in profit. that’s why spammers have to have so many of them.
I myself am loving the update. I moved from somewhere on the 2nd page in google to #3 and #5 for 2 of my sites… and from #42 to #7 for another one of my terms.. heck even one of my “spammy” sites is #1 for it’s term now….. it beat out all other 35 competing sites.
It’s made $0.12 from adsense so far today… I can’t wait for the $1000’s of dollar’s you speak of 
Well, Matt, the Google rollercoaster just emaciated me once again. I have NO clue why Google loves my site then hates it. Is there ever to be any consistancy which Google can be relied upon for? I realize Google updates occur frequently, but the mass destruction episodes truely puts people out of business that depend upon their legitimate businesses online.
I really need some direction here, or an explanation as to why my sites positions fell drastically a few days ago (once again), PLEASE! What exactly did you guys filter out this time? THAT is the big question and ergo the answer to my problem.
Please note, the sites do great and then fall into oblivion and the pattern is repeated over and over again ever since jagger1.
Thanks to all in advance for your help.
Ryan,
“I myself am loving the update.”
You might be confusing the latest “Data Refresh” with a true update
http://beta.search.live.com/images/results.aspx#q=Matt%20Cutts
The MSN Live – IMAGE SEARCH is nothing short of Phenominal.
It uses AJAX, so it is NOT for everybody, but make a comparison to the results for Google Yahoo and Ask.
This is something Google could consider as an Opt-in option for those with powerful PCs and broadband.
Live looks excellent and its more and more relevant. Image search is a bit too slow at slower connections (i.e. 386 kbps), Google Images work faster.
Vista & Live might shake Google next year…
Mladen Adamovic
“Vista & Live might shake Google next year…”
I wouldn’t beat on that.
In fact Google new infrastructure when in place, will shake both Vista & Live. And expect Google to have few surprises waiting too
Hey Matt,
Hope you’re feeling better now – I really enjoyed the videos last month – when are you doing some more – I really learned a lot!
Vista, haha, they are begging for more testers!!
A small fun thing missed: http://documentation.openoffice.org/contests/template_clipart_2006/announce.html
Microsoft officially launched live.com.
Yah, officialy: http://beta.search.live.com/results.aspx?q=Matt+Cutts&mkt=pl-pl&FORM=LVSP&go.x=12&go.y=10&go=Search
Vista?
Eric Schmidt is on the board of directors at Apple. Maybe Google and Apple will put together an operating system of their own?
I hope the vista comes out better than IE7
http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?NewsID=1053247
Apparently, you guys are an unwitting accessory to a murder (I’m not buying that story, though.)
So apparently all isn’t quiet in da Plex, yo.
I think you forgot Gogle setting up a PAC http://www.threadwatch.org/node/8856
Looks like the battle over Net Nutrality is heating up
Btw Matt If Google needs an intruoduction to the UK all party Group on telecoms drop me a line via the blog
Oops
I sould have said My Blog not works’s
I’m not sure just how new this is, but I received an email a week or two ago announcing the entry of ChaCha.com into the ring of next-generation search solution wannabe’s. Naturally, I was curious, so I went to the site to check it out. The site didn’t seem to be working that day, so I left, but kept it in the back of my mind that I wanted to return and see what they were attempting to do. I just tried another search there, with and without a guide (their unique offering is search with human assistance).
The unguided search gave me pretty useless dmoz.org results on the subject for which I had searched. In the guided search, it appeared to hook me up with a live person who did the search for me. The really interesting part of this was, I had just done the search on Google and knew the first page of results. The guide at ChaCha gave me the first five results from Google–one at a time, right in a row–and then asked me if that was good.
ChaCha seems to be using the dmoz directory for their unguided search results and Google for their guided results.
No Matt I had a quiet week too…. first page on Digg and Google took a large amount of money from me – otherwise really peacefull…
Hey Matt,
Did you notice that Windows LIve does not pass the referral information? They are using a JavaScript to track click info, and do not pass the referral information in the URL string anymore. We can’t track traffic from MSN anymore because of this.
Speaking of iPod’s – the new Nano’s do look good but I also read that the average iTunes / iPod user has purchased just 21 songs from iTunes – that is far less than I would have expected.
Although – thinking about it – I guess that is made up of a lot of people who never buy any and a small number who buy lots – averages never show sufficient detail! ;(
“Google negotiates for use in Russia systems of electronic payments WebMoney. Owing to system Google can pay compensation to the Russian owners of the sites which have placed advertising of clients Google under partner program AdSense.”
More importantly…what did we miss while you were locked up in your dungeon laboratory over the past five days?
Yup, I think Matt forgot he has a Blog again.
But that is cool with me, it just means he is working hard… and that means less spam in the index.
You just keep working away Matt.
But please remember that all work and no play makes Matt a dull boy.
GSOH.. I used to buy songs from ITunes… but then my computer died when the power lines went down…and guess what? If there’s a way (short of trying to recover the hard drive) to get back all that music I bought and somehow get it onto my new computer….. I haven’t found it yet. That’s why I don’t buy songs on Itunes now…. I now only buy used cds off of amazon or what not.
Ya I have also noticed that when we type in search.msn.com we are redirected to live.com is MSN Search gone forever.
Akash Kumar
Looks like several months later, Zune is no where near Apple, at least thats what I think.