Lots o’ news

Quite a busy day today:
– Yahoo bought Zimbra for $350 million dollars.
– AOL decided to move their headquarters to New York.
– Microsoft got a decision in Europe.
– Lots of TechCrunch 40 coverage is up on techcrunch.com.
– The New York Times is opening up large quantities of its premium content for free.
– Apple is hosting a press event in London tomorrow.
– Oh yeah, SCO filed for bankruptcy on Friday. Not to editorialize, but… personally I’m glad.

So a pretty busy day. Oh, and Nathan was among the first people to spot something new from Google: the ability to make presentations. Also, Google Docs and Spreadsheets has been renamed to Google Docs. You can check the official posts about the new presentation software from Google. I’m playing with it now; it looks like it can import PowerPoint. It’s available in 25 languages, multiple people can collaborate at once, and it’s got Google Talk built-in to allow people to chat.

On days like this, it’s best to just hunker down until the blogstorms subside. ๐Ÿ™‚

Update: Be sure to watch the video on the official “Presently” blog post. It’s lo-fi and funny, but actually explains why it’s good to store docs in the cloud so you can collaborate. If Ze Frank made a video for Google, it would probably look like this. ๐Ÿ™‚

Update: A few people are chatting over on Nathan’s document and Drew’s document. It’s kinda fun. Nathan has a slide like this:

Presently loves lemurs

So some people are over on the side going:

Chat on Google Talk in a presentation

Update: Chatting in Nathan’s presentation, we figured out that you can embed a presentation on a web page using an iframe. I have no idea what the security implications are, so don’t complain to me if it causes a problem, but it’s pretty fun. ๐Ÿ™‚

54 Responses to Lots o’ news (Leave a comment)

  1. Great work on the presentation software. I wish Google would support opening presentations from OOo Impress (now that Google finds ODF officially hot) ๐Ÿ™‚

  2. The video was done by the Common Craft team – they have done similar stuff for explaining RSS and Social Bookmarks in plain English.

  3. Matt

    Thats very smart move from NYT:

    “The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain. There will be charges for some material from the period 1923 to 1986, and some will be free.”

    Thats a lot of content and a lot of Google traffic if all those archives things would be accessable to Googlebot and get indexed!!

  4. I am a big fan of making content universally accessible and useful. ๐Ÿ™‚

    By the way: it looks like you can embed presentations on web pages using an iframe. Check out the root page at http://www.mattcutts.com/ where I embedded Nathan’s presentation in an iframe.

  5. Matt,
    What time do you usually get up?
    I notice that you usually post way late. ๐Ÿ™‚

    I am always the last to know. I had not seen Google Docs yet. That is dang fantastic. My organization runs on about a 1000 pages of documents that I have written along with spreadsheets and other documents.

    I was just about to use filemaker pro to get all of this organized online and off my computer so my staff could see it wherever they were. This looks like a much, much simpler solution.

    Now if google could just set up an online scheduling program, that was super secure to comply with governmental regulations, and allowed patients (or clients) to schedule their appointments online but still allowed the business owner control, then I would be a little more happy.

    Well at least I get a lot back for what I pay google. Hey! Wait a second, I never pay google anything.

    dk

  6. Matt,

    “I am a big fan of making content universally accessible and useful. :)”

    I’m gonna Take You At Your Word ๐Ÿ™‚

    Working on large news sites, I’m gonna tell the folks here that Matt Cutts encourages making our archieves accessable for free. In return, Matt promissed to index all our free contents and send us all the GOOG traffic we need ๐Ÿ™‚

  7. Matt, does mean the NYT doesn’t need to cloak anymore?

  8. Dr. David Klein, I happened to be up late tonight. I was just about to go to sleep and I was reading feeds on my iPhone in bed — I know, I’m lame ๐Ÿ™‚ . I saw Nathan’s post about this new launch and thought “Hmm. I’d better get up and write about this.”

    Google Calendar could provide some of your back-office scheduling; the front-end would be more difficult. I’ll have to think about that. Maybe the Calendar folks will read your suggestion. ๐Ÿ™‚

    Dave (original), it sounds like it will be a moot point either way. I’m just glad that I’ll be able to point to content without going into a walled garden in a week.

  9. Dang, Google Reader just left Labs as well:
    http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2007/09/breaking-up-isnt-hard-to-do.html

    Busy day.

  10. Regarding the SCO bankruptcy.It does not look like they will be going away any time soon according to the slashdot report (http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/14/1948257) they have filed to protect themselves while they reorganize.

  11. I think google docs is an excellent tool – I have been using its functions to share with all my freelancer consultants across the world to track worl on the spreadsheets, the calendar to note schedules etc, coupled with igoogles custom widgets, it works great as a shared desktop – we use the igoogle widgets to focus on feeds and information the whole team needs to keep track off, as well as the shared gmail account from clients… (p.s and a series of timeclocks to indicate timelines in which each one of us operates).

    With the addition of pwerpoint, it comes closer to a complete working environment…

  12. Im glad SCO got busted for what they were doing. They got what was coming.

  13. Busy day for all ๐Ÿ™‚

  14. The New York Times is opening up large quantities of its premium content for free.

    So basically they’ll still be cloaking, just not as much?

  15. Hmm, Glad to hear about the NYT – I have a subscription, but it’s always a pain to try to send a link to a story to someone because I don’t know if they will be able to read it.

    Amazed that it took this long for SCO to file for bankruptcy. In a previous lifetime (oh about 14 years ago) I was a certified SCO engineer, and the tech manager for a SCO Premier Reseller. Once upon a time, there was a good living in that. (Can’t tell you how many XENIX installs I rescued as well)

    Wish my new iPod Touch would get here…

    Um, not meaning to be a hijacker on your blog, but over the weekend, I came across a huge set of spam/malware in the SERPS while trying to do a search string involving FreeBSD – everything past the first four results was this particular thing, and on investigation, it led to a parked page, and tried to install something on my computer. It’s all faked with a dot and cn in the url, and there’s hundreds if not thousands of them. I reported it in my GWT, but there’s no way to mark something urgent, so I was kinda wondering how often that stuff gets reviewed.

  16. Unbelievable,but true. ๐Ÿ˜ฎ

    AGAIN, it was the constant insistence by SearchEnginesWeb over the past year on Techcrunch’s blog that finally persuaded them to offer live updates and release video archives so that everyone who wanted to around the world could benefit.
    How is it possible to have so much constant impact on total strangers – it is hard to fathom! It really is!

    That rare keynote roundtable with those three Web legends exemplifies how important it is to constantly archive and archive and archive.
    http://blogoscoped.com/forum/108780.html

    But there is another announcement – IBM is releasing their version of an Online Office Suite.

  17. Hi,

    i dont understand this zimbra which is a potential ms exchange killer gets bought for only 350 million while facebook which is piece of crap gets a billion dollar offer yahoo is nuts

  18. I played around with the new Presently and it seems quite simple to use. Maybe too simples. Did I miss it, or the software doesn’t allow for transitions from slide to slide?

  19. I tested the PPT uploading, and on initial glance it works fine. I uploaded and published whitehat seo tips for bloggers.

  20. feeds on your iPhone? I haven’t added those yet. Do you use a service or can you get them delivered like mail?

    oh, and yea, TONS of news. Yahoo seems determined to spend as much theoretical cash as possible this year…go yahoo? ๐Ÿ˜€

  21. Good morning Matt. Do you have any thoughts on BlogRush?

  22. m1t0s1s, it sounded like maybe stuff back to 1986 would be free? I’d have to doublecheck, but that’s a lot of content. Google does provide a way that publishers can provide premium content to Google/users. We call it “first click free” and the short idea is that users see what Googlebot saw when they first click from Google search results to the site. For subsequent clicks, the publisher can show subscription notices, etc. So that’s one way that NYT or anyone else can provide premium content without worrying about being accused of cloaking. Here’s a page about it for Google News:
    http://www.google.com/support/newspub/bin/answer.py?answer=40543&topic=8871

    netmeg, that’s definitely on our radar. It will take a little time to implement everything we’re planning, but we’re working on it.

    Wave Shoppe, I haven’t had a chance to dig into it yet. It sounds like the widget uses JavaScript, so it wouldn’t flow PageRank. That sounded pretty good to me.

  23. Matt,
    I didn’t think that Google liked iframes???

    OT,
    Why are the chinese spam sites still in the index? I thought you were wroking on it and was testing, but the only thing I have seen, and other have reported in WMW, is that sites have disappeared from your listings but the chinese spam sites are still there. How is this possible after over a week?

    Another OT,
    Why does some sites have literally houdreds of links in the SERPs? I see tons of subdomains listed, page after page after page, just because they have one keyword/phrase that fit my search?
    People I talk to, and that’s a LOT of prople because of my work, are not happy with what they find in Google these days ๐Ÿ™ trying to find anything is getting tougher for every day. It’s great that Google comes up with new stuff, but you can NOT forget about your initial idea, show great search results, but right now you are far away from that.
    NOTE: a lot of the spam sites are installing virus on your computer. How many people will be infected before you remove the sites? To me this is a SERIOUS issue that I don’t see you are doing anything about.

  24. George, we don’t index iframes (I believe), but I don’t think we dislike them. On your second point, there’s at least one infrastructure change we wanted to make in order to handle these better. Infrastructure changes take more time than just killing specific spam sites.

    I’m happy to hear examples of sites that host malware/viruses. We detect quite a few such sites, but I wouldn’t claim that the detection has 100% recall.

  25. Matt,
    It seems that most of the spam sites, if not all, are hosted here: 69.50.164.178
    I emailed their abuse dept. to see if they can stop them. Probably not ๐Ÿ™

    I clicked on some of “chinese” spam sites in your result, but don’t dare anymore since I don’t want spyremoval tools or anything else installed on my compter, but you guys might have a lab where you can run through all .cn sites
    Most site are redirected and one thing I noticed was that I checked your cache of a site and it didn’t redirect until I refreshed your cache page, so I am guessing there is a 2 (if not more) step process, one for your crawler where it doesn’t redirect so you can cache it, and one for your SERPs. Not sure it helps or not? You guys have probably seen that already.
    It also seems that they get all their links from about.org

  26. I see the popular DigitalSpy forums in the UK have been marked in the SERPS as hosting malware. Is that a false positive? Quite surprising either way.

  27. Matt,

    Thanks for elaborating more about the NYT case.

    But if a news site suddenly open up for lets say 500.000 articles for free. Wouldn’t that subject the site to be sandboxed? I mean how will you in Google look at a news site of lets say 80.000 currently indexed pages, adding 500.000 “new pages” at once?

  28. I’m very curious to see how much this is going to effect New York Time’s pagerank. I don’t remember the last time I heard a site adding hundreds of thousands of free web pages at once.

  29. slightly off topic as there has been various news

    But as head of the Web Spam team, what are your views on Gmail spam?

    Its like hotmail 2 years ago, and I keep my main gmail secret ๐Ÿ™‚

    For numerous reasons Gmail has become more and more un-user friendly

  30. Matt,
    I get this error very often when I go to your site:
    Error establishing a database connection
    This either means that the username and password information in your wp-config.php file is incorrect or we can’t contact the database server at db70c.pair.com. This could mean your host’s database server is down.

    Are you sure you have the correct username and password?
    Are you sure that you have typed the correct hostname?
    Are you sure that the database server is running?
    If you’re unsure what these terms mean you should probably contact your host. If you still need help you can always visit the

    Remo,
    I agree. How is it that I get spam in my gmail box even though NOBODY but me knows about the mailbox??????

  31. @george

    Gmail spam is unbelievably out of control, I dont say this for one particular account its over numerous and friends/family etc….

  32. lol, I like that pic.

    @George: I agree. I get over 100 per day. Thankfully it gets filtered very well to the junk section. Unfortunately, the occasional “good email” goes in there so I have to check all of them ๐Ÿ™

  33. George, I recently installed WP-Cache again, but I think I’m just getting a lot of traffic today.

    Remo, in my experience Gmail is really good about killing spam. Having you been writing that email anywhere on the web, or using it to register for a bunch of free-for-all link programs or anything?

  34. Soon it will be lot easier to run a Home Office with superb software at almost zero cost, thanks to Google Docs, the best recent news for SOHO entrepreneurs.

    Cheers,

    Alexis K.

  35. Matt,

    Here’s one page fromyour results:
    ALASKAN CRAB RECIPE : alaskan crab recipes ,alaskan crab season… ship caught in storm alaskan fact gold rush alaskan marijuana alaskan employment pipeline alaskan classifieds free malamute alaskan oil rig jobs alaskan …
    http://www.zjczhongyao.cn/alaskan.html – 35k – Cached – Similar pages

    It redirects to this site:
    http://scanner.spyshredder-scannerDOTcom/5/?advid=1322

    If you go there, it wants to install a “spyshreeder scanner” on your computer. People shouldn’t have to exposed to this kind of web sites from google. They need to go ASAP.

    I found some sites that have the same phrase and here’s what you show in your results;
    http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&rls=com.microsoft%3Aen-us&q=%22alaskan+classifieds+free+malamute%22

    I know it’s only 19 results but if you add up all of them, then you’ve infected datacenters.

  36. Yahoo bought Zimbra for $350 million dollars!!!!
    350 Million Dollar!
    thats really veryyy very very high price, if Yahoo pay only 10 Million dollar they will make better than zimbra
    thats funny!

  37. Wouldnโ€™t that subject the site to be sandboxed?

    There is no such thing IMO. “Sandbox”, “aging delay” etc are all buzz words that were born from ignorance.

    Matt, how about a post on the “sandbox” one day. I would bet money there is no such thing, but would be happy to be proven wrong.

  38. Busy Day…

    Very interesting. Surprised that Google did not pick them up. Zimbra has significant traction in SMB. Interested to find out what Yahooโ€™s plan is for them.

    Good Luck Yahoo….

  39. A lot of big news happening. Thanks for the update Matt. Is that lemur holding a can of beer? What kind is it?

  40. Major, I hope Zimbra stays open-sourced either way.

  41. Matt,
    What’s wrong with this picture?

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    www1.compueo.cn/puppies.html – 37k – Cached – Similar pages

  42. Remo, in my experience Gmail is really good about killing spam. Having you been writing that email anywhere on the web, or using it to register for a bunch of free-for-all link programs or anything?

    Its a private email address, one problem may be that I was redirecting mail from another domain. Either way the filtering is rubbish, even though 7,000 mails a month end up in the spam folder I get a couple of hundred a month that get through

    FFA sites, I didnt realise they still existed ๐Ÿ™‚

  43. To editorialize…I am also glad to hear of that particular bankruptcy.

    Question: Is Google Docs ever going to increase the file size limit? I had a situation the other week where there was a 2x,xxx KB Word document that needed some collaborative editing by 3-4 different people… If not, do you know of any collaborative tools out there that can handle that size of doc?

    I found this one that I’ll be testing out: pengyou-project.info

    type-atcha-later,
    Sean

  44. Hi Matt,

    I think it is interesting about NY Times but I am a bit concerned of Google being “polluted”. I don’t know how many articles are from 1851 to 1922, maybe over 100 000. They are unique, hosted on a domain with major trust and each article is just 2 clicks away from their sitemap with PR8. I am not sure how these very old articles will rank but it will be interesting to see.

    Is there any risk of Google being “polluted” with this?

  45. Matt have you ever compared open source collaboration software such as open-xchange, zimbra and scalix? I am sure there is more but it seems that they are getting boughtup quickly.

  46. Great news about Google Docs and the addition of the power point upload. I tried that a couple of months ago and had an error..hehe. I always do a lot of presentations offsite and I’m a big fan of anything Google, so this would work great for me.

    Thanks for the info on NY Times. I always love visiting your blog..I learn a lot from this place. Hope you keep posting the good stuff! Thanks

  47. I played around with the new Presently and it seems quite simple to use. Maybe too simples. Did I miss it, or the software doesnโ€™t allow for transitions from slide to slide?

  48. Nice to hear that NYT is opening up some content. I enjoy reading it but I’m too lazy to go to the library, I’d rather read it in my pj’s!

  49. Google docs allowed me to easily coordinate group presentations in college. I personally think this is a great step in the right direction.

  50. Hey there is lots happening arround.When is this NYT thing happening?

  51. You missed the google deals my friend.They are also doing alot of acquisitions.

  52. wondered about that price!

  53. Google is on an acquisition spree i guess

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