Other Googlers you should read

Philipp has a good interview with Niniane Wang. You can check out Niniane’s blog or her web site to read more about her; I didn’t know she had a SIGGRAPH paper about rendering clouds, for example. I love graphics stuff.

I’ve also really been enjoying Mihai Parparita’s blog. I first encountered his site when I was looking for a way to color-code Gmail labels. I had just switched from Mutt and I was homesick for the ability to color-code. It looks like this:

Colored labels in Gmail

Some readers noticed his recent Greasemonkey script to fold Google Reader into Gmail. He’s also recently done a script to import your del.icio.us bookmarks into Google bookmarks.

One of my favorite “Mihai scripts” is to save persistent searches in Gmail. It looks like this:

Saved searches in Gmail

For example, I have a label “outside” for non-Googler email based on the “from” field of an email. So I often do the searc [to:me label:inbox -label:outside]. Let’s break that down:

to:me This means that the email has to mention me in the “To: line” somewhere. That excludes emails to mailing lists that I’m on, for example.
label:inbox I use my inbox as my todo list, so this restricts the search to things that I haven’t dealt with yet.
-label:outside This excludes emails from outside Google.

The net result is that I’m left with things sent directly to me from Googlers that I haven’t dealt with yet. Mihai’s script lets me save that search right on my Gmail screen.

The Google blog also lists a lot of Googler blogs you may be interested in (search for “Blogs by Googlers”).

Update: I forgot to include a hat tip to Google Operating System for noticing Mihai’s delicious import script. GOS also wrote a cool post about firefox extensions to manage Google bookmarks that I keep meaning to explore more. I wonder if these tools play well with Google’s extension to sync bookmarks across different computers?

17 Responses to Other Googlers you should read (Leave a comment)

  1. I’m also collecting some of the blogging Googlers, though I bet this list is far from complete!
    http://blog.outer-court.com/googler/

  2. Hey, Mihai….

    How about a script to automatically move all my feeds from Google Homepage to Google Reader?

    I’m too lazy to do them all again 1 by one, and it’s stopping me from switching.

  3. Philipp, thanks for the pointer!

  4. Ryan,

    I wrote a homepage Gadget to export homepage feeds to OPML (that could then be imported to Reader) a while back:

    http://persistent.info/archives/2006/05/04/igoogle-opml

  5. Wow.. ask and you shall recieve. Thanks Mihai, I’ll get around to playing with that sometime this week.

    I wish it were an ingrained feature. IF I’d have clicked over to reader one day and seen all my feeds there, It would have really impressed me. Talk about wow factor.

    You guys are coming out with some kickass products, but it’s like they all exist in some vaccum devoid of each other. (although lately you’re getting better)

    That’s a good topic for a blog post actually….[caution marketing speak ahead:] how to achieve synergy among google produts. I’ll put something together later… (as if anybody would read it anyway)

  6. hi, 🙂 i tried google reader. it’s getting better than before. still i can’t seem to refresh the blogs easily.

  7. Call me the non-technical one in the bunch, but how do I “install” these scripts in Gmail?

  8. Did you know that 10 + 2 = 12 🙂

    Went through the collection of blogging Googlers which Philipp mentioned. Couldn’t see any of the other Googlers writing about SEO, PageRank, Data Refresh, Data Push and not even about the infamous “Adam’s” Bad Data Push. How come 😉

  9. i really hope soon we’ll got a faster firefox for Mac. (or that’s time for a faster mac ;P ?)

    so i can use FF and GM instead of camino, those feature are great 🙂

  10. Thanks for the heads-up on the color-code Gmail labels. Thats really ahndy and already putting it to good use.

  11. Mihai, Thanks for the cute Google Gadget.

  12. Thanks for the link to the greasemonkey script. I never knew I wanted to color-code my Gmail labes until I read this, and now I don’t know how I lived without it. (funny how that works, huh)

  13. Harith, I need to do a post talking about that sometime. I think the answer is that I’ve talked about it enough in the past that I’m grandfathered in. But I think there’s room for lots of bloggers to talk about Google-related stuff, as long as they know what they’re doing (and the vast majority do).

  14. Good morning Matt

    The more Googlers friends talk about Google related stuff, the better 🙂

    Btw, we need to update that great post Filing a reinclusion request.

    Filing a reinclusion request is done at present within Webmaster Tools (the sitemaps) throug a link “Submit a reinclusion request” under (+ Tools) and not as mentioned in the post through http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py

    Thanks.

  15. Thanks for that one link, Matt. Through it, I indirectly found a place I can ask a non-SEO-but-still-Google-related-type question.

    But the list of “What We’re Reading” on the Google blog leads to another question…does “what you’re reading” count as an endorsement of those sites and their viewpoints, or does it simply suggest that you look at them with no endorsement, express or implied?

  16. “Mislabeled Spam” is 1??? What the hell am I doing wrong?!?? 🙂

    http://www.shawnhogan.com/2006/08/gmail-spam-filtering-isnt-so-hot.html

  17. Shawn, have you done any link-trading kind of emails? That’s a lot of emails..

    Harith, I keep meaning to do, but take this affirmation as agreement.

    Multi-Worded Adam, I think by definition those are Googlers’ personal blogs. But they can still be handy to read. 🙂

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