Benefits of Google Desktop

So many people are concerned about privacy issues with latest Google Desktop. If you enable "Search Across Computers" feature during the download, Google Desktop will save your word documents and excel spreadsheets on Google's servers. It may sound scary, but if trust Google with your information, you can have so much done from any machine.

Other day, I thought about making changes to my resume while at work. I put those thoughts in a word document on my work laptop and enabled "Search Across Computers" feature on it. My resume is sitting on my home desktop. To make the changes I simply logged into Google Desktop from home. Bingo! Now my latest resume reflects those thoughts.

Tips for airlines

Recently I flew to San Diego in a Delta flight and stayed in a Fairfield Inn. Well, why is it important? During my stay in the hotel, I could go any time in the morning and grab some breakfast. But in my Delta flight, I had to wait until the air hostess brings something to eat. I think Delta or any other airline can save bunch of money by keeping a small food court instead of keeping bunch of airhostess just to serve the food. I bet flyers would love that. It’s a win-win situation.

AdSense for your blog

Speaking from experience, adding AdSense to your blog is not very straightforward. You signed up for and AdSense account at http://adsense.google.com and wondering what to do next, then you are not alone. Worry no more, help is on the way.
I went to their AdSense website and searched for "blog" to find out the instructions.
Here is how you do it...
After logging into your blogger account, follow the instructions at http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=964 This will put ads at top of your blog.
If you want to put some more ads on the sidebar, follow the instructions at http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=974 to accomplish it.

Search for "google" is reaching one billion search results

As of today search for "google" yields close to 1 billion search results. I think that is an incredible feat for a 7-year old company.
Recently Google removed total number of indexed pages from its homepage. At one point this number reached 10 billion. But most of them are redundant any way. I think Google is working on this issue. If this assumption is true, there are 1 billion unique web pages that mention "google"!

Google for non-profit organizations

Today is a very exciting day! I am able to complete the work on a document that can be highly useful for any not-for-profit organization craving for huge web presence. It started with an idea of using Google Grants for these organizations. Later I have added some more Google features that are available for both commerical and NFPs alike - most of them are free of cost.
Visit this document at http://www.dpo.uab.edu/~kalyan/Google%20for%20NPOs.doc
This by no means end of my work on this document. It will be constantly updated from time to time.

What can Ajax do for your website?

Newsweek has an interesting article on Ajax - its a combination of Asynchronous JavaScript, CSS, DOM, XMLHtpRequest. This technology gives a feel running locally on the desktop for your website. For example, there is no hourglass when you move from location to location in Google Maps! Read more at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10965121/site/newsweek

A slew of websites sprung up to take advantage of this technology -
www.flickr.com (photo browsing and photo sharing website)
www.writely.com (website for word documents)
www.numsum.com (website for spreadsheets)
www.voo2do.com (to-do list and priority organizing)
www.gmail.com (Google's email)

Most of them have one thing in common - circumvent desktop-based software such as MS Office.

Google Video

Google posted one more message on their blog about NBA games availability on the Google Video.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/watching-nba-games-on-google-video.html
You can watch these games for $3.95 a pop.

On a side note, PlanetRead, a nonprofit organization in India is using Same-Language Subtitling to develop reading practice among 300 million illiterate people in that country. To see this methodology in action, search for "telugu folk song" in Google Video. Unarguably, movie songs are very popular in India. PlanetRead is using the same technique for movie songs to encourage people to read.

Google participates in a joint effort to combat spyware

Google along with Lenovo and Sun Microsystems launched a new website named www.stopbadware.org Permalink about this announcement is at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/putting-stop-to-spyware.html
If you want to know more about Spyware, Wikipedia has good information at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spyware