Scott Yang's Playground

A few Google weirdness discovered today. See Mum! No PageRank! I was shocked this morning when the SearchStatus Firefox plugin shows the Google PageRank of this blog as — nothing! It was 5 last time I checked which wasn’t that long ago. It wasn’t even a zero — the PageRank bar basically blanked out as [...]

If you google for Chinese New Year right now, you’ll see the AdWords engineers trying to be creative. This does not occur with other search terms. Thanks for reminding me that it is indeed the Chinese New Year eve today!

High Availability on the new search engine startup Blekko competing against Google, and uses Machiavelli as analogy to the search engine business. “Google is the Ottomon empire. Allegiance is given to Google because people are getting paid. Defeating Google will take total war, assuming the prince has not turned the people against him, but once [...]

TechCrunch: Google OpenSocial to be common APIs for building social apps. Instead of building yet-another social network, Google is releasing something this week that provides a platform to link all the partnered social networks out there — Orkut, Xing, Friendster, Hi5, LinkedIn, etc. It allows developers to write applications for all these social networks using [...]

In my pursuing of monetising this blog I joined Text-Link-Ads back in September last year. It was simple to deploy their code and then start to generate income by selling text links — it was almost effortless. So I used TLA to earn some petty cash from a few sites that I got lying around, [...]

Google Finance Blog: Australian and New Zealand pricing data. “We’re pleased to announce the availability of pricing data for Australian (ASX) and New Zealand (NZX) listings on Google Finance.” Great! Time to throw out that dated Yahoo Finance with oversized advertisement and 90′s user interface. Here is the company I work for.

I have been using both ReviewMe and Text-Link-Ads to monetise some of my websites and blogs. However two recent discoveries made me re-consider whether I should continue to go with them. 1. Text-Link-Ads Not Google-able Text-Link-Ads is one of the biggest text-link broker. Site-wide text-links cost my advertisers around $25-$30 greenbacks a month here, and [...]

Google: You can now download the latest 2000 items from Google Reader for offline reading, thanks to Google Gears. Having worked on a web-based application for the last 6 years, I have to say that off-line support is one single most requested feature which means there is still a huge desktop/offline market. An online/offline feed [...]

Official Google Australia blog, and it is also their very first country-specific blog as well. It was just started 2 days ago so not much content yet, but hopefully we will see more action there. It does make me wonder, whether country-specific blog is going to be a trend in Google, or is there something [...]

Google bought Tonic Systems and is expecting to add presentation tool to its office suite by this summer. “Presentation tool” = PowerPoint-like slides creation/showing tool. “Summer” = winter for those of us living in the south hemisphere. It is such a good news — I love the collaboration features in Google Docs. It has been [...]

Via Meg’s post, Sydney OpenCoffee Meetup is an informal and regular meeting for people involved in, or want to be involved in “Startup Industry”. Date/Time: Thursday 3rd of May 2007, 8:30amLocation: Brew Cafe, 121 Harrington St, The Rocks, Sydney How is “Startup Industry” defined? From Wikipedia’s entry of Startup company: A startup company is a [...]

Call it narcissism, but I have set up Google Blog Search to automatically email me IMMEDIATELY whenever the phrase “Scott Yang” has been mentioned in the blogosphere. However, it has also caught a few surprises recently. Around 2 months ago there was another Scott Yang who started blogging on Blogger/BlogSpot. Singaporean, and often posting photos [...]

Google has released its Google Apps for your domain, Premier Edition. At $50/year per user, it looks to be quite an attractive alternative to self-hosted emails/office apps. Moreover it comes with 24×7 support. I guess small SaaS providers need to watch out as both Microsoft and Google have entered the market.

Google has updated their 2007 Australian Day flyover map to include the area where they did take the photographs, which includes a bit of Bondi Beach, Manly Beach and quite a big chunk of Sydney Harbour. That also means most Eastern suburb parks have missed out. Well, we only waited there for a while…

Via Google Blog, The Domino Effect with lots of Diet Coke, Mentos and way too much time. Awesome video. The only annoying bit is that two guys in lab coat walking around making sure everything is smooth running.