Scott Yang's Playground

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.

Google has released a guideline on how you can use the word “google”, and you are explicitly forbidden to use “google” as verb when you mean searching with an engine other than Google. Lorelle has also written a blog post to warn about using the word “WordPress”, as it is now a trademark of Automattic. [...]

SMH: As rumoured, Google bought online video sharing site YouTube for 1.65 billion USD. I have to double check to ensure it is not a fake post. Looks like it is going well for them. Well, it will finally stop all the nay-sayers, like me. Update: Press release from Google.

The answer is, you might be able to buy YouTube, and some even claimed that it is cheap. However, who would have 1.6B USD lying around, and who would be able to handle all all these lawsuits that will surely follow after the acquisition? Who else but Google alone? I still can’t see how a [...]

Almost a year ago Google released their own RSS aggregator entitled Google Reader, but it wasn’t well received. It was heavily Ajaxified, and has a very flashy interface. However a flashy interface does not always bring good usability. It was slow, cumbersome, and always felt “getting into your way” when you tried to skimp through [...]

Glenn Slaven: Australia and New Zealand Get Geocoding. You can now take Australian or New Zealand street address, feed it into Google Maps geocoder, and it gives you back latitude and longitude for you to plot on the map. Domain, the FF real estate website, has got this in action so you can easily see [...]

On Google’s official blog, they are celebrating the birthday of Google Talk. Wait a minute. Google What? Or am I the only one who could not remember that promising Jabber/XMPP-powered Windows-based chat client? Google Talk has actually had a lot of improvement since its launch one year ago. File sharing. Integration with Gmail, etc. They [...]

Goggles: the GoogleMaps flight sim — “This flight sim uses images loaded in from Google mapping service…” A nice bird eye view flight simulator that flies over real sceneries in London, New York, Paris and Tokyo. Quite fun — would be even better if I can flight over streets in Sydney.

Google has just released its latest project, Google project hosting — a “SourceForge-like” hosting services for open source projects. So far it has only an issue tracker and Subversion repository so I don’t see how it “competes” with SourceForege feature-wise. At least it has the scalability and reliability of Google’s infrastructure. It also has the [...]

Around this time last year I have signed up with Google AdSense, and implemented on this website. 12 months later — yeah I have made some pocket money with it, but for me it is more of an experience in online marketing, contextual advertising and the whole Internet economics. It was fun. It was rewarding [...]

Google has taken another step to convert the Internet into GoogleNet. The mega “Search Engine” company has just released Google Checkout to the world (via their blog). Now, as an advertiser, you can do more than putting text or image ads on the Google search result and/or its publisher network, you can also make direct [...]

Got an invitation to Google Spreadsheet this morning, so I quickly logged in, played around, and do up a quick spreadsheet. Here’s a screenshot: Aussie personal tax calculator in Google Spreadsheet Yeah it is a very simple spreadsheet that calculates how much you need to pay the government from your annual taxable income. It has [...]

Via Google Maps API, ZDNet: Pictures of Googleplex in Sydney. Interesting but plain interior design. Looks like it is in a high rise somewhere in Darling Harbour, from the surroundings through open window. I wonder where are they on the Google Maps :)

Unichurch Together — Extreme Makeover last Sunday, and it was all good. It was fun seeing how each fellowship “impersonates” one another (and how pathetic when we are trying to guess). It was great seeing many brothers and sisters in the same church whom you have never met, because they meet in the evenings but [...]

Saw it on Victor’s blog that Bible Gateway has released new Bible reading plans — you can either read through the whole Bible systematically in 365 days, or read through key passages in 61 or 121 days. That reminded me a blog post from ESV Blog a few days ago. Their one-year reading plan is [...]