Google has been showing crowdsourced photos from its own Panoramio service in Street View for just about a year, and it’s now announced that user photos from both Flickr and Picasa are being added to the mix.
The integration works the same way it has since last February; when images are available, a small box labeled “User Photos” will appear in the upper right of the Street View interface. But with all the new photos in the system, Google’s found a novel way to show nearby and related photos.
I am no web designer (I have neither time nor talent to learn web design), however for SEOs it is essential to know some basic tools and tips to test a website design when it is delivered.
Thus this post is not intended to share some advanced tips for web developers: instead it lists three quick ways to test a web design in FireFox:
If you visit Google today, you will see Google has a 3rd (actually, 4th) Olympics logo up today. But if you look closely, you may notice the logo has a heart designed into it. If you look even closer, you may notice that Google’s alternative text tag for the image says, “Happy Valentine’s Day” in it.
I noticed this when I at first posted, incorrectly, that Google was skipping out on the Valentine’s Day logos in exchange for the Olympics. But it turns out, as spotted by Michel, that the Olympics logo is also a Valentine’s Day logo. Here is a picture:
The Olympics are just around the corner and Google has their widest ever logo on their home page this morning, for the special event that kicks off tonight in Vancouver. Here is a picture of the special Google Winter Olympics logo:
Yahoo and Bing also have special logos or themes up already. Here they are:
The Google LatLong Blog announced the addition of World War II imagery to Google Earth. Now you can compare, side by side, the earth as it is today versus how it was during World War II.
Google said:
Images taken in 1943 show the effect of wartime bombing on more than 35 European towns and cities. Imagery for Warsaw, which was heavily destroyed at the time, is available from both years 1935 and 1945. They remind us all of the devastating impact of war on the people in those cities and also the remarkable way in which urban environments are reconstructed and regenerated over time.
If you visit Google.com today, you will see a special doodle, aka logo, with a boy and a girl sitting on a bench together. The painting was one of Norman Rockwell’s most famous, which was on the front cover of the Saturday Evening Post on April 24, 1926. It was known as the “Little Spooners.”
Today is Rockwell’s 116th birthday, which was on February 3, 1894. He was 20th-century American painter and illustrator and was best known for his cover illustrations on the Saturday Evening Post for over 40 years.
Custom Website design is a striking combination of design and web contents to deliver the right identity of the company. With custom web design a company can place their products and services strategically to attract business and expand business. Thus, if you want your business to outshine in the cutting edge competition opting for custom website design would be the most sensible decision.
As You Like It: You can construct and incorporate the designs of your company, the way you want it. See your business strategy turn into reality as you incorporate web content to site to arrest the attention of user.
Optimizing a site’s usability will help to make it more accessible, or at least provide a better frame to build upon. If your wider audience finds the site hard to use, it’ll almost certainly be problematic for those with disabilities or learning difficulties. By the same token, the degree of consideration that goes into addressing accessibility is just as valid when it comes to usability.
Facebook has become an essential communication, collaboration, and marketing tool. In Facebook Essential Training, instructor Susan Cline shows how to navigate the world of social networking and put one’s best face forward online. She covers the basics, starting with creating a profile and finding and adding friends. Susan then explains how to communicate with friends via status updates, wall posts, chatting, and sharing photos, videos, and web links. She also touches on the delicate subject of removing friends and respecting other people’s privacy online. The advanced features, including permissions that control what other members can view or comment on, add-in applications, and dedicated Facebook groups, are what make Facebook so popular, and Susan covers them in detail.
Thanks to PhotoSpin.com for use of their photos in this course.
Google’s US homepage uses an animation to celebrate Isaac Newton’s birthday. After loading the page, an apple falls from the tree to illustrate Newton’s theory of gravity.
It’s the first time when Google uses an animated doodle on its homepage. Now that users got used to the fade-in animation that exposes Google’s navigation links, Google will try new ways to make the homepage more interactive.
Happy New Years! The Search Engine Land team would like to wish everyone a happy, healthy and successful 2010. Just for fun, I wanted to share the various logos from the search engines and also Google’s surprise.
Let’s start with Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” count down to New Years. Remember when you hit the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button on Google.com, it would show you how many minutes to 2010? Well, when 2010 hits, it then shows you a fireworks display. Here is a video I made of it.
As many of you know, Google started their holiday logo blitz earlier this week. Google has now posted four of (I believe) five logos they have for the holidays. We also have logos from Yahoo, Bing, Ask, DogPile, Baidu and many other search engines and search industry web sites. I wanted to share them with you today and update them tomorrow, as more come in.
If you like to use rich formatting when you compose Gmail’s messages, but the default text style is too boring, you can change it. Go to Gmail Labs, enable “Default Text Styling” and change the style from the settings page. You can select a different font face (including Comic Sans), change the color, size and style.
“If you live and breathe code, now you can set your default text style to a monospace font. If your life is purple, your email can be, too. But remember: whatever you see is what your recipients will see, so be nice to them and try not to clog the intertubes with ginormous bold italicized red script,” suggests Google.
One of my favorite bookmarklets translates the current web page into English using Google Translate: you can find it here. Unfortunately, Google Translate doesn’t handle properly web pages dynamically generated using JavaScript. For example, if you try to translate Google Pack’s Chinese homepage, you’ll notice that most of the text can’t be translated.
Google has already solved this problem by adding real-time translation in Google Toolbar and by offering a translation bar that can be embedded into any web page.
If you don’t want to use Google Toolbar, add the translation bar by bookmarking some Javascript code:
Happy Thanksgiving from Search Engine Journal to all of the search industry and all readers who come across our site. This year, I’m spending my Thanksgiving morning shacked up in a Hampton Inn in Tamarc, FL .. watching the Macys Parade on the TV, enjoying my continental breakfast and getting ready to head over to Dave Snyder’s parents’ house for an unofficial Search & Social Thanksgiving Dinner.
Along with turkey, Macys, pumpkin pecan pie, the Lions, the Cowboys, Tums and other Thanksgiving traditions also comes the Thanksgiving logos from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft’s Bing and other search engines.
The Google Mobile Blog announced Google News on the iPhone, Android and other smart phone devices has a new design. The new design looks more like the desktop version of Google News with minor changes to make it fit better on the smart phone screens.
The new design has more stories and images, has personalization features, search and a neat “jump” to section feature. Here are screen captures:
Giving chocolate is almost as personal as giving jewelry. You don’t want to offend anyone by giving or not giving chocolate. To help ensure that you don’t end up in the dog house, we have developed a list of the top ten things to include in a chocolate gift basket.
10. A card. Express your love through words and the recipient will hold onto those words long after the chocolate is gone.
9. Wine. Get an expensive, rich dessert wine and put it in the basket. After the romantic dinner dessert can be an extension of the romance
One of my favorite Google service – its online translation tool just got a newly streamlined layout. And along with the new site design are some great features that will make it faster and easier to translate words in 51 languages.
In case you’re living under the rock, Google Translate is an online tool that lets you automatically translate text and web pages into various languages. I use this service when covering netbook news in foreign languages including French, Dutch, German, Chinese and Japanese. The translation could be crappy at times but good enough to give you the gist of the foreign news that you are trying to cover.
NASA said yesterday it had discovered water on the moon, and Google — always big on space exploration — wasted no time producing a special logo to celebrate the event.
Google’s backing a contest to put a private rover on the moon. Who knows? Maybe one of those rovers will visit sources of water. And we’ll get a new logo to celebrate that.
An attention Heat mapping is a combination of two elements: eye-gazing, and predicted attention.
Eye-gazing simulates the sequence of extremely rapid and involuntary eye movements (”saccades”) that happen as your eye scans a scene. This is overlaid on a Heat mapping of the attention represented by different colors which predicts where the brain will focus. Hotter areas indicate a more intense focus, while cooler areas show a lower level of awareness and importance.
What factors are considered in generating a predictive Heat mapping?
