Monthly Archives: April 2005

Google Marches On

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Speaking of Google…
I had noticed over the last couple of days that Google had started pre-fetching search results or rather, enabling your browser to do that. Of course this only works with newer browsers that support this feature (not Internet Explorer!). I see that the knee-jerk-reactionists over at slashdot are predicting death and disaster. Google (and Mozilla), of course, tell you exactly how to disable it should you wish to do so. Mozilla’s FAQ entry is on-line too.

I also noticed this morning that I am now using 246 MB (20%) of your 1243 1286 1289 1300 MB. on Gmail. That’s an unusual number! I wonder where that came from. It looks suspiciously like 1000MB more than the space I was using yesterday! Could they, would they, have simply added 1000MB to whatever storage everyone was already using? Presumably in response to Yahoo’s decision to provide 1GB of storage. But they’ve not doubled They are doubling it like some speculated.

Update: Weird! The space available keeps growing!

Update: As Serge points out in comments, The Gmail What’s new page now has info on this. They are doubling the storage. They’ve also announced the ‘richtext’ support I had noticed in the compose pane.

Hysterics, Pedantics, and Knee Jerk reactions

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This is the geek pedant in me speaking now: wordpress.org is not the same as WordPress the blogging software, and it is not the same as the tens of thousands of WordPress blogs out there. Which means that headlines like Slashdot’s WordPress Banned by Google for Spamming really annoy me. That should be WordPress.org Banned by Google for Scamming Adsense.

Creating link farms, chains of self-referencing websites, cross linking, and some of the other things that people do to game the search engines and in this case profit from ad placements is wrong, no doubt, but it is not spamming. Spamming has always meant sending out unsolicited content, whether by news posting, email, or blog and guest book comments.

What Matt has allowed to take place on his server, has nothing to do with any of those things. Google have rightly pulled those pages from their index because their terms and conditions state: No Google ad may be placed on pages published specifically for the purpose of showing ads, whether or not the page content is relevant.. Nothing whatsoever to do with spamming.

The only mention of spamming in those terms and conditions is … In particular, avoid links to web spammers…. These articles didn’t have links to anywhere (as far as I remember), they were purely designed to attract high paying Google ads and thus click-throughs to legitimate Google advertisers!

The things people are positing about Google ‘having it in for’ WordPress because of Blogger or about everyone else’s WordPress blogs somehow being affected by this, are just nonsense. Get a grip people! Stick to the facts.