According to Alan Williamson’s blog Google’s founders did not know HTML When they started Google up. The question is have they learned to HTML yet?By looking at Google’s homepage the answer is probably no, just kidding!  

This came out of was the lecture last night where Google’s product manager, Marissa Mayer, spoke. As you can probably imagine the lecture was very well attended! This lecture took place at PARC and Marissa took the people attending though the lengths Google goes to create a good user experence. Some over facts which came out included:

• The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn’t know HTML and just wanted a quick interface. Infact it was noted that the submit button was a long time coming and hitting the RETURN key was the only way to burst Google into life.
• Due to the sparseness of the homepage, in early user tests they noted people just sitting looking at the screen. After a minute of nothingness, the tester intervened and asked ‘Whats up?’ to which they replied “We are waiting for the rest of it”. To solve that particular problem the Google Copyright message was inserted to act as a crude end of page marker. (at least we have the status bar now, lol).
• The infamous “I feel lucky” is nearly never used. However, in trials it was found that removing it would somehow reduce the Google experience. Users wanted it kept. It was a comfort button. (does Firefox use this?)
• Google makes changes small-and-often. They will sometimes trial a particular feature with a set of users from a given network subnet; for example Excite@Home users often get to see new features. They aren’t told of this, just presented with the new UI and observed how they use it. (cough, privacy)
• The name ‘Google’ was an accident. A spelling mistake made by the original founders who thought they were going for ‘Googol’. I thought it must be something like this where could they get that spelling from.
• Gmail was used internally for nearly 2years prior to launch to the public. They discovered there was approximately 6 types of email users, and Gmail has been designed to accommodate these 6.

These note’s were provide by the above blog thanks!

The reason everyone’s talking about Google BTW is that it just celebrated it’s 8th 7th birthday. Those 8 7 years felt so good….

Nintendo DS functions WiFi, but currently it can only be used for multi-player gaming with other DSes nearby, some new games are expected to have online multiplayer facilities, but many amateurs are trying to get the 802.11 (WiFi) on the NDS working before then.

The first person to do this will get over $2000 from a bounty as well as having something of massive commercial value. When this happens it will allow us to chat, browse the web and even blog on our NDS like you would on a PDA! This person is almost certainly going to be Stephen, he?s got the actual TCP/IP (the hard stuff) done and he?s 40% finished his first NDS internet app; an IRC client. He just needs to do this, test it, fix all bugs (70%) and catch up on his sleep

As I have a Nintendo DS I?d love it when this actually starts to work. It will save me from having to buy a PDA to browse the web on the go; hopefully even a Skype will be released so I can use it as a WiFi phone, the Nintendo DS does have a built in microphone after all . I know I might be going a little over the top now but I really think the Nintendo DS is capable of things like this, or at least I hope . I can’t wait until I’m browsing the internet on my Nintendo DS! I hope it doesn’t require extra hardware or lots of extra hardware. Currently it only seems to work for static IP addresses, but I hope that it will soon work with DHCP!

I would be happy to pay the price for a normal Nintendo DS game such as ?30 for this when it is released, it would be worth it! I’m sure it’s not just me who has this view, I?m sure others do too. He could make tens of thousands of pounds of this, which would be nice to see!

Good luck, I wish you success. It will benefit me and any others!

I don’t think Blogshares move of deleting non-blogs was meant to bring into question what a blog was, but it did, for me anyway.

Any argument erupted on the forums; some people argued that a site like Blogshares itself should be removed from the game as it wasn’t a blog, though other’s argued it was a blog. Then somebody moaned they used forum software for a blog (he he) and that was removed as it was a forum. I maintain my views, which are pretty simple.

• A blog isn’t a news site, a blog should be full of opinion.
• A blog must be newest post first and have more than 1 article on the homepage, unlike a forum when the newest post in a thread is last.
• If a site has a blog on the front page the site is classed as a blog.
• Site’s like Digg are classed as blog’s as real people post things.

Some people disagree with this viewpoint, though this is mine. I think most of it is similar to the Wikipedia. Below are a few hard questions to answer like…

• Is a podcast site with only one page a blog? The blog is in the audio, so is the site a blog?

I would say yes, but I’m sure many wouldn’t. It makes me a little bit of a hypocrite as it disobeys the above rules; but if the audio is a blog and the site is providing the audio I would class it as a blog.

• Is an update log on a front page a blog?

Yep, it is, if it’s in reverse cron.

The way Blogshares works is you can vote blog’s into industries (categories) which is for the QuackTrack index. QuackTrack is the largest blog index. Voting works like this:

Voter Votes ——>>>> Moderator Accepts/Rejects (a moderator is an experienced BlogShares voter) ——>>>> Goes into index

However a voter may vote against an industry a blog is placed in.

The moderator and voter both get a reward in chips (can be swapped for B$, adverts or links).

However a moderator may have an opinion and allow a blog into an industry in which it shouldn’t be in, though they are supposed to follow a strict ruleset. A moderator’s opinion of a blog maybe different to that of an admin or voter and they may allow a blog into the index which isn’t a blog at all.

I expect the B$ markets to suffer dramatically from this move as big services which have been removed like MSN Spaces and Blogger are the most valuable site’s in the index, and make up for about 1/3 of all links tracked by Blogshares.

It will be interesting to see how much influence this decision makes.

Tags: blogshares, blog, blogs, blogosphere

(P.S. I’ve started barcoding posts for some really strange reason so here’s the first ever one!)