A simple hint for email administrators everywhere. If you have a large number of users with unique sequential ID numbers, it may be tempting to use that ID as a primary email address, or an alias, but don’t do it. It’s an open invitation to spammers to target your users with the minimum of effort. [...]

For the last few weeks I’ve been testing out some geo-tagging software on my camera. The concept is fairly simple, whenever I take a photo, the built-in GPS works out where I am and records this metadata within the photo.

Mr. Deity shows what can be achieved with a static camera, a simple script, minimalist set design and great acting. Episode 5 was released yesterday. By releasing an episode every 2 weeks the producers hope to garner enough interest to turn it into a full TV series.

Sometimes nice things come back and surprise you. Last year, just after I’d upgraded to Google Earth Plus, I was looking for some good Santa-stuff in Google Earth (so I could show my younger relatives something interesting on what is otherwise a very dull computer), and I spotted a shape: looking around Northern Europe I [...]

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The plugin system on BBPress is still rather rudimentary (you create a folder called “my-plugins”) and any php that exists therein is considered to be an activated plugin. The good news here is, that (a) it works and (b) it’s so similar to the WordPress that many plugins will magically work without modification. My Google [...]

The possibly-too-quick-for-it’s-own-good rise of Google has set them up squarely as the new arch rival to Microsoft, and their latest advertising angle suggests more than a mild concern over the pre-installed applications in Microsoft’s looming Windows Vista, which is now in Beta testing.

Google has this week announced a labs project called Google Trends, a rather nice extension to the monthly search roundup that is Google Zeitgeist. Trends lets you see how popular a particular search term has been over time, and then just for fun, you can compare the popularity of other search terms over the same [...]

Google Calendar has now entered it’s public beta testing phase. The interface will be familiar to anyone who’s used GMail and any other calendar application before – it’s basically a hybrid of the two.

I’ve mentioned previously about how the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM) may be leaving us clues about His impending manifestation on Earth. I think I just spotted another, and it’s rather significant.

The rise in referral traffic from Google seems to have stabilized, so I’ve re-run the analysis from last week and updated the big daddy status list to reflect the current status of the various datacentres; two of which appear to have switched over to BigDaddy during the last week. Curiously (or not, depending on how [...]

Several news and technical commentary sites have been pronouncing the arrival of Google’s Bigdaddy datacentre over the last few weeks, and looking at the stats for this site over the last few days I might be seeing it’s effect – hits from Google are up. After a little digging, I reckon the rollout is 50% [...]

Just a quickie this, because there’s so much to look at. Google Earth has just had a major data update for the UK.

I’m going to stick my neck out and make a prediction. I was thinking around the subject of Google Analytics just now, considering the increased information that Google now have. It’s a short leap of faith to guess that Google will use the data that Google Analytics provides in order to improve or reinforce their [...]

The data from Google Analytics has started to roll in, and the highlight (from a purely human point of view) is certainly the map view which shows where on Earth everybody who visits this site comes from.

This is the first beta release of a WordPress plugin that can add Google Analytics to your website without you needing to code one single set of <>’s.

I’ve hit a major flaw with Google Search this week. A significant number of the technical searches that I’m doing are providing results where one particular company is at the top of the list. This company has the answers I need, but they don’t provide them for free. The top result appears to be an [...]

Google has recently added some new aeriel images to the Google Earth Database, and one of the places that has received significantly better coverage is Portsmouth, UK. Portsmouth College provide some fantastic (historical and current) aeriel pictures of Portsmouth on their website, so I thought I’d try comparing them to see just how good the [...]

Google launched what appears to be an early beta of it’s Blog Search today. It has one Killer feature, and some noteworthy mentionables.

Chris Samuel, pictured (naturally) with a cup of tea here, has just posted this wonderfully cogent message regarding the importance of open standards in government IT.

Google Talk enters it’s beta phase today. It’s an instant messaging and Voice-Over-Internet-Protocol (VOIP) application. The burning question is, of course, can it be a replacement for other instant messaging clients?

Yesterday Google launched Google Desktop 2 beta, an extension of their existing Google Desktop application that indexes personal computers so their information is as easy to find as the rest of the web. This beta release introduces a pluggable sidebar, and introduces some interesting possibilities about what will come next.

Microsoft and Google were bound to end up in a high profile court case sooner or later. It turns out that personnel issues are the catalyst for their first major legal fracas.

Earlier this week we mentioned that it was Brett’s birthday, and that Brett was getting married. We’ve not heard from Brett since then (obviously, because he’s on honeymoon) but knowing that he’s a resourceful chap we’re sure that regardless of the fact that they’ve just been in a hurricane they’ll be fine.

Google are running a public beta of Google Earth, and in keeping with their “don’t be evil” policy, the basic version is free for anyone to enjoy.

When Google bought Keyhole a few months back, several of us were moved to a sharp intake of breath. The potential of combining Google’s search capabilities with a three dimensional model of Earth was just so interesting that only luddites, and my dad (The Grand Luddite), could fail to be impressed.

It’s only two months since Google introduced Google Maps to the USA, and yesterday they started to introduce it to the rest of the world, one country at a time. Happily for me (the first apostle of the church of Google) the UK was the first to benefit.

In “traditional” IR systems, it is common to use a process in which search terms become better stated through iteration (based on analysis and improvement upon each search, until a satisfactory result is found). This is called Relevance Feedback.

One of the more random ideas I had recently was based around Google’s “special searches” which enable a more focussed search to be conducted based on the knowledge that a reader is interested in a general topic.

A couple of years ago, a web page with an open comment form would have been used for commenting intelligently and considerately on the subject at hand or sending a message to the page author. Then, with the advent of Google’s page rank system, comment forms became the subject of massive misuse, because pagerank gave [...]

I previously discussed how I believed Google’s purchase of Keyhole, the 3D mapping company, was a very bold and possibly critical move in their future. I said at the time that in Keyhole, Google holds all the building blocks to make the next killer app – one that changes the world just as much as [...]

Today Google Desktop leaves it’s beta status behind and stands as a fully fledged application. Having used the beta version for several months I’ve found it unquestionably useful. Searching for something on my machine used to be a chore; Google Desktop makes it a breeze.

It didn’t take Google long to innovate again. Several months ago I wrote about Google’s acquisition of Keyhole, describing how it provides Google with a means of presenting location based information. It appears that this may be the first step that’s required before the fruits of that acquisition can be harvested – enter Google Maps.

In accordance with the announcements made today by Google, MSN, Yahoo et al. my website now supports the “rel=nofollow” directive

yesterday, Google purchased Keyhole – if you don’t know why this is important, read on…

Why the Google Desktop Beta only works with Internet Explorer and Outlook, so far.

ugg – is a program which can upload messages from a BSD mbox to google groups. it uses the javamail API and the sourceforge mbox project.

you may be interested to discover that it is not possible to have a google group subscribed to a yahoo group.