Inbal from the Google News team sent me a cool new Google News t-shirt today. The Google News T-Shirt has a robot reading a newspaper and says, "Google News (delivered by robots)."
Here is a picture:
Why did I get it? Well, because I help out here and there at the Google News Forum as part of my Search Engine Roundtable research and discovery morning routine.
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I recently got myself the Country Codes of the World poster. In my opinion, this is a must have for any internet company, be it SEO, internet dev/design shop, marketing, etc. Must have.
Hope to hang it up in our conference room soon.
Thanks Byte Level Research!
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Yesterday, I enabled revenue sharing on my YouTube videos within the YouTube ad network. Today, those videos are now displaying both video ad overlays and ads above my text description. Here are screen shots:
My very popular iPhone Popcorn Trick:
A relevant ad in my last weekly search video:
I guess I can potentially now make money from my videos? :-)
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One thing we were able to improve on the Siddur due to the 3.0 iPhone software release was the map feature. We added a native Apple Google Map directly into the Siddur and plotted where some of our Siddur users are using it right at the moment that you are looking at the map.
The main difference that you will notice is the speed of the map loading and the responsiveness of the zoom and panning through the maps.
Here are the new maps:
Zooming In:
What did the old version look like?
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YouTube began pushing their YouTube Partner Program to Google News publishers, which the Search Engine Roundtable is part of. So I signed up today and was approved.
I then hooked up my AdSense account to it and then agreed to the terms of service, which was actually a hoot - the way they took you through the rules and made sure you read the copyright rules over and over again.
In any event, I am now fully set up and I can now "enable revenue sharing" on my videos. The cool part is that you can pick and choose the videos you want to enable the revenue sharing on. Here is how to do it.
(1) Go to my videos
(2) Click on the "Enable Revenue Sharing" button under the video(s) you want to enable it on:
(3) Fill in a description about the video and read those terms again. Do note, if YouTube reviews the video and it has legal issues (copyright, etc), they will completely remove it:
Then you are done. YouTube may eventually add ads to it or they might remove your video.
How do you know if the video is enabled with revenue share? Two ways:
(1) You no longer see the "enable revenue sharing" button on the my videos page.
or
(2) You see a "Tube" Partner logo on the video view page:
Example, see my iPhone Popcorn Trick video page, and look for that tube logo.
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Last night, at about 4:30pm (EST), thousands of servers went offline due to Rackspace's Dallas data center having a major power management issue. The issue is not 100% clear yet, you can read what Rackspace had to say at their blog.
When my sites and servers went down, I first went to Rackspace to login to my account. But I couldn't access the site. So I then tried calling, but I was getting a busy signal, due to the volume of people calling. I then tried Twitter and found @rackspace there. There were no updates yet, but I followed @rackspace and waited.
I then saw the first tweet that read "We are having an issue that is affecting part of our DFW data center. No details yet. Will update as we get more information." More followed. Twitter Search was swarming with mentions of [rackspace], so it was good to know I was in good company. I noticed people began to say there sites were coming back up, which meant mine was coming up soon also. I assume they began flipping on the power to the servers slowly until all came on.
The most incredible part was that @Rackspace doubled their twitter followers. Before the outage, they had about 1,300 followers and now they have over 2,300. Like I tweeted yesterday, "Expensive way to get @rackspace more followers ;-)." That tweet was when Rackspace had about 1,300 followers.
In any event, I always find it interesting how my customers react to outages. We haven't had an outage in a really long time. But when this happened, some emailed, some IMed, some called. Some of the ones that called were not happy. I wasn't happy either, but I told them what I knew and sometimes that is not good enough, sometimes it is.
The outage, I believe, lasted about 40 minutes or so. Was it the end of the world? No, but it wasn't something that should be accepted. Will I switch from RackSpace? Probably not. They have been the most stable and most responsive company in this space I have ever dealt with and trust me, I have been with many and I spend a fortune on this stuff.
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I am not a big fan of going to doctors. I am not a big fan of going anywhere but my office, to be honest. So when I need to go to doctors, I tend to like to go really local.
By "really local" I mean, within the same office building as RustyBrick. In fact, my general doctor and my dentist (who I really need to see) are both in my office building. My dentist is on the same floor, just down the hall. My doctor is a floor up.
Why do I like really local doctors? Because they are better! No, I am kidding. In fact, I think one of them is actually not that great of a doctor.
I like them because I don't have to sit and wait in a waiting room. Some of my old doctors, I had to sit for hours before seeing them. I don't like the, sit and wait game.
These doctors (dentist) call me when they are ready. They say, the doctor is ready in a few minutes and that I should walk into their office. I then walk into the doctors office, bypass all the people waiting and go into the room to where I will be treated.
I always feel some guilt when I walk pass the people who have been waiting, but I go really local for that reason.
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For those that want to friend me on Facebook, so that I can annoy them with updates, you can now reach me at facebook.com/barryschwartz.
I don't use Facebook like a good Facebook citizen, I use it like a spammer. So I warn you.
I don't post useful pictures there. I don't talk to friends on there. I'll ignore your Facebook messages. I won't reply to Facebook IMs. I am the evil Facebook user.
I only go on to /reqs to accept friend requests. I pretty much accept everyone, so no one gets insulted.
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When did YouTube begin allowing the upload of files over 1GB? I now see that I can upload up to 20GB in file size, up from the 1GB limit that was announced in September 2008. I cannot find any mentions of 20GB YouTube upload limits mentioned anywhere...
Here is a screen capture of me breaking the 1GB barrier:
Here is a picture of the "About Uploading" section that tells me the limit is now up to 20GB!
Do you see the same thing?
Oh, since you are here, why not follow me on Twitter @rustybrick. ;-)
Update: So I checked a different YouTube account and this shows only 2GB. Still up from the 1GB file size, but not the 20GB limit my main account has:
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I have been utilizing GoToMeeting pretty often these days. I had one major issue where I was unable to show my slideshows in presentation mode while using GoToMeeting and Apple Keynote. Whenever I flipped on presentation mode, the person on the other side would see black.
After some trouble shooting with the GoToMeeting support team, they said they know of a work around. So to save you all time, here is what you need to do.
(1) Open Keynote
(2) Go to the "Preferences" section
(3) Click on "Slideshow" tab
(4) Check off "Allow Exposé, Dashboard and others to use screen"
Then GoToMeeting should show your presentation in presentation mode. Do keep in mind that the GoToMeeting presentation tool where people can ask questions, does not display to the presenter in presentation mode.
Hopefully this will help others with the same question.
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