pages

What's the sound of PageRank falling?

After what felt like a long hibernation period, Google has recently made at least a partial PageRank update of the visible or public PageRank, often referred to as Toolbar PageRank. And boy was it noticed--not so much with the update but with the PageRank drops targeted at sites that were buying and/or selling text links.

A lot has been said already by many who have a much deeper understanding and forecast this event. What I find particularly interesting is how PageRank has become a form of currency, yet who can say what precisely that value is? Of course, I … Read more

Is Google's PageRank algorithm changing?

If you want to watch a bunch of A-list bloggers and business folks at big-name news sites go a little ape, I recommend observing them when their Google PageRank takes a hit.

According to blogger Andy Beard, a number of high-profile blogs and news sites have had just that happen to them in recent days.

Some examples, according to Beard, include Engadget, which saw its PageRank drop from 7 to 5; Joystiq, from 6 to 4; and SFGate, Forbes.com and WashingtonPost.com, all of which had their PageRank drop from 7 to 5.

What's behind this?

Well, speculation … Read more

Yelp meets Google PageRank, has baby: Grayboxx

Grayboxx is a local recommendations service that's been quietly humming along since 2005. This morning they added 100 cities to the network, bringing the grand total up to 175. Grayboxx takes aggregate customer reviews from all over, and combines them by neighborhood to serve up business recommendations, kind of like what Google has done with its search results. Grayboxx will scour the internet for references to a business (be it tagged photos, or mentions in a blog post), and give that business a certain rank based on its pervasion. However unlike Yelp and Yahoo Local, which are designed and … Read more

404 funnies: Making 'file not found' work for you

The dreaded "404 File Not Found" error page is one of the great frustrations of the online world. No doubt that it must be a close relative of the "no longer in service" recording for phone numbers.

While they are important for visitors already on your site, they are even more important to visitors coming in from other sites or search engines. These visitors may be entirely new to your site and haven't really "invested" in your site yet or realize what a great site you have. Without a good 404 page, the … Read more

Netvibes now feeding business customers

This morning Netvibes is launching Premium Universes, a new program for businesses to get their own branded start page that can be integrated into their existing site, without jettisoning users off elsewhere. The intent is for site users to get the same functionality they'd get at Netvibes.com, while at the site owner's page. Site owners in turn, can place as much advertising outside of the Netvibes page as they'd like, supplementing the use of the service--and hopefully their revenue.

In terms of features, there's really nothing new from the Netvibes Universe program that launched in mid-April. … Read more

Google co-founders rank 5th among richest Americans

Watch out Bill!

Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, each worth an estimated $18.5 billion, have joined the ranks of the top 10 richest people in the U.S., according to Forbes magazine's list of the 400 most wealthy Americans.

The 34-year-olds are tied for fifth place, behind Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who is worth $59 million; investment mogul Warren Buffett at $52 billion; casino and hotel magnate Sheldon Adelson at $28 billion; and Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison at $26 billion.

Only2Clicks does eye-friendly start pages

Only2Clicks is one of the few Web services I've seen lately whose name tells exactly what it does. The concept is pretty straightforward--set up your favorite Web sites, and the service will load them up in a grid, with photo thumbnails for each. You can add and remove any number of sites, and the thumbnails will be refreshed each time you reload the page. You can also re-organize the links with simple drag and drop. The idea is to set Only2Clicks as your start page, so you'll be able to quickly eyeball each site before figuring out where … Read more

Freewebs' Pagii.com: The return of the personal home page?

Remember when you were in junior high and the ultimate way to express yourself was to line the walls of your locker with photos and notes from friends and magazine clippings of every variety? Well, here's the digital-age version. Web page creation veteran Freewebs (more coverage here) has just launched a new site, Pagii (rhymes with "cagey"), which it's calling a "social publishing network." It's a drag-and-drop service that allows you to put photos, text, shapes, videos, and external widgets into a free-form, JavaScript-based page. The end result is something that's essentially … Read more

Netvibes goes mobile, for real this time

Single-page aggregator Netvibes quietly launched a mobile version of its site in February. It was a bit of a hack: If you created a "mobile" tab, then when you visited Netvibes from your mobile, the feeds you put in that tab would show up.

Today, Netvibes has gone to the next step with two new mobile sites. The lightweight mobile version of the site, m.netvibes.com, doesn't require any special tabs. On your mobile you can select any tab you've created on your desktop or laptop, and it displays almost everything, formatted for the small … Read more

Conduit improves its toolbar

Conduit makes a slick utility for creating browser toolbars. I covered the product back in April, and I had one main beef: Each toolbar you installed took up additional real estate in a browser. Conduit has just fixed that, and has added some other new features as well.

With today's release, when Conduit users add toolbars after the first one they have, each becomes an option on a drop-down item within the toolbar. Conduit is also releasing multitoolbar packs with preloaded combinations of toolbars. There's a Blogs pack (Webware is included in it) as well as Music, Sports, … Read more