Google News worth Another Look

Have you looked at Google News recently? I had not in a while and was surprised by the improvements after using the system for a while.



Customize

The main thing that is different is you can customize a lot of stuff. You can choose which news sources you prefer so those are favored over others. You can also add new categories to the list of topics on the left. This is a bit hit and miss. For example, I added a category for Java which seems to work pretty good. However, when I added JavaScript, I received a number of stories that had a JavaScript error message in them. That was a bit of a hoot.



Trending Topics

One other feature that I really like is how trending topics are incorporated. If you click on "Technology" for example, under that heading a list of the current trending topics related to tech are displayed. This is a great use of their search data and very useful.



So check it out, it is another good data point when looking for the latest news in tech.

Duck Duck Go, a Retro Search Engine

Do you miss the good old days when your search engine just searched? When it only searched for information on the Internet and didn't try to show you localized information? Or social information?



Then DuckDuckGo.com may be the site for you. It is a retro style search engine that doesn't track you. Simple, easy to use. Check it out, its worth a look.



In fact, the site has been doing well, check out the story on SearchEngineLand.

Want to Develop a Blogger Gadget?

Have you ever considered developing your own gadget for Google Blogger? Well there is a developer guide for that. Get the details here.



Gadgets for Blogger Dev Guide

Sky Drive and Google Drive take on DropBox

Big news in the cloud computing world. Yesterday Microsoft announced new updates to its Sky Drive and today Google announced Google Drive. Both of these products are direct competitors to Dropbox which is one of my favorite Internet products.



How the Products Work

Installing the software sets up a special folder on your hard disk. Any files copied to this folder are synced to the Internet. So I have an online backup, big deal. Right? But what happens when I install the same software on my iPhone, my iPad, my second laptop? Suddenly all my devices are automatically synchronized with all my data. Powerful stuff.



What do SkyDrive and Google Drive do better than DropBox?

Well first, both services offer a lot more disk space than Dropbox. For $120/yr, Dropbox gives you 50gb of disk space. Google and Microsoft are offering 100gb for around $50/yr. That is quite a discount.



Google Drive offers Google Docs integration. You can edit Word and Excel files on the web and then have them synced to your devices. In addition, Google Drive looks to have some very interesting photo and video sharing features that seem to be unique.



SkyDrive offers Microsoft Office integration with their online office offering.



What don't SkyDrive and Google Drive Offer?

First off, Dropbox offers support on pretty much all mobile devices (iOS, Android) and operating systems (Windows, OS X, Linux). The new contenders do not. Issues include:

• Neither new product supports Linux


• Google supports Android but not iOS, though it is coming soon


• SkyDrive supports iOS and Windows Phone but not Android


• Google docs can only be edited from the Web. You can't edit them from your local copies. In fact, you only get links to your docs and no local copies.


• Sharing features for SkyDrive do not work on the Mac OS X version

Bottom Line

These moves are gonna shake things up both for the cloud drive market and for the online backup market. Dropbox is still way easier to use and is much slicker than its two rivals. I would expect a price cut or a storage increase very quickly from Dropbox.



Apple has everything in place to be a competitor in this space. However, if they stay isolated in their ecosystem, they surrender this market to their competitors.



In the end, this means more options and better deals for us end users. Hooray for that!



Reviews and General Posts

The Verge: Hands On

Google Drive FAQ



Cloud Drives Compared

Here are the articles comparing cloud drive features.

PCWorld: Google Drive vs the Rest

Laptop Mag: Cloud drives compared

The Verge: All the Cloud Drives Compared

Engadget: Google Drive vs the Rest



Google Terms Controversy

Late in the day there was some controversy about Google Terms of service. My take is it was much ado about nothing. Once your read Google Terms of Service everything looks ok. But if you want to make up your own mind check out these links.

ZDNet: How far do Googles terms of service go?

CNET: Who owns your files?

Google Terms of Service

Posting Links through Twitter

I have been working heads down for the last few months and have been neglecting my blog a bit. So I just realized, Google Reader is no longer auto posting links of interest to the blog.



How I Find Stories

I find stories of interest using Reeder on the iPad using the "Star" feature of Google Reader to feed those stories via RSS to my blog. Apparently Google has dropped the RSS feed for starred stories, so a new method is required to record stories of interest.



Twitter linked to Facebook

Since I can link my Twitter posts to my blog and then to Facebook, I am going to go that route. So now, any stories of interest will be posted on Twitter which will show up here on the blog and in my Facebook wall. And of course, I will be posting links to these posts. So Hopefully this will work better.



Linking your Twitter Account to Facebook