The Deets

Julio has a nice round-up of reactions to the launch of Google’s StreetView. BTW, that was an embed of the StreetView version of the home for sale in this post.

My favorite quote comes from Steve McPherson, who managed to get in a plug for his dog:

Steve McPherson, of St. Paul said, “I’m pretty sure (Street View) shows my wife picking up after our dog, Gibson, in front of our building.”

I put on my tech hat and came up with this nugget:

Along with looking at their homes or offices, users put Street View to practical use for driving places.

“I think this is going to immediately change the way people look up directions,” said Ed Kohler, a local blogger at technologyevangelist.com. “They’ll still do the turn-by-turn thing, but they’ll check out Street View so they can get a feel for the actual property they’re trying to find.”

So Minneapolis has street views now, but Argentina doesn’t even have streets in Google Maps:

That must make driving difficult.

Can I spread my own rumor?

Guess so.

And yes, I do know people who are being recruited, but I’m not naming names.

And if you know names, don’t put them in the comments. It wouldn’t be cool to cost someone a job opportunity.

Google has a new feature where you can see street-level images in a few major cities. Minneapolis hasn’t made the cut yet. Being street level, there are some interesting things being captured in some of the images, including this whale tail sighting.

Ever heard of splogs? They’re blogs full of spammy content. People create programs that generate thousands of pages of content with ads on them, figuring that is they have thousands (if not millions) of pages of content, someone will surely stumble upon the site and click on an ad.

One problem. It takes a lot time to actually write stuff. So rather than write their own content, they scrape copies of content from other sites. A popular source of content is the homepage of Google News, but they’ll use just about anything.

For example, here is a site that’s scraped a post from Kirk’s blog where he’s talking about the launch of Anne’s blog:

http://four-seasons.theluxuryguide.net/12328/

I didn’t link to it, so you’ll have to copy/paste it if you want to check it out for yourself. In this case, it looks like the blog is harvesting any content they find that uses the term “four seasons” that shows up in Google’s blog search.

The site finds content using Google Blog Search, scrapes the content of a Google property (Blogger blog), then puts Google AdSense ads on the stolen content. And the only manual work involved in this operation was by Kirk.

Google has a free, automated 411 service available at 800-466-4411.

Give it a try.

The Other Mike asked about my post on this topic in the comments. This is a reminder to Mike that he read about that over on Technology Evangelist or near the end of the story in yesterday’s Pioneer Press article.

For those of you running Blogger powered blogs, here’s a very simple change you can make that will increase the traffic to your sites from search engines.

This ads your post’s titles to your HTML page titles for each and every page of your blog. That way, when someone searches for some obscure crap you blogged about back in the day, they’ll see a nice blue underlined link on Google directing them to your site. Every page of your site suddenly becomes a big more relevant and looks better in the results to searchers, so people find and click more often.

It’s pretty dumb that Google, who owns Blogger, doesn’t do this by default, but they’re not always as smart as they appear.

It’s official. The Deets has gone to #1 on Google for . . . The Deets.

It seems like only yesterday that The Deets was battling with a post on Jossip about the deets on Kathy Griffith’s divorce. Boy, how times have changed.

What’s next for The Deets? Perhaps hitting 25 subscribers to the RSS feed. Just add the site to your Google or My.Yahoo homepage, or subscribe to email updates using the options in the right column.

Here’s how you can make a custom Google homepage:

1. Go to www.google.com/ig

2. Login with your gmail address if you aren’t already logged in.

3. Now you’re logged in, but you probably see some marginally relevant headlines. How about adding The Deets?

4. Click the Add Stuff link along the right side of the screen.

5. Click “Add by URL” near the search box at the top of the screen.

6. Paste the following URL into the box:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheDeets

7. That’s it. Now the latest headlines from The Deets will come directly to your Google Homepage (you can adjust how many headlines you like by clicking the Edit link next to the section’s header).

PS: Consider changing your browser’s homepage to http://www.google.com/ig so it will be the first thing you see when you open your browser.

I noticed that someone landed on The Deets after a Google search for [ed kohler and manatee and pulp] yesterday. I didn’t realize that manatees were using Google these days.

As little as two weeks ago, people searching or such a phrase would have been sorely disappointed with the results. But now, they can find hard hitting information about manatees and pulp dumping here at The Deets. Things sure move fast in Internet time.