Google has just announced the Google Maps API for Flash. This AS3 library will allow you to natively put Google Maps into your Flex or Flash apps without having to do any hacky-hack iFrame/div methods. You can read the announcement on Google’s blog.
Steve Rubel from Micro Persuasion shows how you can Become a Knowledge Management Ninja with Google Reader. In his article he explains how many under-utilized featrues in Google’s Reader product can help you sift through today’s information overload. Google Reader is - in my opinion - the best RSS reader I have used over the past 4 years. If you’re not yet using RSS, I would certainly suggest giving Reader a try.
O’Reilly’s ONLamp.com site has the first part in a new series documenting The Power of Google Gears. Part one outlines the database portion of the Google Gears API while future tutorials will show you how to use the WorkerPool and LocalServer API’s.
If you happen to use Google Analytics to measure traffic on your site, and you are running Google Adsense ads, you should check out this excellent script for Tracking AdSense clicks with Google Analytics. The script is super easy to implement and gives a nice range of reports to identify what pages on your site are performing well with regards to Adsense conversion.
One of the most popular posts on this blog is my instructions on how to upload to Flickr from Picassa, Google’s excellent image management application. Looks like my hack is no longer relevant (thank goodness) as a Flickr upload plugin for Picasa is now available!
Fading Out Nofollows. Most blog software handles the comment spam problem by adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to anchors in the comments section of your blog. The idea here is that search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN will not follow these links during their spidering process and hence the spammer will not gain link juice from you.
The main drawback from this practice, is that it penalizes people who are posting legitimate comments on your blog. Philipp’s idea is a good one. He suggests a middle ground, where when a comment is first posted, it has the rel attribute by default. Then after a specified period of time, the rel attribute is removed. This gives the blogger some time to moderate the comments and delete the spam that happens to get through your filters (ie. Akismet).
In my opinion, I wonder how much the nofollow strategy is actually working. I am getting more spam (over 1,000 comments/day) than ever. About six months ago, I removed the rel=”nofollow” attribute altogether, and the amound of spam has remained consistant.
Ben Maurer has devised a simple JavaScript that will create a free/busy schedule using Google Calendar and JSON. This is perfect if you want to publicly make your schedule available while only giving details on whether you are free or busy.
Wow! Did I miss hell freezing over? Microsoft, Google and Yahoo! - the three major search engines - have United to Support Sitemaps. This can be nothing but good for web developers and content creators. Sitemaps are simple XML files that help search engines determine how to spider your site and how often to do it. For more coverage of this news check out some of these links…
We all know that the Google Video Player is Flash based and that most Flash movies can be customized using additional parameters. So what parameters does Google use that will allow us to customize our players? Google Operating System blog has a short little post that will show you how to Customize the Embedded Google Video Player.
Google Related Links is a neat new way to add links to related content on your sites or blogs. The related content is context sensitive (much like Adsense) and is organized into links, searches, video and news. Sure it may lead some traffic away from your site, but it can also add extra value to the existing content on your site!
