A lot of others were wondering the same thing. For example, here are a couple of the comments we got:

“So how exactly did u get the recording of its size without making it melt?”

“Someone could have bulls**tted the whole story with a made up sketch, fake measurements and false claims. You dont know, i dont know, theres no telling if this even really happened….”

According to Wikipedia, which Google presented as the top organic result when clicking on the doodle, in the snowflake was observed in 1887 at 38 centimeters (15 in) in diameter in Fort Keogh, Montana.

The Wikipedia entry cites: Lyons, Walter A (1997). The Handy Weather Answer Book (2nd ed.). Detroit, Michigan: Visible Ink press. ISBN 0-7876-1034-8.

I dug up a New York Times article from 2007, which references the same snowflake, noting that it’s listed in the Guinness Book of World Records, and that the snowflake was measured by a nearby rancher, who described the flakes falling in the storm which produced the flake in question, as “larger than milk pans”. It also says that there was no corroborating evidence to support the rancher’s claim.

I’m having a hard time finding anything about the record on Guinness’ site, but here are someother interesting snow-related records.

Here’s an interesting excerpt from that NYT article:

“Who of us has seen a hailstone the size of a golf ball or a baseball?” asked Kenneth G. Libbrecht, a snowflake devotee at the California Institute of Technology who runs the physics department there in his spare time. “But, clearly, they exist, because people pull them out of their freezers. Some of these things can be very, very rare, but not impossible.”

So too with giant snowflakes, Dr. Libbrecht said. “As big as a basketball?” he asked. “Who knows? It’s not out of the question.”

The laws of physics, he said, suggest no obvious restrictions on the size of very large flakes. But in the real world, Dr. Libbrecht added, wind might break up the fragile compilations, putting an effective size limit on what flutters down from the sky.

source form: webpronews

There’s a blurb about it on the Google home page, where the company often advertises various services and activities.

This is the first time I’ve seen this. Google is prompting people about the changes upon log-in now. I just went to log-in to Google Reader a few minutes ago, and was presented with the following screen:

I’ve logged in and out of Google services a number of times over the past week, and this is the first time I’ve seen this.

source form: webpronews

Email marketing service provider Aweber, which boasts over 110,000 small businesses as clients, started using the beta in December.

Justin Premick, AWeber’s Director of Education Marketing, tells WebProNews, “In December 2011, AWeber began using Google AdWords’ email subscription beta through our account representative. We started out using it only for a segment of our campaigns, to minimize the risk of it cannibalizing link clicks and not providing valuable, converting traffic. Thus far, we haven’t seen a ton of traffic from the campaign, but we’ve learned a few things along the way to shape our future use.”

“Like other companies, we started using the ads to build our email list,” he adds. “While this is one way the service can be used, I believe the tool is most useful for sales teams in capturing and distributing leads among a team of sales representatives. In a situation with sales managers and representatives, the manager would presumably distribute leads among the representatives for individual follow up.”

“This is helpful for advertisers and prospects because it cuts one step out of the information request (and lead generation) process,” says Premick. “Instead of clicking through to the site, then filling out a form, prospects can fill out the form directly in the search results.”

The company said that after using the new AdWords feature for a month, it plans to continue testing and experimenting, moving away from automated follow up and towards individual outreach.

“Most importantly, this new AdWords feature points to the fact that email remains a key ingredient to marketing success, serving as a valuable tool for building relationships with both current and prospective customers,” an Aweber spokesperson said.

source form: webpronews

It adds to the noticeable undercurrent of fear that, fueled largely by protests over sweeping Internet legislation, has been permeating. Perhaps fear is the wrong word. Maybe unease is better, but it’s there and it’s undeniable. Internet privacy is just one of the trending topics adding to it. With that in mind, the efforts of DuckDuckGo are admirable.

The search engine with the funny name — hey, you have to stand out — offers a non-tracking service, one that doesn’t send the keyword you searches as the referral term to the site being visited from DDG’s search results. If privacy in relation to search is important to you, DuckDuckGo is certainly not shy about offering you an alternative. Over at the nifty TLD’d donttrack.us site, they make their case with a basic-but-informative explanation of what Google does when you search and what they offer, complete with screenshots of the process in action.

The page is presented infographic-style, and it’s quite effective. An example:

And:

It’s a little bit of a scroll monster, but because the information is important, not to mention, presented in an effective, humorous manner, the scrolling is easy to overlook. It should be noted that privacy in relation to search is not the only service DuckDuckGo offers. Their goodies page is filled with a number of useful resources, like facts, conversions, calculations and dates. Bonus, you can use them all right there, on-page. Further navigation is not necessary.

There’s also some geek credibility going on, something their zero-click info sources lists of Wikia outlets suggests:

• Wookieepedia – Darth Plagueis
• Halopedia – covenant loyalists
• RuneScape Wiki – zamorak robes
• Memory Alpha – Balok’s cube
• eWrestling Wiki – tromboner man
• Memory Beta – RIS Brunia
• The Psychology Wiki – tachistoscopes
• Star Wars Fanon Wiki – gulper serpent
• Muppet Wiki – pink monster
• Annex – sembia
• Digimon Wiki – Alphamon
• Dragon Ball Wiki – Pui Pui nice shot
• Dofus Wiki – Bherb’s Gully
• Fallout Wiki – Diesoon
• Final Fantasy Wiki – gippal
• Indiana Jones wiki – Maggie Stanforth
• The Pokemon Encyclopedia – treecko

 

As the world of the Internet is undergoing some strain as tech companies, governments and copyright protectors battle for “control,” one of the issues embroiled in the unease is privacy. If Google’s search behavior is just too imposing for your comfort, DuckDuckGo offers a viable, useful alternative.

It should be noted, DDG’s “We Don’t Track” service, as is the alteration to the duck in the logo, is in support of Data Privacy Day, which starts today, but continues on “in the surrounding weeks.” The goal of this movement is simple:

On January 28 and in the surrounding weeks, the United States, Canada and many other countries celebrate Data Privacy Day. Privacy is our shared responsibility. Participate in Data Privacy Day by educating students or parents, training employees, hosting an event or sponsoring DPD.

The official sponsors of the event are Intel and eBay, which is quite telling.

source form: webpronews

Update: With the Searchmetrics list, we encouraged you to take it with a grain of salt, but Matt Cutts said the following about it in a Tweet, implying that it’s fairly flawed:

Original Article: Back in November, Google revealed that it was testing algorithm changes that would examine what appears “above the fold” on web pages. It raised a number of questions about the kinds of hoops webmasters would have to jump through.

Last week, the changes were officially announced as the “Page Layout” update, which looks at the layout of a page and the amount of content you see on the page once you click on a result.

Was your site impacted by the Page Layout or “above the fold” update? Let us know in the comments.

Upon announcing the update, Google “Distinguished Engineer” Matt Cutts wrote:

Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away. So sites that don’t have much content “above-the-fold” can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward.

We understand that placing ads above-the-fold is quite common for many websites; these ads often perform well and help publishers monetize online content. This algorithmic change does not affect sites who place ads above-the-fold to a normal degree, but affects sites that go much further to load the top of the page with ads to an excessive degree or that make it hard to find the actual original content on the page. This new algorithmic improvement tends to impact sites where there is only a small amount of visible content above-the-fold or relevant content is persistently pushed down by large blocks of ads.

Following the announcement of the Page Layout update, Matt Cutts hosted a Google+ Hangout where he clarified it a bit. As my colleague Chris Richardson recently reported:

“It’s not a numbers game. Google hasn’t written their algorithm to punish sites with, say, 20 ads above the fold, as opposed to the site owner who only has 19 showing. No, from the Cutts/Google perspective, the algorithm alteration inspects pages to see how the space, especially above the fold, is being used.

In fact, Google isn’t concerned about the number of ads at all. Instead, they just don’t want these ads — however many are appearing above the fold — taking up too much space.

In the hangout, Cutts demonstrated with two yellow stickies on the top of a standard 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper, indicating that even if this space was just one big ad it is too much and could be impacted by the algorithm change.

Cutts said, following the hangout, “I’ll try to review it to make sure I didn’t say anything too wrong. If things look good, we might be able to post the recording.” So, you may get to watch that in the near future.

The new update goes after a specific element of what many took to be an issue related to thePanda update (which, by the way a data refresh on that was confirmed this week).

One of Google’s “questions that one could use to assess the ‘quality of a page or an article,” for example, was: “Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?”

So, excessive or big ads at the top, may still get you in search visibility hot water. And speaking of that, SearchMetrics, which within the industry is well-known for providing data on losers and winners (in terms of search visibility) from the Panda update and other Google updates, has provided us with a top losers list from the page layout algorithm change. Here’s that list:

Some interesting names on that list, no? Facebook. Twitter. Yahoo. Amazon. MySpace. LinkedIn. YouTube. Aol. Sprinkle in the porn sites on the list, and it’s quite an interesting mix. I don’t associate sites like Twitter or Facebook with having too much non-content above the fold, so it’s very interesting that such sites would appear on the list.

Granted, this is just the analysis of one firm, so take it with a grain of salt. For that matter, Google makes algorithm tweaks every day, so it’s also possible sites were impacted by other changes.

Twitter and Facebook are particularly interesting entries, considering Google’s “Search Plus Your World” which gives greater prominence to Google+ content. Twitter, of course, was complaining about Twitter results not ranking better.

Notice that EzineArticlces – a past victim of Panda, which still to this day has quite a few ads above the fold, isn’t on the list. Here’s a look at the top of one of their article pages.

There are 11 ads (Google ads, actually) that are visible just on this part of the page. But the article isn’t too hard to find, so I guess it’s OK.

“If you take a look at the loser list, then you see some losers who used lots of Adsense. Interesting is that ezinearticles.com didn’t lose this time,” a SearchMetrics spokesperson tells WebProNews.

source form: webpronews

Users are getting the same email that other Gmail users have been receiving throughout the past week. Admins are getting a different email, however. Here’s what it says:

Dear Google Apps administrator for YourSiteHere.com,

We’re getting rid of over 60 different privacy policies across Google and replacing them with one that’s a lot shorter and easier to read. Our new policy covers multiple products and features, reflecting our desire to create one beautifully simple and intuitive experience for your users across Google products.

As always, Google will maintain your data in strict compliance with the confidentiality and security obligations provided to your domain.

If you permit your users to access optional additional Google services for your domain, your users may separately receive notifications communicating the new Privacy Policy. You can visit your Google Apps control panel at any time if you’d like to review the additional services accessible to your users.

We’re excited about the improvements we are making across our products and appreciate your support. You can view the new privacy policy at http://www.google.com/policies. These changes will take effect on March 1, 2012.

source form: webpronews

ExtremeTech points to some testing of a new “new tab” page and home page, providing the following screen cap:

This will look familiar to Chrome users.

The new home page is similar but goes a bit further, with a chat section and a “recently shared” section.

In an update, Extreme Tech notes that the new tab page was removed from the Nightly builds, and that it will likely appear in Firefox 13.

Firefox’s home page has really not changed much over the years, so a more Chrome-like experience would really symbolize the evolution of the browser.

Chrome reportedly overtook Firefox in users last month.

Google has really pushed the boundaries in the browser space, despite being the newer kid on the block. Don’t forget that Mozilla basically owes Google for Firefox’s continued existence.Google considers them a partner, not a competitor.

source form: webpronews

The hangout consisted of a group of Google+ power users sitting in a room discussing the service. According to tech writer Mike Elgan, Horowitz “hinted that upcoming announcements about G+ user growth will shock everybody.”

GlobalWebIndex put out data last week indicating that Google+ hit 150 million active users. Some have shown some skepticism around the data. As my colleague Josh Wolford noted, several things have happened with Google+ that could explain the increase in users: YouTube got more integrated with Google+. Pages for brands and celebrities were launched. Google+ signups were built into Android Ice Cream Sandwich (which is on the Galaxy Nexus).

They are advertising Google+ on TV too:

Tom Anderson (you know, Tom from MySpace), who uses Google+ pretty regularly, called the 150 million number “a bit silly.” In a Google+ update, he says:

I can tell you from experience with large scale audiences (over @ MySpace) that it’s nowhere near that number in terms of “activity” defined by any normal definition of “active” (sometimes companies try to say an “active” user is one that logged in once within a month, sometimes once a day, etc). Whatever the actual number is, it doesn’t really matter because Google has a history of “winning” and here’s how they do it: speed, or, you might want to call it efficiency.

Elgan points to a new post from Paul Allen, who regularly puts out estimates about Google+ user growth. According to him, Google+ has passed 62 million users, and is adding 625,000 new users per day. He predicts 400 million users by the end of 2012.

That would be about half of what Facebook has at this point, which would be incredibly impressive for a year and a half of existence. That would indeed, be “shocking”.

He shares this growth chart:

The number of active users isn’t really the important thing. If they have Google+ accounts, that means they have Google accounts, and that’s really what it’s all about. It doesn’t matter if they’re sharing updates with Circles or “hanging out”. It means Google has them as user with a profile that they can push access to all of their other products to.

source form: webpronews

Sean Collins, who was a famous surfer and the founder of the site Surfline.com, passed away in an Orange County hospital, after suffering a heart attack while playing Tennis.

Surfline actually started as a phone hotline in the mid-eighties, that surfers could call to hear surf reports. When the Internet got big in the 90s, Collins turned Surfline into a website at Surfline.com, after running it as a fax service for a while. Daily Pilot ran an interesting profile of him earlier this year, talking a bit about the site’s origins. It says:

At the 1995 U.S. Open of Surfing, they posted still images taken from video because streaming video was not yet available.

By the 1996 U.S. Open, Collins spent the $10,000 for their first surf cam and presented the first live surfing webcast in history. Now, Surfline has 150 surf cams around the world.

While his backround in forecasting and meteorology (apparently mostly self-taught), was his claim to entrepeneurial fame, his surfing won him plenty of acclaim as well. He was inducted into the Surfers Hall of Fame in 2008.

Surfline.com has a slideshow-style presentation up honoring Collins’ life.

Our condolences to Collins’ friends and family.

source form: webpronews

Since this morning the internet has been abuzz with backlash against Ocean Marketing. The story broke just after midnight with a post on Penny Arcade that contained an email exchange between a customer named Dave and a representative of Ocean Marketing named Paul Christoforo. Dave had apparently ordered two PlayStation 3 controllers from the company, and was complaining to Christofolo that he had not received sufficient communication from the company regarding his order status. What follows is an increasingly childish and vitriolic exchange, wherein the Ocean Marketing representative breaks pretty much every known rule of good public relations.

The Penny Arcade post was picked up in short order by Reddit and Twitter, and as the day has gone on it has ballooned into an enormous scandal. Here are some of the early Twitter reactons:

Reactions like this have continued throughout the day, and drawn the attention of some fairly well-known Twitter users:

Throughout all this, Ocean Marketing’s one attempt at damage control was to change their Twitter account. The original account, @oceanmarketting, was abandoned (and re-registered almost immediately) partway through the day, though the Twitter link on the company’s website still leads to it. Meanwhile Paul Christoforo took up residence in a second account, @oceanstratagy. Neither the attempted subterfuge nor Mr. Christoforo’s terrible spelling skills went unnoticed, as users immediately found the second account, which has not been updated since this morning.

Then, just a short while ago, the whole situation took a major left turn. MacHeist, purveyors of popular software bundles for Mac computers, tweeted the following:

Given MacHeist’s popularity and solid reputation, Twitter responded with a collective gasp of disbelief. Most who responded felt that MacHeist was making some sort of joke, though the company remained quiet in response to repeated requests for clarification. Meanwhile, Eli Schwartz, who apparently works for N-Control, the company that makes the controller that was at the heart of the original email exchange, has been doing damage control for over an hour via his Twitter account. He has assured people that all preorders will be honored and that N-Control no longer employs Ocean Marketing. In response to MacHeist’s tweet, he had the following to say:

Finally breaking its silence, MacHeist replied, apparently admitting to having played a bit of a joke:

So despite the moment of panic among MacHeist fans, it appears that this debacle is the real deal. And so, once again, Twitter has proven why being a jerk to paying customers in a world of social media is a spectacularly bad idea.

source form: webpronews