Google Elmer Fudd

Google in Elmer Fudd language:



They also have Klingon and Pig Latin.

Cadie

Cadie is Google's new AI. It loves Pandas as it states on its blog.

It also has a YouTube video:



Google is really outdoing itself with the April Fools stuff this year.

UPDATE - Cadie was deactivated on the evening of April 1st. Boo hiss!

Will Google's Purity Pay Off?

Article on how Google is going to make money from Dec. 2007. This was back when Google was a young upstart company, before "Google" was a verb, and when geeks used to tell others about this great new search engine they had found.

How times have changed...

Google

Rich Googler Marissa Mayer gets a article about her obsessive cooking habits.

Small woman giving birth to a relatively large baby.

Why Google buys companies. Why didn't they buy us? Oh right, our CEO insulted them.

Random Links from Yesterday

The Mac ads apparently are correct in many ways about how Mac users differ from PC users. Engadget analyzes this article.

Article on the Funded, the new website.

Google TV sucks ass.

Britney Spears photoshopped magazine cover.

NY Times trying to offload About.com for a small profit.

EBay changing fee structures again. With the prices like they are I don't know why anyone would use eBay when you have Craigslist for free.

Tidbits

WalMart takes a bunch of magazines out of its stores.

Google video on the secret history of silicon valley:

Some tidbits for Monday

Google is launching something called "knols" which are basically a cross between Mahalo, Wikipedia and Squidoo. TechCrunch has some good thoughts on this idea.

From Valleywag comes Google CEO Eric Schmidts latest extramarital relationship.

Philip Kaplan, founder of AdBrite, is apparently the same Pud that everyone loved to hate back in the last bubble when he was doing Fucked Company. Good for him. AdBrite seems like a pretty solid service.

Is the Wii shortage bad planning on Nintendo's part or a smart scheme to build up buzz? While the former may seem incredibly stupid I believe it to be the case, as people are buying other gaming systems when they can't get a Wii.

Google Adsense Outage?

A bunch of my domains that run AdSense are showing up with:

Sorry, there are no results for your search. Search again

I don't know if there is a problem with the keywords, or if there is an outage or what. A bunch of my other domains are working fine. It seems to be about half of them that are not working.

Does anyone know what is going on? I emailed Google this morning but no response.

Busy at work... Here are some snippets

Fat kid avoids ridicule by swimming with his shirt on, from the ONN:


Fat Kid Successfully Avoids Ridicule By Swimming With Shirt On

Mouse vs Elephant, from MythBusters:

Mouse v elephant
Uploaded by krupis

Breaking news: Mark Zuckerberg is still a smug little shit.

Video about the writer's strike:



Classmates.com goes public, makes no money and has no users.

The long awaited gDrive may finally see the light of day.

Fake Steve Jobs book comes out and gets good reviews from the WSJ.

Wednesday Round-up

Rupert might actually make the WSJ's content available for free! Joy! Oh wait... I hate reading papers online. Hurts my eyes and my brain. So... meh, I guess.

What the Rackspace transformer explosion might look like, via Valleywag.

Robert Scoble's comments on the gPhone.

Something about Facebook and OpenSocial. I really don't even read most of this stuff.

Apparently Internet advertising is huge and growing. Why can't I see some of those dollars? Please...

Google is trying to get people to develop software for it's new phone... But they haven't given out any phones or a single line of code yet. I don't even know that the phones exist. So you people have fun with that. Actually a few people do have the code or the phone or whatever it is.

Apparently Friendster could have bought Facebook back when they were starting out. Unfortunately for them they did not. However once Facebook crashes and burns they will be happy that they did not.

Random Stuff for Tuesday

real medical condition. I wasn't sure about the Alien Hand thing but sure enough, it is real as well.

A new site that sets you up on Crazy Blind Dates or something.

Barry Diller on CNBC explaining why he is spinning off everything, when he has been saying for years that he could get some sort of synergy out of it.

Some commentary on the writers strike.

Kill Buljo. A Kill Bill rip off.

Kick Scott Adam in the balls in Second Life. Yay. Second Life is sooo useful.





Open Social hacked within minutes of launch.

A different opinion on Apple. He makes some good points but I don't see it happening.

Social networks and such

Dave Winer on the MySpace / Facebook / Google brawl. I believe my opinions of Facebook have been made abundantly clear. Also - Facebook apparently has not been briefed on OpenSocial.

A chart of how to tell how much your web site sucks. Pretty accurate in my opinion.

Valleywag does a Web 2.0 for idiots primer.

And an update on the breaking Jakob Lodwick story... He responded to my response to his post with a "LOL." I'm not sure exactly what he was laughing at but... um... OK. Thank you, come again.

And Valleywag posts their opinion of the same interview I posted this morning. Shall we take bets on how long it takes him to reply to that? I have seen him leave comments on Valleywag before...

However I posted my name, which I have a Google ego alert set up for, in one of my other random blogs and I have not received notification yet. Interesting...

Evil Characters from South Park (and Facebook)

Imaginary evil characters on South Park:



Self-help books that will never sell, from Radar.

How to kill yourself in a totally awesome way.

Interview with David Lynch about Twin Peaks. Lynch is apparently some sort of boy scout with a really twisted imagination and I love it! The next movie I am going to watch is Inland Empire. Without cows there would be no cheese in the Inland Empire.

The Microsoft Facebook deal in 15 seconds or less. A reasonable person's view on this matter. And a rather non-committal viewpoint.

Google was named by a typo. By someone who know works at Microsoft.

Best. Headline. Ever: Pit Bulls Kill Miniature Horse Donated To Cancer-Stricken Child

The Hills is staged? Really? (I've never seen it, nor do I have plans to)

NPR's Daily News Quiz.

Valleywag lists some websites that used to be funny or useful but are no longer. The Onion is #1 on the list.

Financial Tips for those of us who don't reportedly own 30% of Facebook

Some common-sense financial tips, from theStreet.com.

Some thoughts on the Microsoft Facebook deal that is making huge waves today:

• Did Zuckerberg not want this deal?
  
• Microsoft took a 1-2% stake in Facebook for $240 million... Some tidbits of info about this.
• What exactly does a poke mean? Not being a regular Facebook user I am not exactly sure.
• Facebook downgrades its growth rate.
• If Zuckerberg does, in fact, own 30% of Facebook as has been reported, on paper he is now worth $5 billion. That must feel nice, but I can say from experience, it's horrible when you are worth a lot of money on paper and you don't cash out and end up with nothing. See an older post of mine for more details on this.
• I still hold by my belief that Facebook is going to crash when and burn when they are unable to turn their large user base into a large money base. While Apple reported such a good quarter last week, I think the stock is pretty much done with it's run. It's been down for the last two days. Want to hear something that will make you sick? I bought AAPL at $18 and sold it at $30 a few years back. Makes me sick to think about it, but not as sick as the above mentioned paper loss of 99% of my net worth.
• All of the above that is not from me is from Valleywag.
• And just in - Facebook is getting another $500 million from two hedge funds, bringing their take over the last two days to a hefty $750 million!
• And something about Facebook's value and growth... As a note, Facebook's users are growing at 2% a week - not active users, registered users. And as far as I know the revenue growth is pretty much non-existent.
• Some guy from Intel agrees with me.

In non-Facebook news:

• Google is once again being a little bit evil. Only like 2% evil or so but still...
• Sergey Brin tries to pass off the Facebook mess as something positive for Google. I don't think its positive for anyone except Mark Zuckerberg and the other early investors.
• Montage of Mark Cuban's all-too-brief stint on dancing with the stars.
  

Yahoo 360?

• Jerry Yang shuts down Yahoo 360 and the world lets out a collective "meh."
• Translation of Yangs latest conference.
  
• Google finally does something about all of those horrible link farm sites that clog up its results. But they lower most blogs in the process. And another blog on the same.
  
• Some ibanker on "nanny arbitrage," which is where a spouse makes more money than they pay the nanny, and on how enforcing labor laws and eliminating the illegal, off-the-books, underpaid majority of nannies would have a negative impact on the legal NY labor market. From Gawker.
• iTunes removes a video starring a nude Natalie Portman. No one is sure why.
  
• Monetize your thirst with Facefuel. Heh.
• NY Times online meta-data.
• MySpace is still the social networking leader, although others are catching up.
• Porn may save Google $1 billion? I'm not sure how but interesting anyway. Apparently has something to do with the 2257 laws.
  
• Anna Nicole Smith tape. A brief exception to my ban of celebrity gossip.
• Mark Cuban finally gets the boot on the dancing show he is on. Video from Valleywag.
• Sounds like Microsoft and Facebook are finally close to closing a deal.
  
• Facebook is going to be rolling out "SocialAds" soon which I assume they are hoping will finally make them some money from all these eyeballs they have.
  
  

YouTube

Is it just me or did YouTube take like everything down last night? About 75% of the videos I try to look at are no longer available. I knew this was going to happen and if Google keeps taking stuff down like this some other video site will rapidly overtake YouTube. Big corporations and grass roots stuff tends not to mix too well.

Here is one video that is still up:

Kids Start Becoming Gamers at Age 6

I am not a gamer so I don't really understand all the fuss. But apparently young kids are turning into serious gamers. From Advertising Age.

Seth Godin on using Wikipedia for homework. He thinks its a good idea, as do I, a lot of other people apparently do not.

Debbie Harry is 62 years old? Other stuff in the article as well.

A list of 66 celebrities that blog. Just because we have nothing better to do.

Zuckerberg is a smug little asshole as usual.

Man given vodka after he drank antifreeze or something. Apparently he needed it for medical purposes.

Man arrested for standing on a sidewalk in Time Square.

Apparently eBay's acquisition of Skype contributed quite a bit to the not so good numbers eBay reported last night.

Google's ridiculous 411 idea is apparently being copied/rivaled by Microsoft. Two companies with huge amounts of money now battling it out over the same stupid idea.

Some crappy web apps that everyone uses and some better replacements that not too many people use. I haven't used any of the replacements so I have nothing to say about them, other than that I dislike Vimeo for personal reasons.

More from Friday

Google is apparently getting kind of desperate to get it's radio advertising program, Google Audio, adopted. They are now offering $2,000 free to anyone who spends $1,000. Tech Crunch reports.

This is but the latest piece of evidence that, while Google may be golden in online advertising, its forays into off-line advertising have yet to catch on. Google must be having a real hard time selling those radio ads to have to resort to such a blatant attempt to buy market share. It’s not the first time it’s tried such tactics either. Last year, in an effort to jumpstart Google Checkout, for instance, Google paid $10 for every $30 in sales that merchants directed through its PayPal competitor. I’m not sure how well that went. But last time I checked, PayPal was still around.

Just because Google has cash to burn doesn’t mean it should use that cash to try to buy market share. If it truly has a better way of buying and selling radio ads, advertisers and radio stations will quickly figure that out on their own. It is not a good sign when Google has to resort to paying customers to try out a new product.

And for some bizarre reason Google is placing ads for rehab centers and drug addiction treatment on this blog. There is only one mention of drugs, which is yesterdays post about Count Bismarck's OD. So that is odd.

My wife just called me having seen a commercial for a drug for restless leg syndrome, that mentioned side effects including the urge to gamble or have sex. So I looked it up and there it is. At least it doesn't make your arms turn purple and fall off, or cause instant death like some other medications we see advertised.

And, from Valleywag, Jason Calacanis finally says something that makes sense!

An interesting chart from the WSJ about P/E and dividend yields.

Wednesday Round-up

An article on rehab, Malibu style.

Don't try to time the market. It almost never works.

Article on Yahoo, Google and paid search results. From Valleywag.

And an article on how Google screwed people over when buying Urchin, which its analytic software is baded on.

Some other people's opinions of Facebook "Platform" and apps.

Ten questions for the guy who does the PostSecret.com web site. From Guy Kawasaki.

Jeff Jensen's latest Lost article for EW.

And I leave you with a long, nonsensical interview with Bob Dylan for Playboy, from this list of his top ten most nonsensical interviews. The Playboy one is #1.

Tuesday Morning Round-Up

100 Ice Breakers to avoid (from Radar)
Top Ten Worst 80s Cartoon Adaptations (from Cracked)
Stills from the Simpsons and the movies they are from

Apparently Friendster is still big in China... I didn't even know it was still around. MySpace and Facebook should really be paying royalties to Friendster or whoever did that first.

This is possibly the stupidest idea I have ever heard of. I thought the credit crunch was supposed to hamper the private equity companies to the point where they don't have millions to throw at stupid ideas:


This, on the other hand, seems like a good idea, if Google hadn't bought it. And I also heard that the "phone number for life" was really only a "phone number until they decide to change it on you or the company goes out of business or gets sold." But it's a good idea.

And I've seen this before, and maybe even posted it here, but it is still very funny: