Google Stuff....

So lots is going on in Google, as usual. Its kind of funny to me how much I dont really care to pay attention to all of these changes, but working here I really cant help it.

Here are a few interesting articles and blogs about recent activities.

Google China looses one of its main men.

Gmail went out for quite a while the other day, causing headaches to people all over the internet.

This is a great rebuttle on an article posted on The Onion, regarding a fake account of Neil Armstrong claiming that the moon landing was faked.
Turns out that a newspaper from India actually printed the article, not realizing that it was a fake article. This was hilarious because I actually read the article yesterday and was completely confused by it, I cant believe that this newspaper would print something so absurd without checking into it.

All geeks should find this interesting, or at least hilarious.

LARPS have made it into the nightclub industry.

Having fun with my new favorite site
www.PopURLS.com
Lots of fun information in content, video, and photo form. This site has a great little hub started compiling of the interesting articles and posts from all of the other interesting sites. Wow... what an idea... its a website featuring other websites?! How novel... because you know that they are making bank off of it. They dont even really have much to do... I mean sure they could do reviews and articles about the top new, which is already being posted 40 milliong other times, so why not just point everyone in the direction of those other articles and make money in the mean time.
Considering starting one of those "free vector art" sites..., kind of along the same deal as brusheezy, vecteezy, or vectorjungle.
I mean, between the 3-4 of us, and adding some extra adspace, we should be able to turn all of our blogging into some actual cash... we could set up a donate page and seek out advertisers...
Its a thought, I mean heck, with everyone else making tons of money doing iphone apps and other ridiculous websites... I think that the vector design is the best route. We would actually be able to provide our own artwork on there as well, gaining exposure personally as well as using the basic vector packs that are already on all of the other pages.
Just a thought.

Top 50 Sites! Or at least a few of them.

Wow, Top 50 List is out and it is an interesting one....

Found an alternative to Pandora with last.fm
Etsy made the top list, which I know a lot of people I went to school with will appreciate. Even the Gamers love this stuff.
Speaking of games, a great site is OMGPop

I will post more later..
Something interesting was that CraigLook made the list. While craigslist was bashed for having lame graphics. Which actually is something that I admire about craigslist. I think that the simplicity of craigslist actually makes it less intimidating than other sites, and therefor a great tool for an older crowd who are serious about looking for work or to trade, without trying to get all computer savvy.

Google sued

Yahoo and Bing sue Google.

This is going to be interesting. I think that the company buzz around this office was originally that we shouldnt really have any issues with the merger between Yahoo and Bing. But it already seems like they are going to be pulling out the big guns in order to even the playing field. I dont know, with both parties tackling Google, we could essentially have a significant impact. Think about it. What does Yahoo and Bing have to offer individually?

Yahoo still has its name.. No doubt that Yahoo has usually trailed far behind Google, but having Microsoft backing it now can really set it apart.
The fact that Microsoft is so hell bent on being the best at everything else it does, I can only imagine that the Search engine BING will soon catch up to Yahoo and gain notoriety based on Microsoft alone.

Still, BING is relatively unknown, except for most of the computer techy world. Combining the name of Microsoft and the household name of Yahoo, they might actually make a huge dent in the Search World.

We will see how it goes, for now we might need to get in touch with Bing. Does anyone know if they are going to try and favor one domain over the other. I can imagine that Bing would want to push its name more than Yahoos, considering that they are the big investor in the merger. But since the merger is going to be reevaluated in a few years, I wonder how Yahoo is going to be able to bounce back, if they ever decided to leave the marriage.

SEO

Im a cheese, totally into the whole SEO deal lately. metatags and all that crap. I really wish I had enough of an attention span to actually do all of the coding. I seriously cant stand sitting here typing in code, trying to get the bugs all worked out. Ugh. The graphics are fun, but it still gets hard for me to sit in front of the computer and render them. I get pretty annoyed when I have to change the anchor points on vectors. Haha. Ive been the delegated "adobe illustrator" on the team... Probably only because I messed around with it in school, but I know Sam would be just as good with it if he used it more. Oh well, at least I have one thing that Im pretty good at.

Check out this blog... some good info...

District 9 and looking forward to 9 (The movie)

9

Other Fun Sites
BlackBook Stencils
Cardboard Robot

Working on developing a quick website layout for my friend Justin in Chicago. He has a screen printing company called 420 Church Street.

There are some interesting phenomenon starting up on the social networks... I personally was a member of a CCS student art challenge blog. Sadly, it fell to the wayside once we all seemed to get enveloped in career ambitions. I think that these types of sites are necessary to challenge yourself and see what other people create when given the same criteria... Similar to art class homework. Haha.
Back to the main point. CNN.com did a pretty interesting piece about these growing trends with interactive art and preformance websites. One in particular is a collaborative remake of Star Wars in 15 minute segments.

Having said that, I think it is necessary to find people whom you can work with directly and feed off of one another. Its really important to have a creative environment that you can thrive in.

My not so weekly update.

So, here we go, yet again, with my rambling about nothing in particular. I think maybe I should start to get some direction with this blog. But I figure that I cant really keep my head interested in one particular thing for too long, so I should probably just be thankful that I actually post on this at all.
So work gets increasingly silly with the addition of yet more bobble head dolls. They are essential to a creative and productive work environment.
I am a little bummed today. I created a pretty B.A. layout and logo for a local furniture company (at least I think they look good), after getting instruction from one of the co-owners, but was completely shot down on the idea from the other owner. It cracks me up how different opinions can be about the functionality of the site being insanely important, where as the look of it is not as important. Oh well, its just sad that we have the opportunity to really provide a great design and make the site work well, but this guy just isnt interested in it. Oh well. Ill get to use the design on another site.

Meh.

Ive got some contract work coming in, which should be nice, considering I am desperate at this point to get my license and plates updated. Im about to be a serious Oregonian! Haha, it only took me a year to get this all changed over.

The new apartment is going good. Though we still have Mars the Boxer living with us. He will be shipped off to Pennsylvania in mid september and I will be extremely glad to get the carpet steam cleaned and dog free.

Anywho, its lunch time. Later...