Cre8tive Flow

Google News was a legitimate contender for “Best Internet News Service With More Than 1 Million Monthly Visitors” in an award presentation by Editor and Publisher.

Should a site like Google News even be considered as one of the best popular news sites.

There are plenty of postives to be said for the Google service. I use it frequently, and I find information that I’d never otherwise have access to.

But…

Google is an aggregator of news. They don’t have people investigating stories, or even writing stories. There are press releases and articles within the news mix which are more marketing and less news.

I’ve loved bookmarklets as a means of adding extra functionality and tools to my browsers ever since I first discovered them some years ago. I even created a few for a portal client a couple of years back. Well, I’ve just created a few more.

The set of Propellernet bookmarklets for SEM/SEO use are a handy set of resources that can save you time (and typing) again and again each day. Go and check them out if SEO is an interest and saving time and energy is a desire.

Last week, Cre8asite Forums moderator Jean Manco introduced us to the word alphabar. She quickly credited the editors of DMOZ as the source where she first heard it used.

Alphabar - the horizontal navigation rulebar across the top of a page which lists the letters of the alphabet as links, and lets you navigate further down on a page, or to other pages for topics that begin with that letter.

Research Buzz added another word to my web lexicon on Friday with a word of the day entry where they introduced the word searchgunk. The example they use of the word in action is illuminating. (Research Buzz is a fun, and fact filled site.)

A few days ago I was freaking out to discover that along with my phone number and address being available in Google, so was a map with directions to my house sitting right next to my phone number.

I wrote to Google to complain. They replied, in part:

“The intent of all of Google’s services from Websearch to Google Groups to
Google News is to organize and provide *publicly* available information.
Due to the vast amount of data that we aggregate (more than 4 billion web
pages, 845 million Usenet messages, and 880 million images) many
individuals become aware for the first time that their personal
information is publicly available via a Google search.”