Google’s long awaited operated system, Chrome OS, was open-sourced today at a big to-do at Google’s HQ in Mountain View. Here’s a video of what Google thinks is a better idea for your computer.
Much has been written about Microsoft’s bribery search engine – Live Search Cashback. I like a deal as much as anyone, but this almost seems ridiculous. Anyways…I’m shopping for a couple of unique items for my car stereo in order to hook up my iPod, and here’s my experience:
1) I typed in the product name I’m looking for “FMMod01″, into the box at the top of this page. Here are the results. Looks like there are some options at a decent price, hopefully.
2) After clicking on Compare Prices, I see the list of merchants. Oh, Crutchfield! Fantastic…love ordering from them, even if it costs a little more. And look at that discount! 50% cashback…score!
3) At this point I’m getting excited, so I click Go To Store and see this:
OK, what!? It went from 50% cashback savings to a whopping 0.0% cashback savings!? I decide to enter an email address, hoping that the savings will switch back as quickly as before, but the next page shows this:
Well that really bites! Two thumbs down for live search cashback – I’ll just stick with Google and evreward.com.
Man…so much you could say about this transaction if it goes down. This has long been the speculation, but Yahoo in the past has scoffed at the idea. At this point however, and given the recent news out of Sunnyvale, I would be surprised if this deal didn’t happen.
Let’s look at some of the assets MS would be acquiring:
Whew…
I’ll try to post more later, but I’d like to hear your thoughts on this deal.
Google just added Streetview for several more cities including my home town of Big-D. I simply love this thing…it’s so compelling. But, all you Dallas folks need to spend the evening ensuring that the Google cams didn’t catch you picking your nose or something like that. 
Here’s a neat shot of my office and my church (well, the south campus).
Next week I’m headed to Las Vegas for PubCon, the year’s most anticipated search engine marketing conference. I’m really getting excited about this, as I haven’t been to a search marketing conference in several years. I’ve also never been to Vegas, so it should be fun to see the city and take lots of pictures. I’m not really a gambler, but I might try my hand at blackjack once or twice if I can round up some loose change.
Me and two co-workers are staying at the New York-New York, which looks really sweet (rollercoaster and everything). Gotta give credit to NMG for investing some money into my team and rewarding our guys for some hard work these last few months. Out of the three of us who are going, I’m the only one who’s ever been to something similar, so I’m really excited for Zach and Brent cause I know they’ll learn a ton.
Look for a post-conference report next week!
I’m an avid ebay shopper, but I just noticed that ebay is using sub-domains for its main categories (left side of homepage). I think this is a new development, and one could assume that ebay is trying to leverage the sub-domain strategy for better organic search rankings. Of course about.com is famous for utilizing sub-domains, and it ranks for everything under the sun.
I’m often asked at work if sub-domains are a good way to optimize a site. I tend to recommend using sub-domains when the content and categorization makes sense, but not so much that the site becomes fragmented and looks unnatural. For instance, ebay has long had sub-domains for motors and express, which makes sense because they are separate from the main ebay shopping site.
It will be interesting to see if this change makes a positive or negative impact on the site’s traffic.
Often times in programming, you need to get a random number, right? Yeah. Maybe you’re building a rotating photo album, or a nifty little Flash movie, or maybe just a random quote script. And sure, advanced languages like PHP have random number functions built-in, to make it easy. But I’ve come across the most feature-rich random number generator out there! I’m telling you…this baby’s got lots of user options, ensuring that you’ll get the most random number possible. Check it out here.
