Creating an automatic news sitemap for a TypePad blog

Google News is one of the most popular news sources on the internet. It is a very convenient way to obtain information about, practically anything which happened in the World. The news is submitted by Google News Publishers, which are either websites like The Guardian is, or simple blog-like websites, just like Devoracles is.
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People annoyed by Google News

Recent modifications at Google News in many users’ mind is rather an annoyance than an improvement. Google fails to communicate appropriately which only increases the conflict between the Search Giant and its users.
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EPA content on Google Hosted News and more ads

The Google News Team has announced yesterday that 8 news agencies will join the Google Hosted news partners.
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Google: What would you like to see today?

Remember that Microsoft slogan, “Where do you want to go today” ? It was the beginning of a new era when that slogan popped up for the first time on your Windows. Now Google AdSense arrives in a new state.
Advolution has begun.
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Gmail has issues again

There is a service outage affecting “a small subset of [Gmail] users” as Google says. Interestingly, there are quite a lot of service outages nowadays at Google’s end. Maybe modifying how the engineers are distributed over the offices wasn’t a too good idea, or maybe the chairmen are getting too many bonuses.

First, during February Gmail has several outages, which are traced back to the back end software which should improve the performance of the service. The software should redirect users to data centers which are not under maintenance when they try to access a data center which is under maintenance. Sounds cool? It is, but in February the software revealed the googlers’ a latent bug which practically overloaded the data centers the users were redirected to.

Then early March, Google Calendar goes down. Since this is a service with less interest, Google fails to communicate what was the issue.

Then yesterday, YouTube which is a Google service, announces that they practically ban UK based users from viewing premium content. Why? Because they can’t arrive on agreement with an organization which represents over 60,000 performers in the UK. The organization asks for too much money, YouTube don’t want to pay that sum thus it blocks the UK users. Much easier than paying.

Finally, and this affects only Devoracles and our readers, Google fails to communicate now for 3 days why our news-related articles stopped being added in Google News.

Even I am one of the biggest Google fans, when somebody mentions “Google” nowadays, the “headache” word comes in my mind. I miss those times when I respected the company, but, I can’t complain: the services which I pay for are working well. Too bad there’s no Google service I pay for at the moment.

by Gary Jordano
The article expresses my own thoughts and not my employer’s.

UK based YouTube users blocked

As per an announcement made by Patrick Walker, Director of Video Partnerships at YouTube (Google Inc.), UK based users will be unable to watch certain music videos because YouTube can’t arrive to an agreement with Performing Rights Society for Music (PRS for Music).
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Week in a review: Big brands, big money

Quite interesting week. At the beginning of the week we learned from Lisa Respers a bit about the infamous rapper, 50 Cent. If you start thinking about girls dancing on the table or his brand new Escalade, you are wrong. This CNN article shed some light on on the rapper’s gaming habits. No, he doesn’t play Half Life nor World of Warcraft. He plays games like “Tetris”, “Pac-Man” and all-time favorite “Super Mario Brothers.”

The same day a CNET article by Dawn Kawamoto shed some light on Google’s finances. But this time not on its server costs or how much did they spent on the food for their employees. It’s a much interesting subject: the article covers how much the execs of Google got in bonuses. I tell you in advance that the total sum is a ten figure number. Just as an example, Patrick Pichette received a $1.24 million bonus for his five months of work. I’m not jealous, but am sure I could do one-two things with that cold cash. Head on to CNET to read the full article.

The next day Microsoft announces in a press release the availability of two new games, sorry, applications for Facebook and MySpace: “Hexic” and “Chess”. I could have swear that these were games once. Oh, sorry. My bad: these are applications for the two social networks which can be used for playing. Or rather games which were transformed in applications to let people play with each other on the social networks. What a chaos.

Still 4th of March, AP reports that Facebook revamps its homepage. This wouldn’t be that interesting, but the infamous social networking service probably will take a cue from Twitter, which IS interesting. Let me clarify: if I start to produce light bulbs and I say that I invented the light bulb, I’m an impostor. But if am big and strong and I say I invented the Troy Square cooling solution, that’s OK.

By the way, the Troy Square cooling solution is an Asus invention. If we’re already at Asus and if you are a gamer, you will love this: Asus has put together a PC designed specifically for gamers. It’s equipped with an Intel Core i7 processor, three-channel DDR3 memory and a GeForce GTX285 graphics card. If that wouldn’t be enough or you miss the topping cherry from the above composition, it also has a SupremeFX X-Fi Audio Card. The bonus is an inbuilt fingerprint scanner. The system is called ASUS ROG CG6190, you should see it on the left.

One of the most shocking and terrible news of the week was that two Windows 7 testers found a new feature in the non-public build of the beta OS. My bad again. While that would be a news alone, this is about something else. So, there’s a new feature in Windows 7 which affects almost the whole population of the Earth: Internet Explorer 8 can be removed altogether from the OS! Head to AP to read the whole story.

Same day I’ve learned from a Reuters story that sending SMS in Germany can be extremely expensive and the bill can be even $2,300. Sounds weird? Well, if you know the whole story it turns out that it’s not that weird at all, because the sum is a fine “issued” for a man by the German court because the he sent a quite antisemitic message to his friend who’s home was incidentally searched by the police. Read the whole story, it’s interesting.

Google fights excessive power usage with video contest

Climate Savers Computing Initiative (CSCI) in partnership with Google has launched the Power Down for the Planet video contest.

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Exclusive training on ApacheCon Europe 2009

Amsterdam, The Netherlands — ApacheCon Europe, the official user conference of The Apache Software Foundation, has unveiled the program for two days of special training sessions that will be available before the main conference begins.
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Google – Earthquake search

A new, quite interesting Google feature was presented by Mike Danylchuk in a blog post made on the Official Google blog: Google Earthquake Reports. The information about the recent earthquakes can be accessed simply by entering in the search-box the “earthquakes” word.
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