The Official Google blog was temporarily unavailable yesterday because Google had accidentally deleted their own blog!

Google has admitted this mistake.

Update: We’ve determined the cause of tonight’s outage. The blog was mistakenly deleted by us (d’oh!) which allowed the blog address to be temporarily claimed by another user. This was not a hack, and nobody guessed our password. Our bad.

Then a blogger tried registering a new blog with it and it worked and posted the following message

Google, fix your blog pleeasssee! <3

Just over a week ago I started experimenting with paid advertisements using BlogAds to promote two of my blogs; Sabahan.com and OffbeatEnough.com.

I purchased two ads at LiewCF.com and Kahsoon.com and paid $20 and $50 respectively for a week of exposure on their adstrips. The price was reasonable enough considering each of these blogs is getting an average of 4K and 15K daily visitors respectively (and even higher in page impressions).

The final click thru rates are 0.082% for LiewCF.com and 2.241% for Kahsoon.com. Such a big different and one of them is quite disappointing. But I think I know what causing the low CTR which I’ll write more about this in my next post.

For those who are using Internet Explorer 5 and 6, now you can add tab browsing ability into your browser using the latest Yahoo toolbar.

In adding the feature to version 6.3 of the IE toolbar, Yahoo hopes to attract IE 5 and 6 users before Microsoft ships the final version of IE7.

Yahoo has also recently released a button that can be added to your IE or Firefox toolbar to take you directly to Yahoo’s del.icio.us service.

For my purpose though, I am using the Firefox del.icio.us extension which is available here.

Here’s a trick if you want a sneak peak at Google’s new interface.

1. Go to google.com (or whatever Google server you use such as Google.com.my)
2. Enter the following Java script into your address bar. It has to be in one single line

   javascript:alert(document.cookie="PREF=ID=fb7740f107311e46:
TM=1142683332:LM=1142683332:S=fNSw6ljXTzvL3dWu;path=/;domain=.google.com")

3. Press enter. Ignore the popup message
4. Perform a search. You should see how the new interface on the result page.

Click to view larger image.

What do you think?

[via threadwatch.org]

If you are a computer buff you might find the dual processor vs dual core article an interesting read.

Dual core processors setup has been gathering momentum with the introduction of such processors by Intel and AMD. But you may be wondering which setup is more beneficial, multiple processors or a dual processor and what are the differences between them.

This article will attempt to answer your question. From the article:

I wrote about the blazing fast XPS 600 limited edition Dell PC with a $10,000 price tag.

Apparently it has sold out recently even though the monster rig has lost a bit of its ultimate status due to now wide availably of NVIDIA’s quad-SLI technology and the 5.46 GHz over-clocked machine displayed at CeBIT.

From the article:

Whether Dell plans to make a second offering of XPS 600 limited edition PCs remains unknown. What impact Dell’s acquisition of Alienware will have upon Dell’s interest in ultra-premium PC gaming is also open to speculation, though if the XPS Renegade is a true success, at least in limited quantities, we may begin to see equivalent or better entries coming soon from many manufacturers.

I wrote about Adsense Black List a few days ago. Since then, this service has been attracting attention, good and bad. But reading the following post has made me question more about the integrity of this service and the real benefit it brings, if any, by filtering the highest paying ads on your site even though they appear to have low cost per click.

A post over at SERoundTable points out a blog entry named Adsense Blacklist which shows some history about the person who created the list. From the post:

There’s an interesting article from Newsweek about what’s hot in Web 2.0 universe. The list includes Digg, a techie news site that asks its users to be editors, Plum – an online tool that let you grab information from any available source and several others.

From the article:

Deciphering the exact meaning of the phrase Web 2.0 is a popular parlor game in Silicon Valley. The expression can stand for many things—the kind of start-up that forges new connections among Web users, lets them share their tastes in music and video or simply exploits their creativity and participation in new ways.

A few days ago I wrote about one guy who has made a million in three months from Adsense.

That guy was Markus Frind the owner of the free dating site PlentyOfFish.com who has been making $10,000 a day from Adsense. Markus had agreed to be interviewed by Andrew Johnson, the owner of The Web Publishing blog.

Andrew writes:

You appear to be an advocate of simple, quick loading designs. Do you think that there are any other elements of web site development that developers are looking at wrong and may be counter-productive to their success?