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New Media News Every Morning

What Google Gains from Google Public DNS

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Google Public DNSIt’s days like these that make me really, really happy that so many Google services are so indirectly monetized. OpenDNS, the world’s most popular DNS service, makes money by hijacking 404 errors to show its own ads. Combined with revenue from filtering services for corporate users, OpenDNS made $20,000 per day on just 7 billion daily queries last year. Today, they handle 20 billion daily queries.

Sure, OpenDNS is a great service that offers lots of features, but DNS hijacking is an ethically questionable practice. Error pages full of ads might occasionally be useful, but they’re one step away from hijacking legitimate pages — for censorship, phishing, blocking competition, whatever nefarious purpose.

Enter Google Public DNS, which follows DNS protocols to the letter: absolutely no hijacking, even for error pages. If you misspell stuff in your address bar, or if the webmaster of your favorite site is a moron, then you get an error page and nothing else. If Google isn’t showing ads through Google Public DNS, then what do they gain from offering this service for free? Three things: [Read more…]

Google Wants Ten Million Servers

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Are you having trouble scaling your new media empire across a few dozen servers? How about scaling it across ten million servers? That’s the scale Google envisions with a new storage and computation system they’re developing for all their global datacenters, appropriately named Spanner.

That should be more than enough to run Skynet. And you thought your hosting setup was complicated.

(Via Rich Miller.)

Google Wave, one step closer to the Google OS? No way, it’s even no Beta.

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On the day that Skype announced a new version, completely with screen sharing cross platform-wide (although the new version was only released for Windows), the Big G went one step further and announced Google Wave.
Jens and Lars Rasmussen, creators of Google Maps, discovered that in our modern era online communication the A and O is but still leaves lots to be desired, so they started a new project based on actual restrictions:

  • Why do we have to live with divides between different types of communication — email versus chat, or conversations versus documents?
  • Could a single communications model span all or most of the systems in use on the web today, in one smooth continuum? How simple could we make it?
  • What if we tried designing a communications system that took advantage of computers’ current abilities, rather than imitating non-electronic forms?

After two years of development, Google Wave was born.

google_wave_snapshots_inbox

What is Google Wave? Let’s not beat around the bush but face things as they _really_ are: Google Wave is the next big thing. It will cook your potatoes, boil your eggs, chop your trees and slice tomatoes for you. Google Wave will become the Rolls Royce of the internet. The whole world wide web and some more agree.

What is Google Wave exactly? [Read more…]

Family Seeks Financial Assistance Through New Media (and Succeeds)

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Social media is all about networking. And for a family who needs all the help they can get, being able to seek out helpful individuals online can sure be a big help. David Armano posted on Logic+Emotion about helping out a family who is a victim of domestic violence, and asked folks to spread the word through various means (“blog this, tweet this, re-tweet this”). Contributions flooded in from all over.

As of this moment, Daniela’s family is staying at our house and we are trying to help her find a one bedroom apartment for her family to live in. With Evelyn, her youngest having Down’s Syndrome and Daniela herself being a Romanian immigrant with very little family support she literally has no one to turn to. Except us (all of us).

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Here’s what we are asking. Right now, Belinda and I are opening our home, but it’s tight as we have no basement. We’ve committed to giving as much as we can spare, diverting funds from other places. I’m asking if you could think about doing the same. Or at the very least, helping get the word out about this. We are looking to raise 5k for Daniela and her family. Enough so that she doesn’t have to worry about a deposit or rent for a while.

To date, contributions via ChipIn amount to more than $8,000, which is about 170% of David’s target of $5,000. While this may not be much, considering today’s cost of living, this would be a good amount to start with.

This is just one example of harnessing new media for viral marketing, or at least virally spreading the word about a cause. However, it may not always turn out to be successful. My analysis of this is that for such an activity to succeed, it would require two things: a catalyst, and good connections. For one, it helps if one is already influential in his field or in online media, to get noticed. If you’re not too influential, you might not get the traction you need to get your cause noticed. Secondly, it helps if you know folks who can effectively get the word out and get people talking.

I got word about the fundraising through Twitter myself. While I don’t follow every link tweeted or re-tweeted, I do click those with intros or messages that interest me.