Some fun links

January 13, 2009 in Uncategorized | No comments

I caught up on some of my non-search feed reading this weekend. Normally I’d drop some of these links in my Twitter stream, but I ended up with a ton of links. So I thought I’d drop them here.

In case you missed it, Google’s webmaster console launched a new Webmaster Tools API a few weeks ago. A few days after that, they announced that Google’s Webmaster Tools are now available in 40 languages. I think every webmaster should be using this free service at this point.

Mac vs. PC is a really entertaining video:

It’s amazing that a small production can do match moves (tracking camera motion from video, then inserting virtual objects) so well. At this rate, it feels like we might not even need actors in a decade or two. ;)

Google had a Festivus pole over the holidays and I missed it?

Mmm, Girl Scout cookies. Learn how to make home-made Girl Scout cookies.

Seth Godin hits marketers over the head with his obvious stick in an excellent post:

If your ads work, if you can measure them and they return more profit than they cost, why not keep buying them until they stop working?

And if they don’t work, why are you running them?

The time-tested response is that you’re not sure, that ads are risky, that you can’t tell. …

Digital ads are different (or they should be). You should know cost per click and revenue per click and be able to make a smart guess about lifetime value of a click. And if that’s positive, buy, buy, buy.

And if you don’t know those things, why are you buying digital ads?

Jacob Gube did a great post about 10 ways to improve your website’s performance.

I love this video where a projector shows objects falling down a whiteboard and reacting to things on the whiteboard.

Michael Zalewski on Google’s security team had a blog post about Google’s new Browser Security Handbook. The stuff about browser security mechanisms is pretty interesting.

Darren Rowse discusses the 21 things all new camera owners should know.

Reto Meier had a good post about programming for Android. It made me hit Amazon to order his Android programming book. While I was there, I picked up Erica Sadun’s book about programming the iPhone. I kind of want to make a movie where the two books fight with each other.

If you want to convert your blog to a different format, the Google Blog Converters project can help. It looks like it can convert back and forth between Blogger, WordPress, MovableType, and LiveJournal. I like that you can use this code to move your data out of (or into!) Blogger, which holds with the “not trapping users’ data” philosophy that Google has.