Google does it again, they gave me graphical happiness!

This change from Google is awesome! I am one of those people who needs to have colors and graphics to make my work day strong! I opened Google to my personalized homepage this morning to find that I could now have the beach right there at my fingertips! And if I feel the need to change that view ( and those who come here regular and see how often I change my template here know this of me) I can change the theme to something that fits my mood! I hope they make many more themes, the choices are great so far, but Google I want more!

The beach is nice, because the view changes with your local time, from night to day 🙂 Is this a cool feature or what? Google never misses a beat.

If anyone at Google is reading this blog, I will happily clean bathrooms for the pleasure of working with your company! <hint, hint>

Google and Real Estate

Now we are talking about one of my all time favorite things in the world – Real Estate. It must be the Russian in me, but to my mind land is the only gold worth having. With land you are always protected (unless it has radiation on it,…well never mind) and you have “money in the bank”. Values of land are driven by consumer demand, but not to the point that one risks losing all they put into the land, so its almost a worry free investment, IMHO.

Now, this morning I see a post in the Seattle Times by Brier Dudley about Google moving into the Real Estate game, and this is the skinny –

Google reached a deal with Trulia, a Real Estate search engine ( love this ) to display their listings along with the listings of Realogy.

This is a topic I can talk about, searching for Real Estate online. I can tell you that I know of a few good Real Estate companies whose online searches are really good, a Santa Cruz, California site – AmberFloodman.com ( A Coldwell Banker Real Estate Website) and ZipRealty.com ( another California based Real Estate Company). I love both of these sites because of the ease of finding the properties I am looking for, and because there are photographs and details on the site as well as contact info, mortgage info and anything else one might need. Both also have a map based search, so if you have a particular zipcode or county you are looking for, the available listings for that area are right at your finger tips. Both websites only need an email for your access to them, with the only emails I have ever gotten being listings in area I am interested in.

The biggest problem right now when someone searches for Real Estate online is the immense amount of crappy sites you have to wade through, and sometimes this even means legitimate real estate company websites! You can spend literally hours going through a ton of websites , registering with them, just to find that their site redirects you to another site or has what I call uncomfortable searching.

Now that Google is going to be handling things for the Real Estate search, its only going to be easier and more fun to look for properties.

Making money with Adsense and your blog

Can it be done? While reading my daily blogs such as Paula Mooney ( trust me, you want to be following her blog closely, she blogs daily and has good information concerning monetizing your blog and doing it well!) I saw she posted about John Chow visiting her, WOW!

Now John Chow is said to be an Internet Mogul, and from the looks of his income from his blog, I would have to say, what ever he does it is definitely working! Enough of this scams for work from home, we need to be reading and re reading what John and others are saying, they are obviously doing it right.

I thank Paula for bring this back to my attention, and John for speaking in a easy to follow manner for us to understand. I also like that in this post of Johns, he shows what he did to obtain the income he has. He suggests that if you are a first time blogger just starting out that you begin with reading his posts part time blogging, full time income.

You can bet I will be spending my day off from school reading all he has to say, as well as keeping Paula’s blog in my Google homepage reader.

My time on Google not the norm of other surfers

I ran across this blog via Scobleizer’s blog article “Big gadget sites don’t link to blogs – with updates”, its a blog called – The Last Podcast . This blog had an interesting post about time we spend online and where. I myself never ever stray from Google, can’t stand MSN, Yahoo, or any of the others for searching. Now, I admit I have had a Yahoo email account since at least 1996, while I was at EKU. And I do like their egroups ( because no one else has made a better alternative yet) but for surfing and all my other Internet activity…. its Google all the way.

I remember the first time I saw Google; in the Library at EKU some time back in 1996 or so. I recall thinking “wow, that is some cool looking search engine”. At that time, for my internet surfing at home, I was still stuck using Lynx ( the text only browser) for surfing the Internet. Do you remember LYNX? (Surprisingly, I found the webpage for an older download from 2004, but I do not know if this still works.)

The chart is surpising to me, 39% of the pie chart is broken up as follows:

11.9% is Myspace ( Does not anyone see how absolutely horrid that site is?) In my opinion, WordPress is the only way to blog socially, but one cant load tons of crude on there.

8.5% is Yahoo.com ( to me, Yahoo as a search engine just seems a bit archaic, but that is just me and I am no geek)

3.7% each for MSN and Ebay ( another surprise is that eBay is not higher!)

Google ranks in at 2.1 %, slightly above AOL! This seems wrong for some reason. I just thought everyone one used Google, I mean look at the perks they give their employees! I had originally thought a few months ago that the place to work was Yahoo, the campus is great, the whole place looks like a bunch of really happy people. Then we see the report on CNN today, where the Googlers get free meals, pools, massages etc! How can they be doing that, if they only rank in at 2.1 % of the users? Why would high dollar advertisers use Google with numbers like that?
Where did the chart came from, who compiled it, what was the ranking criteria?

Okay, found the website – Complete.com Blog- and they explain where they get the numbers from in the article here.

If you are interested in number crunching, this is the article for you; too much FAQs for my tiny, tired brain tonight 🙂 I am glad to have found this original post from The Last Podcast, as it has lead me to a new blog with new information, and I believe learning new things is very important ( even if I can not always understand the info)