onfocus

After focusing on Yahoo! and Flickr for most of 2005, I've been kicking off 2006 by poking, prodding, and generally hacking another side in the search wars: Google. I'm going to be bringing Google Hacks up to date and into its 3rd edition.

The first edition of Google Hacks was published in February, 2003 and it was a runaway success. Here's an article Tim O'Reilly wrote just months after it was released: Thoughts on the Success of Google Hacks. (The key ingredient? Having fun with technology during the darkest post-bubble days.) Google Hacks, 2nd edition was released in December, 2004 during the mad frenzy to get a gmail account. (Doesn't that seem like ancient history?) It's been over a year, and there are plenty of new topics to cover. 2005 was the year of Google Maps Mashups, and O'Reilly felt the topic deserved its own book: Google Maps Hacks. It's out now—and it rocks! (please note O'Reilly bias, but seriously. it's good.). I'll be including a few Google Maps Hacks in the new addition along with many, many more new Google features that you can tweak to your advantage.

And of course I'll be keeping a close eye on the news that Feds are after Google data. Wired News is already on the case letting people know that there are some privacy hacks you can use with Google or any other search engine. Personally, I'm happy to see Google standing up for their users' privacy.

I'm very excited to be adding to what's already a fantastic book, and I'm honored to be walking the trail that Tara and Rael blazed. Plus I get to play with all of the Google goodness at google.com and from around the Web. I'm searching for the most useful (and fun!) hacks, tips, and tricks I can find to include in the new edition. Got a Google Hack? Lay it on me.

Update: On a negative but important note, Philipp Lenssen is doing good reporting on the latest news that Google Censors Its Results in China.

If I could embed a sound file of crickets chirping in this post, I would. My non-web world is busy at the moment, so the blog suffers.

Google Maps really is all that.

Here are some weblogs I read regularly, but aren't on my sitegeist sidebar:

• Whiskey Bar
• Cool Hunting
• we make money not art
• Spin of the Day
• CoolGov

There are many many more, but that's a start. Back to the crickets.

Hey fellow Oregon geeks, Orkut Buyukkokten from Google (yeah, his namesake Orkut) is going to be speaking at OSU on Monday night. The talk is called: Google: A Computer Scientist's Playground. See ya there!

Woke up this morning, checked the server logs, found slashdot linking to Google Smackdown. What other site can illicit joy and dread at the same time? Of course the Google API developer key maximum of 1,000 queries has been reached for today, which sucks. But maybe some will get their own key if they really want to try it out.

So far the server is doing ok with the blip in traffic:



I've mentioned it here before, but you can find the code for Google Smackdown in the new O'Reilly book Google Hacks. (Which is currently ranked #10 on Amazon overall!)

In case you haven't heard, Google bought Pyra—the makers of Blogger. (I joined Pyra a few months after Ev and Meg founded it and was there for about two years.) I think this is a good turn of events for everyone who believed and invested in Pyra/Blogger in the early days. (Anyone close to the company has had a bit of a rough ride with ups and downs.) And it feels good personally to see something I believed in and worked hard for enter a new phase with a company like Google. Sometimes I wish I could still be involved with Blogger's development, but life never goes according to plan. We always had fun anthropomorphizing the application—and this feels like Blogger's graduation.