Categories
Debated

Fact Checking A Call To Fact Check

There was a brief hullabaloo after the iPhone price drop where some strangle Google ads appeared when you search for “iphone price drop”.

> This is like salt in the wound for the early adopter while I was initially bummed by the price cut news, this makes it infuriating! I’m a big boy and made the choice to stand in line and have fun with the rest of the faithful on iPhone day. I can handle a price change or even a new product, but for the price to be cut so drastically so quickly and then to have it rubbed in my face like this by Apple is just wrong.

Today, Cory O’Brien over at Didn’t You Hear came clean and admitted to placing the ad allegedly from Apple. Which would have been fine if he didn’t try to pass the buck to the blogs who covered it for “misreporting” and failing to “fact check”:

> See how their address is apple.com/store, and mine was store.apple.com? Also, see where their ad is placed? That’s usually a pretty good clue about the source of an ad. Fortunately, some of the various blogs’ commenters picked up on the fact that this was an affiliate ad, and not one placed by Apple, and called it out as such. Unfortunately, many of the blogs themselves did not. Fact checking would have saved me quite a bit of worry in this situation, so my plea to the big boy blogs is this: Keep those journalistic integrities intact, and Check That Fact!

Of course, had Cory done a little more research, he would’ve realized his own “facts” are wrong.

Also, the yellow box that sometimes appears at the top of the page? It has nothing to do with the source of the ad.

> While there isn’t a way to ensure top placement, there are certainly some best practices that may well help your ads rise to the top. Really, there are no secrets: these are the same best practices that affect the positioning (or ranking) of your AdWords ads wherever they appear, and they also happen to be the same best practices we wrote about just a few days ago.

Never let the facts stop a badly planned joke.

Categories
Explained Found

Quicksilver: Universal Access and Action

Few applications have energized the Mac community as Quicksilver has, and few developers have been more elusive to speak publicly about it than its creator, Nicholas “Alcor” Jitkoff.

The amount of peer pressure at Google is apparently overwhelming, as Nicholas have given a **fantastic** 25 minute talk as part of the Google Tech Talks series.

> In this talk, we will explore the motivation behind Quicksilver, highlights of its implementation, lessons learned from its design, and the ways it might inform the future of navigation for the desktop and the web.

Quicksilver users/fanatics/zealots should not pass this up.

Other people I know and love who have done Google Tech Talks: Suw Charman’s Does Social Software Have Fangs?, and Merlin Mann’s ridiculously popular Inbox Zero.

Categories
Found

The Rate Of Google

I subscribe to the [Official Google Blog](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/); it’s normally an interesting look into life at Google. But there’s been an odd pattern over the last week.

Notably:

Friday, 2:36 PM – “[The next step in Google advertising](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/next-step-in-google-advertising.html)”

> To that end, we are truly excited to announce our acquisition of DoubleClick. DoubleClick provides a suite of products that enables agencies, advertisers, and publishers to work efficiently, that will enable Google to extend our ad network and develop deeper relationships with our partners.

Monday, 5:33 AM – “[An agreement with Clear Channel Radio](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/agreement-with-clear-channel-radio.html)”

> Today’s announcement of a strategic multi-year agreement with Clear Channel Radio, the largest radio station group owner in the U.S, is an important milestone for us.

Tuesday, 12:01 PM – “[We’re expecting](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/were-expecting.html)”

> First of all, we want to welcome the team from Tonic Systems to Google. Tonic, which we’ve just acquired, is based in San Francisco and Melbourne, Australia.

Thursday, 8:10 PM – “[Collaborating with Marratech](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/collaborating-with-marratech.html)”

> As a company, we thrive on casual interactions and spontaneous collaboration. So we’re excited about acquiring Marratech’s video conferencing software, which will enable from-the-desktop participation for Googlers in videoconference meetings wherever there’s an Internet connection.

Three acquisitions and one multi-year agreement in one week.

If this rate continues – which I’m praying it won’t – Google will purchased 156 companies a year. (Are there even 156 companies worth buying a year?)

This is as they’re [destroying earnings predictions](http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/04/19/ap3633420.html), have nearly 12 billion dollars in the bank, and have a market cap of 146.86 billion as I write this.

I realize this number has no bearing on anything, but if you divide the amount of cash Google holds by the number of employees the company has (listed in the Forbes article as 12,238), you’re left with a ratio of $972,381 per employee.

Mind-boggling.