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I sent a couple of people the following question: "What are your top tips for dealing with information overflow?" Here are some of their answers (with formatting partly adjusted, omissions within quotes indicated with dots). Please add your own tips and approaches in the comments. Niniane Wang, Google: «I like the time-honored tradition of responding to emails or archiving them as soon as I read them. (Like this one.) I've also found it helpful to maintain a to-do list that I reference every hour. Everything goes on the list or in my calendar, so that I don't have to remember it.»

Last week I asked Google and YouTube press support (and another Google employee) whether their Scientology channel was paid. The channel was listed in the "Sponsors" section of the site, for one thing, and Scientology has been seen spending many advertising dollars with Google in AdSense campaigns. One reason why I asked was that the page included a link to Scientology.org without "nofollow" -- which would make it a paid link, which would be against Google's own webmaster guidelines. Now, while Google did not reply to me offering a disclosure whether it's an ad or not, I can see the links to Scientology from th ...

Yahoo released a new type of search result for India called "Glue Page." Instead of the usual text listing, some queries -- like blog, einstein or asthma -- will now trigger a comprehensive and very visual result page. This page contains different elements laid out in boxes; there's "normal" search results, encyclopedic information from health sites or Wikipedia, news results, YouTube videos or Google blog search results (yes, they're integrating results from competitors, though Google is also a partner of Yahoo in some areas) and more. This is a very interesting prototypical service; part meta search engine and part original results from ...

Google Web Security for Enterprise (based on Postini) is an offering by Google which, according to the company, "provides real-time malware protection and URL filtering with policy enforcement and reporting." On top of that, it "extends the same protections to users working remotely on laptops," Google says. The program also enables monitoring of "online activity with comprehensive reporting" and "Quota support by surfing time" and protecting "your staff from undesirable web content." I guess what Google's really trying to say here is that their service ...

Google is shutting down Hello, Picasa's photo sharing service which was part of the Picasa acquisition back in 2004. On the program, Wikipedia writes: Hello by Google's Picasa is [was] a free computer program that allows users to send images across the Internet and publish them to their blogs. It is similar to an instant messaging program because one can send text, but Hello focuses on digital photographs. I made a copy of Hello's old homepage and their "how it works" page* as the site is now just displaying the following message: All good things come to an end. So ...

The Google Translator has been slightly redesigned. Instead of a single HTML combo box showing the available language pairs, you now get two DHTML combo boxes each containing a language for more free mixing of source and target languages*. (I wonder why Google does not pick traditional combo boxes?) What's best is that there's now a "Detect language" option for the source language; it might be neat if Google makes this the default selection too or perhaps save the last selection in a cookie. *Google's meta description of the service explains, "This translator supports: English, Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, ...

The below form triggers an image search using Google's option to show faces only. A different site operator will be used depending on the country you pick, e.g. site:de for Germany*. Afghanistan Albania Algeria American Samoa Andorra Angola Anguilla Antarctica Antigua and Barbuda Argentina

Jason Yu provides a break down of some of the differences between Google China and their local competitor, Chinese search engine Baidu. One section compares the products of the two: Both Google and Baidu are trying to leverage their network effects to promote other products. Google has many excellent products, but not every product has performed well in China. For example, Google Maps is widely used by American users. Unfortunately, Google Maps in China is unable to provide the same features due to unavailability of mapping data in China. Google’s satellite map currently only covers the major Chinese cities. Should Google acquire better maps, it would have a clear ...

Difficulty of Climbing a Mountain % of People Who Know What the Acronym RADAR Means Route the Golf Player Took Can you create one too? [Also see Matt Cutts' post on Google Charts.]

Author Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker writes that the phenomenon of simultaneous discovery, called "multiples" by science historians, is very common (added quote characters for clarity): One of the first comprehensive lists of multiples was put together by William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas, in 1922, and they found a hundred and forty-eight major scientific discoveries that fit the multiple pattern. Newton and Leibniz both discovered calculus. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace both discovered evolution. Three mathematicians “invented” decimal fractions. Oxygen was discovered by Joseph Priestley, in Wiltshire, in 1774, and by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, in Uppsala, a year earlier. Color photography was invented at the ...

Google.com now links to a special donation page titled "Support disaster relief in Myanmar (Burma)". Google News has more information on the devastating cyclone that struck the country. [Thanks John.]

Search Engine Roundtable shows off a screenshot of what looks like a Google experiment -- of using the Comic Sans font in AdSense ads. Among designers and people with taste in general, Comic Sans is often considered one of the worst fonts of all time (or at least, the worstly abused font). So much that there's a Ban Comic Sans initiative... which, as this latest case show, may be a futile attempt. On the other hand, there are not that many fonts which are deployed across lots of systems, ...

Elliot Schrage has left Google to join Facebook, BoomTown reports. Google on their management information page explains Elliot is or was "Vice President, Global Communications & Public Affairs" and "responsible for the company's public-facing communications, including media relations, policy strategy and stakeholder outreach, as well as internal communications." At Google Press Day 2006, Elliot said, "The Google Story is getting more complicated and complex everyday." Also in 2006, Elliot gave a testimony in front of the US House of Representatives over Google censoring in China. Boo ...

Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle today writes about his experience visiting the Google headquarters, and he's reminded of another building: Some years ago, I spent a year taking meetings at the Playboy mansion, both the one in Chicago (RIP) and the one in Los Angeles. It had a lot of amenities -- I was never more than 15 feet from food and extremely good red wine, and the chairs were comfortable enough for the all-nighters we routinely pulled. There were scantily clad women about, too, and occasionally I passed one in the halls. It was a lot better than a regular office. I think maybe Google is the Hefner mansion of the 21st century. It too rises from ...

The CEO of online office Google Docs competitor Zoho, Sridhar Vembu, regularly sends out interesting thoughts from the Zoho blog for others to republish. Below is a partial (partly snipped) reposting of his latest musing; you can find the full text (titled "IBM, Microsoft & Google Eras of Computing") from May 2nd over there. By now it is conventional wisdom to say that there was an IBM Era of computing, then a Microsoft Era, and now we are in the Google Era. In this post, I will explain why Microsoft was not the "next IBM" and why Google is not the "next Microsoft" -- there are significant qualitative differences among them, quite apart from their status as the dominan ...

CNET News.com | Tech news blog - Category: Google

Recent posts on technology, trends, and more.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--YouTube users soon will see some new advertisements around their online videos.

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said the company is working on new ads for the video site in a meeting here with reporters before Google's shareholder meeting, but he was cagey with details.

Google ...

Update 3:10 p.m. PT: I added more quotations from the Google executives

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Google's top executives on Thursday gave a glimpse into how it might try to deflect antitrust concerns of a possible ad-sharing deal with rival Yahoo, advising observers to look at the overall ...

Update 3:30 p.m. PDT: A correction: Although only travel modules could be sponsored at launch, now all can be. Also, there's no display ad opportunity at present, though the sponsorship can mean more prominence than text ads. Update 11:45 p.m.: I updated with new detail ...

Update at 8:15 a.m.: The verb tense has been changed to reflect the announcement's release, and a link has been added.

Google announced Thursday its Web Security for Enterprise, which is designed to protect corporate Web surfers from viruses, spyware, and malicious Web sites. It also extends ...

Google is lending its security expertise to the open-source community to help plug security holes with its oCERT team. While much remains to be seen as to how successfully or actively oCERT will operate, it's a welcome addition to the open-source world by Google.

oCERT, short for the open-source ...

Privacy advocates should take note of an effective way to avert the prying eyes of Google Street View: the lowly plastic bag.

Google Street View foiled by a plastic bag.

(Credit: Google)

A block of College Road in Fairbanks, Alaska, along with portions of Minnie St. and Third St. show ...

Google is willing to fight Viacom all the way to the Supreme Court in the companies' legal battle over YouTube and pirated videos, but Viacom is taking a hard line of its own, executives from the companies said Wednesday.

David Eun, Google's vice president of content partnerships, told Dow Jones Newswires ...

Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney has been widely cited for his February analysis showing some strong financial benefits of a deal under which Yahoo would use Google to supply search ads. With that scenario now appearing more likely, he's issued a new report on the subject that projects as much ...

Updated May 6, 5:50 AM PDT to reflect the actual announcement from the two companies.

Yahoo and McAfee announced a partnership Tuesday under which potentially unsafe Web sites appearing in Yahoo search results will be flagged as risky.

The deal, an exclusive for Yahoo, uses McAfee SiteAdvisor technology to ...

Google's AppEngine looks great. It's a way to build web applications and run them on Google's "cloud" infrastructure.

The downside? Your applications effectively become Google's applications because there's no easy way to move them elsewhere. You have to run them using Google's authentication engine, framework, file system, APIs, etc. Free as in Google's.

Enter Morph Labs.

[Morph] claims to have done all the back-end cutwork to make it easy for developers to get their software up and running as a service on Amazon's Web Services (AWS), freeing them from Google's Microsoft-like vendor lock-in....

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