Today Google celebrates the first ascent of man on Mount Everest, the world’s highest mountain.

Mount Everest, which stands at 8848metres, was first conquered by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay at 11:30 am May 29, 1953. The pair were part of a two pair expedition aiming to conquer the peak.

Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans, the first pair, came to within 100 meters of the summit but had to turn back due to exhaustion. Their work wasn’t in vain though, as their route finding and trail breaking paved the way for Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay.

Tenzing Norgay revealed that Edmund Hillary was the first to actually put his foot on the summit.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Google has officially launched Google Health. Anybody can sign up for the free service a google.com/health, log in and to import their medical records, fill prescriptions, and get lab results, set up text-based pill alerts, keep track of immunizations, and get pertinent news alerts.

Users can opt to share their information with partners. Sharing at this point is all or nothing.

“What absolutely will not be the case – no Google Health user will ever find their health information as search results on Google,” a Google spokesman said. “That information is yours and only you have access to it.”

Google says it will not advertise on the site, and it will not share your private data with anyone without your authorization.

You can read more about the service at the Google Health FAQ.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Google Friend Connect has officially been launched. With Google Friend Connect, any website owner can add social features on their web site.

Here is what Google said about Google Friend Connect:

Google Friend Connect lets you grow traffic by easily adding social features to your website. With just a few snippets of code, you get more people engaging more deeply with your site.

Attract more visitors. Visitors bring along friends from social networks like Facebook, orkut, and others to interact on your site.

Enrich your site with social features. Choose engaging social features from a catalog of gadgets provided by Google and the OpenSocial developer community.

No programming whatsoever. Just copy and paste snippets of code into your site, and Google Friend Connect does the rest.

Below is a video introduction of Google Friend Connect:

More information can be found here

Popularity: 3% [?]

It’s time to update your Google AdSense for Search code if you have update it since 5th May 2008. Google AdSense for Search is now powered by Custom Search which offers advanced customization options to help improve the accuracy of your search results and tailor them to what your users are looking for.

Here are some of the new features:

Site Search: allow your users to find all the information they’re looking for on your site. without leaving your site.

Improved indexing of your pages: Google recent improved indexing technology will now index more pages of your site so the users will see more results in your AdSense for Search results.

Vertical search: allow your users to search across multiple sites, could be your network of sites or sites you think your users will find it useful.

Tuning search results and ads with keywords: allow you to show relevant search results by setting relevant keywords which will be added to your user keyword when they are performing the search. This tuning will led to an increase in earnings for AdSense Publishers.

Selecting ad location: Choose where to place your ads on the search results. Google hints that ads at the top and right monetizes the best for publishers.

Quick and easy updates: allow you to change the custom search engine without generate new search code for each changes as the settings are saved in your account.

Here’s a video from the InsideAdSense explaining the update:

Popularity: 4% [?]

Google Analytics shows you how people found your site, how they explored it, and how you can enhance their visitor experience. Improve your website return on investment, increase conversions, and make more money on the web.

Google Analytics provides powerful tracking for anyone with a web presence, whether it be a small hobby website or a giant online enterprise. It’s one of the most powerful web analytics solutions on the market - and it’s free for anyone to use!

Click here to sign up an account today and start making money online.

By the way, if you already have a Google Analytics account, remember to update your code to the new tracking code (ga.js) if you have not done so.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Today, I noticed a change in Google PageRank on 4 of my websites. 2 of the sites, which I started this year, 2008, has achieved a PageRank of 2 while another old site has moved from a Google PageRank 4 to 5.

Richard Palace Dot Com has also moved from Google PageRank 2 to 3.

So what is Google PageRank?

PageRank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. Also, the importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself is. Google calculates a page’s importance from the votes cast for it. How important each vote is is taken into account when a page’s PageRank is calculated.
PageRank is Google’s way of deciding a page’s importance. It matters because it is one of the factors that determines a page’s ranking in the search results. It isn’t the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is an important one.

The next Google PageRank update is expected to be somewhere in July.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Thanks to mihai from PatchLog for providing XML Sitemap for Pligg update 0.6. I installed it for my pligg 9.9.0 powered site at http://pligg.topsites.sg running on php 4.

However when submitting the sitemap to Google, the date was an invalid format. The sitemap lastmod date was showing <lastmod>2008-04-16SGT10:23:16</lastmod>

According to Google Sitemap FAQ, Google Sitemap requires the ISO-8601 encoding which has two variations:
- 2005-02-21
- 2005-02-21T18:00:15+00:00

After some research, i found the solution. Thanks to Guides - Dynamic ATOM Feed

Open xml_sitemaps_main.php

Before

function xml_sitemaps_show_sitemap(){,

Add

function get_iso_8601_date($int_date) {
//$int_date: current date in UNIX timestamp
$date_mod = date(’Y-m-d\TH:i:s’, $int_date);
$pre_timezone = date(’O', $int_date);
$time_zone = substr($pre_timezone, 0, 3).”:”.substr($pre_timezone, 3, 2);
$date_mod .= $time_zone;
return $date_mod;
}

Find

echo “<lastmod>”.date(’Y-m-dTH:i:s’,strtotime($r[0])).”</lastmod>”;

Replace with

// echo “<lastmod>”.date(’Y-m-dTH:i:s’,strtotime($r[0])).”</lastmod>”;
echo “<lastmod>”.get_iso_8601_date(strtotime($r[0])).”</lastmod>”;

Find

echo “<lastmod>”.date(’Y-m-dTH:i:s’, $link->modified).”</lastmod>\n”;

Replace with

// echo “<lastmod>”.date(’Y-m-dTH:i:s’, $link->modified).”</lastmod>\n”;
echo “<lastmod>”.get_iso_8601_date($link->modified).”</lastmod>”;

Find

echo “<lastmod>”.date(’Y-m-dTH:i:s’, $m_time).”</lastmod>\n”;

Replace with

// echo “<lastmod>”.date(’Y-m-dTH:i:s’, $m_time).”</lastmod>\n”;
echo “<lastmod>”.get_iso_8601_date($m_time).”</lastmod>”;

That’s all you need. Submit it to Google and it should accept your Sitemap.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Google Adsense is the programme that can generate advertising revenue from each page on your website—with a minimal investment in time and no additional resources.

Adsense delivers relevant ads that are precisely targeted on a page-by-page basisto the content people find on your site. And when you add a Google search box to your site, Adsense delivers relevant ads that are targeted to the Google search results pages generated by your visitors’ search request.

You can customise the appearance of ads, choosing from a wide range of colours and templates. You can do the same with your search results page. Your reports are customisable, too. Flexible reporting tools let you group your pages in any way you want so you can view your results by URL, domain, ad type, category and more to learn where your earnings are coming from.

Watch the video below on how to add Google Adsense to your blog at Blogger.com

Popularity: 3% [?]

Finally, AdSense for video is now in beta. You can read about it on AdSense Blog or check out an overview of it with this video below.

The InVideo ads, which are adopted on YouTube site are paid on a CPM basis while Text overlay ads, which are contextually targeted to signals in your videos and on the page where the video live, are paid on a CPC basis. You can see InVideo ads and Text overlay ads demos here

Publishers must serve a minimum of one million video streams each month and are based in the U.S. with English language sites.

For non-US Publishers, the good news is that Google do plan to expand the program to more publishers of various sizes and locations in the near future.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Google XML Sitemaps Plugin is highly recommend. This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.

Current version is 3.0.3 updated on 2007-12-30

Click here to stay updated with the latest version.

Popularity: 3% [?]