Last fall I became a fan of the ABC TV series “Invasion” and not just because one of the main characters is a blogger, although in a typically dumbed-down TV sort of way.
Recently, I was wondering when the series would start up again, so I went to the ABC Website in the hopes of finding out some more information. Instead of a traditional show page or mini Website about the series, the ABC Website links to a fake blog titled “Dave’s Diatribe” located (rather cleverly) at:
Category: Domains
Edits to this article appear at the end (Nov. 4, 2007)
Well, this will stir things up a bit.
A few hours ago Google launched “Google Pages”:http://pages.google.com/. If you have a “Gmail”:http://mail.google.com/ account you can create your own web site on Google using a very nifty AJAX interface.
The application itself is great, although the standard templates leave something to be desired.
Some of the nicest features:
* An “undo” button
* Ability to add images, links and pages easily
* Testing links while in edit mode
* 100MB of storage
* Simple, memorable URL
You should really try it out. But you might want to *think twice before you hit “publish”.*
See that last feature (simple memorable URLS) is also the greatest weakness of Google Pages and I think it is going to cause a *huge* headache for Gmail users. And *a potential PR nightmare for Google.*
Why?
Last week we did a “one week update”:http://www.onedegree.ca/2006/02/15/one-week-with-gordon-and-frank-so-much-to-learn on our little “gordonandfrank.ca”:http://www.gordonandfrank.ca/ experiment.
Here’s what we see after two weeks:
* 21,026 pages served (a bit less than half of One Degree traffic).
* 4,032 people clicked through to the real Bell site.
* 2,001 people got here by searching on phrases using Bell, Beavers, Frank, or Gordon.
* “Bell Beavers” is the most common search term. 683 people got to One Degree using that phrase!
* 89 people got here because of Norm MacDonald. They’re still angry about this.
* 46 people have taken the time to post “often gushing”:http://www.onedegree.ca/2006/02/21/do-real-people-know-about-agencies comments about the mascots.