Hi All,

We just launched private beta testing of SiteHoppin Toolbar.

You can e-mail me at zedomax [at] gmail.com to get a private beta invitation code then go here.

Remember, we are only looking for 1,000 beta testers at this point so I highly suggest you get in early as the doors will close within couple days.

Here’s a screenshot of the new SiteHoppin Toolbar:

Basically, it let’s you surf the web, bookmark sites, and hop them really really really fast. And also, private beta testers will become the “power” users, just like power users on Digg…

Cheers~

Max

Today, I was going to goto my GoogleDocs to edit a new Press Release for our new Beer Stock Market system on SiteHoppin. (Btw, I am on break today, so don’t shoot me for not having any gadget or DIY posts)

Here’s a fun experiment you can do for today. Go to Google and type “Googledoc” and you will see bunch of sites showing you how to use Googledoc. I guess the official name is GoogleDocs, but shouldn’t GoogleDocs show up first on Google for GoogleDoc?

Even funnier, I did type Googledoc.com AND Googledocs.com on my Browser window before even trying to search for GoogleDoc on Google.  Those two domains were like the worst web pages ever, well like a link farm or a spam site really.

Well, my opinion is that Google should at least buy those two domains for helping lazy people like me who don’t want to take 4 steps to finding GoogleDocs.  I mean, I thought they had couple bees in their bank?!?

Well, the final say is up to you but I had to re-type, “GoogleDocs” to find GoogleDocs.  What a day, I just wasted 20 minutes of my time doing that and also telling you about it.

Better yet, we will make this into our own little experiment and see if we can show up on the first page of Google for “GoogleDoc”, that’s some serious traffic we might get.

Cheers and have a great weekend everybody. (well, i did take my weekend today since I’ve worked straight through the weekend for about last 2 months…)

Did you ever wanted a cheat sheet so you fully utilize the power of Google? Well, Joe over at HackNMod sent this one in. Thanks Joe!

The Google cheat sheets cover the following info:

• A list of all Google domains
• Company information
  • Founded Date
  • Key People
  • Revenue
  • Employees
  • Contact Address
  • Contact Phone & Fax
• PageRank
  • Googlebot 2.1 Addresses
  • List of sites with PageRank 10
  • PageRank formula
• Google Form Elements
• Google Services
• Query structure to access directory listings of:-
  • Music files
  • Movie files
• List of basic Google Calculator operators
• List of advanced Google Search operators
• List of Google Investments
• List of fun Google services and tools
• List of 15 official Google Blogs
• Google Calculator examples
• Search by number examples

Download Google Cheat Sheets in PDF

[via] adelaider

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Check out the new Android SDK, a developer’s kit so you can build apps for the new Android Platform. (Note: Android is simply an open-source operating system that can run on cellphones, it’s not the cellphone itself.)

Maybe we will try making a SiteHoppin application for the Android soon so you can hop on the new Android phones. (It already works on iPhones)

Google is also giving out $10 million to the best Android app developer. Cool stuff, we might have to start developing for that challenge.

Sergey looks like he just got up, did he take a shower yet?

On the bright side, I think Sergey and Google is doing a great job promoting open-source platforms and linux.  (Android is basically Linux hacked to run on mobile phones with lots of Google stuff embedded.)

This will be exciting as Google will really try to take over the world with cellphone software and make my GoogleMaps work better too.

Get your Android SDK here.

Check out a preview of the new GPhone, basically a Samsung phone with Google’s Linux Android operating system.I think it’s got great browser which I dig the most. There’s also street view from GoogleMaps but I guess that can be useful.

Perhaps most impressive is the Street View mode of Google Maps, pulled down to the 3G prototype reference phone running at a relatively mild 300MHz. That reference design, which may or may not reflect hardware that will run Android in the future, had another interesting feature: a trackball, currently seen on Danger Hiptops and Blackberries.

via BoingBoing

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Lol… this is a funny video of GMail in Russian. (Art)

via HighT3ch

This post was guest-blogged by Adriaan from i am jack’s design. (Send your guest blog posts to guest@zedomax.com to get them published for free)

SiteHoppin’ is a new social bookmarking site, combining some of the popular features of sites like StumbleUpon or del.ici.ous, with a few unique twists.

At SiteHoppin’, users can discover new and interesting sites quickly and easily with the site’s simple interface. Sites are broken down into categories and by tags for even easier browsing of sites you might enjoy. In addition to browsing sites in the SiteHoppin’ system, users can also rate each one on a scale of 1 to 5 beers. The scores are tabulated and the highest rated sites appear on a special “Most Popular” page.

SiteHoppin’ is built on a heavily modified version of the popular wiki software MediaWiki and is also compatible with a variety of mobile browsers (so you can SiteHop from the comfort of your shiny new iPhone).

User Benefits While anyone can use SiteHoppin’ to hop around to different sites you’ll probably want to register for an account. When you make a free account at SiteHoppin’ you get access to features regular visitors do not. Registered users can bookmark their favorite sites and share them with their friends, leave site reviews for visitors to see and have SiteHoppin’ remember all of your SiteHops so that you never see the same site twice.

Site Owner Benefits If you run a website it’s definitely worth registering with SiteHoppin’ and submitting your site, blog or articles into the system. As a site gets more beer votes it will rise in popularity and lead to more traffic. This is another opportunity to cash in on the viral marking and social networking traffic explosion happening online today.

While it is new, SiteHoppin’ is still a unique and interesting player in the social bookmarking scene. Anyone interested in an easy and fun way to find new web sites or those of you looking for new ways to promote sites of your own should give SiteHoppin’ a try.

Okay, I will have to tell you the truth tonight about one of the biggest social networking sites, SpambleUpon, or most people call it, StumbleUpon.

They are making so much money off bloggers, basically StumbleUpon “scrapes” bloggers’ content and makes millions of dollars off you!  Even though no one has really “sued” them, they are in big trouble if bloggers start sueing them one by one.

Google should really ban them for “splogging”, every one of SU users’ blogs are “splogs” made up of content written by bloggers like you and me. (My traffic actually boosted after SU banned me, I think I was getting penalized for duplicate content by using SU.  Besides, don’t rely on backstabbing social networks who make millions dollars off your content and simply ban you later for “spamming”???  Are you kidding?  Go look at my DIYs, they are all original.  Lol…at least my blog isn’t full of splogs.  Here’s a post you can read about how to protect yourself against splogs although it won’t work with SU.)

Why?

Well, every “blog”, they say, is a “splog”, every image consisting of an image scraped off a “copyright protected” blog (Mind you, every “blog” is actually naturally protected from scraping, this site has about 10 other sites’ images w/o their written permission) . So, we simply took at the most top-left blog on their “Top Stumbler” list.

Well here it is:

As you can see, the image is “scraped” off another “original” blog. If you go to any of their “splogs”, the results is the same. They almost store 0% of their “splogs” images on their servers and simply scrape and live off other blogs.  SU is like a real big mosquito that lives off your blood, your blog post that “you” wrote and uploaded images. Their future will only rely on other bloggers’ content and NEVER their own.

So, what can you do?

You can always file a “copyright enfrigement” notice and lawsuit to SU, which their headquarters addresses I couldn’t even find, AND uninstall that hideous toolbar that takes too much of your life, time, and 50 pixels of height on your browser. (Most of their admins are “fake” people behind stupid 50×50 pixel images. They “pretend” they created a special technology when I could re-create a similar service within days.)

Then, simply head over to SiteHoppin, where every site is not “splogged” and is simply “bookmarked”.

Okay, here’s the 5 second wrap up:

1. Every blog on StumbleUpon is a “splog” made up of scraped images and text from other blogs

2. The only reason they don’t get sued is because they send websites traffic and a lot of website owners are happy about that.

3. Every blog in the world has now a “copyright enfringement” against SpambleUpon. If your content is on SU, you deserve the right to sue them for scraping your content.

Now, we don’t have to sue them. You do. So, in all, just stay away from these SpambleUpon guys and stick with the American Dream, SiteHoppin, where “real” developers develop w/o scraping bloggers’ content.

Now maybe we may be a little bitter but at least we fight for our right to be conscious about the “real truth” behind everything. Yeah, SU fucked up this time bad….real bad…let the truth be known even if you do continue to use SU, you will remember this when you get banned.

Here’s the address to send your copyright infringement letters about their “Splogs”: (This is the only real contact info you can find on their site baby)

StumbleUpon, Inc.
Attn: Copyright Agent
StumbleUpon, Inc.
140 Second Street, 3rd Floor
San Francisco, CA 94105
phone: 415-979-0640
fax: 415-896-2600
email: copyright AT stumbleupon.com

This might comes to a shock to some of you but yes, Google’s search engine dominance in South Korea is less than 2%. Proof?

Here’s an image I got from a blog post from Korea:

As you can see in the above graph, Naver.com is dominant with over 70% market share, Daum.net with 12%, Yahoo at 7%, Empas.com at 2%, and Google at the last place. The above graph is from last year but it probably hasn’t changed much a year later.

Why is it that the famous PageRank not working for the South Koreans?

Answer is simple. Google’s Algorithm is geared toward the English language. As soon as you put another language, the algorithm no longer works. (This is not the case with all languages such as Spanish, French, or other languages derived from Latin)

Even me, I remember rarely using Google in Korea unless I wanted to find something in English. (Funny thing is, as soon as I come back to the US, I am ONLY using Google…)

How did Naver.com take so much market share? They don’t have an algorithm.

From what I hear on the news and my friends over in Korea, Naver has like 100,000 people working at their company adding and editing their search engine results daily.

Basically, Naver is a “human” powered search engine, sorta like what founder of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales is building right now, the Wikia. You can check out Wikia’s new alpha version of the search engine here.

I tried the Wiki search engine but the results? very mediocre indeed. But I do remember when Wikipedia first started appearing on the internet, the Wikipedia content was so crap back then I didn’t think it’d get so big today.

I think Wikia has a chance at grabbing a big share of the search engine market if they can start picking up more users. We will give it some time and come back to this topic later down the road.

Although there have been rumors that Wikia may not be so successful at taking some share of the search engine market from Google, this study proves that the “PageRank” algorithm can be beaten in other countries.

FYI, Korea has about 15 Million internet users. Naver.com makes about $15 million in revenue annually. (Nothing compared to Google but why isn’t Google at the top with the billions of dollar they have? I mean, they did open an office in Korea couple years back too.)

The point of this story?

Not that Wikia might get some of the market share but that search engine markets in other countries are still vulnerable to young MBA graduates (or dropouts) like Sergey Brin.

I apologize if you can’t read Korean and all my sources are in Korean but I have only translated them and all sources are from respectable blogs in Korea.