Keeping your GMail Inbox size under control

Google Gmail gives you more than 2.5 GB of Inbox space sufficient to store hundreds of thousands of email messages. But you can quickly run out of space even on GMail if your friends regularly email you PDF, video attachments, sound clips, large zipped files, or high-resolution photographs.

When you near the GMail storage limit, the quota indicator displayed at the bottom of your account (that says - You are currently using 59 MB (2%) of your 2720 MB) will change from green to red.



If you go over your storage limit, Gmail will hold your messages for a few days while you clear out some space. If you don't delete anything within that allotted time, you won't be able to receive new messages, and messages sent to your account will then be returned to sender.

Before your GMail Inbox space gets almost full, follow one of these tips:

» The query string "has:attachment" will list all messages that have an attachment. If you further refine the string to "has:attachment from:me label:sent" - it will show all messages with attachment in the Sent Mail folder that were sent by you. Deleting them can retrieve lot of important space.

» Queries like filename:pdf or filename:xls will show messages that have attachments of a specific type. Combine them with a label:sent to display all the PDF files that you have you sent in the past.

» You can set GMail to display upto 100 messages per page. This setting is useful while deleting a more number of messages in one go.



» A query of the form "before:2006/01/01 label:sent" will retrieve all message sent by your before January 1, 2006 - You might want to clear your old sent items using this technique.

» If you have subscribed to tons of mailing lists, now is a good time to get rid of them - you will probably never read them and they are anyway available on the group website. Open a list message, view the header and copy the email address mentioned in the from field. Run a query like from:mail-address@list.com - Choose select all and press delete.

» If GMail search operators tend to confuse you, download your GMail messages to a local mail client like Outlook or Thunderbird that supports POP3 access.

» GMail won't allow you to search or sort emails by the size of attachments. However, your offline client will definitely have this feature. Find messages with the bulkiest attachments in Outlook, then search for the same message in GMail and delete it.

» Don't use the GMail drives that promise to convert your GMail inbox into a virtual hard disk. You may have to wait a little but both Google and Microsoft are about to launch file storage services. Read more about and Windows Live Drive.

Any of the steps above will help you reduce the size of your GMail mailbox now and will keep it from getting too big in the future. What's your favorite tricks to keep your mailbox size down ?

Thanks to http://labnol.blogspot.com/

Zoho Chat - Web based instant messaging, Group Chatting.

Zoho Chat a brand new beta release from Zoho is available now. It 100% webbased chat with group messaging system.

How is Zoho Chat different from other Chat?

Zoho Chat is Web based & so no need to install, configure & upgrade anything. Zoho Chat allows both instant messaging + Group chatting. Group chatting helps people working from different places to stay connected.

gTalk with buddy icons

A new testing version of gTalk is available for download.

http://desktop.google.com/download/googletalk/googletalk-setup-testing.exe

Though there is no public announcement from google, it has few new features like buddy icons, chat themes.

Good collection of computer based books for reference

Came to know about this nice blog via mail forward. apart from w3schools i had never been to such kinda live reference of computer books stuffs. But this time it was really a worthful visit.

http://online-books-reference-index.blogspot.com/

hope that helps many of you guys...

A Nice DHTML JS animation

If you have Internet Explorer 6, view this nice DHTML demo.(with sound)

Italian, US & Nato AirBase installations in Google Map

Google Maps seems to be expanding to all around the world. Many of the countries are covered now including UK, Italy, etc. Becos of this Google Maps has extended satellite imaging to Italy. You can see details of most Italian, US and Nato installations: Aviano Air Base, Decimomannu airport, Taranto naval base and so on.

RMail - RSS feed to your email

This sounds very interesting: Rmail by Randy Charles Morin delivers any RSS feed* to your email – one email per fresh article posted, and individual blogs are crawled once per hour.

Longest email address i had ever

karthikeyan@abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijk.com

Yeah thats silly... yet... thats my new mail address from the longest free email address provider.

Visit http://www.abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijk.com/ for your free account...

How doctors use google? Interesting !!!

The Clinical Cases explains how doctors use Google. For example:

“Google images is very helpful, especially when you are reading on some “dry” subject from a book without illustrations. Also, you can check out the web page that Google shows below the image (when you click on it). Sometimes this can lead you to very interesting websites which are otherwise hidden on page 20-30 from the regular search results. We are all visual creatures and clinical images are definitely helpful.”

Dont Click It !!!

DontClick.it shows off an alternate way to navigate a web site – without clicking anywhere. Its nice to navigate without clicking but by moving the mouse over a particular link like thing. Try for your self and have fun.

How Google's site ranking works?

Google recently filed a US patent which reveals a great deal of how they rank your web site. Some of it you could never have guessed at...

How many years did you register your domain name for?
If it was only one then Google could hold that against you.

Why?

Because the majority of Spam websites only register a domain name for one year. A domain name registered for a longer period implies that the owner is more likely to be legitimate and serious about their web site.

This is just one of the unusual factors possibly considered by Google when indexing and ranking a website. Factors you could never even have guessed at in some cases.

How do I know this?

Google recently made public, March 31 2005, the contents of their filing of United States Patent Application 20050071741.

In which many of the search giant’s secret ranking criteria is revealed and it makes very interesting reading. You must read this if you are serious about ranking well in Google. The days of Spamming Google are drawing to a close. With this patent they reveal just how hard they're coming down on Spam sites. You Do Not want to get caught out.

Listed below you will find the hard facts, I recommend that you bookmark this page now You will need to reference it each time you optimize a new site.

• Links.

It's common knowledge that Google relies heavily on inbound relevant links to rank a site. Now they explain exactly how it works.

As well as the number, quality and anchor text factors of a link. Google seems to also consider historical factors. Apparently the Google 'sandbox' or aging delay begins count down the minute links to a new site are discovered.

Google records the discovery of a link, link changes over time, the speed at which a site gains links and the link life span.

With this in mind, fast link acquisition may be a strong indicator of potential search engine Spam.

Gone are the days of pages and pages full of links. You must grow your links slowly to stay below the radar and be careful who you exchange links with. That means no more buying hundreds of links at once or other underhand tactics.

PR is now very valuable.

Your link anchor text should vary but remain consistent with your site content. No more using your main keywords on every link exchange you gain. That's 'anchor Spam'. Instead vary them around your top five to ten keywords.

Link exchanges are still very important but you must work and utilize them ethically. If you don't and you get caught, the recovery from a ban can be months and your host and IP may also be recorded.

Softly seems to be the message. The fact is fewer but better quality links will benefit you more and they will be much more likely to be over the long-term which is good too.

• Site click through rates (CTR)

CTR may now be monitored through cache, temporary files, bookmarks and favorites via the Google toolbar or desktop tools. Many have suspected for some time that sites are rewarded for good CTR with a raise in ranking. Similar to how Adwords works.

CTR is monitored to see if fresh or stale content is preferred for a search result.

CTR is also analyzed for increases or decreases relating to trends or seasons.

• Web page rankings are recorded and monitored for changes.

• The traffic to a web page is recorded and monitored over time.

• Sites can be ranked seasonally. A ski site may rank higher in the winter than in the summer. Google can monitor and rank pages by recording CTR changes by season.

• Bookmarks and favorites could be monitored for changes, deletions or additions.

• User behavior in general could be monitored.

As Google is capable of tracking traffic to your site you should closely monitor the small amount of copy returned in search results. Ideally you will want to integrate a call to action in there to increase your listings CTR.

Clicks away from your site back to the search results are also monitored. Make your site as sticky as possible to keep visitors there longer. As mentioned above it may also help if you could get your visitors to bookmark you.

• The frequency and amount of page updates is monitored and recorded as is the number of pages.

Mass updates of hundreds of files will see you pop up on the radar.

On the other hand, few or small updates to your site could see your rankings slide --unless your CTR is good. A stale page that receives good traffic may hold it's own and not require an update. So don't update for the sake of it.

Depending on your market, fresh content may not be a requirement. If the information your pages contain do not go out of date then updating may not be necessary. If your market is more news based for example, then changes regularly are a must. In general changes don't necessarily have to mean fresh content. They could involve simple edits to current content.

A further indicator that Google is really cracking down on Spam is made clear in the following extract from the Patent. Reference is made to changing the focus of multiple pages at once.

Here's the quote -
"A significant change over time in the set of topics associated with a document may indicate that the document has changed owners and previous document indicators, such as score, anchor text, etc., are no longer reliable.

Similarly, a spike in the number of topics could indicate Spam. For example, if a particular document is associated with a set of one or more topics over what may be considered a ’stable’ period of time and then a (sudden) spike occurs in the number of topics associated with the document, this may be an indication that the document has been taken over as a ‘doorway’ document.

Another indication may include the sudden disappearance of the original topics associated with the document. If one or more of these situations are detected, then [Google] may reduce the relative score of such documents and/or the links, anchor text, or other data associated the document."

There's still more to look out for:-

• Changes in keyword density is monitored and recorded as are changes to anchor text.

• The domain name owner’s address is considered, most likely to help in a local search result.

• The technical and admin contact details are checked for consistency. These are often falsified for Spam domains.

• Your hosts IP address. If you are on a shared server it's possible somebody else on that server is using dirty tactics or Spamming. If so, your site will suffer since you share the same IP.

The impression I get here is that Google has learned from the Spam 'attack' they suffered in early 2004 and they are determined to eradicate it from their listing results.

So what do you do?

There's a lot to take onboard here and consider. But you can't go far wrong with your SEO if you try to grow your site as organically as possible.

If you know what you are doing you can take short cuts. Carry on with link exchanges but consider each site carefully and slow down in your gathering of them. Vary your anchor text. Add small amounts of good quality content to your site regularly. Check your search engine listings and edit your site to include a call to action in them if possible. Make your site more 'sticky' to encourage visitors to stay a while. Encourage visitors to Bookmark your site. Oh, and register new domain names for at least two years.

Before you do anything remember to reference the above info first. It may just save you months of misery as your site gets banned and 'Sand boxed'.

Overall keep it ethical and you can't go far wrong.

Do not be tempted to Spam. Stick to the guidelines above and you are much more likely to outlast and out rank your competition.

Courtesy : buzzle

Know your link statistics

At PubSub, you can check your link statistics – both “InLinks” as well as “OutLinks.”

Sitemaps

Google releases Google Sitemaps

"Google Sitemaps is an experiment in web crawling. Using Sitemaps to inform and direct our crawlers, we hope to expand our coverage of the web and improve the time to inclusion in our index. By placing a Sitemap-formatted file on your webserver, you enable our crawlers to find out what pages are present and which have recently changed, and to crawl your site accordingly."

Its nice to hear that the engineering director and technical lead for Google Sitemaps is an indian Shiva Shivakumar

Taj by night experiment

Taj by night experiment

Source: IANS. Image Source: DGL.Microsoft

Poor response from foreign and domestic tourists to see the Taj Mahal by night has dampened the enthusiasm of the tourist industry that had expected a flood of visitors.

Against the upper limit of 400 tourists a night, five days a month around full moon, the number of actual visitors has never exceeded 200. Surprisingly, most visitors at night are Indians. On May 25, only 10 people bought tickets to see the 17th-century Mughal-built architectural marvel. Only 199 tickets were sold during the five days of May 21 to 25. If this trend continues, officials say, the government would stand to lose millions of rupees because of the deployment of the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) for the night viewing. Figures available for the past six months suggest that a majority of tourists who come to see the Taj by night are Indians. In November 2004, the month when the Supreme Court gave the green signal for Taj's viewing in moonlight, more than 400 of the 600 tourists were Indians. Again in March and April this year, the number of Indians who came to see the Taj at night exceeded 50 percent. One reason why the experiment has floundered is that the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) has restricted the movement of tourists within the Taj Mahal at night. Tourists often complain they can't see the Taj in mist or fog when the clouds are around because they cannot get close to it. Since the ticket holders are not permitted to get closer to the main mausoleum, it leaves many frustrated, say the guides.

Tourism industry leaders say the government should consider flood lighting the Taj and allowing tourists to see the main building from an angle closer to the marble monument and not from 100 metres away as is the case now. The ASI is experimenting installing floodlights at the Etmauddaula tomb near Agra. If the scientific studies being conducted confirm no danger to that marble mausoleum, the ASI may consider allowing flood lighting of the Taj, according to superintending archaeologist D. Dayalan. Sandeep Arora, president of the Hotel and Restaurant Association, has demanded "soft flood lighting". Meanwhile, Agra Divisional Commissioner Ashok Kumar has indicated that efforts would be made to appeal to the apex court to permit tourists to see the Taj from the central white marble platform. District authorities are also trying to persuade the ASI to sell tickets 24 hours in advance for the convenience of the tourists. The Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) has in association with a Canada- based group lately installed a monitoring system to better and continuously assess the pollution in the vicinity of the Taj Mahal. The pollution related data will now be made available 24 hours a day on a CPCB website. CPCB officials feel the most dangerous pollutant is the level of SPM or suspended particulate matter.

Stealth Bomber found in Google Maps

A stealth bomber uncovered on Google Maps. As you know it’s prohibited to get close to military bases, let alone photograph them.

Usually satellite images which are made public online are retouched to blur scenerey which might compromise security. At least that’s what you assume in times of terror. However, the googling tourist stumbles upon a stealth bomber on a military airport in California. Apparently, someone forgot to paint over this one.