It looks like I am going to be putting more of my life on Google’s servers, this time future business projects (as long as it is legal that is).

(Google Docs & Spreadsheets Blog) Whenever those of you who use Gmail receive a spreadsheet or a document in an email, you will see a new link next to the “Download” link that says “Open as a Google document.” Click on that and the attachment will automatically be imported into Docs & Spreadsheets and added to your personal document list where you can make changes, invite collaborators and search for it later. We hope you like it.

If they continue doing cool things like this, Google will end up being a portal–that is if they are not one already.

Note: Is it me, or did Google finally open up comments on their blog?

It looks like Google just got rid of (or at least greatly suppressed) the ability of bloggers and websites to Googlebomb those they despise.

(Google Webmaster Blog) People have asked about how we feel about Googlebombs, and we have talked about them in the past. Because these pranks are normally for phrases that are well off the beaten path, they haven’t been a very high priority for us. But over time, we’ve seen more people assume that they are Google’s opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries. That’s not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception. So a few of us who work here got together and came up with an algorithm that minimizes the impact of many Googlebombs.

Previously typing in failure in Google brought up President Bush (thanks to liberal bloggers) and Israeli bloggers did something something similar to Prime Minister Olmert.

It looks like for the first time (in a long time) Google has recaptured the Internet (or the Internet on its servers) before politics ruined it for everyone.

Note: I wonder if Yahoo plans on doing the same thing for their search engine?

Update: Silly me! I forgot the to add the “quotations” for my source. As well as corrected a noticeable spelling error.

The problem is not getting to be ridiculous. It’s just a bit annoying to go from no spam for months on end to about five a day.

What’s even worse is the fact that spammers seem to type either in all caps, or unable to spell out half their entire message.

If you are going to spam me, at least use proper grammar. You would think they would teach these things at the “annoy planet Earth” spam conferences, assuming that spammers actually attend them.

After previously posting about how to fix the mysterious 404 WWW issue with Blogger, I think I may have found a faster (and more simple) fix.

I tested this out with one blog already, and I am sure everyone else is going to love this as well (well, mostly everyone else).

Note: This may or may not require you to sign up with Google Apps (I don’t think it should, but you never know).

1. First, login to your host account, and locate the area of your account where you can create sub domains (on GoDaddy simply pull up the page listing your domain(s) and click on the one you want to create an account on. Then click on the Manage Sub domains account).
2. Next, create a sub domain on the page. Since we all love Google, lets call it “google” (no pun intended).
3. Underneath you should have an option to forward the domain to a URL. Simply type in your www.mydomain.com (with the “WWW’s”) and click save.

Now what is going to happen is that whenever someone clicks on mydomain.com it will automatically select the sub-domain google.mydomain.com as its first choice (don’t ask me why it does this, but it does for some strange silly reason).

As soon as your “google” alias pops up, your server will redirect you to mydomain.com.

This is a lot more simple and easier than my previous explanation (and a lot faster too). This should work after ten minuets, but give it a day to make it “round the net.”

As always, feel free to comment if you have any questions, concerns or praises (I like those) regarding this issue.

Update: You should not need to point this CNAME to a host directly. Also, I updated the “google.” to “google” (without the period) in the post.

For those of you who switched their blog*spot blogs to Google’s custom domain for blogger, you may have run into some unexpected errors, mainly being only able to publish either directly to your domain (example: mycoolblog.com) or to the “www” address (example: www.mycoolblog.com) but not both.

After finding many other bloggers experiencing the same thing, I decided to do some testing to see if there was a way to resolve this.

Note: Make sure your CNAME has an alias of www (or the place you want to publish your blog) as well as having the host account point to ghs.google.com.

1. The first thing I did was create a Google Apps account, adding my blog domain to its services.
2. Next, I would select the available Google services. Although you can select all or none of the features to add to your blog, you must choose the Domain Web Pages feature.
3. After adding this feature, you should see a link that says something to the sort of Activating the web pages (underneath the Domain Web Pages image). Click on it.
4. Make sure that you put “www” as the publishing address. This will do one of two things. Either a) It will kick blogger from originally publishing to the domain (which is good) or b) blogger will refuse to move (not as good, but okay). If blogger is stubborn simply publish on mycoolblog.com, in order to let Google Apps have a turn at “www.”
5. If you are unable to publish to “www” via Google apps, create a new sub name/alias instead. On the left should be in bold a category called Services. Find the Domain Web Pages link and then click the Change web publishing address on the screen and select an alias such as “about,” “google” or even “darnell” if you would like.
6. Visit the “www” domain (or the alias you created in its place) and make sure you see a 404 error in an off color mellow yellow orange (note: what is that color anyways?). If you don’t see it, try refreshing a couple of times.
7. Wait about five to ten minuets after seeing the 404 error, and then delete your Domain Web Pages from your current account, and republish blogger to the “www.”
8. Give the internet 24 hours and with any luck (as well as some prayers) your mycoolblog.com should redirect to www.mycoolblog.com.

After testing this on several of my weblogs (ColonyWorlds.com, IsraGood.com, InsideOrkut.com as well as this one) I found this to be the only consistent method that seemed to make this work (as to why it works, you’ll have to ask someone else that question).

One of my blogs redirected within a few seconds. Another one took several minuets while two of mine took almost 24 hours before they were functioning. I would also give it 48 hours until all of your friends see the same thing, (as it takes awhile for the new settings to register throughout the entire internet.

If you have any problems, comments or questions, feel free to post them here.

Update 1/17): If this doesn’t work (or is too slow/confusing for you) try this easier and (hopefully) faster one.

Whatever Google is putting in their employee’s water cooler, they definitely need to share it with the rest of the world. The search engine king has announced their commitment to bring users real-time instant live stats of stock quotes, free of charge and free of delay.

(Google Blog) As a result, we’ve worked with the SEC, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and our D.C. trade association, NetCoalition, to find a way to bring stock data to Google users in a way that benefits users and is practical for all parties. We have encouraged the SEC to ensure that this data can be made available to our users at fair and reasonable rates, and applaud their recent efforts to review this issue. Today, the NYSE has moved the issue a great step forward with a proposal to the SEC which if approved, would allow you to see real-time, last-sale prices across all Google properties including Google Finance, Personalized Google, Mobile, and of course, Google.com. It won’t matter if you’re on Wall Street or Main Street — you’ll have free, easy and fast access to real-time prices from NYSE on Google.

When it comes to innovation of information, Google is serious about change. This may put many expensive stock software companies out of business, but it will empower the consumer to track their own portfolio.