Hi!, If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Google Adsense updated its policy a couple of weeks back and the update to the policy now requires every Adsense publisher to update his/her individual privacy policies.

Jennifer who blogs at Jensense put up a detailed explanation of the changes in the policy and now provides us with a standard template that one can use. Ajay has a slightly more elaborate version and I’ve created the Privacy Policy for Tech Spikes based on that.

It has been made compulsory by Google that each and every blog which earns revenue via Google Adsense publish its privacy policy and notify readers each time a change is made. If you are feeling lazy but want to put up a Privacy Policy for your blog, you may choose one of the following three options.

1. Use my Privacy Policy as a template and suitably modify it for your blog.
2. Use the template made available at Jensense.
3. Use the Privacy Policy Plugin.

For those who have a blog but do not use Google Adsense but still want a Privacy Policy, you might want to check out either the Disclosure Policy Generator or DMA’s Privacy Policy Generator.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Google sometimes locks your GTalk account either by mistake or for whatever reason that they deem fit . The same happened to me last night and it took me quite a while to realise that my account was locked. Here is how I unlocked it.

If you see Account locked after trying to log in, follow these steps:

1. Using the same computer on which your Google Talk logins are failing, click here.
2. Enter your Google Account username and password, and the letters in the distorted picture.
3. Once you have successfully logged in, restart Google Talk and try to sign in again.

That’s it. Your GTalk Account is unlocked!

Popularity: 2% [?]

Google’s latest Street View feature has been in the news for the last few days and I’m sure a lot of us have seen images similar to the ones below

What we might have not seen are the vehicles and the cameras used to take these images. Have a look at them. These are the ones used by Immersive Media, one of the companies that is actually shooting majority of the photos for Google.

The camera mounted on top of the car is Immersive Media’s own; patented 11-lens camera. I believe Google has their own Vans with cameras too which are of higher resolution than that of Immersive Media’s.

Via: PR Differently

Popularity: 1% [?]

Google’s acquisition spree seems to be never ending. After recently acquiring DoubleClick and Feedburner, Google is in the process of acquiring Spanish Company Panoramio, a photo mapping site. The acquisition is expected to be completed by June end 2007.

Panoramio is basically a social networking website for sharing photos around locations and the website already integrates Google Maps and has also been integrated into Google Earth.

An excerpt from the home page of Panoramio says

Panoramio Announces Planned Acquisition by Google

Today, we are pleased to announce the planned acquisition of Panoramio by Google. This acquisition is a great opportunity for Panoramio uploaders to leverage Google’s reach, increasing the exposure of their photographs to photophiles around the world and for viewers to choose from a larger universe of photographs as Panoramio becomes more widely known. We hope to close the acquisition in mid to late June of 2007. Got questions? Go to Q&A to learn more.

I wonder what Google has up its sleeve next. Any clues?

Popularity: 1% [?]

Google has come out with a cross-language search feature, using which users can search foreign language web pages in their own native language. According to Google vice president of engineering Udi Manber, the feature will “in effect, make the Web universal.”

This feature is at its beta stage where only a few languages are supported and may contain some errors but it would be informative and usable as a whole. It enables the user to conduct multi-lingual searches of the Internet, and then translates the findings into the user’s language of choice.

For now, the languages covered are: French, Arabic, English, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and traditional and simplified Chinese.

To check it out, go to Google’s Cross Language Information Retrieval.

Via: BizReport

Popularity: 1% [?]