Today, Google.org announced its new core philanthropic initiatives: Climate Change, Poverty, & Emerging Threats.

Google.org is the public service component of the Googleplex machine. In the past, Google.org has helped in many different areas, but without a real specific focus. But today (17 Jan. ‘08), Google.org’s mandate to “make the world a better place” has decided on a few very specific foci, by zeroing in on five core initiatives.

Predict & Prevent

Google.org’s Predict & Prevent initiative focuses on empowering local communities to predict and prevent events before they become crises by identifying ‘hot spots’ and enabling a rapid response. The first step of this new program is targeted in Southeast Asia and tropical Africa, with grants given to Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disasters, Global Health and Security Initiative, and Clark Labs.

Inform & Empower to Improve Public Services

Google.org’s Inform & Empower initiative is aimed at improving the flow of vital information to increase basic services for the developing world. The program is at first targeted in India and East Africa, with grants given to Pratham, the Centre for Budget & Policy Studies, and the Center for Policy Research.

Fuel the Growth of Small & Medium-Sized Enterprises

Google.org’s SME support is intended to lower transaction costs in SME investment and to create opportunities to access larger financial markets. The program is initially focused on the developing world, with initial partner TechnoServe.

Develop Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal (RE<C)

Google.org’s RE<C support sets a goal of producing one gigawatt of renewable energy capacity that’s cheaper than coal. Initially launched in November 2007, Google.org is expanding its investment in this area by supporting eSolar (pdf), a solar power oriented power plant technology company.

Accelerate the Commercialization of Plug-In Vehicles (RechargeIT)

Google.org’s RechargeIT initiative aims to reduce CO₂ emissions, cut oil use, and stabilize the electrical grid by accelerating hybrid electric vehicle adoption. Unlike the other four initiatives announced today, Google.org specifically mentioned that its investments in this area will mostly go to for-profit companies that are working in this area.

Google Giving

It’s refreshing to see a company so dedicated to giving back. Google sometimes has to deal with a number of critics, but their Google.org division seems to be fully intent of fulfilling their mandate of “making the world a better place”.

Posted by Eric Herboso.
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Posted by Eric Herboso.
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BREAKING NEWS:
At pubcon, Matt Cutts of Google just announced that they will start limiting search results to two subdomains for any one web search. This is a drastic revision, and may very well affect your site, possibly very negatively. Thankfully, the announcement specifically stated that the changes would be rolled out only in the next couple of weeks, so you still have time to prepare.

What This Means

In the past, search engine results have treated subdomains as though they were different sites. If your company is QWERTY, Inc., for example, and you sell widgets and fizzsnaps, then you might use widgets.qwerty.com as your widgets site, and fizzsnaps.qwerty.com as your fizzsnaps site. In this way, you could keep using the same branding for all your sites by using the same domain, but use different sites for each product.

But now, that logic has been perverted by google’s recent announcement, because now, no matter what the search is, your domain can at most occupy two slots on any search engine result. Which means a search on “qwerty”, for example, would at most show the www subdomain and your most popular other subdomain. Other slots will go to other people’s sites.

Even worse is if you do not own your own domain, but are just renting out a subdomain–now, for any given search, you are almost GUARANTEED not to get into the search results AT ALL.

How To Make Sure Your Site Does Not Take a Hit

If you are currently relying on subdomains for the different departments of your site, now is a good time to start thinking about setting up different domains for each of your departments. Do not abandon your old sites, especially if you have long term seo investment already in them, but start up new sites with unique one-page content on each, that links strongly back to your old domains. Once these pages reach sufficient pagerank, they should be able to replace the positions that you will have lost from Google’s drastic change.

If, however, you unfortunately are hosting your site under a mere subdomain, then this is the call for you to get your own domain. When this new policy rolls into place (Matt Cutts said it would be “in the next couple of weeks”), your site will be effectively dropped from all search engine results, period. The only way to fix this, unfortunately, is to get your own domain.

Posted by Eric Herboso.

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Wordpress 2.3.1 is the most recent version of one of the most popular blogging platforms on the web.  Known for its ease of use, Wordpress is designed to be accessible to bloggers of all backgrounds.  Setting it up on a server is designed to be as simple as possible, and maintaining your blog involves little to no knowledge of servers or really any web technology.  It is not just an entry level system, however, as it provides support for plugins that make it a powerful application.  Out of the box, however, it has limited functionality in many ways.  For the purpose of this review I will take into account the core functionality of Wordpress, but if plugins do exist to solve issues, I will make note.

The core of Wordpress is the “Write” pane, where you create your posts and pages, simple permanent pages linked from your site that are edited the same way as posts.  The editor includes 2 modes, a rich text editor and an html editor.  The rich text editor has all the normal formatting options, and includes a spellcheck, but it also has some serious glitches.  I, like many, write and edit my posts on my desktop machine and paste them into my Wordpress blog.  Unfortunately this leads to some confusion, as Wordpress attempts to correctly format the text to match its source.  This process has been greatly improved over the three years I’ve been using the product, but it still occasionally runs into problems.

Issues with the rich editor may lead you to using the HTML editor, but this comes with its own problems.  Wordpress only offers limited html support, and specifically limits an extremely useful tag for formatting text, the forced line break.  While there are ways around this issue, for example line breaking and placing only a space then breaking again, this can be very troublesome when working with page templates that format text poorly.  Still, this is the only major difficulty I uncovered working with the HTML editor, which is overall an enjoyable experience.

By far Wordpress’ greatest strength is the widely customizable options it provides, making them easy to use.  Trackbacks are simple to implement, categories are easily managed and permalinks can be formatted virtually any way the user desires.  While the included templates are boring, there is a massive database online offering near limitless options for customizing your blog.  If you know how to edit templates, this gives you even more power.

There are, unfortunately, a few areas where Wordpress lacks features, but there are numerous plugins that help.  There is no built in system for tracking traffic and keeping statistics on your site.  Customization for search engine optimization is lackluster, but again, numerous plugins can be used to solve this problem.  Both of these would benefit the functionality of Wordpress if implemented into the core system.

One area where Wordpress shines is the inclusion of a “widget manager” directly in the software.  This allows you to not only run small applications on the sidebars of your site, but also organize the location of the applications, making providing extra functionality enjoyable and attractive.  Different options include syndicating and RSS feed or providing videos from youtube, among many others.  Again this requires use of plugins, but this system was previously a plugin unto itself, meaning Wordpress is being updated to function as its users desire.

Overall, Wordpress is the most powerful basic blogging tool I have ever encountered.  It is easily customizable, and so has a large community of developers making content for it.  There is little that you can’t do with it, making it a great application to transition to from simple web based systems like livejournal or blogger.  You will run into problems, especially if you are using a large number of plugins that conflict with each other, but overall it is a stable program.  The success of Wordpress is also a testament to its greatness, and as such I can say I recommend the program to anyone who might be interested in blogging, from the uninitiated to computer whizzes, everyone can get a great deal out of using Wordpress.

Posted by Ian Logsdon.
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