Wikipedia has decided to black out its english language version in protest of SOPA and PIPA.

But you got a homework to do and don’t know where to get the information?

Google to the rescue.

Search for the term in Google and hover over  the arrows that appear on the result when you hover you mouse over it. (click on the image to see the example)

And click on cache to view the site. Please note that the site content might be different from what it is now as the Google cache data would be several days old. So, you might not get the necessary results if you are trying to find information related to current affairs.

Here is the link to the cached version of wikipedia page Paleontology. In this case, the cache data is just one day old, i.e of 17  January, 2012.

You can use the same trick  for other content sites when they are down for maintenance or would be blacking out today like Reddit.com.

Google sure can’t trust China anymore. After it was revealed by Google that China had launched sophisticated attack on it to hack in to Chinese human rights activists’ accounts, they are now taking them seriously.

Gmail does warns users, if it detects any suspicious activities from foreign ip-addresses. I have been accessing my account from German servers, but haven’t got any warnings. So maybe the Google’s algorithm knows that it is me who is accessing the account.

But there has been news about many people are getting warnings that their account have been accessed from China.

Threatpost says the users affected seem to be pretty randomly distributed—they found everyone from a privacy advocate, to the editor of a marketing blog, to doctors and gamers had been affected. The warning includes the IP address used to access the user’s account, and a recommendation to change their password.

It is a good practise to change passwords regularly, I do it after my account password was once compromised. Here is more on how to protect your account.

Gmail announced a feature called Priority inbox that would make sorting emails in ones account incredibly easy as it uses an intelligent sorting algorithm which gets better every time you you use it.

That is not the only intelligent feature in Gmail that makes it the best webmail. It also contains several small but useful features. It has an intelligent spam filter. Chances that you will find spam in your inbox is very less as much as 1 in 100000, unless of course you go on giving out email ids in bad neighbourhood sites.

Write ” I have attached” in the message body and try sending it to anyone without attaching anything. You will get a pop up message from gmail enquiring whether you want to send the email without an attachment. It is incredibly useful when you write long emails and you forget to attach any attachment you wanted to attach. It saves you from the hassles of resending the email with the attachment

Suppose you like sending particular emails to a particular group of people. Gmail remembers your group and next time you forget to send it to a particular person it will notify you about that. This feature is in labs and is called Don’t forget Bob.

There is another useful lab feature which is a variation of the above feature called Got the wrong Bob? In this, if you send emails to a particular group of people it remembers the preferences. Next time you try sending an email to this group but get a person’s email id wrong, due to several similar email id’s,  gmail will warn you. egs. If you put bobsmith@gmail.com instead bobmartins@gmail.com

And lastly, it has an incredibly good search. You can search through entire set of emails using operators to find the exact email you wanted. It is as easy and powerful as the Google search itself.

Google and their Gmail team never quite stop to amaze me. They had made email fun and easy from the time of launch when it was still in beta. Better spam filter, ever growing inbox memory (at a time when a competitor gave just 250 mb of space) and lots more.

They launched multiple inbox feature few months ago. It helped you create a new inbox when you login according to the filter you created. I used it create a separate inbox for emails forwarded from my another Gmail account.Hence, I only need to login to my main account to check mails of both the accounts.

Priority inbox is similar to the above but intelligent on its own. The gmail team has been working on the algorithm for past 18 months.

If you have signed up for many newsletter you will find the priority inbox feature very useful to sort out the important mails from the less important ones.

Priority Inbox splits your inbox into three sections: “Important and unread,” “Starred” and “Everything else”:

If suppose Gmail algorithm fails you can use the +/- options to set priority of emails. Gmail algorithm will use this information to intelligently sort your emails next time.

This feature is being rolled out slowly to all users. If it hasn’t been activated yet, it will be soon. Just wait.

Verisign is offering up to US$10,000 in cash prize for your story on how .COM changed your life in How Do You .COM contest. Also up for the grabs are $5,000, $2,500 and 10 iPads. .COM here is taken in context as the Internet phenomenon and not just a TLD.

The .COM age changed the lives of many people. Alex Tew of milliondollarhomepage.com, founders of Yahoo and Google, etc and the list goes on.

So, if you have an interesting story on how the .COM age has changed your life then you must enter into this competition. Write a 300 words essay or record a video (less than 2 mins and 2GB) where you describe how .COM changed your life.

You need to send in the entries before 31 August, 2010 23:59:59 MDT. And finally this contest is open only for residents of the US, Canada and Puerto Rico, so I am not eligible to participate.

We all loved Christopher Nolan’s movie Inception. It has been trending on twitter even before it released. Now think how to take advantage of people tweeting and searching about the movie Inception. Simple, use the word as a part of sentence and promote it.

The Last Exorcism movie makers have used this trick to good effect. They have advertised their movie on twitter and have cleverly used the popular keyword ‘Inception’ without making it evident that it is spam.

Twitter on its help page has mentioned that only tweets that resonate will be shown. This particular tweet had just 9 retweets after 13 hours but was still being displayed on the search result page of ‘Inception’. Simply, because people who were tweeting about the movie ‘Inception’ were helping this tweet resonate.

As mentioned in earlier blogpost, Gmail’s interface has indeed been changed today. It looks cleaner with contacts link and an ability to sort contacts by first name , last name and phone number.

Here is the blog post Future design changes to Gmail.

Delhi police have started a facebook page to help ease traffic problems in the capital city of India.

From NYT

The traffic police department started a Facebook page two months ago, and almost immediately residents became digital informants, posting photos of their fellow drivers violating traffic laws. As of Sunday more than 17,000 people had become fans of the page and posted almost 3,000 photographs and dozens of videos.

It is a cool thing here in India where red tape and bureaucracy slows down everything. A government department using Internet, especially a social networking site like facebook is refreshing.

By Lingaraj G J - Flickr

It will be interesting to see if the police allow the people to film cops breaking laws themselves.

An image uploaded to the Chromium OS bug tracker shows a number of changes to the design and layout of Gmail. This seems as a Google’s internal version of Gmail. These changes may or may not be made public.

Here is the visible list
1. Three new links at the top of the sidebar menu (Mail, Contacts, Tasks)
2. Compose mail link is now a button
3. A drop-down allows you to switch between Google accounts
4. Select all, none, unread, etc. is a drop-down instead of a link list.
5. Call phone option appears in Gmail Chat
6. Chat settings appear as a drop-down
7. Search contacts box has moved
8. Menu at top of screen seems to have been moved from the right to the left.

Google has been granted a patent to a technology that will track mouse movements to deliver relevant results. The title is “System and method for modulating search relevancy using pointer activity monitoring”. Here is how the abstract for the patent describes it:

A method and system of modulating search result relevancy use various types of user browsing activities. In particular, a client assistant residing in a client computer monitors movements of a user controlled pointer in a web browser, e.g., when the pointer moves into a predefined region and when it moves out of the predefined region. A server then determines a relevancy value between an informational item associated with the predefined region and a search query according to the pointer hover period. When preparing a new search result responsive to a search query, the server re-orders identified informational items in accordance with their respective relevancy values such that more relevant items appear before less relevant ones. The server also uses the relevancy values to determine and/or adjust the content of an one-box result associated with a search query.

It means that if a user quickly moves his mouse towards a result, Google will know that it is relevant to him.  If a user hovers over a result or an ad then it means that the user found the result or ad interesting.