Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

This article is in a direct response to an article on Slate subtitled How Gmail destroyed Outlook. Farhad Manjoo has written an article explaining how to use Google Gears to take your Gmail account offline. However he has badly titled it The Best E-Mail Program Ever and subtitled it How Gmail destroyed Outlook.

If he had just left it titled something like Google Gears provides Gmail with offline capability I wouldnt have minded. But to attempt to use that feature to claim that Gmail is the best program ever or to even more ridiculously claim that Gmail has somehow destroyed Outlook as a result is farcical at best and completely misleading and untrue.

OK lets look at what he says and why.

I have had so much new stuff come over my desk the last few days I haven’t got time to try it or even review it properly. There is a lot of new innovative things going on at the moment on the web.

Here is a randomly ordered selection of stuff that I thought was cool or useful.

Large File Sharing Services

(also added to my original large file sharing post)

Pando is free P2P software that makes downloading, streaming and sharing large media files fast, easy and fun. Need to email large attachments, IM a folder, or publish your downloadable videos to the Web? Maybe you'd just like to watch full-screen HD Internet TV. Meet Pando.

Microsoft Office Live Workspace Beta

Save your documents to the Web—for free!

Access files from anywhere

• View documents from almost any computer with a Web browser
• No more flash drives—files are there when and where you need them
• Password-protected sharing; you control who views and edits your work

Work with programs you know

• Save over 1,000 Microsoft Office documents in one online place
• Open and save files from familiar programs like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
• Synchronize contact, task, and event lists with Outlook

Free Photo Shop tutorials at Luxa

SkyScanner is a Flight Search site that works for other countries than US.

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is paying off for me.

I have an unfortunate name. Tim Miller is a pretty common name. So when you do a Google search for me you cant find this Tim Miller, instead you find a whole bunch of other people. This is part of the reason I have promoted my blog as SpyJournal. Its a unique name and its the name I use for most of my social websites and so on. Our business names also of Jethro Management and Jethro Consultants are pretty unique.

  So when I do a Google search for SpyJournal, every single entry on the first page is me. Jethro Management is the same, and Jethro Consultants has the second last one only as not me. 9 out of 10 or 10 out of 10 results is pretty good. I think I have a pretty good chance of getting found with my company name. By the way I would be interested if readers in other countries could try the same thing and let me know in the comments what you find. Feel free to use other search engines, though Google is of course the main one. I cant remember the time I needed  to try a different one!

The next step for me is to keep working on my keywords, specifically Drupal and Excel and Excel VBA.

I have received numerous jobs recently through from people who found us with Google searches here in Australia. More in the last 6 months than in the rest of our business history so far.

Has your Excel application slowed down lately? Have you installed the Google Desktop Application?

They may be related. Dick from Daily Dose of Excel reports this article taken from Charles Williams web page.

This report comes from Charles Williams of DecisionModels.com fame. Charles knows a thing or two about performance in Excel.

For the last few weeks I have been trying to find out
why clearing a large range of cells caused Excel to hang on some PCs
but not on others. This does not happen with Excel 97, but does with
Excel 2000, 2002, 2003 and 2007.