Alexa's Blog

Hello people,

for those of view wondered what has happened in the last month in which no posts where added, I have 1 word:

VACATION !

The best one I had in the past 10 years.And for those which are still keep update their blogs and other online stuff I have another three words:

GET A VACATION!

That´s right.Get a vacation with your family, friends, pets or whatever you like.Stay away for at least 3 weeks from your computer, blogs, email and everything related to your work.You will come back in a better shape and why not more happy. Don´t worry, your website can live without you
I live in a very beautiful country and there are many nice things to see. Below are some pictures taken in the 1600 Km trip around my country together with my family.Enjoy !

Well, I think is pretty safe to say: They don´t control it yet. However they have a lot of  information about many of us and many voices are rising about privacy issues.

As many of us know Google is gathering data from us with any tools they put on the table for our benefit and of course for free. They store anything we search for, all of our emails and anything we do in generally with all their tools.

Let´s make a short review:

For general users,

• Google Search - search engine.They store anything we search
• Google Talk - Anything we talk.As far as I know there is no support for encryption here too.
• Google Mail (Gmail) - Any communication via their email system.Unlimited space, more emails stored, better for them.
• Google Desktop - Index EVERYTHING on your computer.Files, music, photos, chat logs, browsing history and god knows what else.
• Google Calendar - Your planning and events that takes part of your daily life.
• Google Docs - Whatever you put there.Personal things, project stories, etc…
• Google Orkut - Personal information about you and your friends
• Google Reader - Anything you read via their Rss/Atom feeds service
• Google Checkout - Anything you buy and from where
• Google Maps - Anything you search and request there.Driving direction to a given address and why not to your own home…
• Google Video - Anything you watch.

If I forgot something let ´me know.Just imagine what big amount of data they collect for any about us.If a user use all of their services they just know… everything about him.What they do with all that information ? Personally I think that everything is resuming to Marketing and Control. How do they know what are the best deals and market trends ? How they decide what to buy and what not ? You guess. Analyze of this data can reveal a lot of things about almost anything.

I must admit that Google owns people which use all of those services or at least a big part of them.I know persons who drive their business using Google Docs to share documents and discussions with their teams. Then they get surprised when they found that Google has just coming on the market with a similar tool or service.

On the other hand, I think that there is no privacy issue here.People grant them the right to collect all this data in exchange for those services.As a result what they do with this data is up to them, but keep in mind that all of their power come from us, the daily users of their tools.I don´t think that making all data collected anonymous after 24 months will solve any privacy issues either.They can use that data before and after very well for the same purposes.The big problem here is about collecting and the fact that users are agree with that without any concerns.

Just imagine what can happen if one of their employers steal and sell the most searched product.Or the top 10 of the best sold products.

If we put together all those tools with the ones they give to Webmasters and the new Google Gears which is for developers the set for driving the world in the near future is almost complete. I am sure that everything will get completed soon with the only thing they don´t have yet (or at least we don´t know about) and that is political power.

We are the ones that we push them high and we are the ones that help them make their dream to happen.
Don´t forget:

“Who will control the information will control the world.”

Google is just one step away from that and their actual leaders will not live forever.What will happen after that? Who make some predictions ?

And to see that I am not alone thinking like this, here are some links to related articles. Enjoy and get scary at the same time…

Is It OK that Google Owns Us?

Is Google Evil ?

Google Evil ?

Google - Don’t Be Evil

I decided to write this post with the hope that will help somebody to avoid the pain I had in the last two weeks with my blog sitemap.

Everything has started when in one day I noticed that my sitemap is reported with errors in my Google Webmasters Tools account. Because I didn´t changed everything in that part I have just re-submitted the sitemap again but finally I ended with the same errors.And here the pains begin.

I have clicked on the Errors link and looked at the reason which says:

“Network unreachable: robots.txt unreachable
We encountered an error while trying to access your Sitemap. Please
ensure your Sitemap follows our guidelines and can be accessed at the
location you provided and then resubmit.”

Both the above files have been at the right location and I was able to see them in the browser.More than that, Yahoo and Msn get the files almost daily without any errors so this was really strange.

I was searching on the Internet and I found that many other people has the same problem without any apparent reason so I started to look the the possible reasons in order to eliminate all possible mistakes on my side.I have changed the file encoding to UTF-8, change & validate the structure and resubmitted again.I get the same error.

I get very pissed off and I opened a ticket to my hosting company (Sorry guys !) but that did not solved anything because they did not changed anything on the server also.

I was posted also a message n the Google Webmaster groups with the hope that somebody might help me but all I was get was a point to a possible DNS error which at the end has nothing to do with this.In all this period the Google bot has ignored my website totally. I did not found any attempt access to download the sitemap.xml file and that has make me think that definitively something is wrong on the Google side.
So I decided to make the only change I din not tried until now. To delete the old file from Google Webmaster Tools account and replace it with a new one with a different name.And guess what ?

THIS WORKED.

The new sitemap was downloaded by Google in 15 minutes and the crawler was again on my website after 20.

I must say that I found again a stupid situation where a stupid error message is not able to say what the real error is.They could at least to show the url to the sitemap they are trying to get, not mention that somebody from their staff should have a look from time to time to the Google Groups and try to check what´s wrong when people complains there.

So if you have similar problems, just rename the old sitemap file with a new name (adding a letter or something like that), delete the old one from your Google account and submit the new one.You have a big change to get your problems solved.

All the bests.