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The Fedex man dropped off a package today and to my delight it was from Google. It is this year Christmas gift from Google which is a 2 GB Credit Card sized USB storage in its own little google wallet and a card to donate supplies to the school of your choice. To me not as impressive as last year digital picture frame, but it is cool they are encouraging the people the work with to also share the cheer by giving back to a school of your choice.

Pictures of the Google Christmas Gift 2008 - 2 GB USB Credit Card Sized

Thanks GOOGLE!

Yay! Finally after all this wait LiveSide is now reporting that Microsoft has enabled the @Live.com and @Live.xx email signups and registrations.

Previously the @Live.com email registration could only be accessed through certain tricks and was not made available to the users generally. @Live.xx emails will be perhaps something that you will find new and interesting. Basically it refers to local domains such as e.g. (@live.co.pk) and now you can even register email on your these local domains too.

Please use this link http://get.live.com/getlive/overview to register local domains and use this link @live.com signup to register email at @Live.com address.

LiveSide has compiled a confirmed list of all the available domains and here is how it goes:

Migrate from @Hotmail.com to @Live.com

If you want to migrate from your existing @hotmail.com address to @live.com then Please check out the Windows Live Fresh Start page for instructions.

Please note that at the time you read this post the method might not work due to its unavailability at the time or due to some technical issue. The registration page is acting quite abnormally so the best thing is to try and try again.

After almost 11 attempts I was able to get hold of two @live.com email addresses though my target is still to get an email at my local live domain.

Best of luck

Google Adsense is no doubt the world’s best ad network but until now the most annoying thing about it was that it did not allow fast payment methods like Western Union Money Transfer or Bank Wire Transfer rather it was restricted to the traditional check delivery system which came through regular mail and could take weeks to reach you. Plus you had to then deposit your check to your bank account and wait 1 month more to get it processed but the good news is that Adsense has introduced a new fast method of getting your payments.

Adsense Money via Western Union Quick Cash

Google Adsense has now introduced a new payment form i.e. Western Union Quick Cash. Western Union Quick Cash is a payment method that allows you to receive your Adsense payments in cash using the worldwide Western Union Money Transfer service. Payments will be available for pick up at your local Western Union Agent the day after they are sent according to the normal payment schedule of Google Adsense.

But what exactly does this mean? and how much of a good news is it? It means that now:

• No more wait for check through standard delivery
• No more extra Bank fees
• No more long term clearing times as associated with deposit checks
• Fast money making and Fast delivery

However this feature is currently not available to all publishers (it depends on your location). Even after living in a country like Pakistan I was amazed and pleased to see that this payment option is available here

To change your payment form you need to login to your Google Adsense account and go to Payment Details. if you are eligible for Western Union Quick Cash then you will see an option there which looks like this

Before you go and pick up your payment via Western Union be sure to check out the Guidelines To Pickup Your WU Payment by Google Adsense Support.

I think its a good news for all publishers Please don’t forget to share the joy

Google has a lot of online services which do not seem to have any practical use in the start but eventually Google rolls out some brilliant upgrades that really make the service worth a try. Google Book Search is another so-called Google service which did not meet high fame until now but recently Google has rolled out an upgrade in the service that can make it one-of-a-kind and perhaps now users can take good use of it.

Create an Online Library with Google Book Search

Google Book Search will now enable you to collect, share, and discover new books following the feature upgrades done by Google. This will enable you to make your own online digital library where you can add books of your choice and they will be available publicly to anyone. This will help you to make an online log of your personal favorite books and if ever you need to pick a book for an occasion you can just log in to your account and pick it out. It will also make it easier for you to share your favorites with your friends and family.

How To Add Books to Google Book Search Library

1. Go to Google Book Search and click “My Library”
2. Search for a book using the Google Book Search
3. Click “Add to my library” to add book to your library

You can even Import Book to your library using their ISBN and can even export your whole library. The “My Library” link is the actual link to your public online digital library and you share it with anyone. The other good thing in Google Book Search Library is the ability to read and display the books in RSS Format.

Don’t forget to check out my Google Book Search Library

Disclaimer: all Google logos and service images used on this post are property of Google itself and have been used here just for educational purposes. Sizlopedia is in no way affiliated to Google and does not claim ownership of these images and logos.

The more you get familiar with Google and its services the more you realize that Google is not only about search or online products rather Google is also about fun, entertainment and recreation. For a geek like me Google can turn out to be the best free-time relaxation but its up to the most of us to discover how we can utilize Google services for a little fun and recently I was lucky enough to discover the fun part of Google Suggest.

Find Your Name in Google Through Google Suggest

Google Suggest is a Google Labs product which guesses what you’re typing and offers suggestions in real time. This is similar to Google’s “Did you mean?” feature that offers alternative spellings for your query after you search, except that it works in real time. It is a very useful service by Google through which you can search for particular keywords and other keywords which are similar to your search term.

Discover the Fun Part of Google Suggest

The real fun part of Google Suggest is to type in your name up to the minimum number of alphabets and see whether Google Suggest is wise enough to guess your name.

I used my alias Dj Flush up to 5 alphabets and was surprised enough to see that Google Suggest guessed me right away with 1,540,000 results. Wow! now thats really something. Take a look at it:

and when I used my real name i.e. Saad Hamid to see Google Suggest results I was again surprised to see that Google Suggest traced my name at the 7th possible alphabet with over 360,000 Results.

That was pretty cool and amazing right? Test the results for your name at Google Suggest and share it here with everyone so everyone can know how better Google knows you

Disclaimer: Google is the legal owner of all the Google Logos and service screenshots used in this post.

Yay! Guess whats special today? well its the 9th birthday of our favorite web company named Google. Everyone now knows how Google has evolved from a search engine baby of the old world to a search engine daddy of the modern era which now rules the web.

Happy Birthday Google 

The Google journey has been amazing over these 9 years. It has contributed a lot to the web plus last year it even made it to the Oxford dictionary thus claiming an eternal and unique identity.

I wish a merry Happy Birthday to Google and may it the Google trend live forever

Gmail is a Google-owned, web-based email service that includes over 2 gigabytes of storage (and growing). Until now Gmail only offered POP access which would let you read new email messages in your inbox but any changes made to your Gmail inbox on a remote device would not be reflected in your real online inbox but with IMAP now things are going to change.

Google recently announced on the official Gmail blog that Gmail can now be accessed through free IMAP.

IMAP is the best way to access your email from multiple devices (e.g. phone or desktop). It keeps the same information synced across all devices so that whatever you do in one place shows up everywhere else you might access your email.

This would not only let you read your inbox messages on a remote device but even the changes you make to your Gmail account will be reflected in your Gmail inbox using live synchronization. Using this new feature you will be able to use Gmail at your work, in your car or anywhere in the world with any device in a live environment.

To turn this feature on just click the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” tab in your Gmail “Settings” and turn it on.

It all started a couple of months ago when there was a rumor flying through the blogosphere about Google penalizing blogs for selling links. Many bloggers took this information as a mere rumor but little did we all know that Google was very serious about stopping paid link activities around the Internet.

The main reason for Google’s hatred towards commercial link trade was that the activity was giving advertisers a way to manipulate Google Pagerank.

Google Pagerank is a pure technology algorithm created by Google that calculates the importance of a web page based on the inbound and outbound links. The activity of selling/buying paid links was basically interfering with Google’s Pagerank technology and therefore Google decided to take action against the sites/blogs that were a part of this activity.

Google penalized some high profile blogs recently as an action towards stopping paid link activities around the blogosphere. Some blogs have even reported a decrease in their search engine traffic however for most of them its just the drop in their blog Pagerank. Here is a list of high profile blogs which supposedly lost Pagerank on this issue:

• Engadget (from 7 to 5)
• Problogger (from 6 to 4)
• Copyblogger (from 6 to 4)
• Quick Online Tips (from 6 to 3)
• Blog Herald (from 6 to 4)
• Weblog Tools Collection (from 6 to 4)
• Coolest Gadgets (from 5 to 3)
• CyberNet News (from 6 to 4)

and today Sizlopedia itself became a victim of the Google Pagerank terror and experienced a Pagerank drop (from 5 to 3). Its hard to say whether Google is right on this or not but this is really a striking issue for all of us.

The recent Google Pagerank update that took the air out of most of the webmasters and bloggers by dropping their Pagerank does not seem to be so harmful after all. Until now Google Pagerank was considered a key factor that used to decide the search engine ranking of blogs and websites in Google. However a little research suggests that Google Pagerank may not be so important after all from traffic and rankings point of view.

Matt Cutts recently mailed Search Engine Journal confirming the latest Google Pagerank update terror saying:

The partial update to visible PageRank that went out a few days ago was primarily regarding PageRank selling and the forward links of sites. So paid links that pass PageRank would affect our opinion of a site.

Going forward, I expect that Google will be looking at additional sites that appear to be buying or selling PageRank.

This tells us clearly that Paid Links were really the root cause of all Pagerank sweeps. Search Engine Journal is reporting that the latest Pagerank drop has not affected websites and blogs in terms of traffic and rankings. Perhaps to support this statement I would like everyone to consider the current month traffic graph of Sizlopedia below:

The green horizontal line represents the average traffic before Pagerank drop and the blue horizontal line represents the average traffic after Pagerank drop and if you compare both the lines then you will notice that at least for this blog, Google Pagerank drop has not affected the rankings and traffic at all.Perhaps we all should assume that the Google Pagerank Drop for all blogs was just a sweet little warning by Google to stop the paid links activity and dropping the rankings can be a next strategy which we all definitely fear.

Google Adsense is no doubt the biggest ad network on the Internet and every publisher seems to like it because of its good support and huge number of resources. Facilitating such a large number of Publishers with all these resources is not an easy task therefore the Google Adsense team has come up with a great new addition which will make the life of publishers easy as far as Google Adsense Resources are concerned.

Google Adsense has introduced a new tab to every publisher’s Google Adsense account called Resources.

This new tab shows a list of all the webmaster and publisher resources related to Google Adsense. This is perhaps a very good addition to the Google Adsense accounts as now every publisher will know where to find all the resources and all Adsense stuff.

Google Adsense Resources page has links to the Google Adsense Blog, Help Forum, Adsense Calendar, Optimization Tips, Ad Formats, Terms & Policies etc. This will definitely help out every publisher in the long run.

now that this feature is here already, when the hell is Google Adsense going to roll out the Manage Ads feature?