Google Logo: Sir Edmund Hillary

Google has put up a special logo on its homepage to celebrate the 55th anniversary of Sir Edmund Hillary's ascent of Mt Everest.

New Zealand-born Sir Ed, who died in January, was with Sherpa Tenzing Norgay the first to reach the peak of the world's highest mountain.

The logo is visible on the Australian and New Zealand Google homepages, as well as other countries such as Nepal.

Google periodically changes its logo to celebrate special events and anniversaries, such as the invention of the first laser, Earth Day, or February 29th.

Click here to see a list of previous Google logos.

Google helps Chinese earthquake

谷歌的工程师经过 24 小时不间断的奋战，已经紧急搭建出灾区人员搜索平台，我们努力将那些零零落落的信息整合在一起，方便大家寻找亲人。

地震的当天夜里，谷歌中国紧急启动了“地震形势图”，让大家可以实时看到四川汶川当地的地理位置、全国各地最新的抗震救灾情况和捐赠链接。谷歌的工程师在包括谷歌地图、资讯、来吧、移动搜索在内的谷歌产品上还增加了一些特性，帮助人们及时获得跟地震相关的有用信息。

How big is your homepage?

John Clegg (Zoomin, Projectx) has posted a series of tables showing the heavy and the lite New Zealand websites.

He used the excellent Firebug extension for Mozilla Firefox together with Yahoo’s YSlow, to measure and analyze homepage performance over the top 75 New Zealand websites from Rankr.

TheNew Zealand Homepage Hall of Shame includes, in order from the worst offender, TV3, Kiwiblog, Seek and Stuff among other Kiwi internet stars.

The survey shows the average homepage was 304.9kb compared to a global average of 312kb

Time spend on sites

Do you want to know how much time internet users spend on zillion of websites? Here is the top websites.

Image from http://www.techcrunch.com/

Microsoft Walks away from Yahoo

Microsoft has withdrawn its bid to buy Yahoo on 3rd May, Microsoft was willing to pay US$47.5 billion or US$33 per share, up from the bid's current value of US$29.40 per share, but Yahoo demanded at least US$53 billion or US$37 per share.

Here is the letter that Steve Ballmer wrote to Jerry Yang Microsoft Withdraws Proposal to Acquire Yahoo!

Choose a default photo for a place on ZoomIn

From today on, ZoomIn allows users to choose a default photo for their places. If you are the owner of a place , you have the power to let other users choose a default photo for your place.

Go and do it now, pick the most beautiful photos for your places!



I have been working on this for more than one day, it is pretty good experience for using RMagick and webistrano for deployment.