Quantcast

Index on Afghanistan: January 2007

Pepe Escobar, Asia Times. The “war on terror” is back with a bang. First Afghanistan, then Iraq and now Somalia. And Iran could well be the next Islamic nation to be bombarded by the US – as President George W Bush telegraphed in his

We all have an eastern exposure now

Official Google Blog: New sunrise layer on Google Earth

Many of us aren’t lucky enough to experience one of nature’s most glorious sights—the beauty of the sunrise—every day, let alone on demand. That is, until today. Now there’s a Google Earth layer that brings the sun’s ascent right to your computer screen, and Google Earth aficionados can also see video vignettes drawn from Discovery HD Theater’s “Sunrise Earth” program.

To view the videos, open Google Earth and select the Sunrise Earth layer under Discovery Networks.

Beautiful.

Som-OIL-ia?

Pepe Escobar wrote for the Asia Times,. US military circles dubbed it “a significant strategic shift” when Donald Rumsfeld, in one of his last tasks as defense secretary, set the stage for the birth of the African Command – a lean,

Don’t Index This Page

Official Google Blog: Controlling how search engines access and index your website

Controlling how search engines access and index your website

1/26/2007 11:36:00 AM
Posted by Dan Crow, Product Manager

I’m often asked about how Google and search engines work. One key question is: how does Google know what parts of a website the site owner wants to have show up in search results? Can publishers specify that some parts of the site should be private and non-searchable? The good news is that those who publish on the web have a lot of control over which pages should appear in search results.

The key is a simple file called robots.txt that has been an industry standard for many years. It lets a site owner control how search engines access their web site. With robots.txt you can control access at multiple levels — the entire site, through individual directories, pages of a specific type, down to individual pages. Effective use of robots.txt gives you a lot of control over how your site is searched, but its not always obvious how to achieve exactly what you want. This is the first of a series of posts on how to use robots.txt to control access to your content.

It’s interesting that this is still such a big problem that it deserves a place in the Google Blog. The robots.txt file has been around for web aeons. Yet apparently people are still complaining that Google indexes too much of their stuff.

Technorati Tags: ,

Australian megafauna

Mega-marsupials once roamed Australia – CNN.com

CANBERRA, Australia (Reuters) — Marsupial lions, kangaroos as tall as trucks and wombats the size of a rhinoceros roamed Australia’s outback before being killed off by fires lit by arriving humans, scientists said on Thursday.

The giant animals lived in the arid Nullarbor desert around 400,000 years ago, but died out around 50,000 years ago, relatively shortly after the arrival of human settlers, according to new fossil skeletons found in caves.

Fossilized remains were uncovered almost intact in a series of three deep caves in the center of the Nullarbor desert — east of the west coast city of Perth — in October 2002.

“Three subsequent expeditions produced hundreds of fossils so well-preserved that they constitute a veritable “Rosetta Stone for Ice-Age Australia”, expedition leader Gavin Prideaux said of the find, detailed in the latest edition of the journal Nature.

The team discovered 69 species of mammals, birds and reptiles, including eight new species of kangaroo, some standing up to 9 feet tall.

Protected from wind and rain, and undisturbed due to their remote location, the remains of the mega-beasts are in near-perfect condition, including the first-ever complete skeleton of a marsupial lion, Thylacoleo carnifex.

Super-cool.

Australian megafauna

Mega-marsupials once roamed Australia – CNN.com

CANBERRA, Australia (Reuters) — Marsupial lions, kangaroos as tall as trucks and wombats the size of a rhinoceros roamed Australia’s outback before being killed off by fires lit by arriving humans, scientists said on Thursday.

The giant animals lived in the arid Nullarbor desert around 400,000 years ago, but died out around 50,000 years ago, relatively shortly after the arrival of human settlers, according to new fossil skeletons found in caves.

Fossilized remains were uncovered almost intact in a series of three deep caves in the center of the Nullarbor desert — east of the west coast city of Perth — in October 2002.

“Three subsequent expeditions produced hundreds of fossils so well-preserved that they constitute a veritable “Rosetta Stone for Ice-Age Australia”, expedition leader Gavin Prideaux said of the find, detailed in the latest edition of the journal Nature.

The team discovered 69 species of mammals, birds and reptiles, including eight new species of kangaroo, some standing up to 9 feet tall.

Protected from wind and rain, and undisturbed due to their remote location, the remains of the mega-beasts are in near-perfect condition, including the first-ever complete skeleton of a marsupial lion, Thylacoleo carnifex.

Super-cool.

SANDY BERGER SHOULD BE IN JAIL

YouGoogle Assimilates the Networks

Official Google Blog: A look ahead at Google Video and YouTube

Starting today, YouTube video results will appear in the Google Video search index: when you click on YouTube thumbnails, you will be taken to YouTube.com to experience the videos. Over time, Google Video will become even more comprehensive as it evolves into a service where you can search for the world’s online video content, irrespective of where it may be hosted.

And:

Over time, Google Video will become even more comprehensive as it evolves into a service where you can search for the world’s online video content, irrespective of where it may be hosted.

What this means: YouGoogle is going to assimilate the networks. Let them put their content on their own servers and charge what they want. If they want Google users to find them, they’ll give Google a cut.

Technorati Tags: ,

DAILY WAR NEWS FOR WEDNESDAY, January 24, 2007 Photo: Iraqi youths …

Pepe Escobar: ONE, TWO, A THOUSAND FALLUJAHS? What both Zawahiri and Muqtada are saying [in a video starring al-Qaeda's No 2, Sunni Arab Ayman al-Zawahiri, and an interview by Iraqi Shi'ite nationalist leader Muqtada al-Sadr] torpedoes

The state of the (dis)union

By Pepe Escobar “Security is a shared destiny. If we are secure, you might be secure, and if we are safe, you might be safe. And if we are struck and killed, you will definitely – with Allah’s permission – be struck and killed.”