Check your page rank now!

PageRank is Google’s measure of the importance of a web page. It is a numeric score assigned by Google and ranges from 0 to 10. Google uses the vast link structure of the web as an indicator of an individual page’s value. When one page links to another, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. Google also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes received from pages that are themselves “important” carry more weight. Google combines PageRank with text-matching techniques to find web pages that are both important and relevant to search queries.

You can now check your Google PageRank without using the Google toolbar, check out http://www.mohanjith.net/pagerank/ .

The Google Highly Open Participation Contest

Following on from the success of the Google Summer of Code program, Google is pleased to announce a new effort to get young people involved in open source development. Google has teamed up with the open source projects such as Apache Software Foundation, Drupal, GNOME, Joomla!, MoinMoin, Mono, Moodle, Plone, Python, and SilverStripe to give student contestants the opportunity to learn more about and contribute to all aspects of open source software development, from writing code and documentation to preparing training materials and conducting user experience research.

If you’re a student age 13 or older who has not yet begun university studies, you could help out these projects. In return, you’ll learn more about all aspects of developing software – not just programming – and you’ll be eligible to win cash prizes and the all important t-shirt! You will, of course, need your parent or guardian’s permission to participate where applicable.

To Read more and take part go to http://code.google.com/opensource/ghop/2007-8/.

If you have already begun university studies like me you could always spread the word 🙂

Google TiSP – Toilet ISP?

Is this one of the few April fools day jokes devised by Google?

The idea is great if feasible, innovation at it’s max.

Only problem link to the list of utility companies lead to a page that looks like a typical google 404 error page, that beats around the bush until they finally get to the real jucy truth, that Google TiSP is a April Fool’s joke.

Thumbs up Google for a neat April fools joke. Question is how many people fell for it.

Part in the FAQ that lead to the 404 page explaining it all.

Does my water company support TiSP?
TiSP was developed with the support and assistance of a large number of major metropolitan water companies. A full list of companies that support TiSP is available here. If yours isn’t listed, please contact them to verify their ongoing and unstinting support before you even think about signing up for TiSP service.

Here is the 404 page quoted:

Not Found

The requested URL was not found on this server. There are so many reasons that this might have happened we can scarcely bring ourselves to type them all out. You might have typed the URL incorrectly, for instance. Or (less likely but certainly plausible) we might have coded the URL incorrectly. Or (far less plausible, but theoretically possible, depending on which ill-defined Grand Unifying Theory of physics one subscribes to), some random fluctuation in the space-time continuum might have produced a shatteringly brief but nonetheless real electromagnetic discombobulation which caused this error page to appear. Or (and truth be told, this is by far the most likely scenario) you might have reached a page that we meant to create but didn’t get around to it, since this year’s April Fool’s joke got hacked together at the last minute, more or less the same way this one did. And this one. And this one, and this one, and this one