Profy

PayPal is one of the most important web services for freelancers - that's what I learned long ago when working as a freelance translator and persuading my international clients to go through all the hassle involved in sending money my way by wire transfer. Of course you'd expect PayPal to be a better option available for quick and cheap international payments to just about anyone in the world. Right? Wrong.

Unfortunately, PayPal's support of some countries is very limited - limited to the extent that makes this great service only half usable for international customers from a long list of countries. The thing is that in the majority of countries (Russia included) people can easily open accounts and prove their identities (even if it can be a complicated and time-consuming task), they can even connect a credit card to the account and send money to PayPal account owners elsewhere...

Today Google is finally rolling out its long-promised and long-tested by a large group of randomly-selected users SearchWiki functionality - this time for everyone to see and use. The functionality allows any Google user to customize search results for any search query by moving results up or down according to their relevance (as viewed by this user), deleting certain links from results if deemed not relevant, adding sites that are not in the results pages and also adding notes for various sites - for example, to describe why you think this particular website is helpful for a user doing a search on this query...

We have recently reported on a Russian company Era Vodoleya that expressed its intentions to sue Google for a huge amount of $3 billion (which is 15% of Google's revenues) because of Google allegedly infringing a patent with its contextual advertising technology - the one that turned Google into a multi-billion company.

In the post I thought that the entire situation looked more like the company was trying to attract some publicity to itself instead of actually having the resources required to sue the internet giant - patent or no patent...

Louis Gray has just published a review of yet another Twitter tool named TweetValue intended to assign value to any Twitter account - this time the value expressed in real money. We have already seen applications calculating all types of ranks for us but TweetValue goes one step further and encourages us to know how much our Twitter accounts are really worth.

To find out the value, you simply let the application know your Twitter ID and it will calculate its dollar value based on some secret algorithm using publicly-available information about your Twitter account...

The latest buzz from Google is the newly-launched Gmail themes that allow every user to choose exactly how your Gmail application will look like in your browser. Also Gmail team has rolled out a slight change in the overall default application interface that features a little different colors. But when on a normal day new interface for Gmail could be a hot topic for the day, today people don't even mention it with the new Gmail Themes introduced being big news...

Even Google makes mistakes from time to time and its own virtual reality Lively seems to be one of such mistakes. Today Google's team working on Lively has admitted the mistake and announced the decision to shut Lively down explaining that the company needs to focus on its core lines of business - search, ads, and applications.

Lively definitely was a short-time experiment for Google: the internet giant launched its own tool for users to create 3D virtual worlds ("rooms") only in July so it will last only half a year by the time the experiment is finished in the end of December...

As some of you may remember, over the weekend I published some of my thoughts about very visible increase in spam volumes that arrives in comments to blogs. I was not the only person noticing that and my idea was that spammers were trying to compensate for loss of email channel for spam after McColo hosting company responsible for three quarters of the total worldwide spam volume was disconnected from the internet.

Now that we are starting to see the number of spam emails hitting our inboxes slowly resuming, I am also seeing the number of spam comments caught by Akismet getting back to normal again...

Have you ever noticed that Twitter content is generally suitable for all audiences? For some reason everyone tries to stick to language that will not offend anyone and you will rarely see strong language used in tweets in public. And even when strong words are used, twitterers will often choose to mask them somehow not to offend anyone who may not want to see offensive language on Twitter.

Yet from time to time I am surprised with what I see on Twitter. Like today, for example, I have received a following notification from a user MediCann with a bio stating "Largest Provider of Medical Marijuana Evaluations"...

We have already heard voices in the blogosphere that media people (both bloggers and reporters from traditional media outlets) should be cautious about how we cover various economic events in these hard times as we are partly responsible for what our readers will think and how they will behave. And since it is hardly arguable that the financial crisis is partly due to panic and irrational behavior of traders and investors, this issue definitely deserves our attention and consideration from every reporter or blogger...