Google Launches Personalized Home Page

Google has unveiled a new service that allows people to consolidate various Google features they use, ranging from web search to email, into a personalized home page.

The new personalized home page service will no doubt make many people scream "Portal!" That's because despite the name, it is essentially a "My Google" feature, similar to the My Yahoo, My MSN and other My Whatever pages that portals created so their users could access the many features they offer.
Well, Google's already been a stealth portal as I've called it for some time, offering standard portal features such as email, search and the home pages of today, blogs. The new personalized home page is merely a visible acknowledgement of this.

But the feature is also welcomed. It makes sense for Google to offer a unified page for many of its services, and the page does this without impacting the regular Google site nor getting far away from the general Google feel at all.

Feeds: A New Channel for Search Marketing

Savvy search marketers are taking advantage of an increasingly popular technology to attract traffic: RSS feeds that get picked up virtually instantaneously as they are published by specialized webfeed search engines.

RSS feeds deliver summaries of regularly changing Web content to publishers. In this session, representatives who operate major news and webfeed search engines talked about how to prepare, submit, and subscribe to the various webfeed search engines.

Source : www.searchenginewatch.com

Google buys Dodgeball.com

The complete Story

As a two-person team, Alex and I have taken dodgeball about a far as we can alone. Since we finished grad school, we've been trying to figure out how to grow dodgeball and make it a better service along the way. We talked to a lot of different angel investors and venture capitalists, but no one really "got" what we were doing - that is until we met Google.
The people at Google think like us. They looked at us in a "You're two guys doing some pretty cool stuff, why not let us help you out and let's see what you can do with it" type of way. We liked that. Plus, Alex and I are both Google superfans and the people we've met so far are smart, cool and excited about what they're working on.