Puffbox

A parliamentary question has revealed that, in the year to the end of January 2010, the Department of Health spent £2.72 million on Google Adwords pay-per-click keyword advertising. A big number, but a fair one? With Google's Adwords advertising, you only pay on results. An advert is displayed at the top, or down the side of [...] read on »

I've come across a rather curious anomaly in Google's new Street View. Southampton is one of the cities covered in the initial UK rollout... or rather, most of Southampton. You'll note the bizarrely unavailable stretch of Romsey Road... and the odd interruption of Wimpson Lane. Here's a link to it in Street View, to see [...] read on »

When I first saw reports of the Guardian's new Data Store 'open platform', my heart sank. In a former life, I ran the web operation at the Office for National Statistics; I resigned in June 2004, when frustration started to turn to anger. I've still got a copy of my resignation letter, in which I [...] read on »

Google's javascript API has an exciting, and somewhat underreported little feature built in: each time a call is initiated, it attempts to establish where the browser is physically located - and reports back a town, 'region' (county) and country. I was wondering if it was accurate enough to be used to 'personalise' a website automatically: [...] read on »

The release of the first 'Googlephone' running the open source Android couldn't have come at a better time for me. My Nokia E65 had served me well, but was getting a bit temperamental. I'd already handed all my email over to Google, and was keen to do likewise with my calendar needs (bye bye Outlook!). Plus, [...] read on »

Wednesday saw the formal launch of London's crime maps, which first appeared in beta only a couple of weeks back. Don't call it '1.0' though: the source code declares it's actually 'beta 1.02'. As before, it shows areas colour-coded for the rates of 'burglary, robbery and vehicle crime', based on comparisons with 'the average'. Yes, that's [...] read on »

It was the usual mix of excitement and fear as I downloaded Google Chrome last night: the former to see what Google would do when it had total control of the browsing experience, the latter in case it rendered any of my designs horribly. To be honest, there wasn't much to report on either front. Let's [...] read on »

Presenting, in the blue corner, Google's announcement of its forthcoming Chrome browser - by the medium of the comic book. And in the red corner, Mr Stephen Fry's armchair chat on the subject of GNU, the movement to create a completely free operating system. Both are trying to do something quite peculiar: they want to give [...] read on »

I've recently noticed people's Twitter accounts ranking particularly highly on search results for their name. So is the benefit to your search engine ranking good enough reason to get into Twitter, even just as a token gesture? For example, I run an experimental Twitter account for Puffbox: it's just a Twitterfeed thing for blog posts specifically [...] read on »

Time for some tech talk. A few weeks back, I wrote about Google's new AJAX Feed API. Having played with it last week on behalf of a client, and having liked what I saw, I decided to implement it myself. If you're reading this on the puffbox.com website itself, you might see a list in the [...] read on »