TechnoCloud

In a sudden rush of originality and inspiration, I’m going to share surely the first ever list of 2008’s most popular posts!

10. Gearing up for something more useful
The awful pun in the title didn’t stop the traffic as this look back at Google Gears’ first year scraped into the top 10.

9. Google will see you now
One of my pet topics, visual search, made it into ninth as Google joined the innovators trying to unlock this most difficult and potentially lucrative of challenges in the search marketplace.

8. Adding Google Adsense on Wordpress.com
The painful move away from hosted Wordpress and then back again, did at least have some benefits. A list of handy advice for those contemplating similar folly and a coveted position in the top 10.

7. Google searches related to
Clearly I wasn’t the only one wondering where that appeared from…

6. Wii want cricket
Well, beach cricket did arrive only to disappoint, leaving one of the big questions unanswered for 2009 - when is the massive cricket diaspora going to get wii cricket?

5. Google plays the April fool
Always a ratings winner, this year’s April fools were mixed in terms of amusement value, but not in traffic value, cracking the top five.

4. BBC News video embed
It may be a post on a woefully out-of-date experiment, but with BBC iPlayer embedding still to appear the Google searches keep delivering the punters to this old post.

3. Build your own supermodel
Can there really be that many fans of Weird Science trying to build their own supermodel? It appears there are, as this old post continues to deliver.

2. Review of Chrome - the good, the bad and the too early
No surprise to see one of the stories of 2008 high up the list, as this not entirely postive review of Google’s Chrome browser made the top 2.

1. Lies, damn lies and social networking statistics
Everyone’s looking for them and Google keeps sending them to Technocloud to find them, helped no doubt by the catchy title. This post bemoaning the lack of decent social networking statistics, while offering up some of my own, pipped even Chrome to the top.

It’s been an interesting, challenging and exciting year. Best wishes to all for 2009.

After a previous post on wii cricket deploring its absence, cricket of sorts has come to the wii.

Big Beach Sports includes cricket as one of its games, as you can see from the embedded video below.

Although I haven’t got my hands on a version yet to test it against my expectations, as ever the Amazon reviewers have with some very mixed reviews. In short, it works, but falls short of their expectations in terms of graphics and gameplay, suggesting more French cricket than Test cricket.

Cheap and cheerful it may be, but at least it is here and will hopefully lead to a more sophisticated game from the likes of EA Sports entirely devoted to cricket. Key requirements would be the ability to play Test, one day and Twenty 20 matches with national teams and named players, plus career modes including the all-important averages.

This morning’s check of my RSS feeds produced a pleasant surprise. Google Reader’s previously rather ugly design has had a winter spring-clean with the heavy blue backgrounds toned down or replaced with a sprinkling of seasonal white snow.

Changes in design to heavily used sites or applications are not for the faint-hearted and are a common way of upsetting your most loyal users. RSS feed consumption is about speed and familiarity of the layout, but the redesign has addressed many of my grumbles.

Collapsable menus to decide what’s important to me on the page, not to Google. A cleaner, simpler design, easier on the eye. More white may be a design cliche, but it works.

The only real remaining grumble is that the ‘home’ page still looks cluttered and an area where Google of all people should know that less is more. I’d like to be able to configure the homepage to remove the recommendations, collapse the starred/shared items and select which feeds appear as defaults on the page.