The internet, a network spanning the globe. Today around 20% of the world’s population is connected. That’s over 1.4 billion people, a number with ten digits and it’s growing. Imagine each of these individuals would contribute only one sentence per day and one file per week.

And now think again. How realistic is that? How many sentences and files do you put online on an average day? Does that put Google’s name choice into perspective? Google is said to be named after the number googol, i.e. 10¹⁰⁰, a one followed by 100 zeros. It’s funny how back then they obviously didn’t care about the correct spelling, and today the verb google is found in many contemporary dictionaries.

GmailAssistant is an amazing little java application that allows you to check multiple Gmail accounts including Gmail for Domains at the same time. GmailAssistant accesses your Google accounts securely using IMAP over SSL. Basically folks, that means that it’s pretty secure!

GmailAssistant allows you to completely customize your notification options. You can choose to have it find all mail, unread in the Inbox, and even mail with specific labels. You can even choose different alert methods…i.e. popup message, chime, blink keyboard LED.

I have not been much of an online mapper up until now (give me a map and I guarantee to get you even more lost than before!) but while I was casually surfing around the other day, I somehow happened to land upon Google Maps.

We all know that selecting the right keywords is an important prerequisite for a good search engine visibility of a blog/website. There are many keyword tools available online, some of them being completely free and some are paid but offer a free edition with a few features.

We decided to list the best of the free tools which can help you research different keywords specific to your site and optimize the site.

1: Google Adwords Research Tool

Although this tool is primarily meant for Adwords bidders, this is also widely used by webmasters and publishers to measure the popularity of different keywords based on their Google search volume.

Google Gears is a free open source application and browser plugin that you can use to sync web applications to your computer for those times when you do not have internet access. It also has the capability to work on both Firefox and Internet Explorer web browsers; and Linux, Windows, Windows Mobile and Mac operating systems.

Like most Google products, Google Gears is still in beta, but it definitely gets the job done!

When researching possible stories, I sometimes use the Stumbleupon toolbar button but I recently came upon two other toolbar buttons which pretty much perform the same function. You may be interested in using them yourself for surfing the web.

Google’s “Picks For you”

This one won’t be for everyone’s tastes for the following reasons. First of all, you need the Google toolbar installed. Secondly, you need to activate Google search history. You also need a Google account but anyone with a Gmail account already has one of those. So you kind of need to be a bit of a Google fan to have all of that and you also need to trust them with your search history (so anyone that values their privacy may howl with protest).