Pilot Program for Google TV Ads

After testing newspaper ads and radio ads, Google moves to a higher dimension: TV ads. Wall Street Journal reports that there's already a pilot program with a cable company in California, Astound Broadband.

Forbes gives a possible motivation: "Internet search advertising is a $15 billion business, of which Google has a two thirds share. However, TV advertising in the U.S. is a $54 billion market."

At a Morgan Stanley conference, Eric Schmidt said that the TV ads are inefficient because they are poorly targeted. People see ads they have no interest in and change the channel. "Schmidt told the conference that the next generation of digital set-top boxes would be addressable Internet devices, which would present a huge opportunity for targeted advertising."

The pilot program is "is aimed at testing the computer and network infrastructure needed for Google to broker and deliver commercials to cable systems more widely. In the test, advertisers are buying commercial placements through an auction system, people familiar with the matter say. But it is at an early enough stage that the buys are being handled manually by Google salespeople, rather than through a full-fledged automated auction like the one Google uses to sell ads online, one of the people says."

In a not-so-distant future, when Internet and TV become closer, Google could become a search engine for TV shows and serve targeted ads based on the content you're watching, location and the information from your Google account.

How Happiness Is Reflected in Blogs

Rada Mihalcea, from the University of North Texas, and Hugo Liu, from MIT, wrote last year an interesting paper [PDF] about happiness and the way it's reflected in blogs.

From the abstract: "What are the sources of happiness and sadness in everyday life? In this paper, we employ 'linguistic ethnography' to seek out where happiness lies in our everyday lives by considering a corpus of blogposts from the LiveJournal community annotated with happy and sad moods. By analyzing this corpus, we derive lists of happy and sad words and phrases annotated by their 'happiness factor.'".

LiveJournal, which is mostly popular in the US, lets you annotate your post with a mood and this made things easier.

This chart shows the happiness factor in a day and for each day of the week, measured by looking at the distribution of the most popular "happy" words ("yay", "shopping", "awesome", "birthday", "lovely", "concert", etc.):

Saturday seems to be the happiest day for LiveJournal bloggers, while the night is the happiest time of the day. Some of the most frequent contexts associated with happiness are talking about birthday or about something new, while the sad contexts are more human-centered and use verbs like "wish", "hate", "miss".

The paper also offers a recipe for happiness:

Ingredients
- Something new
- Lots of food that you enjoy
- Your favorite drink
- An interesting social place

Directions
Go shop for something new – something cool, make sure that you love it. Then have lots of food, for dinner preferably, as the times of breakfast and lunch are to be avoided. Consider also including a new, hot taste, and one of your favorite drinks. Then go to an interesting place, it could be a movie, a concert, a party, or any other social place. Having fun, and optionally getting drunk, is also part of the recipe. Note that you should avoid any unnecessary actions, as they can occasionally trigger feelings of unhappiness. Ideally the recipe should be served on a Saturday, for maximum happiness effect. If all this happens on your birthday, even better. Bon appétit!

{ via eLearningBlog }

Scribd - Share Documents with the World

Scribd is a site that lets you upload a great variety of documents (from text files, PDFs to Microsoft Office files) in a public database. You can attach a description, some tags and the document is instantly available to everyone.

You can upload more than one file at once, there's no limit for the size of a document, and you don't have to create an account to upload files. The uploaded documents can be viewed and downloaded in many formats, including PDF, text and MP3 (obtained using a text-to-speech program). Scribd uses a very powerful PDF viewer that lets you read huge PDF files without slowing down your browser. The documents can also be embedded into any site.

All the documents are searchable and it's easy to discover similar documents. An interesting detail is that Scribd serves different content to search bots: visitors see the PDF viewer, which is a Flash object, while search bots see the text version. While cloaking is not the best idea, at least documents can be found in Google and other search engines.

Anyone can post comments and rate a document, but one of the greatest feature of Scribd is the comprehensive statistics: for each document you can see a detailed log with all the visits, the referrers, a log for search bots, and charts for page views and unique visitors.

The homepage features a ranking of the most popular documents, and many of them of are copyrighted material. But, unlike YouTube, Scribd should have an easier mission to detect copyrighted text (of course, if they want to).

As it looks right now, Scribd doesn't have a way to edit documents or to share them with a list of collaborators, but it's an excellent solution to share documents with the world and find what the world thinks about them.

Netvibes API for Widgets that Work Everywhere

Netvibes, my favorite personalized homepage, is a site that thinks big. There are so many platforms for widgets/gadgets/modules, and each platform uses its own format, so the most popular personalized homepages got the most widgets.

Netvibes has just launched a universal widget API, that should let you develop widgets for Netvibes, Google Personalized Homepage, Windows Vista, Apple Dashboard, Opera etc.

"The Universal Widget API (UWA for short) is the name of the 1.0 release of the Netvibes API. With it come major changes and possibilities. While previous version of the API only let you build modules for Netvibes, UWA makes it possible for you to see your widget be used not only on Netvibes or on personal websites, but also on many other platforms, both online or on the desktop. (...) Thanks to its open-source JavaScript runtime, the Netvibes UWA can be easily ported to other platforms. As a developer, you can leverage your existing code on a large number of platforms. As a user, you can use all your favorite UWA widget on your favorite platform - it doesn't have to be on Netvibes only."

There are some sample widgets here and you'll notice they keep their Netvibes look on other platforms, which is not a good thing. But Netvibes gained a lot of points by inviting developers to build gadgets using their API: their mission is excellent and the number of widgets built for Netvibes will increase.

Google Shows Popular Videos from the Blogosphere

Google Video has a new section on the homepage: Blog Buzz, that features the videos from YouTube and Google Video that are discussed the most in the blogosphere. I assume that the ranking includes Google Video, even though the current top 10 videos are all from YouTube.

For each video, there's a link to Google Blog Search, where you can find the blogs that discuss those videos. It's a interesting to note that a search for [ link:http://www.youtube.com/v/8K_NQe57C-k ] in Google Blog Search returns not only the posts that link to the video, but also the posts that embed it.

There are many sites that try to find the hottest videos, by monitoring who links to them. Technorati sorts YouTube videos by the number of new links in the last 48 hours. Tailrank also focuses on YouTube, but gives priority to important blogs. Megite looks at videos from more than 20 online videos sites and takes into account the importance of a blog when ranking videos. There's also BlogPulse that also monitors Flash animations and shows a daily top of the most linked-to videos.

Another Step towards Google News - Blog Search Integration

Google News changed the right sidebar to look more like Blog Search. You'll notice this when you search: instead of the standard navigation links, there are options to change the time interval.

Google News added links to Blog Search in October last year and the integration was successful, even if it was just a small step. Eventually the two search engines should merge, as blogs become more influential and credible.


Related:
More about Google News
A new perspective for Google News

{ Thank you, Dave P. }

Google and Social Networking

Keith B. sent his thoughts about the latest update of Picasa Web Albums, Google's photo sharing site:

I absolutely LOVE the Picasa software (I haven't opened Photoshop for personal photos in ages) and the Picasa Web Albums is a nice service.

But is it just me or is the one thing Google seems to have a hard time getting a good feel for is personalization and social networking? Sure they bought YouTube, but they didn't build it or its user-base; nor have they really had it long enough to leave their mark on it. Blogger is arguably the best product in their line-up where they finally appear to be getting a better feel for this aspect.

The interface and integration with Picasa (and now Blogger) is very nice. But IMO it just doesn't seem to encourage social interaction or browsing through networks of friends, groups, tags, etc. Like a lot of Google products, it just comes across as rather cold and clinical. Functional? Absolutely - just like most Google products. But fun or personable (which is more important for things like photos and video v/s maps and email)?? I guess that's a matter of opinion, but I just don't get that vibe from it yet.

Like in Google Video, Picasa Web Albums dedicates most of the space to the photo and very few pixels to the author. People might find this strange and intimidating. Both Google Video and Picasa Web Albums lack profiles, while in Picasa Web there's no open door that invites you to discover interesting content. Google doesn't integrate already existing communities from Blogger or orkut, and each new product has its own profile, its own contact lists and connections. So why should you invest time and energy into a "cold and clinical" site instead of going to a site that cares less about user interfaces and more about human interactions?

Musicovery - Music Tailored to Your Mood

I've always wanted a music player that creates playlists based on your state of mind, but I couldn't find a good one. Musicovery is a site that lets you choose a mood (anywhere from dark to positive and from calm to energetic), a list of genres, a time period, and you get a playlist that can be listened online (in a low bitrate for free).

The songs are visually connected in a graph and when you select a song, the view centers on the current song. This reminds me of MusicPlasma, that shows music artists based on their influence and similarity.

Musicovery doesn't have a huge database, but it's a good option if you miss a dark song from the 90s or you just want to hear a relaxing song.

Google Maps Shows Images in Business Listings

Google Maps shows photos next some business listings to give you a better idea about the location. If you click on the thumbnail, you'll discover a new section of photos that displays images from the web, filtered from Google Image Search, and images uploaded by the business owner.

"Google Maps also includes pictures of buildings, storefronts, signs, and logos—especially helpful if you're going somewhere for the first time," says Jess Lee, product manager of Google Maps.

Google could improve the local results from Google Maps by integrating other information, like news related to a certain company, videos from YouTube/Google Video or public events from Google Calendar.

Statistics for Google Gadgets

I asked last month: how popular are Google gadgets? Niall Kennedy compiled some stats that could answer this question much better than my analysis.

Google has 3 times the number of gadgets from Netvibes, Windows Live and Pageflakes (Google has more than 4,200 gadgets). According to Niall's investigation, Google "served up over 700 million gadget views last week, including over 400 million gadget views (57%) from its top 10 gadgets". The most popular gadgets by far are Date & Time and Google Calendar, which are included by default in any personalized homepage. The most popular categories are: tools (includes Google Calendar), fun & games and lifestyle (includes videos, horoscopes). It's very interesting to note that 44% of the total number of page views were for the 28 gadgets created by Google.

Google Personalized Homepage grows much faster than the competition mostly because there's a link on Google's homepage that sends you there, but also because people found out that it's a good way to view information for different Google services in one place. The project was initially called "Google Fusion" and had the mission to become a glue for the growing number of Google products. Google should now focus on promoting third-party gadgets and the features introduced last week are in that direction.

Blogger Adds Transliteration for Hindi

Blogger has a new feature that may be helpful if you write your posts in Hindi.

"Blogger offers an automatic transliteration option for converting Roman characters to the Devanagari characters used in Hindi. This lets you type Hindi words phonetically in English script and still have them appear in their correct alphabet. Note that this is not the same as translation -- it is the sound of the words that are converted from one alphabet to other, not their meaning."

You just have to go to settings in one of your blogs and enable "Show transliteration for each post". In compose mode, Blogger will automatically convert Roman characters to the Devanagari characters while you type.

Hindi is spoken by almost 800 million people (according to Wikipedia), mostly in India.

{ Thank you, Krish. }

Major Update for Picasa Web Albums

Today Picasa Web Albums has the most important update since its launch, in June 2006. Basically, it adds the most requested features and even some obscure features that will make you very happy.

First, the free version of Picasa Web gets 1 GB of storage (up from 250 MB), enough to host 4000 high-quality photos. It's interesting that Google says "1 GB (and counting)" so the storage could increase like it does in Gmail.

Like in Flickr, you can also search the public photos posted by other people. Until today, you could search only your photos and the public photos uploaded by your contacts. Google wanted to be polite and ask you before including your public photos in the community search, so you must go to settings and enable this.



I told you last year that the new Blogger uses Picasa Web Albums to store photos. Now you automatically get new albums that store all the photos uploaded to your Blogger blogs. This is a nice way to view and search all the photos uploaded to your blogs, but also to backup your photos. For more context about a photo, click on the link to the post that includes it. Here's the album for Google Operating System.



It's also easier to link to a photo and you have more options when you embed a photo into your site. If you want even more options regarding the size of the embedded photo, check this post that lists all the available photo sizes.

{ Thank you, C. I. R. E. }

Send Google Maps Addresses to Your Car

Google Maps Germany has a new feature: if you have a BMW car that includes a navigation system and you happen to live in Germany, it's easy to send the address of a local business to your car's navigation system.

The "send" link from every Google Maps page will open a dialog that lets you fill your BMW account name and send an address plus some notes to your car. This service is free and it works only for businesses in Germany.

Google explains their partnership with BMW by saying "they're a leading innovator in the automotive space, and they share our vision for a network-connected world". In the web space, BMW's German site was removed from Google last year because it used doorway pages, but it was quickly reincluded.


Here's a video that shows how the whole thing works:



{ Via Google Blog. }

Google University

James D. Carmine, a Philosophy professor at a US college, writes an open letter to Google:

It makes sense that for-profit institutions like Google, Amazon, Barnes and Nobles or even Starbucks, begin to consider applying for university accreditation, and offering degrees of their own. Clearly, well-run for-profits are vastly more economically efficient than any non-profit college or university. The efficiency is a consequence of following the basic economic principle that an informed consumer will always purchase the best value for the least money. I, like most parents, would happily send my children to Google University if I knew they would learn more there than at a higher priced university. (...)

Google could escape the tenure trap by not hiring any faculty at all. Instead of hiring the faculty themselves, institutions like Google could simply purchase a vast library of taped, high quality, lectures given by academic super stars or other top performing teachers who are willing to sell series of their lectures (perhaps even receiving residuals if they really rock!). These professors would operate as free agents in a digital world of Professors Without Borders. (...)

Google University (...) would not only reduce the cost of education to students, the competition between professors to produce the best lectures would create vastly superior lectures, and the competition between for-profit institutions in order to attract students would produce vastly better outcomes for students, and therefore would even help American corporations, like Google itself, who need highly competent employees.

James suggests that YouTube could be a good platform for distributing lectures and other Google tools could make learning much more efficient. Google Books and Google Scholar could be a universal library, Google Groups and Google Talk - a way to communicate, Google Docs - a platform for online assignments.

Google Desktop Gets More Serious

There's a new version of Google Desktop in town: Google Desktop 5.0. This time, the software gets more serious, adds security features, makes it easier to access the search results and adopts dark colors.

"The sidebar has a completely new look and feel. It samples the color of your wallpaper and fades in the sampled color so that it fits seamlessly onto your desktop. Some of our gadgets have been redesigned so that they are easy to tell apart, easy to read, and easy on the eyes. More differentiated gadgets allow for faster scanning of information through the sidebar. And we've created a new dialog for adding gadgets so it's easier and faster than ever to find the right gadgets for you."

Search results get a small preview box below the snippet, so you can make an idea if they're useful. Of course, the preview box is small enough to be hardly usable, and there's no highlighting for your query. The box reminds me Ask.com's binoculars.


Google Desktop has a new feature that shows warnings if you're trying to visit sites that "might be trying to steal your personal information or install malicious software on your computer". They're the same malware warnings from the search results combined with the anti-phishing technology previously included in Google Safe Browsing and as an advanced option in Firefox 2. Google Desktop automatically updates a list of suspicious or malicious sites by downloading information from Google's servers.


While there's no dramatic change in functionality, it's strange to see how a different theme makes you look at a software from a different angle. Google Desktop became more distant, more serious and looks more and more like Vista's sidebar.

Web History, the Next Step in Personalized Search?

"With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc)." (From a Google presentation)

Google's plans for using personalization to improve search results could face some difficulties. Google already uses your queries, the results you click on, your bookmarks, but this isn't enough to build a comprehensive profile. People don't search too many times and, most often, they click on the top search results.

So I think the next step in Google's efforts to tailor the search results to your preferences is to expand the search history into something more complex: the web history. Browsing web pages is an important part of your online activity and there are already applications like Google Desktop that monitor and index the visited web pages.

A web history service could be easily implemented in the toolbar. If you enable PageRank in Google Toolbar, you send each page you visit to Google, but they are logged anonymously. Now these web pages would be connected to a Google account. Unlike the solution implemented in Google Desktop, this service would use the information from Google's index and wouldn't need local storage. It would also extend the history feature from most browsers, which is severely limited in time.

You'll be able to tell if you visited a page in the past, how many times and what was the context. Some clever algorithms could extract patterns and could recommend you similar pages you wouldn't have discovered otherwise.

Of course, a such a service would cause a big debate regarding privacy and trust, so it will be disabled by default.

Google says in a patent application filed last year: "Search engines typically provide a source of indexed documents from the Internet (or an intranet) that can be rapidly scanned in response to a search query submitted by a user. As the number of documents accessible via the Internet grows, the number of documents that match a particular query may also increase. However, not every document matching the query is likely to be equally important from the user's perspective. (...) Over time, a user will have executed a history of search queries, results which were examined, advertisements that were clicked on, and other various browsing activities which reflect the user's preferences and interests. Oftentimes a user may be interested in examining the user's such prior activities. It would be desirable to permit the user to use the prior activities to enhance the user's searching and browsing experience."

Browse Faster in Firefox

Firefox's extensions are useful, but often they slow-down web browsing and increase the amount of RAM used by the browser. A simple way to run Firefox with no extension enabled is to use the safe mode.

Before trying this, you can change a setting that saves the sites loaded when you close Firefox (Tools/Options/General/When Firefox opens... show my windows and tabs from last time).

How to run Firefox in safe mode? Close the browser, go to Start, click on Run and type:
firefox -safe-mode

In Linux and Mac, you should open the Terminal and type:
/pathtofirefox/firefox -safe-mode

Another idea is to create a profile that only has the most important extensions. In Firefox, a profile stores your bookmarks, passwords, extensions, web history. To create a new profile, close Firefox and open the profile manager:

* In Windows, go to Start/Run and type
firefox -ProfileManager

* In Linux or Mac, type in the Terminal:
/pathtofirefox/firefox -ProfileManager

Create a new profile, select it and click on "Start". Now you have a blank profile you could use to store the most important extensions. If you don't want to download everything again, there's always the option of duplicating the existing profile and deleting stuff from the clone.

To open Firefox using a certain profile, load the profile manager. It might be useful to have a second (or third) profile if you need to use your computer for a presentation or at work.

Also see:
Reduce memory usage in Firefox
Misc Firefox tips

Google Forces You to Install Google Pack

If you try to download Google Desktop, you'll see something strange: you have to download Google Updater, an executable available that's a part of Google Pack, the collection of Google software and third-party applications launched last year.

"The Google Updater is the program that downloads and installs all the software in the Google Pack. You can use the Google Updater to monitor the status of your installation, run software that's been installed, or uninstall software. A Google Updater icon will appear in your system tray and will display notifications when new software is available."

So if you try to download Google Desktop, you're forced to download Google Pack, or at least Google Pack's core, which is Google Updater. You can look at Google Updater like an equivalent of the "Add or remove programs" included in Windows. Unlike the application manager from Windows, Google Updater monitors the applications for new versions and is configured to automatically update the applications.

It seems that Google tries to centralize the way you install and manage Google software, so I wouldn't be surprised if you'll be forced to install the Updater for any Google software in the near future. Like Google Toolbar, which is a way to push new services and feature, Google Pack and the updater are a way to push new software from Google and its partners (there's a "Show new software" link that sends you to a page that lists software from Google Pack you don't have on your computer).

Note: In case you don't see the text below when you go to Google Desktop, this is the page where you should've been redirected. There's a workaround if you want to download only Google Desktop: this link.




Update: This is a new version of Google Pack (2.0 beta) that will be used to install individual Google products. Even if the download pages are not changed for everyone yet, Google Toolbar for IE and Google Earth for Windows will be installed in the same way.

Google Might Work on an OS for Mobile Phones

Google bought in 2005 a company called Android. Business Week reported at that time that "Android has operated under a cloak of secrecy, so little is known about its work. Rubin & Co. have sparingly described the outfit as making software for mobile phones, providing little more detail than that. One source familiar with the company says Android had at one point been working on a software operating system for cell phones."

Simeon Simeonov speculates that Andy Rubin, Android's founder, "has a team of about 100 people at Google working on the Google Phone". Recently, we found out that Google bought a small company named Skia in 2005. "Skia's first product, SGL, is a portable graphics engine capable of rendering state-of-the-art 2D graphics on low-end devices such as mobile phones, TVs, and handhelds." Simeon found from a source that Google's phone could be:

* Blackberry-like, slick device
* C++ core w/ OS bootstrap
* Optimized Java running on the C++ core
* Vector-based presentation courtesy of Skia's technology
* Many services, including VoIP

It's unclear whether or not Google actually develops a phone, but they're aware that mobile phones grow faster than computers in terms of users and a presence in this market is important.

Related:
Google and Orange could launch a mobile phone
Samsung phones include Google applications

Freeload Press Makes Textbooks Free

Freeload Press is a US company with a very noble mission: "liberating the textbooks so students from all financial backgrounds can use these important learning tools." They try to convince authors make their books available for free in exchange of a sum of money. Then Freeload Press takes the books and inserts ads at the end of the chapters. The online version of the book will be available for free as a PDF, while the print version will be much cheaper than the original.

Tom Doran, cofounder of Freeload, explains why he built the company: "Textbooks cost too much, and students increasingly are showing up to class without probably the most important tool they need to succeed in the course, outside of the lecture."


Many teachers will probably say it's unacceptable to promote commercial products in an educational book, but Freeload's limited success should be a signal that this model might work at a larger scale, if implemented in a clever way. Freeload's tagline ("Imagine a world where textbooks are free") could be replaced with: "Imagine a world where books are free".

{ Sample image, courtesy of Freeload Press Inc. }

How Google Desktop Ranks Search Results

A patent application recently filed by Google ("Temporal ranking scheme for desktop searching") gives some idea about how Google Desktop indexes and ranks files. The main criteria for ranking files is how likely a file will be accessed in the future. To estimate this value, Google Desktop tries to find different hints about the importance of a file.

It would be desirable for a user to be able to access applications, desktop files, and/or data on local or networked servers through a single interface. Access to each of these could be initiated by finding and identifying the correct resource, through the user's selection of a search result. Search results should be generated using methods that reflect how desktop resources are used. In most cases, the most relevant items are likely to be those that have been accessed or used recently and frequently, or have been designated as particularly important by the user, for instance through the creation of a desktop shortcut. (...)

To make the results of the searching more useful to a user, the items being searched are ranked according to their relevance, and based on this ranking, the items can be selected and/or ordered for display to a user. A temporal ranking scheme ranks the search results according to an algorithm designed to give higher scores to items that are more likely to be desired by the user in the search. In one embodiment, the relevance of a particular search result is determined according to an estimation of the frequency that the corresponding item will be used in the future.

In one embodiment, a group of items are ranked based at least in part on a last access time and a class associated with each item, where the class associated with an item indicates a frequency of use of the item. Possible classes include a location of the item (e.g., whether the item is a document in a "MyDocuments" folder), a type of the item, and a file size of the item. Once the items are ranked and a search is performed, the results from the search (e.g., the matching items) can be displayed according to their rankings, where the order of the displayed results may be based on the ranking and only the highest ranked results may be displayed. In this way, the search, such as a desktop search, returns the items matching the search query that are more likely to be the items for which a user is looking.

{ via SEO by the Sea }

Yahoo Image Search Shows Recommendations

Yahoo seems to try anything to entice users to use Yahoo search as much as possible. They display anything from popular to related queries on their homepage, in ads, and in many other places.

Yahoo Image Search has a new feature that shows recommended queries at the bottom of each search results page. Yahoo looks at the most popular queries used by those who tried the current query. For MSN, the results were pretty good: Yahoo, Google, Hotmail and... funny, but I can't say the same for the attached images.


I've also noticed that Yahoo continues to show way too many adult images for queries that shouldn't trigger anything sexual (like Hotmail).

The idea of representing words or expressions with images is interesting and search engines should experiment more with showing images as answers for some queries. But the recommendations should be filtered for irrelevant queries, because popular searches like "funny" or "Britney Spears" tend to show up often just because they're popular.

{ Thank you, Ron Wilson. }

SuperGenPass - Simple Password Generator

Yesterday I suggested some ideas to keep your passwords secure. In the comments, Thunder Rabbit pointed to a very simple solution to generate secure passwords, without having to remember them. SuperGenPass is a bookmarklet (a bookmark consisting mostly of JavaScript code) that uses a master password as a seed to create passwords for different sites. The nice thing is that the script generates the same password for a domain, but the process is unidirectional: you can't obtain the master password from a generated password. It's also cool that your master password is not stored anywhere (unless you want it to be stored in the bookmarklet).

The script works for any browser, but for Internet Explorer it needs to download some JavaScript code because of IE's limitations. If you don't want to rely on that site, you can save it to your site.

If you decide to use this solution, you'll have to change your passwords for each site where you want to use passwords generated by SuperGenPass. You can first try it with an unimportant site to see if you like it. Also you'll have to stop storing passwords in your browser or other password managers.

How will you use it?
* type the username and the master password when you log in
* click on the bookmarklet [extra-click]
* click on "Populate" [extra-click]
* submit the form

So two extra-clicks, no required software, no stored password and just a bookmarklet that could be easily stored on a USB drive (there's an alternative page for mobile phones). And, best of all, you can use a single password for all the sites that need one.