It was not long ago that Google changed their favicon. Looks like they have decided to change it again to start off 2009.
I have to hand it to them, it is colorful.
I am sure there will be many people that don’t care for it, but I have to say it stands out on the address bar and as a bookmark.
I admit that I am a huge Mozy fan. I use it to backup my personal photos and files and I use MozyPro to backup my business files. Of course that is not the point of this blog, the point of this blog is to highlight some great looking favicon’s, so aside from the fact that I use the Mozy, I honestly do think they have a great favicon.
The favicon obviously is taken from the logo:
Not every logo can work well as a favicon. Many logos have to much detail, and a 16×16 pixel space is just not enough space for little details. The Mozy logo works perfectly in the 16×16 pixel space and I can only guess that someone must have been thinking about how the logo would work as an icon on desktops, taskbars and as a favicon.
Great job on the icon Mozy, oh and on a great product as well. Nice to know my photos, work files and memories are safe.
Well things had been running smoothly until we noticed that for some reason the favicon.ico file was not properly being created. You might have noticed that your favicon.ico file had a file size of 0kb. Opps, sorry about that. For some reason the code that created the favicon.ico file started to malfunction. I think the gremlins did it. It appears to be working properly again, but if anyone has a problem with 0kb files being created let me know and I will take a look and see what the gremlins were up to on the code.
Google/Blogger broke the instructions in the previous post about how to add your own favicon to a blogspot blog by adding some HTML that referenced the Blogger.com favicon instead. Fortunately the fix for this is relatively simple. Here is what has happened.
Blogger.com has added their own HTML to the templates near the top referencing their favicon. It looks like this if you look at the source code.
<link href='http://www.blogger.com/favicon.ico' rel='icon' type='image/vnd.microsoft.icon'/>
The instructions on How to Add Your Favicon to Blogger in step three says to add your own HTML code referencing your favicon right below the <head> tag. The web browser however will use the last reference so the Blogger.com favicon code was coming later on. The fix for this is to place your favicon code just before the closing <head> tag that looks like this: </head>.
Your code referencing your custom favicon then overrides the Google/Blogger.com code for the favicon and your custom favicon will return.
I tested this on the Free Favicon Blogspot blog and the favicon has returned. Give it a try on your Blogspot blog and let me know if it works.
This might not be as big of news as Google getting a new favicon, but Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Google’s Webspam team decided to change his favicon. His previous one was well, interesting. I grabbed this snapshot of it from the Internet Wayback Machine from December 2006, so it might not be the one he was using just before this recent change. 
As you can see from this screenshot 
he has gone with a favicon that uses his initials, and a green that matches the green from his blog. It is nice to see he made a change and the new favicon at least has some meaning to his website, so if you bookmark it you have an idea of who’s website you might be visiting.
If you like to keep up on Google Matt Cutts blog is a good source of information about Google, although it is not an official source of Google news, he often talks about many of the different Google products and how to use them better.