I bashed Google Maps before for suggesting ludicrous trips across the Bay of Sidney in order to cross a street, but this is way more funny than annoying.
Archive for the 'google' Category
Following the lead of Jeremy and Leo, here are my latest geo-tagged photos on Google maps. Not a lot of exotic destinations of late, as you can see.
Now it would be nice if there were a parameter that allowed you to show more than the latest 20 or so pictures. Or show a map for a specific set. There doesn’t seem to be a way to tell Flickr to generate a feed for a set, though it is possible to generate a feed for a tag. So here’s the map of all my photos tagged “umbria”, which is only a subset of all the pictures taken on a recent trip to Umbria.
In the end, using the Yahoo-supplied map on Flickr itself gives more complete results, though probably less amenable to cool mash-ups.
Google Data APIs (Beta) Developer’s Guide: “The Google data APIs (’GData’ for short) provide a simple standard protocol for reading and writing data on the web.
GData uses either of two standard XML-based syndication formats: Atom or RSS. It also has a feed-publishing system that consists of the Atom publishing protocol plus some extensions (using Atom’s standard extension model) for handling queries.
Each of the following Google services provides a Google data API:
- Google Apps Provisioning
- Google Base
- Blogger
- Google Calendar
- Google Code Search
- Google Notebook
- Google Spreadsheets
- Picasa Web Albums”
As DeWitt Clinton wrote on the atom-protocol mailing list:
What never ceases to amaze me is that APP was applicable in so many cases. A true testament to the power of the protocol.
It’s indeed noteworthy the amount of buy-in and mindshare the Atom Publishing Protocol has gained in such a short time. And it hasn’t even reached RFC status yet.
A couple years ago I made fun of Microsoft for suggesting a trip across most of Northern Europe for going from Haugesund, Norway to Trondheim, Norway. It’s only fair then that I poke fun at Google now for suggesting that you cross Sydney Harbor (going via a toll bridge) if you merely want to go from 200 Sussex Street to 201 Sussex Street, which amounts to basically crossing the street.
Google Embarrassed in Australia | TechCrunch: “Reporters at a Sydney, Australia newspaper discovered an embarrassing flaw in Google’s Map product – Google recommends a 10.4 kilometer trip, across the harbor and back, to go the thirty steps from Google’s Sydney headquarters to a hotel located across the street. The suggested route would also include a AU$3 bridge toll. Any query for driving directions from areas east, south or west of Google’s headquarters will suggest the same detour across the harbor, using a toll tunnel or bridge.
Google is blaming MapData Sciences, the Sydney-based company that supplies the mapping data to Google, for the problem. I imagine MapData is working on a fix rather urgently.”
At least they don’t make you cross half a dozen national boundaries and a couple seas to get there.
Eureka! Your own search engine has landed!: “Wouldn’t it be cool if you could easily build a search engine on your blog or website tailored to the topics and areas you know and love the most? You’re not alone if you’d like that — we’ve heard from partners large and small, and users across the web who want access to the Google search platform, and want to customize and make it their own.”
Now, this is fucking cool (yes, I dropped the F-bomb too, Tim)! I’ve been wanting this for ages, mostly to build a search engine for all matters Open Source to go with The Open Source Zone. Now in just about five minutes I was able to set up a very basic search engine and prime it with just a handful of sites. I will be adding more sites in the future, but right now all visitors can have a look here (what’s up with that hideous URL? Can’t we have a simpler one?) and click on the Volunteer to contribute to this search engine link to add more sites to include in the search (you need a Google account for this though; is this part of Google’s evil plan to collect all of our lives online? 
)
Next step will be integrating the custom search site into The Open Source Zone (which badly needs reviving, I know), maybe using the Ajax API.
Picture courtesy of Ted Leung.
Technorati Tags:
google coop, custom search engines
Heather Adkins, Security Team, Google: “Maintaining the trust of our users and ensuring a positive experience using our products and services is paramount to our ability to accomplish our mission. As a result, Google takes security very seriously and designs all of its services and applications to protect your privacy and data security.”
Compare the above with:
Mike Arrington, TechCrunch: “So the real story here is that the Google blog has been hacked. This is a bit of an embarrassment, although it is not nearly as bad as when Google deleted the blog accidentally in March of this year.”
Alright, it might happen to anyone. It happened to me and will probably happen again, but still…
Technorati Tags: google blog hacked, click-to-call.
About 70,600 times, according to Google Code Search, the latest product of the fertile Google Labs.
But it only sucks 6,511 times, according to Krugle, and a meager 1,910 times according to Koders.
I think Krugle and Koders are going to face some tough competition. Is this a signal to all the companies that are offering vertical search products: “Be warned, your business might be eaten by Google.”?
And now, for another silly statistic, if you were looking for a confirmation that Open Source developers are really sloppy, you can find about 327,000 instances of the string “FIXME” in comments, even limiting ourselves to languages that have a comment syntax like the one of C, C++, Java, etc.
Technorati Tags: google code search, google labs, krugle, koders.
I’m seeing strange AdSense ads in the right column here today. Kyoto hotels, debt relief and folk art? Has AdWords’ algorithm for selecting contextual ads gone crazy?
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At least, I hope they are paying good money per click.
Dave Winer: “Google reports 16,200 hits for ‘Joanne Colan.’ Let’s measure that again in a week and a month.”
That’s not completely true: in order to correctly compute the so-called “Google Number” for a person, you should put her name in quotes, otherwise all sorts of spurious results will come up, like for instance:
Peter lives with his wife Joanne and their family in Lyme, New Hampshire. … Neil Colan is a psychologist with over 20 years of experience providing …
If you search for “Joanne Colan” (in quotes), Google gives you just 513 hits as of today, many of which are related to the recent news about her, so they were probably even less a few days ago. Quite strange for someone who is, after all, already a public figure.
Even curiouser, for one who has such pretty looks, is the small amount of pictures of her you can find online. I guess this also is going to change a lot from tomorrow.
Technorati Tags: joanne colan, rocketboom.
I’d really like to use the Google Browser Sync extension for Firefox, to keep all my bookmarks, cookies and passwords between my laptop and my desktop, but I cannot get it to work. After it authenticates me and it asks for a PIN, it fails when generating the security key with the following, unhelpful message:
Has anyone else got the same problem? This is on OS X Tiger, using the very latest Firefox (1.5.0.4).
Technorati Tags: firefox, browser sync, error.
Mike Arrington: When is the last time Google released a product that really changed our lives? For me, it was (and is) their core search engine. I grant that Google Maps pushed the envelope and forced the other big Internet guys to improve their own offerings (but today Microsoft and Yahoo are both significantly better than Google). And I do appreciate the POP access to Gmail (this was the one thing that converted me from hotmail for personal email). Everything since has been, well, somewhat underwhelming.
Hmm, yes. I’d give a bit more importance to Gmail, not so much for POP (I would vastly prefer IMAP) but mostly for SMTP: Between it and the web interface, I am pretty sure I can send email wherever I am, no matter what account I am sending mails from. I am also confident that I can go to a single place when I need to find an old message, whether sent or received by me.
Google Maps is cool too, especially now that they are covering Europe, but I have to admit other services are better when it comes to finding addresses and routes.
As for Spreadsheets, it’s probably the right service for me, since I seldom use Excel and only at the most basic level. What I find very interesting about it is the sharing of spreadsheets online. Much more effective, privacy concerns aside, than sending Excel files around attached to emails.
Technorati Tags: gmail, google maps, google spreadsheets, excel, techcrunch, arrington.
So Google Notebook is alive. The Firefox extension is nice and even nicer is the integration in Google’s search results, but I’m left wondering: Where are the tags? We’ve just learned that folksonomies are better than taxonomies, that the organization of information provided by del.icio.us, Flickr et.al. is vastly superior to fixed categories, and now we should do without that again? What’s the point?
Technorati Tags: tagging, google notebook, folksonomies, notebook, del.icio.us, flickr.
I just finished the last puzzle in the Da Vinci Code Quest on Google (not that it was particularly hard) only to discover that prizes are for US, UK and AU residents only. Hmmm, I guess I should have read the rules before. Oh well, it was fun anyway.
Technorati Tags: da vinci code.
Reuters.com: “SAN FRANCISCO, March 18 (Reuters) – A parental advice Internet site has sued Google Inc., charging it unfairly deprived the company of customers by downgrading its search-result ranking without reason or warning.
[…] KinderStart charges that Google without warning in March 2005 penalized the site in its search rankings, sparking a “cataclysmic” 70 percent fall in its audience — and a resulting 80 percent decline in revenue.
[…] KinderStart contends that once a company has been penalized, it is difficult to contact Google to regain good standing and impossible to get a report on whether or why the search leader took such action.”
Given my recent problems with Google rankings, I might be tempted to sue them too. Let’s sue the bastards .
Update: I checked the KinderStart website and it seems quite obvious that it is a very bad website, with no original content, very few backlinks and (according to Alexa, at least) nowhere near the “10 million pageviews per month” they are claiming. This lawsuit seems to be no more than a very bad publicity stunt but it’s apparently working, at least in the short term.
Technorati Tags: google lawsuit, KinderStart.
Tris Hussey: “While web-based apps are stable, if you accidentally close your browser window, you’re still hooped. At lest Word, Excel, etc prompt me if I’m sure that I was to close without saving.”
Word, Excel, and most other apps out there are dumb. As I wrote before, applications should provide transparent save with versioning and not bother users with useless questions.
Connectivity is still a problem for web office apps, though.
I had this very unpleasant surprise yesterday. I started noticing a considerable decrease in traffic coming here via “organic” (i.e. search-originated) referrals from Google. A brief check confirmed that my rankings for several terms for which I was among the first results went south by a long range. One phrase which showed one of my URLs as the first or second hit is now ranking 214th! Other ones are nowhere to be found, even after 50 pages of results.
Still, the number of indexed pages and backlinks stayed about the same as before.
As aboout 80% of my traffic was coming from Google, you can imagine how much of hit I took. This is all very annoying, especially considering that I never engaged in any “black hat SEO” tactics, like hidden text, doorway pages, cloaking, and buying or selling links.
I followed Matt Cutts’ advice, submitted a reinclusion request, got an automated reply, and followed up via email. Let’s hope they examine my request soon.
Technorati Tags: google, serp, seo, rankings, reinclusion.
In the last few hours I noticed something strange with the AdSense ads that appear on this site. While before most ads were about blogging and RSS, recently I’ve seen a bunch of ads that seem to be triggered by keywords like “speed reading”, “memory improvement”, “online surveys”, “IQ testing” and stuff like that. The point is: I never used those keywords here (now I have, so I have just probably perturbed the phenomenon by talking about it, in a sort of feedback loop).
I had the suspect those ads were paying more per click than the previous ones, but the first results don’t seem to confirm my suspicion. My sample, however, is still very small, so it might just be that nobody is clicking those ads yet (and please don’t, unless you’re really interested in the products advertised).
Just saw this while doing a Google search (and being logged in to Google):
I hadn’t noticed this before and saw no mention of it while browsing the usual suspects, so I thought it useful to post about it here. There’s also a page about this on Google’s Help Center:
Personalized Search orders your search results based on your past searches, as well as the search results and news headlines you’ve clicked on. You can view all these items in your Search History and remove any items you’d like.
I wonder what effect this is going to have on SEO practices.
Technorati Tags: personalized search, google.
It doesn’t matter whether you believe crop circles are made by alien intelligences or are just pranks, it’s indisputable that sometimes they are real works of art. Now the fine people at Google Sightseeing have started collecting images of crop circles as they can be seen on Google Maps. Cool stuff!
On a related note, Antonella Pavese is collecting Google Maps pictures where people are visible, in the 2006 Google Earth Census. Until recently, the world as seen from Google Maps/Earth seemed eerily uninhabited, as if some mysterious epidemic has swept it empty of all human life, just like in some sci-fi movie. But recently, with the increased resolution made available by Google, it has been easier to spot people on satellite pictures. I wonder if, in the future, resolution will become so hight that it will be feasible to actually recognize some of those people. Scary, huh?
(Via Davide.)
Technorati Tags: google, google maps, google earth, google sightseeing
David Heinemeier Hansson: “MeasureMap just got bought out by Google. I believe that’s the first Ruby on Rails application to be picked up in a Web 2.0′ish buyout. And it didn’t even have to launch, take that Yahoo! Speaking of, I’m now having a sale of futures in ideas for apps that I haven’t even thought of. Who’s bidding?”
Picture me envious! Here’s hoping that my Ruby on Rails application is the second one to be picked up. Yahoo! are you listening?.
Now, more seriously, Google will probably need some Ruby programmers soon so, if you have any experience, it’s maybe time to polish up your resume and send it to Google Jobs.
Last, if Measure Map is as good as they (the lucky few beta testers) say, I hope they move to an open beta soon. I don’t dislike Analytics too much, apart from the lagging issue, but having a more blog-oriented tool would rock.
Technorati Tags: google, measuremap, ruby, rails.