MPD

Google Maps is full of amusing images… Check out the recent invasion of Germany:

Germany

For other fun sites in Google Maps, check out GoogleSightseeing.com, including their explanation of this one.

Check out this new blog I found: Startup Reviews.  The author writes case study-like reviews of various internet startups, why the succeeded, etc.  It’s pretty interesting stuff, so I’ve read a few too many reviews already, which explains why I’m up so late…

Check out this article about a new system in development to identify earthquakes and tsunamis via P2P software.  It works by analyzing the vibrations from many hard disks, and if the correct correlation is found, it issues a warning.  Right now, the system is still under development, but I think it’s an intriguing idea that demonstrates a creative use of computers.

I’m not sure how this program gets geographical location on people to use in its calculations (i.e. to determine the speed of the wave, etc.) because the homepage of the project is currently down.  Hopefully this ends up working well and we hear more about it in the future.  I, for one, wouldn’t mind running it on my computer should I end up in the bay area…

This is pretty old news, but I didn’t know it before today. Google has apparently tried putting advertisements in print newspapers, specifically the Chicago Sun-Times. I’ve been looking for any sign of what happened to this program, but I haven’t found any follow-ups. Does anyone know anything?

I’m kind of curious about how this program worked. Did Google promise to fill empty space, then the newspaper ran their page through some service to generate the ads? It must have happened after the content of the page was finalized, but before printing, which isn’t much time.

I’ve already been using Google Analytics for a while to analyze the traffic that visits my website, but today I learned about another fun Google service for webmasters: Google Webmaster Tools.

This site can tell you how high your site ranks for various searches, which searches have people actually go to your page, etc. For example, I now know that a page from my site is now the top Google result for the query “goat playground“. Who knew? (It seems to be a little off, though… If you actually do the search, I am listed as number five, number two for image search).

Anyway, both analytics and webmaster tools are sites you should check out if you’re interested in the traffic to your webpage.

Yesterday, I finished reading “The Corporate Blogging Book” by Debbie Weil. My mom took it out of the library where she works for me because she thought it would be interesting. I actually really liked the book because it covered a number of topics well that were not necessarily directed just to the corporate uses of blogging.

For one, Ms. Weil provided an explanation of exactly what blogging can be beyond the stereotypical teenage-angst-look-at-my-everyday-life blogs and examples of good blogs.

Secondly, chapter eight was a consice collection of layperson-accessible descriptions of typical blogging tools and technology from choosing the basic blogging software to more advanced topics such as RSS, tagging, and podcasts. I think anyone confused about all the acronymns and technology should read this chapter.

Third, and most importantly, the book was full of advice on how to write and maintain a good blog. Much of this advice is general enough for anyone to follow. For example, bloggers are encouraged to choose very narrow topics on which to blog, invite a conversation, publish consistantly (and warn when you will not), and above all to be authentic. In the section discussing the “fear of blogging,” she even offers advice on how to publish consistantly.

Finally, Ms. Weil’s words were only 155 pages out of 197 total. The rest was devoted to “Bonus Resources.” She had example corporate blogging guidlines (from IBM and Sun), sample disclamers on employee blogs, and a piece on weblog usability by Jakob Nielsen.

As a result of reading this book and of keeping a blog to record my summer, I’ve been inspired to do a bit more. I think after I arrive at school next week, I will set my server back up at daugherty.mit.edu and redesign my own website and begin a blog. My next step, then, is to look into some good blogging software; I’ll probably use WordPress or Serendipity. What do you think? Any opinions?

Anyway, to conclude, I would recommend “The Corporate Blogging Book” to anyone thinking about starting a blog. If you aren’t specifically thinking about a corporate blog, however, you can probably skip the first few chapters (though you may still find them interesting as examples of good reasons to have a blog). Technical people may want to skim the sections of the book that discuss tools, while good writers may find themselves skimming sections on how to write. Either way, there is enough advice for everyone that you will likely read something new.

Looks like Yahoo! is moving pretty quickly now integrating Flickr with their other services. I’ve never used this site, but today upcoming.org (another Yahoo! company) announced integration with Flickr. This time, it’s not quite as deep as the geotagging update – searching Flickr for photos with special tags is no more than any third party could do using the Flickr API… But that doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea.

Also, I searched the internet a little while ago and found that Flickr photos have started to appear in Yahoo! search results as of last Thursday. Read the Yahoo! Search blog entry about it, or check out a search for funny photos.

Overall, I think Yahoo! is moving in a really promising direction. For a while, it seemed like they were the has-beens of search and while they always had a lot of traffic, their actual sites didn’t feel very innovative or cutting edge. Now, however, Yahoo! has made a number of strong aquisitions and is moving towards a very personalized version of the internet. In my opinion, personalization, integration, and leveraging customer behavior will be the lasting impact of Web 2.0. AJAX is just an implementation technology that is popular right now, but the three aspects I mentioned earlier are philosophies that span implementation.

Yahoo! has a huge focus on leveraging customer behavior right now; they own del.icio.us, Flickr, Upcoming.org, etc.. Just try searching for good pictures on Flickr vs. Google Image search right now. Flickr will almost certainly return more interesting pictures for two reasons:

1) Flickr appeals to good photographers, who upload quality content
2) Flickr uses client behavior as feedback for the interestingness ranking

Flickr doesn’t need to solve any machine vision problems or determine what aspects of a photo make it interesting, they use the aggregate behavior of all their viewers to come up with a “good-enough” approximation. This is a very powerful technique that can be applied to many other domains. Most importantly, perhaps, this thought process could lead to better search results by adding the click-through rate of links to the rank of the target site, not just the fact that the link exists. Right now, it might be impossible to collect this information because no one company owns all the webservers in the world, but it’s something to think about.

On the other hand, Google has a head start on integration. While Yahoo!’s disparate aquisitions maintain their unique brands and have for the most part not shared services, Google emphasizes sharing user information across applications (Calendar, Gmail, Google Talk, etc.). This is Google’s powerhouse, and the way that they will convince users to continue to try new services and to use the Google version of an application even if Google comes to market late. As this week has shown, however, Yahoo! is certainly not standing still in this area. In fact, at this point, I think Yahoo! may have more APIs available for third party developer use than Google.

It will be interesting to see how much more useful the web becomes when companies begin to really incorporate all three of the lessons from Web 2.0. I, for one, am excited to be a part of it.

Today Flickr released a lot of new functionality related to geotagging – one of my favorite pieces of metadata and the real basis for my photo maps that I made this summer. Check out the official Flickr blog post for instructions on how to use their geotagging tools. This latest release is the first really powerful result of Flickr’s aquisition by Yahoo! that I am aware of. Hopefully they’ll do more in the future, even if it’s as simple as having a link from reviews on autos.yahoo.com to Flickr photos of the same car.

Anyway, I’m still trying out their geotagging features, so if I experience anything particularly noteworthy, I’ll let you know. I still have a few questions for which I need to find answers:

1. They say that this geo information is not stored as a “geo:” tag. How then, is it stored?
2. Depending on how it’s stored, how much do I have to change my map application to use the new tags?
3. Is it worth it to update my map application? The functionality I have that is not yet implemented by Flickr is the ability to view the photos directly on the map (as opposed to having to click to view every photo) and the ability to view photos by date/as a slideshow. I can’t imagine it will be much longer before we can do that stuff in Flickr, though, and I know they can make their site much more responsive than mine. In order to get around the cross-domain XMLHttpRequest object limitation, I have to spoof the AJAX requests through another server, which slows the site down a lot.

If anyone out there has any opinions on the last question, let me know. I’m not sure what to do right now.