I went a fine girl geekdinner tonight. This time hosted by Google at their UK headquarters in Victoria. Took some time to get there but arrived in time for some Google style dinner. Can I just say how great a idea it is having free dinner between the hours of 6pm-8pm, if the BBC did that I'd be there till 10pm every night I wasn't going out. Anyway, the dinner was good and treats even better. I also enjoyed the speeches from Google and Foundem (A Search Platform). It was a great venue and great to see Google once again getting more involved in the local community. Kudos to Sarah Blow and Nicola for once again another great girl geekdinner.
Tag: google
Interview with Chris DiBona and Ed Parsons of Google
While at Google Developer Day, I caught some time with Chris DiBona and Ed Parsons from Google. Chris is well known in the Open source and Free software worlds for his work on Google summer of code and the book Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution. Recently he's (sometimes) hosts a great podcast with Leo Laporte called FLOSS weekly. Its hardly weekly but worth subscribing to anyway. Ed on the hand was the key man at the Ordnance Survey and tried to kick start the mapping craze well before Google maps hit the net. It made sense for Google to poach some a key man such as Ed.
Anyway, the interviews are up on Blip.TV as usual, and filmed with my Sanyo camera.
- Interview with Chris Dibona at Google development day
- Interview with Ed Parsons at Google development day
A couple of new things came out of the Google Developer Day. Google Mapplets, Google Mashup Editor and Google Gears.
First up is Google Gears, an open source browser extension for enabling offline web applications. Now developers will be able to create web applications that don't need a constant Internet connection to work. Users, meanwhile, can interact with Gears-enabled websites anywhere, whether they're on the couch or on an airplane. With this early release, we hope the community will provide feedback and move towards an industry standard for offline web applications. Read more on the new Gears blog.
An experimental product debuting today is the Google Mashup Editor, an online editor that enables developers to create, test, and deploy mashups and simple web applications from within a browser. Now developers can turn out those weekend projects more quickly. We've also launched a new blog where you can learn more about the Google Mashup Editor and get the latest news.
Finally, we released Google Mapplets yesterday at the Where 2.0 conference. Mapplets are mini-applications that any developer can build on top of Google Maps so that users can easily discover the creative genius and usefulness of the mashup development community. You'll find more about Mapplets here. And we're also quite excited about the interest that has been shown in Google Web Toolkit (GWT). Since its launch last May, there have been over 1 million downloads. You can read more on the GWT blog.
Mapplets is interesting but what makes me excited is the Mashup Editor which somewhat fits in area of Flow* and Gears, which seems to be the final step in the move towards the Google Operating System. I would usually say who cares but Google Gears will be a open source project and they already have Adobe, Opera and Mozilla on board.
Generally Google once again made it clear there commitment to open-source and developers. I look forward to hacking about with this stuff really soon.
Google Eats Technorati For Breakfast?
Some good news for Google found via Techmeme
Google launched its blog search engine more than a year ago, but only last week did it finally pass category leader Technorati, according to Hitwise. The surge in traffic to Google's beta blog search started in October when Google News began to link to it prominently, but what pushed it over the top is a prominent link on Google's
main homepage.
And have to say, good for Google. I love technorati and have tried to get on with it but when it comes to my own blog its got serious problems. Do a search for Ian Forrester on Google and Technorati. On Technorati you only see one post I wrote which is actually for my other blog
(flow *). While on Google you get a pretty much upto date list of entries from my blogs and even a link to my blog in related blogs. I'm sorry but Google blogsearch is much more effective at indexing my blog. I've said it to Dave Sifry when he was over here in London last time. I think technorati does not like Blojsom the blogging server, and seems to throw a wobbly on my http redirector page (which is now gone – thanks to the server upgrade). Technorati
seems to love MT, blogger and WordPress blogs. But seems to rank ones like blojsom, roller, etc much lower. Some would ask if I've claimed my blog? Well yes I claimed them ages ago and its made little difference. As far as Technorati is concerned I have a blog Cubicgarden redirector and I haven't updated it for almost 400 days! Dave Sifry, Tantek, etc I love technorati (I
even have the sticker on my laptop and computer) love what your doing with Microformats, etc but this is unacceptable and I'm now done with Technorati searching and mining. If it can't even get my blog right, I'm sure there are many more its missing. For example Blojsom.com (633 days since david wrote anything?)
What is google up to?
What is google up to? That seems to be the question on a lot of peoples lips. A while ago they did a deal with Sony, then bought YouTube with stock (this is the intimate details link). Not long ago Jotspot was bought by Google and now Google have launched there mobile gmail service. Its not that amazing, Plaxo has offered the same kind of service for quite some time but alas only for there paying users. However its going to be secure and free for anyone who has a Gmail account. Its a bit of a bum deal if you live outside north america and don't have a all you can reasonably eat data plan. But as the taoofmac describes, this could be the email for the masses. Once they start pushing calendar, contacts, etc through that same gateway, it will be even more useful. I hate to say it but this is what Plaxo do right now.
Generally Google is doing the loosey joined pieces pretty well. You can certainly see how everything will fit together in the future but right now, there very keen to just develop the pieces. There pieces are not always cutting edge and best of breed but there getting traction and gaining users.
Cheers Miles for a lot of the links.
What is going on at YouTube?
I got two of these today…
Dear Member:
This is to notify you that we have removed or disabled access to the following material as a result of a third-party notification by Comedy Central Property claiming that this material is infringing:
Future Shock with Samantha Bee: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJrTlUv6EaA
Lewis Black on Advertising: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhSQxPH-YxMPlease Note: Repeat incidents of copyright infringement will result in the deletion of your account and all videos uploaded to that account. In order to avoid future strikes against your account, please delete any videos to which you do not own the rights, and refrain from uploading additional videos that infringe on the copyrights of others. For more information about YouTube's copyright policy, please read the Copyright Tips guide.
If you elect to send us a counter notice, to be effective it must be a written communication provided to our designated agent that includes substantially the following (please consult your legal counsel or see 17 U.S.C. Section 512(g)(3) to confirm these requirements):
A) A physical or electronic signature of the subscriber.
B) Identification of the material that has been removed or to which access has been disabled and the location at which the material appeared before it was removed or access to it was disabled.
C) A statement under penalty of perjury that the subscriber has a good faith belief that the material was removed or disabled as a result of mistake or misidentification of the material to be removed or disabled.
D) The subscriber's name, address, and telephone number, and a statement that the subscriber consents to the jurisdiction of Federal District Court for the judicial district in which the address is located, or if the subscriberis address is outside of the United States, for any judicial district in which the service provider may be found, and that the subscriber will accept service of process from the person who provided notification under subsection (c)(1)(C) or an agent of such person.Such written notice should be sent to our designated agent as follows:
DMCA Complaints
YouTube, Inc.
1000 Cherry Ave.
Second Floor
San Bruno, CA 94066
Email: copyright@youtube.comPlease note that under Section 512(f) of the Copyright Act, any person who knowingly materially misrepresents that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification may be subject to liability.
Sincerely,
YouTube, Inc.Copyright © 2006 YouTube, Inc.
Yes YouTube got told to take down all the Daily Show, South Park and Colbert Report by Viacom representing Comedy Central. But now I'm hearing Viacom have changed there minds and has allowed the material to go back up. Crazy!
Who says the Social scene in London is nothing compared to San Fran?
What the heck is going on? Next week is insane! There are tons of events going on in London next week. I'll outline the crazyness…
- Monday there is a Symbian pub meetup and a Internet Peeps Dinner with Robert Loch.
- Tuesday there is Beers and Innovations 5: Aggregators and upsetters, Swedish Beers and Opera backstage. London Mixer was also going to be on the same day but they changed it to the 18th due to the crazy clashing.
- Wednesday there is London mixer and Innovation Wednesdays.
- Thursday there is a Microformats WSG meetup, Imperial Entrepreneurs Society Launch and a Tech Crunch UK launch party
- Friday there is a geekdinner with Molly.
- Saturday game on kicks off and Sunday is a Copyfighters Drunken Brunch and talking shop
Now imagine if Momo Monday, Girl geekdinner and Pub Standards were all added to the mix! Someone needs to sort this all out. Its too insane that all these events are happening the same week.
So getting serious for a while now. To be fair everything is ending up on Upcoming which is a good thing. I was using Eventful for quite sometime but since most of the events are ending up on upcoming, i'm not going to fight it. So things are getting a little more origanised here but the problem is that the actual event holders are not looking at upcoming first let alone posting them. Then add the extra pain in the butt that you need to sign in to register yourself with an event, not everyone likes that. So actually things are not that rosey. I thought the Jigsaw wiki might be a good idea but it seems few people use it for events. Then I thought Techcrunch UK might bring some calm to the crazyness but nope, its not happened.
I've filled you all in on the context but this conversation has gone on a little longer in the TechCrunch comments on the same subject. The suggestion of using a google calendar by D4rr3ll sounds good but I'm not sure it solves the problem of sign up but it will certainly help with clashes. As he said a XSL would mean anyone could see it on a normal webpage, and yes using the API event.add or event new, it would be possible to automaticlly add it to Upcoming and Eventful.
So I've setup a Google account for London Social events which I'll email around to people who run events in London. The Calendar is here – http://www.google.com/calendar/render?cid=londonsocialevents@googlemail.com. You can subscribe to the RSS here and Ical here.
Hey whats on the GooTube?
Looks like its all true now – Google To Acquire YouTube for $1.65 Billion in Stock. Everyone's eating it up but to be honest, does it really matter that much? I've yet to be convinced about the importance of this deal except Google now on top of Fox with there MySpace.
Google loads in high resoultion satellite imaging of London
I just noticed Google have loaded in super high resoultion satellite pictures of London. Wow the quality is amazing. Check out Woolwich Arsenal where I moved to.
Google Using SVG
A few days ago Google released a series of statistics on the way in which HTML (and a few other things, such as HTTP and scripting) is used in the wild, wild Web. As in any good statistics report they have accompanying graphical charts. The interesting aspect in this instance is that those charts are available only in SVG.
You will need a recent version of either Firefox, Opera, an SVG-enabled Safari build or Konqueror to see them, apparently due to minor markup issues that prevent IE and/or ASV from working. It certainly is interesting to see a major web site such as Google use SVG for live Web content. SVG support moving away from plugins and into browsers does appear to have the effect of helping it edge its way into the mainstream.
I thought about this the other day when looking through the fantastic series of Google Statistics. Good to see SVG used by a huge company like Google. I mean it makes sense to put the graphs in SVG format, but its a calculated risk on Googles part. And looks to have paid off, because I've not seen many people make a fuss about not seeing the graphs. Actually looking around the web svg is really starting to become a reality for general web use. It reminds me to check out the Canvas element and HTML 5 which were both mentioned at the last geekdinner with Dave Shea.
Calendaring interoperation with eventful?
On the eve (maybe) or at least before Google Calendar didnt happen is put out into the public internet, the eventful seems to be scrambling for some more marketspace. In a unannounced blog move the people behind EVDB have a option to submit the event to other sites. I've not checked out what all the end result are like but if the del.icio.us/events entry is a example, its not bad. Yes it links back to the Eventful calendar but the tags and description are still pretty much there. I've already suggested a blog this option, which would save me copying and pasting. Export as hCalendar (microformat) would be useful too.
I meant to blog Eventful's new group feature which allows you to group togther peoples events via tags and searches. But honestly there blog entry says it all and all I can add, is that its great. I really need to check back on upcoming.org, see if they have improved things there.
The eventful blog has just updated and wrote a more detailed account about this new feature. And thanks Sheila for letting me know Google Calendar never quite happened as rumored. Which is a real shame, I was looking forward to seeing what Google would do differently from the others.
All your bases belong to google
This entry by Greg at Blogdigger titled Someone set up us The Bomb is excellent. I'd honestly hadn't really looked into Google base because the idea of marking up my data just for Google gives me the creeps, but the angle gives me a even creeper feeling.
In an effort to push things in the proper direction, a small group of individuals and companies began working on ways to structure information, in an attempt to prevent SDL (Semantic Data Loss) and create better search in the process. The history here goes back quite a bit, so I'll skip to the end, which is often called datablogging, microformats and/or structured blogging, all of which attempt to make the process of capturing the meaning of content easier both for the producer and the consumer. Things were moving along nicely in that direction; Google Base, however sends a proverbial “Make your time” to all those services, since Google Base essentially allows content producers to explicitly tell Google what all those little bits of data mean and how to interpret them.
Greg is right, but this is the dilemma. Google is offering a solution to put large amounts of structured data online while Databloggling hasnt gone that far and Microformats for as much I love them are still a second thought when blogging. I mean I'm a xml guy and I usually write the text, add the basic links, etc then some tags and maybe trackbacks. The adding of microformats usually comes afterwards, imagine what most people do.
We really need to start adding microformats to the Blogging applications, and soon.
The WebOS…
Jason Kottke has an amazing read about the emergence of the web operating system. I've noticed over a very short time, people habits changing (even my own) most of my day is spent in some web/net connected applications like firefox, widgets, rss readers. I hardly ever need most of the apps on my computer day in day out. He also confirms quite a few thoughts I've had about the future of the web in regards to operating systems and the net. So some thoughts while reading Jason's post…
Google. If Google is not thinking in terms of the above, I will eat danah's furriest hat. They've already shifted the focus of Google Desktop with the addition of Sidebar and changing the name of the application (it used to be called Google Desktop Search…and the tagline changed from “Search your own computer” to the more general “Info when you want it, right on your desktop”). To do it properly, I think they need their own browser (with bundled Web server, of course) and they need to start writing their applications to work on OS X and Linux (Google is still a Windows company)[4]. Many of the moves they've made in the last two years have been to outflank Microsoft, and if they don't use Google Desktop's “insert local code into remote sites” trick to make whatever OS comes with people's computers increasingly irrelevant, they're stupid, stupid, stupid. Baby step: make Gmail readable offline.
In agreement, Gmail with offline support via google desktop would be a good move forward.
Yahoo. I'm pretty sure Yahoo is thinking in these terms as well. That's why they bought Konfabulator: desktop presence. And Yahoo has tons of content and apps that that would like to offer on a WebOS-like platform: mail, IM, news, Yahoo360, etc. Challenge for Yahoo: widgets aren't enough…many of these applications are going to need to run in Web browsers. Advantages: Yahoo seems to be more aggressive in opening up APIs than Google…chances are if Yahoo develops a WebOS platform, we'll all get to play.
Hard to admit, but Yahoo are seriously getting this and have over took google in the innovation field. Yes Google still have the upper hand, but I'm not certain that will be the case if Yahoo do buy Technorati or launch there killer. I'm also thinking Yahoo and Mozilla could partner if Jason is right about Widgets not being enough.
Microsoft. They're going to build a WebOS right into their operating system…it's likely that with Vista, you sometimes won't be able to tell when you're using desktop applications or when you're at msn.com. They'll never develop anything for OS X or for Linux (or for browsers other than IE), so its impact will be limited. (Well, limited to most of the personal computers in the world, but still.)
I'm still trying to get my head around a operating system which is so web enabled. I'm assuming RSS will allow Vista to by pass the web on the desktop type crap. Hopefully Microsoft have got there thinking hats fully on because they will miss the trick if they let Yahoo and Google develop a web OS on top of Vista.
Apple. Apple has all the makings of a WebOS system right now. They've got the browser, a Web server that's installed on every machine with OS X, Dashboard, iTMS, .Mac, Spotlight, etc. All they're missing is the applications (aside from the Dashboard widgets). But like Microsoft, it's unlikely that they'll write anything for Windows or Linux, although if OS X is going to run on cheapo Intel boxes, their market share may be heading in a positive direction soon.
I think Apple get it but there hardware/software dependancy is a problem which could really slow them down. I expect we shall see what happens with the whole Apple on Intel deal.
The Mozilla Foundation. This is the most unlikely option, but also the most interesting one. If Mozilla could leverage the rapidly increasing user base of Firefox and start bundling a small Web server with it, then you've got the beginnings of a WebOS that's open source and for which anyone, including Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and anyone with JavaScript chops, could write applications. To market it, they could refer to the whole shebang as a new kind of Web browser, something that sets it apart from IE, a true “next generation” browser capable of running applications no matter where you are or what computer (or portable device) you're using
.
See I think Jason has it a little wrong here. Mozilla has built a lot of community mind share into there web OS products. More so that the others in some respects. Also about the small web server, Greasemonkey anyone? XUL runner is also the foot in the door of widget type fuctionality and they certainly have the full support of the community behind them. How many extensions are there now for Firefox, anyone? Jason also made reference to the lack of rich UI support in web OS. Well Mozilla's got the open standards message and is using SVG, XBL and other standards going on. My bets are on Mozilla and Yahoo for sure.
Google talk is live and using jabber
So Google Talk has been covered to hell now, but the best entry I have found is this one called Smsh which details how to connect to Google Talk with any Jabber client. I havent even bothered downloading the client because Skype serves me well right now, but I'm interested to find out what protocal there using for voice over ip.
I got a feeling that Google Talk is only the start of things…. it would be really useful if google added a bot for searching via im. Till then, I'm currently using it under the username – cubicgarden if you want to drop me a test im and confirm it works. You can find my Gaim settings here on Flickr.