I tried out Google’s new Second-Life clone, Lively. Never having played Second-Life, I’m not so sure what all the fuss is about, but just for kicks, embedded below is my Lively virtual room.
If you’ve got an hour to spend, this Google Tech Talk by David Weinberger is worth a listen. In it he explains how the breakdown of categorization designed for physical objects when applied to digital or abstract objects (such as thoughts) can be overcome through new kinds of categorization—ie. tagging.
I’m not sure if it can be considered sci-fi, since Bubble City takes place in “the real world” involving potentially real technology, but it’s got enough techie panache and thrilling conspiracy that make it the most fun fiction I’ve read in awhile.
Bubble City, a serial novel currently being written by the brilliant Aaron Swartz.
Three friends of mine are travelling the South Pacific (currently they’re in New Zealand). One of them mentioned to me that he is having trouble accessing gmail from his laptop. I was wondering if anyone has heard about anything like this:
Whenever anyone tries to access their gmail account from our laptop it logs in and then automatically logs out and shuts down that window. I think an add-on has been enabled or disabled to some how to prevent this gmail thing from working.
I think their best bet will be to contact the gmail team and see if they have any suggestions, although my gut tells me it’s a malicious script/virus. What do you think?
Just in time for the holidays, Google releases the Google Browser Sync. No longer will the masses be forced to manually manage bookmarks between home, work, and laptop.
Google Browser Sync for Firefox is an extension that continuously synchronizes your browser settings—including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords—across your computers. It also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions.
This Google sponsored tech talk, human computation, explains how the fact that humans are sometimes smarter than computers can be used to solve some interesting problems and is extremely interesting. I am going to have to check out these tech talks more often.
For more video’s like this one, check out Google’s collection of Tech Talks.
This google image of a North Americian Indian is not too far from my parents place in Medicine Hat.
DVH Link to Indian
He’s listening to an iPod in Australia.
You’ve probably already heard the big tech news this week that Google is going to pay $1.65 billion for YouTube (the creators are happy). What you may not have seen is this anthology video of YouTubers in action, which goes to show that there is a lot more happening on YouTube than just copyright violations.
(via Waxy)
After years of neglect… Finally an upgrade at Blogger worth noting.
Some of the upgrades include:
- a tie-in to your Google Account
- dynamic pages
- separate comment feeds
- new layouts
- an apparent merger with Google’s Page Creator for WYSIWYG editing
- integration of feeds
- public/private access control
- tag-based labels for categories
Take Blogger’s New Features tour. If they would have done this about 6 months sooner, I wouldn’t have switched to WordPress.
And as a special treat for those of you that like to blog (or have friends that do), here is Sprites - I Started A Blog Nobody Read.
The Gapminder World 2006, beta is pretty cool. It also makes me a little more aware (maybe even uncomfortably so) of the world around me.
Steve Rubel’s post, 25 Things I Learned on Google Trends is a fun look into world search trends using the new Google Trends.
What I enjoy is not only what search trends are developing, but how one search item compares with another. Seeing where the less politically correct searches are popular is also extremely interesting.
Sex is obviously a lot more popular than drugs for searches, but it’s mentioned just about as often in the media—rock and roll almost doesn’t even register. Cairo, Egypt gets the award for searching for “sex” most often with most of those searches being done in Arabic. Prostitution, however, is most searched for in Montreal.
Backmasking is most searched for in Melbourne, Australia, and it’s hard to say for sure, but it looks like it had a spike in January when the Wall Street Journal did that story about it, and again lots of other spikes as other big organizations and networks picked up the story.
Pepsi appears more popular than either term—Coke or Coca-cola, and Yahoo is still more popular than Google but they’re closing the gap.
Please post interesting Google Trend finds in the comments.
There’s a new show online called Google Current, which dishes out the scoop on Google’s top search terms. (Check out the report/tribute to the Numa Numa Dancer).
Google Current airs every half hour on Current TV and provides a look at what the world is searching for on Google. From hybrid cars to human-animal hybrids, from Paris riots to Paris Hilton photos, your searches guide our stories. There’s nothing like it on television.
Google Current can be found at http://current.tv/google/.
Google is offering a new webpage building tool called Google Pages. The service offers a simple CMS, free hosting, and 100 MB storage. I’m not quite sure why this is an advantage over blogger—other than the free storage (which could have been implemented at blogger)— but I’m glad to see more options that empower users to create simple webpages.
Check out Retro’s Test Page for an example of a google page, not to mention he has a bit of information on the new service.
Remember a few years back there was a site called Adcritic.com? It hosted copies of all the best advertisements. Well Adcritic is long gone, but now there’s Google Video—and here is a link to Saturday’s Superbowl commercials.
One thing I just realized about converting the blog into php pages is that if I erase the old .htm pages I will lose ALL of my google PageRank and probably won’t be indexed properly in Google’s search results.
Does anyone know if there is anything that can be done about this?
Update: 25 December 2005
So what I did to fix the problem was to enable Permalinks under the WordPress options tab. This consequently fixed my problem of named archives, but somehow at the same time it broke the search tool so that it would only work when on my ‘home’ view.
I found a google cache with the answer and I’m posting it here to help clear up the problem for others.
On my site, the search works fine when you’re on my “home” view. However, when you go onto a page that I created, the search seems to fail. How can I get it so that if I’m trying to search on a page instead of my main page, it’ll search the main pages?
I think it has something to do wtih the fact that I’m now in www. myurl.com/pages/ instead of www. myurl.com so it can’t search properly. Anyone know how I can fix this? Thanks!
Posted: 2005-02-25 15:22:51 # Kafkaesqui
Member
Go into the search’s form tag (in page.php if you’re using this for your Pages template) and change the action value to:action=”/”
or:
action=”/index.php”
I went into the searchform.php template and changed <form id="searchform" method="get" action="< ?php echo $PHP_SELF; ?>"> to <form id="searchform" method="get" action="/index.php"></form> and it worked! Hope that helps.