Showing posts with label web-based services. Show all posts
Showing posts with label web-based services. Show all posts
Saturday, January 13, 2007
Weather Bonk
In one of my recent forays into somewhere or other, I ran across Weather Bonk, a very cool mashup of Google maps, regular weather forecasting, amateur weather stations, and webcams. You can enter a city name or a zip code, and then you'll get a page with a bunch of weather and geographically related information. The most interesting part is a Google map of the selected region, but showing temperatures from all of the amateur weather stations in that area. (These are private stations which publish their data to the U.S. Weather Service.) If you position your cursor over one of the temperatures, you get a semi-transparent box showing more detail about that station. Likewise, there may be little camera icons on the map. These represent webcams at those locations. If you position the cursor over those, it shows a small window containing the most recent image. Very cool.
Monday, January 08, 2007
Shilling For Google And Netflix
Over the holidays, I had a number of occasions to chat with family and friends. Toward the end of the break, I began to realize how often I ended up evangelizing for Google and Netflix. This was disturbing to recognize, because in the past I myself had often been critical of people who were overly laudatory about some company's products.
For example, back in the early 1990s, I worked for a large contract research house. One of my fellow employees, otherwise a fine individual, was a monomaniac about Lotus Notes. His basic view was that it was good for whatever problem you had, so he brought it up in every meeting he attended. This greatly irritated me, because (1) I thought the product was over-priced, (2) regardless of what my friend thought, Lotus Notes was not the magic bullet that would cure all our ills, and (3) I wanted to develop such systems myself, and there was no way I would be able to do that if the company spent a lot of money buying one. I needn't have worried. The product was too expensive, and I left the company anyway.
Then there are Microsoft zombies. These are people for whom the answer to any problem is a Microsoft product. There are not anywhere nearly as many nowadays as there were, say, ten to fifteen years ago. Back then Microsoft was the only acceptable desktop application vendor for a large corporation. A Microsoft zombie in a management position was every bit as repressive as any party official in a totalitarian state. Of course, the synergistic interplay of the Internet and open source software has taken a lot of the wind out of Microsoft's sails.
Like Microsoft in the 1980s and 1990s, other companies have had their own dittoheads. Both IBM and Oracle won my disdain early on because of this, although it seems they both have lost the adoring crowds that once followed them.
Since the late 1990s, I have mostly been plumping for open source stuff. There are lots of reasons for this, including lower costs, usually higher quality for the things I cared about, and more diversity. Nearly all of my geek friends felt the same way. There was something really gratifying about endorsing and using software that was free to download and install. I didn't mind at all telling people about it, and I argued with commercial software dittoheads on more than one occasion about why open source made sense for commercial companies.
Then Google came along. They are not an open source organization by any means, although they make heavy use of an open source infrastructure. Somehow Google managed to establish a pretty lofty reputation among geeks even though they were a commercial outfit. Part of this reputation came from their "Don't be evil" slogan. Probably an even bigger part was the fact that their most useful service, namely searching, was free. Google found a non-offensive way to present relevant ads along with search results, and users gladly accepted that as the cost of getting such a great service. For a good long while, about the only people critical of Google were competitors.
Google began branching out into other products, including the ones that I regularly use: Gmail, Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Video, Google Reader, Google Chat, Blogger and Picasa. These are all 100% free, and they have changed the way I do things every day. It has gotten to the point that if Google rolls out a new product, I almost never bother to look at what competitors have to offer. Even worse, I evangelize for these products. I tell people what great things they are. I have become just like my Lotus-Notes-loving friend. I am a Google shill.
As if that weren't bad enough, I found myself doing the same thing for Netflix. In case you don't know about that (I was surprised that some of my non-geek friends had never heard of it), Netflix provides an extremely easy-to-use DVD rental-by-mail service. For a relatively small monthly fee, you can request DVDs online, and they are mailed to you as they become available (usually there is no waiting). You keep them as long as you want, but you can only have a certain number out at a time. When you are done with a DVD, you mail it back in, and then Netflix will send you the next one you requested. The best part of Netflix, in my view, is the incredible range and variety of material that they have available: old classics, whole TV series, rare and seldom seen masterpieces, etc. Searching and requesting are very easy.
So, here I am . The only thing that keeps me from being a true shill is that I don't get anything out of my evangelizing, at least not in a monetary sense. But then, neither did my Lotus-Notes-loving friend. The real question is whether this change is because I am growing morally weaker, or just mellower.
For example, back in the early 1990s, I worked for a large contract research house. One of my fellow employees, otherwise a fine individual, was a monomaniac about Lotus Notes. His basic view was that it was good for whatever problem you had, so he brought it up in every meeting he attended. This greatly irritated me, because (1) I thought the product was over-priced, (2) regardless of what my friend thought, Lotus Notes was not the magic bullet that would cure all our ills, and (3) I wanted to develop such systems myself, and there was no way I would be able to do that if the company spent a lot of money buying one. I needn't have worried. The product was too expensive, and I left the company anyway.
Then there are Microsoft zombies. These are people for whom the answer to any problem is a Microsoft product. There are not anywhere nearly as many nowadays as there were, say, ten to fifteen years ago. Back then Microsoft was the only acceptable desktop application vendor for a large corporation. A Microsoft zombie in a management position was every bit as repressive as any party official in a totalitarian state. Of course, the synergistic interplay of the Internet and open source software has taken a lot of the wind out of Microsoft's sails.
Like Microsoft in the 1980s and 1990s, other companies have had their own dittoheads. Both IBM and Oracle won my disdain early on because of this, although it seems they both have lost the adoring crowds that once followed them.
Since the late 1990s, I have mostly been plumping for open source stuff. There are lots of reasons for this, including lower costs, usually higher quality for the things I cared about, and more diversity. Nearly all of my geek friends felt the same way. There was something really gratifying about endorsing and using software that was free to download and install. I didn't mind at all telling people about it, and I argued with commercial software dittoheads on more than one occasion about why open source made sense for commercial companies.
Then Google came along. They are not an open source organization by any means, although they make heavy use of an open source infrastructure. Somehow Google managed to establish a pretty lofty reputation among geeks even though they were a commercial outfit. Part of this reputation came from their "Don't be evil" slogan. Probably an even bigger part was the fact that their most useful service, namely searching, was free. Google found a non-offensive way to present relevant ads along with search results, and users gladly accepted that as the cost of getting such a great service. For a good long while, about the only people critical of Google were competitors.
Google began branching out into other products, including the ones that I regularly use: Gmail, Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Video, Google Reader, Google Chat, Blogger and Picasa. These are all 100% free, and they have changed the way I do things every day. It has gotten to the point that if Google rolls out a new product, I almost never bother to look at what competitors have to offer. Even worse, I evangelize for these products. I tell people what great things they are. I have become just like my Lotus-Notes-loving friend. I am a Google shill.
As if that weren't bad enough, I found myself doing the same thing for Netflix. In case you don't know about that (I was surprised that some of my non-geek friends had never heard of it), Netflix provides an extremely easy-to-use DVD rental-by-mail service. For a relatively small monthly fee, you can request DVDs online, and they are mailed to you as they become available (usually there is no waiting). You keep them as long as you want, but you can only have a certain number out at a time. When you are done with a DVD, you mail it back in, and then Netflix will send you the next one you requested. The best part of Netflix, in my view, is the incredible range and variety of material that they have available: old classics, whole TV series, rare and seldom seen masterpieces, etc. Searching and requesting are very easy.
So, here I am . The only thing that keeps me from being a true shill is that I don't get anything out of my evangelizing, at least not in a monetary sense. But then, neither did my Lotus-Notes-loving friend. The real question is whether this change is because I am growing morally weaker, or just mellower.
Saturday, December 16, 2006
Wikipedia Über Alles
Over the past year or so I've noticed a significant change in what Google shows in the top matches for most queries. I have not done any kind of systematic study of this, but it seems to me that I almost always get a match from Wikipedia in the top five matches. What's more, that Wikipedia page usually provides the answer I want. Perhaps this has more to do with the kinds of things I look up, but I don't think so.
Wikipedia of course is one of the great success stories for collaboration software. A few months ago there was a report that compared Wikipedia and Enclopedia Brittanica, and found them roughly equal in terms of depth and accuracy. That is a pretty remarkable finding, considering that Brittanica is a well-established commercial organization with over 200 years experience in collecting and organizing information, whereas Wikipedia is mostly a volunteer organization going back a decade or so.
Of course, Wikipedia is not without its flaws. As do most Wikis, Wikipedia has an open update policy. That means that anyone can update pretty much anything at any time. The Wikipedia staff have had to modify that policy for certain pages. Wiki pages on topics which produce controversy and strong emotion, such as abortion, evolution, Islam, Palestinian independence, Scientology, and the like, became textual battlegrounds, where warring ideologues spent their days deleting each others' corrections. For those pages, the Wikipedia staff have had to step in and lock the pages, and then try to provide some sort of editorial oversight so as to attain to their idea of a 'Neutral Point Of View'. No doubt this is a painfully time-consuming process, but the end result is more likely to represent the different sides of an issue more accurately and completely. I'm glad someone is doing that.
Apart from these more vigorous kinds of disputes, Wikipedia is pretty accurate. Every now and then, however, one does run across an error that no-one recognized, but which later seems to have been a pretty pointed attack by someone. For example, prominent journalist John Seigenthaler recently discovered that he is mentioned by name as "a longtime suspect in the assassinations of president John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert". That kind of thing can ruin your whole day. He got that one fixed.
Happily, those kinds of problems are rare. I mentioned the comparison with Encyclopedia Brittanica. On Dec. 15, Wired News published an article summarizing the current state of things. With four million pretty good articles already, it's not so surprising that Google finds those pages so readily.
Update 12/26/2006:
Scoble also notes how WikiPedia often has a better, more focused answer than Google does.
Wikipedia of course is one of the great success stories for collaboration software. A few months ago there was a report that compared Wikipedia and Enclopedia Brittanica, and found them roughly equal in terms of depth and accuracy. That is a pretty remarkable finding, considering that Brittanica is a well-established commercial organization with over 200 years experience in collecting and organizing information, whereas Wikipedia is mostly a volunteer organization going back a decade or so.
Of course, Wikipedia is not without its flaws. As do most Wikis, Wikipedia has an open update policy. That means that anyone can update pretty much anything at any time. The Wikipedia staff have had to modify that policy for certain pages. Wiki pages on topics which produce controversy and strong emotion, such as abortion, evolution, Islam, Palestinian independence, Scientology, and the like, became textual battlegrounds, where warring ideologues spent their days deleting each others' corrections. For those pages, the Wikipedia staff have had to step in and lock the pages, and then try to provide some sort of editorial oversight so as to attain to their idea of a 'Neutral Point Of View'. No doubt this is a painfully time-consuming process, but the end result is more likely to represent the different sides of an issue more accurately and completely. I'm glad someone is doing that.
Apart from these more vigorous kinds of disputes, Wikipedia is pretty accurate. Every now and then, however, one does run across an error that no-one recognized, but which later seems to have been a pretty pointed attack by someone. For example, prominent journalist John Seigenthaler recently discovered that he is mentioned by name as "a longtime suspect in the assassinations of president John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert". That kind of thing can ruin your whole day. He got that one fixed.
Happily, those kinds of problems are rare. I mentioned the comparison with Encyclopedia Brittanica. On Dec. 15, Wired News published an article summarizing the current state of things. With four million pretty good articles already, it's not so surprising that Google finds those pages so readily.
Update 12/26/2006:
Scoble also notes how WikiPedia often has a better, more focused answer than Google does.
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Google Reader
It seems like I am always late to the party. That is, whenever there is some new trend in the computer world, I never manage to be an early adopter even when I would like to be. No doubt the wisest course is as Alexander Pope described:
Anyway, philosophizing aside, I did want to describe a relatively new Google service that you may not have had a chance to look at. You have probably heard about RSS feeds and aggregators. The whole subject is quite complex, with the usual convoluted history and politics that rapidly evolving technology always has. Over the last few years, there have been a number of different approaches to handling feed aggregation. Attempts at comparing these different approaches are, frankly, unusably complicated. Because of all of that, I just hadn't been able to make much progress in figuring out what, if anything, I wanted to do with the whole area.
Some months ago, Google (as part of its overall plan for benign world domination) introduced their version of an aggregator, dubbed Google Reader:
Google has made it particularly easy to add more feeds with an 'Add Subscription' link. Clicking that brings up a small dialog box in which you can enter either a URL for a new feed, if you happen to know it already, or a search string, in which case the reader brings up in the right pane a list of matching possibilities which you can then subscribe to with a single click.
The Reader has other features which you can easily find for yourself, such as how to arrange your feeds into folders (which are really more like Gmail labels). So far, Google's Reader is complete ad-free.
I suppose I should wrap this up by recommending a few blogs. Let me hasten to say that it has been my experience that whenever someone tells me "you'll just love" book X, movie Y or website Z, there is at least a 60% chance that my reaction will not be one of love. (Why this is true remains one of the great mysteries of my life. The persona I project and the person I am on the inside must be truly out of sync.) So, I will simply say that I have found these blogs interesting and thought-provoking. They tell you very little about my own views of things.
Addendum: Ron Jeffries recently wrote about his experience switching from Bloglines to Google Reader, which very much mirrored my own. His posting was prompted by an earlier posting by Gina Trapani on the same topic.
Be not the first by whom the new are tried,Nonetheless, I usually find myself on the 2nd line of this quote rather than the first. Perhaps you'd think that being at home full-time recovering from a major illness would give me more opportunity to try things sooner. Unfortunately, about all I seem to run across early are funny videos on YouTube.
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.
Anyway, philosophizing aside, I did want to describe a relatively new Google service that you may not have had a chance to look at. You have probably heard about RSS feeds and aggregators. The whole subject is quite complex, with the usual convoluted history and politics that rapidly evolving technology always has. Over the last few years, there have been a number of different approaches to handling feed aggregation. Attempts at comparing these different approaches are, frankly, unusably complicated. Because of all of that, I just hadn't been able to make much progress in figuring out what, if anything, I wanted to do with the whole area.
Some months ago, Google (as part of its overall plan for benign world domination) introduced their version of an aggregator, dubbed Google Reader:
http://www.google.com/readerIt was easy to set up, easy to use, and certainly meets my modest needs for reading blogs and other feeds. Implemented as a web application, it is available from any computer without needing to download anything. You login using the same ID you use for Gmail and the other Google services. Once you login you see a straightforward multi-pane browser. The left pane lists the feeds you have subscribed to, and which of those has new entries. Upon choosing a particular feed, the right pane shows postings from that feed in reverse chronological order, with the newest ones naturally at the top. Depending on how the feed is set up, what comes through in the right pane is either the full text of each posting (although not necessarily formatted quite the same way as the original) or a short version. Either way, you can click on the posting's title to get a new window with the full posting as seen in the original blog or feed.
Google has made it particularly easy to add more feeds with an 'Add Subscription' link. Clicking that brings up a small dialog box in which you can enter either a URL for a new feed, if you happen to know it already, or a search string, in which case the reader brings up in the right pane a list of matching possibilities which you can then subscribe to with a single click.
The Reader has other features which you can easily find for yourself, such as how to arrange your feeds into folders (which are really more like Gmail labels). So far, Google's Reader is complete ad-free.
I suppose I should wrap this up by recommending a few blogs. Let me hasten to say that it has been my experience that whenever someone tells me "you'll just love" book X, movie Y or website Z, there is at least a 60% chance that my reaction will not be one of love. (Why this is true remains one of the great mysteries of my life. The persona I project and the person I am on the inside must be truly out of sync.) So, I will simply say that I have found these blogs interesting and thought-provoking. They tell you very little about my own views of things.
- http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog: The Bad Astronomer. 'bad' here does not mean 'poor in quality', but it could mean several other things. Covers a wide variety of science related topics.
- http://www.pandasthumb.org/: The Panda's Thumb. Written by Francis Collins, an evolutionary biologist who wrote The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. Although himself a devout Christian, he spends a lot of time working against the Intelligent Design crowd.
- http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/: The Dilbert Blog. Remarkably insightful yet usually very funny observations and commentary by Scott Adams.
- http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/: The Long Tail. Commentary by Chris Anderson, the senior editor of Wired. His book with the same title explores in depth the impact that the widespread adoption of computer technology has made in the sheer number of choices consumers now have available.
Addendum: Ron Jeffries recently wrote about his experience switching from Bloglines to Google Reader, which very much mirrored my own. His posting was prompted by an earlier posting by Gina Trapani on the same topic.
Friday, November 03, 2006
Storing Your Data On Somebody Else's Machine
This posting is more of a question than a comment. Over the last several years, there has been a surge in various web-based services that encourage you to store your data and documents on machines that you don't control. The winner in this category is, of course, Google, who provides the world with Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Documents & Spreadsheets, Google Base, Google Notebook, Picasa and most recently JotSpot. There are other companies that provide similar services, such as Yahoo, Hotmail, Flickr, etc. These services are very attractive because of factors such as
This last point would seem to be an especially serious obstacle, only it's not, at least for me and millions of others. I've thought about it a lot of times, but I keep making the choice to store my email, my files, my data, etc. on these services because of the factors listed above.
What do you think about this situation? What do you do?
- large (or even unlimited) disk storage
- universal accessibility (i.e., you can get to your data from any machine you would like)
- reliable data backup and other maintenance
- highly functional and constantly improving software
This last point would seem to be an especially serious obstacle, only it's not, at least for me and millions of others. I've thought about it a lot of times, but I keep making the choice to store my email, my files, my data, etc. on these services because of the factors listed above.
What do you think about this situation? What do you do?
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Problems with Google's AdSense
I just spent some interesting but ultimately fruitless minutes looking for a particular blog entry I saw somewhere a few weeks ago. It was on a scientifically-oriented blog of some sort (like The Bad Astronomer) that had Google AdSense ads on it. What struck me at the time was the irony of the fact that the particular posting on that page was a rant against some pseudo-science while AdSense provided an ad for a service based on exactly that pseudo-science. That got me wondering how often it happened that an ad was diametrically opposed to the content of the page it appeared on. So I tried a very small experiment. I got onto my Gmail account, and sent myself a message containing the one line:
This is a rant against water dousing and water witching.When I read the message in Gmail (which also shows AdSense ads), it showed these four ads over on the right side of the page:
New Winner Every DayAs you can see, two of the ads are exactly for services based on the pseudo-science I mentioned in my mini-rant. I tried the same thing again using different text and, as I expected, got essentially the same outcome. Google searches (upon which AdSense is based) are very effective for finding matches for words and phrases such as those that occur in a blog page or an email message. The problem is that AdSense cannot distinguish between positive and negative mentions of these terms. (BTW, I have no explanation for the 'Pet Peeves' or 'Subtle Energy' ads.) So, the moral of the story is:
Win 5 Pet Peeves Characters(tm) Enter the Free daily Contest here.
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If your page uses AdSense, and it is showing ads you don't like, try changing the wording of the problematic phrase, or try rendering it in some clever way that human readers can easily read but which AdSense will not pick up on. For example, space the p r o b l e m w o r d s out.
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