Zmarties

A view from the palace

2007-06-17T13:48:00.001+01:00

Taken, processed, and uploaded as part of Hack Day London

Improving CustomEyes

2007-03-26T22:51:00.000+01:00

GlassesDirect offer a feature they call CustomEyes which allows you to "try on" the glasses they offer online. It works by you uploading a photo of your face, and then you can overlay an image of the glasses on top of that.

Unfortunately they don't really use the power of the computer in doing this. CustomEyes is a silly little Flash application, whereas this could all have been done in far more accessible HTML. You currently get to see a small image of your face, and then have to select the frame you want to see by name from a drop down. The Flash controls do allow you to rotate the glasses - but who wants to see glasses that are rotated off of the horizontal anyway? In addition, they also allow the glasses to be resized, which is necessary since you they don't know in advance what sized face image you have uploaded - but is doubly necessary because they don't even make all the glasses images the same size - some are twice the size of others!

I'd suggest that the application could be much improved by doing the following:

do away with the Flash, and make this a straightforward dynamic HTML page
select from an illustrated list of frames, rather than simply by text name
for each frame that you select, add a new copy of the uploaded image to the page, so that you can actually fill the page with images that you can compare side by side, or which you can print out and compare that way
either automatically recognise where the eyes are in the image when it is uploaded, or ask to be told once, and thereafter make sure that all the images of the frames are scaled to be the correct size to fit.

What are Zooomr up to this week?

2007-03-07T23:17:00.000Z

Just setting things up so that I'm all ready to try out the new Zooomr version 3 when it's ready (which Thomas Hawk is saying is very soon now).

moon Hosted on Zooomr

YouTube blog

2007-02-14T21:03:00.000Z

YouTube has millions of users.

It also has a blog at http://youtube.com/rss/global/our_blog.rss

According to Bloglines, there are just 9 subscribers to that blog via Bloglines!

I wonder, is it that YouTube users are not very blog savvy, that the YouTube blog is not very interesting, or are YouTube blog readers not doing it via Bloglines?

(By comparison, the official Google Blog reports 43,697 subscribers via Bloglines).

Ask maintains a blacklist of IP addresses

2007-01-28T23:09:00.000Z

Someone at Ask.com should realize that IP addresses are dynamically given out by ISPs to their clients (potentially) each time they connect - so blacklisting "clients" by IP addresses is not a very smart thing to be doing.

I recently found that the IP address I was now allocated was somehow on Ask's blacklist, and that instead of getting Ask's search engine, all I got was a page saying:

Your client does not have permission to access this site.

Please refer to the Ask.com terms of service page.(Ask.com and Syndication).

If you feel that you have received this response in error, please send an email to unauthorized@ask.com. Before sending this email, please refer to our terms of service page, accessible at the url provided above.

Please copy and paste the information below into the body of the email.
fff9480d-2fff9480dfff9480d

I'm not sure if emailing that address is an automated system to remove the IP address from the blacklist - you can probably spot that the text they ask to be included in the body of the email is simply the hex representation of the client's IP address, (repeated 3 times for some reason). (I've obscured the actual address in the example above, but kept the same format).

Having sent the email, I've certainly not gained instant access to Ask again - I rather think that it will be quicker to get a new IP address from the ISP's DHCP server than to sort out Ask's broken blacklist. If Ask wants to use a blacklist system then they should probably expire IP addresses off the blacklist say a few hours after whatever behaviour it is that triggers the inclusion on the list was last detected. That way, zombie machines that continue to do something bad via Ask will remain blacklisted and hence blocked, but legitimate users who inherit an IP address that was previously used by a zombie are not permanently banned.

Findory rides into the sunset

2007-01-14T23:48:00.000Z

Searching is for when you know roughly what you are looking for.

An alternative way of finding information is for it to be recommended to you. One of the leaders in recommendation systems is Amazon.

Findory tries to apply some of the ideas Greg Linden learnt when building Amazon's recommendation systems (and what he's learnt since!), but unfortunately Greg has found it difficult to continue to grow Findory - and has just announced that "Findory rides into the sunset". Roughly speaking, this means that development of the site has slowed to a crawl, and that Greg is to concentrate on other things - which for the moment he explains means health and family.

I'm sorry to hear this - Greg's was one of the best blogs in the search area, backed by his ongoing research interests and development of Findory, and whilst I'm sure his interest in personalizing information will continue, without the need to attend to it on a daily basis, I suspect we will be hearing less from Greg in the future. I wish him well, and sorry he couldn't find a way to continue expanding Findory.

Keyhole website still up and active

2006-10-05T22:20:00.000+01:00

When Google bought Neven Vision recently they were extremely quick in tearing down all the pages on the websites that Neven Vision had.

I was therefore rather surprised to find that although

http://www.keyhole.com

redirects to Google Earth, if you just add index.html to the url thus

http://www.keyhole.com/index.html

then the old Keyhole site is still there, and apparently fully functioning.

OCR problems in Google Books

2006-09-29T07:24:00.000+01:00

The accuracy of OCR is vastly increased when the words you read exist in a dictionary. In that case the OCR, when trying to decide between more than one possible interpretation, can use the dictionary to help determine which is the more likely.

As the Google Books project announces its extension to scan European books in Madrid it will have to adjust the dictionary it uses - it's no good scanning Spanish books using the same dictionary as American English books.

However, there are some "English" documents that Google has scanned already where the OCR process has gone very wrong. Consider this page of old printed English, with the "long s" symbol, which looks like a modern "f" character. Looks like the OCR was not told that this dated from 1796, so to look out for long "s" - hence it has identified lots of "fuch" and "fale" rather than "such" and "sale" on the page. A simple dictionary check would have helped here - but only if the process expects "f" and "s" to be confused.

Picasa Web Albums adds email digests

2006-08-16T19:39:00.000+01:00

There is a new feature just appeared on the Picasa Web Albums settings page. Between the existing Public Gallery URL, and the Content Controls, there is now a section that allows you to set up an Email Digest.

It looks like Google are defaulting this to a weekly digest, to get the news out to people, and then giving them an option in the email to turn it off. The 4 choices given are no digest, or at a frequency of daily, weekly, or monthly. The description alongside explains:

What is an Email Digest?

When people you have marked as favorites create new albums, upload more photos, or comment on your photos, we send you a summary of these activities to your email address at the interval you specify.

The digest email itself is an HTML formatted email as follows:

The links in the email for changing settings are generic - they just take you to the main Picasa Web page, where you can then log in if needed. This means that you can forward the email to someone else without security issues.

The images do of course link through to the album that has changed. The thumbnails shown are embedded in the email, not just links to the Picasa Web site, so they can be seen when offline, or when external images are turned off (as is the case with most email programs these days).

I didn't have any new comments for this example to notify me about, but the source of the email indicates that they would follow after the list of changed albums.

(This should have appeared on my Documenting Picasa blog, but I'm having a few publishing issues at the moment).

Update:It did eventually make it to the Documenting Picasa Blog.

Most popular tags on flickr

2006-08-13T13:32:00.000+01:00

Whilst thinking about Searching Picasa Web Albums I did a bit of investigation into the most popular tags on flickr.

flickr provide a tag cloud, but that is just a visualization of the data, and I couldn't see that they provide the data in a direct form anywhere on the site. However, with the aid of the flickr API I was able to take all the words in the tag cloud, and feed them to the API, to get a count of how many matching tags there were for each word. In addition, I also fed those same words to the "free text" search API call, which looks for the word in more than just the tag field - considereing comments and descriptions for example.

The table below shows 3 columns - the tag I searched for, the number of tags of that word found, and the number of photos found using a free text search. The table is ordered by popularity of tags.

wedding	1697455	2269471
party	1475681	2350563
family	1160057	1557739
travel	1113576	1275557
friends	1093997	1649955
japan	1074281	1167494
vacation	1020423	1162147
london	927172	1100791
beach	864728	1493985
california	837012	960129
birthday	829670	1371859
trip	817324	1786838
nyc	774884	879161
summer	732387	1122946
nature	728059	816467
italy	686976	776812
france	669406	759215
me	664111	2886782
paris	662024	786996
art	643563	1104574
flowers	627830	1439335
sanfrancisco	618604	620523
europe	610237	708284
china	604334	707039
flower	596891	1439327
newyork	572049	575557
water	565749	973599
people	552582	975146
music	551493	740282
cameraphone	544369	634883
australia	543923	611789
christmas	537883	834827
usa	531563	619628
sky	527376	756538
germany	526931	595724
new	526549	2723772
canada	512067	612492
night	510466	1210035
cat	504840	852699
holiday	501819	703551
park	498178	1820673
bw	495568	514618
dog	486692	859611
food	478691	684164
snow	478068	643189
baby	463882	837637
sunset	462862	752411
city	446866	1294211
chicago	445639	529140
spain	441158	491290
taiwan	437633	461265
july	435057	1033708
blue	431367	862404
tokyo	427181	505507
england	425920	510575
mexico	406752	535804
winter	403827	579849
portrait	396759	644632
green	394571	671410
red	393719	848593
fun	392680	688356
india	386409	446473
architecture	383526	423993
garden	382303	981077
macro	380663	428872
spring	373441	759260
thailand	368331	411644
uk	362555	468979
seattle	357614	421000
festival	357137	658357
concert	350224	471579
canon	349327	580369
house	347404	1236984
berlin	343694	403534
hawaii	340744	384573
street	339503	1036943
lake	324783	937873
zoo	324442	460997
florida	322534	387322
june	321243	729667
may	316693	903231
white	313703	867135
vancouver	312657	383569
kids	312551	635702
tree	312542	1019630
clouds	307407	479446
toronto	304648	359194
barcelona	293035	341533
geotagged	292631	294655
home	291227	778635
sea	288469	546365
day	287287	2136618
texas	284851	360478
scotland	284615	309559
car	281730	788266
light	281436	909673
halloween	280515	362042
camping	279238	654077
church	273001	535265
animals	270757	542946
trees	270098	1019628
washington	266921	470046
river	266128	668903
nikon	265291	393117
april	262835	581807
boston	261935	330032
girl	258663	857847
ireland	258647	305876
graffiti	257081	283560
amsterdam	256794	307304
rock	256142	795001
landscape	254799	343825
blackandwhite	252987	253364
cats	252971	852700
newyorkcity	250213	250430
san	247739	1271943
rome	246027	286082
roadtrip	245326	255484
urban	244511	321849
honeymoon	241904	271611
ocean	240941	359337
dc	235053	363788
newzealand	232776	233573
march	231491	532229
black	231180	708269
museum	230643	562979
york	230193	868773
hiking	226067	398781
island	224110	844505
mountains	223030	759360
yellow	221515	347290
sydney	221447	278644
sun	218685	503464
hongkong	216193	222298
show	216155	850535
graduation	214681	306454
color	213967	579521
film	210509	351853
mountain	210046	759360
animal	208416	542946
losangeles	207932	208309
school	205891	550486
moblog	205613	210954
photo	205047	2308835
dogs	203610	859613

Documenting Picasa

2006-08-07T08:03:00.000+01:00

I've mentioned Picasa, the photo software from Google, a number of times on this blog.

Of all the Google services, this is perhaps the worst documented (with no API, and a tendency from Google of making the old forum / groups support postings unavailable), so I'm looking to do something about that. I've created a website called Documenting Picasa, together with the Documenting Picasa blog, which both look to cover the downloadable Picasa client software, and also Picasa Web Albums.

Refreshed betas for Picasa and Google Earth

2006-07-10T08:26:00.000+01:00

The beta versions of Google Earth 4 and Picasa 2.5 have been refreshed.

Picasa moves from build 31.99 to 32.01, though its unclear what fixes have gone into this.

Google Earth moves from build 1565 to 1657 on the PC, (1658 for Mac, 1660 for Linux), and the changes are listed on the release notes that is installed with it, and available via the Help menu. Google Earth Blog has a post summarizing the changes.

Distorted images on Geoportail

2006-07-08T09:29:00.000+01:00

Now that the French mapping site Geoportail is finally available, I've had a chance to have a quick look round.

As you zoom in, the images show one version of the data (I'm assuming a browser scaled version of the low res data), then replace it with the higher res data. In many places that I looked at, the two images do not line up - leading to a strange image shift on switching between the two.

I wasn't sure what was causing this, but wondered if it was something to do with the images being warped over a 3d terrain model. However, the net effect is simply one of image distortion - if it is a terrain effect, then their model has bad data.

The example image below shows the runway at St Martin in the Caribbean - where as you might expect, a runway is straight, flat, (and in this case at sea level, which should mean no terrain height problems). It's a spectacular runway at the best of times, with landing jumbo jets passing closely overhead of sunbathers on the beach at the end of the runway, but I wouldn't fancy landing on it if it's as uneven as the distorted images on Geoportail suggest!

(I havn't found how you bookmark a particular view using GeoPortail - is it possible?)

St MartinHosted on Zooomr

Overplot mashes quotes heard in New York

2006-06-26T20:17:00.000+01:00

Mihai Parparita, a Google employee, has put together a Google Maps mashup he calls overplot. It mashes together the quotes from Overheard in New York, via the Google Reader feed of the data, with some geocoding via the Google Maps API, so that the quotes can be seen in their appropriate positions on the New York street map.

The technical details include having to use an overlay instead of individual pushpins, since there are so many clustered results to show, and the use of the canvas object to draw areas. Although there is a fallback to ExplorerCanvas to support IE, the code makes no allowances for earlier Mozilla browsers that didn't support the canvas object, which is a shame, since it looks as if this was a late change to improve performance - presumably the earlier code could have been left in place (with reduced performance) to cover a fuller range of browsers.

Geoportail - impressions of the homepage

2006-06-25T09:20:00.000+01:00

France's new mapping service at GeoPortail continues to be suffering from huge demand, and hence to be generally unavailable. I did however once succeed in getting up the home page, a screenshot of which is shown here, and there's enough to be seen there to allow for some comments.

The site is all in French! OK, so thats the political reality of this being set up by French government dictact, but if the objective is to encourage interest in France and French culture, then making it more accessible to those outside the country, speaking different languages, would seem to be a valuable feature. (The site is also (un)available at geoportail.com, but this just redirects to geoportail.fr)
There are 3 stages outlined

Summer 2006 (now) - aerial images and scanned maps
Autumn 2006 - 3D viewer, and initial data sets
2007 - a rich set of public information available, plus WebServices

The page is hardcoded for a screen size of 1024x768 - if you have a smaller screen then there's a lot of scrolling needed, and a larger one wont give anymore useful info. This is not the way to handle such graphically rich applications as mapping - they really do need to use all available screen space to show as large a map as possible. The layout is achieved via tables, rather than via CSS.
Coverage entends to

FRANCE
CORSE
REUNION
MARTINIQUE
GUADELOUPE
ST MARTIN
ST BARTHELEMY
GUYANE
ST PIERRE ET MIQUELON
NOUVELLE CALEDONIE
MAYOTTE
ILES KERGUELEN
ILES CROZET
WALLIS
FUTUNA

The initial map shows the whole globe - with no zooming or other controls on it. If you move the mouse over the map, certain hidden areas are clickable - merely indicated by the mouse pointer changing to a hand pointer. (These areas are of course those listed above).
There's a built in feature for bookmarking favourite locations. The current top 3 are

Le Terminal Trans-Manche (62)
Le Mont-Saint-Michel (50)
Le Château de Chambord (41)

The geoportail site is for the "visualisation"; there is a separate site for the "geocatalogue" (and this site, since it has nothing but a holding page until Sept 2006, is available). The visualisation does not include any search box, to direct the map to a particular location.
In a commendable effort to be openly available to as many users as possible, the site is

compatible with IE6 and greater, Mozilla 1.7 and greater, Firefox 1.0 and greater, Safari 2.0 and greater, and OSs Windows 2000, XP, Linux (Redhat, Suse, Debian), Mac OS X

Much of the site is using php to serve up the pages, even for what would appear to be static information - perhaps that's part of the problem as to why the servers cant cope with the demand.

French support of Google Earth

2006-06-23T19:11:00.000+01:00

With the (possible) launch today of http://www.geoportail.fr, which has been rather hyped as the French challenge to Google Maps/Google Earth, I was doing a search for current French use of mapping, and came across the Gers Chamber of Commerce and Industry geomatics technology centre.

There they have some very well crafted KML files, which show information about the interior region of France, to the west of Toulouse. The files on offer include both sets of placemarks, and also presentation of statistics such as employment and population figures. Neat features about the KML used include snippet control, the addition of a fixed logo, and a copyright string down the left of the view, though unfortunately the statistics key now appears just where the (semi-transparent) controls of Google Earth 4 are.

It looks as if the data files were prepared with the help of GE-Data, a French company which specializes in producing data files for Google Earth.

... and as for geoportail itself, as I write this, the website is unavailable, so all we have to go on are some screenshots and early user reports.

GNT, a French tech blog, has coverage of the inaccessibilty of geoportail, IGN (which produced it), and of GNT itself, which happened to also rank highly in Google for the search "geoportail". The screenshot included in this report is quite unlike the others - I assume it is from an earlier prototype of the site.

Opera 9 ships, but still fails in its support of xml

2006-06-22T22:52:00.000+01:00

The Opera browser has often been praised for its standards support, and with the release of the latest version, Opera 9, I had hoped that it may have added good support for xml.

Although web browsers are primarily used to browse HTML formatted documents, they can also be used to view a number of other types of documents. Foremost amongst these are xml documents, a close relative of HTML documents, but in many ways far more powerful - that x stands for Extensible. Viewing a raw xml file is rarely the best way to do it, so xml files are generally viewed with the aid of a stylesheet - written in xsl (Extensible Stylesheet Language), and the the process of transforming the xml into a viewable form is known as XSLT.

The Opera 9 spec document states that

XML support

Opera can parse and display XML documents. Opera can be both a validating and non-validating processor.

Documents with Content-type "text/xml", "application/xml" or with a subtype ending on "+xml" will be treated as an XML document. If a Content-type is not available, the ".xml" file extension will also make the document be treated as XML. Opera does not use US-ASCII as the default character set for text/xml, but otherwise follows RFC3023. We recommend using application/xml instead of text/xml or use explicit character set declaration.

XSLT, XPath, and XSL-FO

Opera has near-complete support of XSLT 1.0 and XPath 1.0

Opera does not support XSL Formatting Objects.

It sounds from that as if the support of xml is pretty extensive, but in practice there's aparently a lot of flexibility in those words. The "near-complete support of XSLT 1.0" seems to mean that they don't support the vitally important document() function - which rather takes the teeth out of XSLT. The document() function reads xml from a named document URL, making the XSLT process powerful, allowing it to pull information in from a number of xml documents. Consider a page of product information that pulls in current prices from a specific price document, and stock levels from another document.

(The previous version, Opera 8, had no support of XSLT, so partial support might sometimes be considered an improvement. However, in many cases its a step backwards - in Opera 8, since the XSLT instructions associated with a xml file are ignored, at least you get to see the raw xml data. In Opera 9, it starts to process the file, but fails on an unsupported base feature, so nothing but an error message is displayed).

Without fully supporting XSLT 1.0, Opera languishes a long way behind the other browsers in supporting xml - IE 6 has great support for XSLT, as does the Mozilla / Firefox family (if a little slow at times).

Update: A fascinating interview on Slashdot, with Håkon Wium Lie of Opera. He notes that:

From that perspective, it makes sense to leave ### half-implemented. You can claim support (and many journalists will believe you), and you also ensure that no-one can use the unimplemented (or worse: buggily implemented) features of the standard. The only way to change the equation is to remind ### how embarrassing it is to offer a sub-standard browser. And to use better browsers.

How true this is - the sentence could so easily apply be completed with XSLT and Opera filling in the gaps. Actually, the published quote was about CSS2 and Microsoft!

Håkon Wium Lie was the father of CSS, and I think reading the whole article gives an insight into the thinking at Opera - they view CSS as all important, and are happy to let XML and XSLT take a back seat. This also comes through across in another reply, which notes

... CSS is an intrinsic component of AJAX. The "AJAX" name sounds great, but allow me to propose a few alternate spellings that I find more accurate:

AJACX: Asynchronous JavaScript, CSS and XMLHttpRequest
ADJACS: Asynchronous DOM, JavaScript and CSS
ADHJACS: Asynchronous DOM, HTML, JavaScript and CSS
AJAHCS: Asynchronous JavaScript, HTML and CSS
AJACS: Asynchronous JavaScript, HTML and CSS

Bloglines upgrades their Atom parser

2006-06-21T08:21:00.000+01:00

Although Bloglines has been able to process Atom feeds for a while, it didn't do a very good job of it - in particular it would lose whitespace around hyperlinks, which made reading atom feeds a bit of a pain.

However, in "Duplicates; real and imagined" it mentions that it is introducing a new Atom parser, and the Atom protocol makes it much easier to detect duplicates, especially when articles are syndicated into different feeds.

It looks like this parser is available now - so now I can read Tim Bray's Ongoing in its full text form, rather than in just the summary form that he also made available in RSS format. (Looking at the stats from Bloglines, I see that Tim has 49 Bloglines subscribers for his Atom feed, but 3465 via his RSS feed - expect that pattern to change now that the much better Atom feed can be displayed properly).

An API for Picasa?

2006-06-20T23:44:00.000+01:00

I've mentioned before that Picasa is one of the few Google offerings without a (published) API. However, although unpublished, there are a number of integration points with Picasa that form a sort of unofficial API.

Specifically, Picasa offers the following

upload to a Web Album (new in the Picasa 2.5 beta version)
upload to Joga (in the customized version of Picasa available at Joga.com)
upload to Blogger

This uploading interface is undocumented, but has been reverse engineered by tabblo, who use it to offer a way to upload to the tabblo photo service direct from Picasa. They offer few clues as to how they did it, beyond this comment on a flickr forum, to the effect that

"we had to spend a couple of days reverse-engineering a complicated desktop application/server-based protocol, then more time debugging it, and as of late, more time bringing it up to date for the 2.5 release of Picasa."

Picasa has some other potentially useful integration points

the oem.xml file is used by the Joga customized variant to supply the customization of the title bar
Picasa 2.5 uses kml files to interact with Google Earth, with the communication in the reverse direction acomplished by Picasa acting as a web server
Picasa also shows a webserver interface when you use the Ctrl-L shortcut, which gives a close approximation to the Picasa UI within a web browser
Picasa Web Albums offer a "download to Picasa" link that works by using a url of the form "picasa://downloadfeed/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Flh%2FrssAlbum" so Picasa must register a url handler for the "picasa://" protocol.

Whilst the above are all undocumented, there is documentation provided for another integration point. If you look in the web directory under your Picasa installation, there is a documentation directory, and within that is a index.html file which documents the Picasa Web Templating System. This describes the templating system used when doing an export as web page from Picasa. In addition, you can also export as xml, which provides another fairly easy way to extract data from the Picasa system, for use in other programs.

Keyboard shortcuts in Picasa

2006-06-15T21:50:00.000+01:00

Picasa is a great tool from Google for organizing your photos.

However, its documentation is a bit sparse, and hard to find (and from a developers point of view it's one of the few Google offerings without an API).

Certainly underdocumented are the many keyboard shortcuts that the program offers, which both serve to make using the program easier and faster, and in some cases offer facilities that are not available with the mouse, or via the menus.

My favourites are:

CTRL + ALT - displays the image the mouse is over at full screen size
CTRL L - brings up a web browser view of the whole Picasa interface

Google Book Search - Shakespeare

2006-06-13T23:49:00.000+01:00

Google Book Search has put together a page specifically on Shakespeare, which ties in with their sponsorship of some theatre perfomances in New York's Central Park this summer.

A sidebar on the page suggests "Take a Literary Field Trip - Download Google Earth to visit the Globe Theater and other Shakespearean landmarks right from your desktop.", but unfortunately it doesn't provide a KML file link on the page to actually provide this tour.

There is also no actual search box on the page, so although you can browse through the various Shakespearean plays by title, you cant do a simple search for a word, or half remembered piece of dialog - surely some mistake from a search engine!

Major mapping upgrades from Google

2006-06-13T23:13:00.000+01:00

Google's been releasing a whole load of new mapping features all at once:

Version 4 (beta) of Google Earth, which is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. This has an improved UI that give lots more space to the photo data, and allows textured 3D models
A new version of the KML file format, that supports the new 3D model changes, improves network links, adds regions for different details at different zoom levels, adds radio buttons
A new version of SketchUp, now available for Windows and Mac, that produces textured 3D models
Geocoding in the Google Maps API - available for US, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Japan, with data returned as xml, kml, or JSON
Support for KML in Google Maps

Its going to take a few days for people to get their heads round all these new features, but its certainly going to make for interesting opportunities. There are of course plenty of things that can still be improved, for example

why no UK geocoding suport? - Google claim that "More countries will be added as Google Maps launches in new countries", but the UK was the first country after the USA to get comprehensive Google Maps coverage
Supporting KML for Google Maps as well as Google Earth is great, but it looks as if the Maps version is severely limited - for example loading my Countries of the World KML file gives corrupted balloons, just 67 data points, and a message that "Parts ... could not be displayed because it is too large"

Sony SLR digital camera

2006-06-13T08:22:00.000+01:00

Following on from Sony's acquisition of the photographic assets of Konica Minolta, they have now launched their first SLR digital camera, called the Sony Alpha DSLR-A100.

Its an obvious development of the Konica Minolta 5D, using the Minolta lens mount, and so compatible with many existing lenses. The highlights of the camera include

10 megapixel CCD
camera integrated anti shake
anti dust mechanism
40 segment honeycomb metering
2.5" 230,000 pixel LCD monitor
Lithium ion battery with a claimed capacity of 750 shots

Oh, to get my hands on one to play with. In the meantime, there are hands on reviews (of preproduction models) at

Livesearch from AllTheWeb

2006-05-10T22:07:00.000+01:00

We havn't heard much from AllTheWeb recently, (now part of the Yahoo stable), but today they released a new search interface they call livesearch.

This takes the Google Suggest technique of suggesting words as you type in the search box, and goes one step further by actually doing the suggested search for you to the right of the screen, automatically. This is obviously a resource intensive operation which leads to lots of unnecessary searches being done, so you can see why Yahoo are trying the experiment on an almost forgotten engine, rather than on their main search properties.

The words (or phrases) that come up after typing just one letter are an interesting mix, and it's informative to compare them to the words that Google Suggest uses for the same letter. Some letters agree, but others are widely different.

And what better way to illustrate the chosen result other than by comparing them via another of today's other search engine launches, Google Trends?

In all cases the livesearch result is given first:

a) american idol vs amazon
b) bank of america vs bbc
c) craigslist vs currency convertor
d) both agree on dictionary
e) both agree on ebay
f) facebook vs firefox
g) google vs gmail
h) both agree on hotmail
i) internet explorer vs ikea
j) jessica alba vs jokes
k) kelley blue book vs kelly blue book
l) both agree on lyrics
m) myspace vs mapquest
n) natalee holloway vs news
o) both agree on orbitz
p) photobucket vs paris hilton
q) qvc vs quotes
r) runescape vs ryanair
s) southwest airlines vs spybot
t) both agree on target
u) unique baby names vs ups
v) verizon vs valentines day
w) both agree on weather
x) xanga vs xbox
y) both agree on yahoo
z) both agree on zip codes

I think the K choice is particularly interesting, where they both suggest the same thing, but Google plumps for the much more popular incorrect spelling!

Google Trends

2006-05-10T21:28:00.001+01:00

Released today in Google Labs, Google Trends allows you to get graphs of search and news volume over time for keywords you provide. (Its thus a great complement to the Google zeitgeist, which shows whats hot over a short period of time).

If you provide multiple keywords, separated by commas, then the graphs are overlayed, so you can compare them. The graphs also have little lettered marker flags, which correspond to particular news stories, so you can sometimes see the reason for a particular peak in the searching. The graphs carry no scale, so you can't see absolute numbers, just trends over time, or in comparison to another keyword.

There are a few interesting examples provided

Yankees v Red Sox - with a big peak when they were head to head in the World Series (and the winners search volume was twice the loosers)
major US holidays, peaking as you might expect

and a few of my own examples

da vinci with a huge peak last year (when Leonardo's birthday was a featured Google doodle), and recently increasing news volume obviously due to the film of The Da Vinci Code.
olympics with expected peaks for the Greek summer games, the announcement of the 2012 hosts (London), and the winter games
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