Dear Zooomr #
There seems to be absolutely no way to contact the people (/person) behind Zooomr to tell them about a bug in their Beta software, and I'm not about to leave a comment on some random post in their blog.
On the slight offchance this makes its way to them, the message is a simple bug report:
Hello,
Your 'Add to Google' link at the bottom of my user page is broken. The link points to :
http://fusion.google.com/add?feedurl=${root_url}bluenote/feeds:rss/people/${user_rs.unix_name}
Zooomr, First Impressions #
Tried Zooomr tonight, a photo hosting and sharing website - here are my first impressions:
- When I sign up I need an OpenID. Or something like that. I wanted a Zooomr login, not a login for some other place.
- After signing up, whenever I go to Zooomr I get the home page. I'm spoilt by Flickr on this which'll automatically redirect me to a place where I see my photos and contacts. If I want the same on Zooomr I need to go to the WelcomeMat apparently.
- What's a Zooomrtation? Apart from a really odd looking word. I click it. It shows a load of photos. I don't know why, or what the relevance of these photos is since there's absolutely no explanation.
- I tried uploading some photos and they were slooooow. It needs a progress bar of some kind.
- The 'ultra convenient and fast' jUploadr is a 4.4Mb ZIP that doesn't tell me what to do with it. There's a README file (if I delve into the folder structure of the ZIP), but it's got something about double-clicking the BAT file which I really don't fancy doing inside a ZIP. Why isn't it in the Start Menu like everything else at this point? Where's the friendly installer?
- How many 'o's are in the name? I have to keep making a point of correcting myself from writing Zoomr when I do this (which happens to be a completely different photography website)
- The Geotagging doesn't appear to support the wheel mouse. I got used to this in the normal Google Maps and now it's not working.
- Ok, so I've added a photo which seems to work. I see somebody else's photo so I click on that. Looks nice and all. Now I go to add my second photo and it doesn't work -- why not? (I look and apparently I need to click Start Geotagging again to continue - I thought I was already doing that!)
- What are the three colours in Geotagging supposed to do? Red Green and Blue are meaningless.
On the plus side, I did have a few views on my photos within a few minutes of uploading. That never seems to happen on Flickr, for instance. Somebody even added a photo as a favourite within a minute of upload. Maybe this is what Zooomrtation is about? (I genuinely don't know what that is about; somebody care to enlighten me?)
Google Reader - Interesting #
Right, so Google Reader collects and presents feeds from all over the world, on a variety of subjects. It lets you read them. If you like them you can share them. Other people can then read your shared items. Of course, they could be reading them in Google Reader. The circle goes on.
Why's this interesting? Think of it from an information perspective. Google have x million regular Reader users. Each of those readers is subscribed to y feeds. Simply from this alone you can work out things like the most popular feeds. Hey - that's not new. Add a time factor and you can work out the most interesting new feeds, as well as the all-time favourite feeds.
Now, according to Bloglines, Slashdot is the most popular feed (other than Bloglines News...). That's hardly a surprise considering how many readers Slashdot gets, who are tech savvy and probably want all their headlines in their favourite reader. Wired News, Dilbert, the BBC. All frequent stuff.
Let's look at the BBC's headlines. A bit about Syria; something about Bush and Iraq; Europe eases Algeria visa rules apparently; French rugby player receives knee injury. How could we tell which of these are interesting? Well we could use our favourite buzz aggregators which watch links from oodles of blogs. One problem with these is that they take time to update. 13 minutes is good, but not good enough (and that was Google). They rely on picking information from third parties (the blogger themselves). You have to accumulate the inbound blog links by visiting each and every newly posted blog (by the way, the pingmesh/pingosphere which is supposed to notify websites of post updates is absolutely crammed with spam).
Let's come back to Google. With their sharing capability, you can immediately publicise blog posts you think are interesting. Because this is all internal to Google, the act of sharing is immediately known to Google. They could build up a list of top new posts basically in real time. With enough posts and user contributions, you've basically got yourselves a Digg. If you get enough of a user base sharing their 'favourite' posts, that's a pretty good statistical sample to determine 'what's hot' in the blogosphere (and wider web - let's not forget feeds are not just synonymous with blogs...)
Then we have folders aka tags. These allow the reader to specify under which headings their feeds appear. Again, enough of a sample base and you've just obtained a huge human-editing categorisation tool - a folksonomy. These things fascinate me because humans are far better at categorising things than computers. If 2000 people all refer to Granny Buttons with the tag canals, for instance, it's a pretty sure bet that Mr. Denny over at Granny Buttons probably has a word or two to say about canals.
As I said earlier, I think this shares a lot with OPML reading lists.
More interesting yet again is the abillity for users to subscribe to other users' tags. This starts really delving into Voice of Authority territory, which as it happens was the focus of my final year dissertation at uni... My reckoning here is simple. If you have one person who tags canals; 500 other people subscribe to that, you can probably infer that that person has pretty much nailed the category of canals. The VoA stuff really starts kicking in (in my view) when the 'authority' has editorial control over what does and does not get added to their 'output'. Mix that in with some of their own content (hey, Google have that covered too!) and you've got a content stream you can rely on. See also, similar filtering in Google Co-Op.
Now, here comes the crunch. You have an enormous number of people effectively 'voting with their subscriptions' for the best content on the Internet. You have a whole bunch of people who, in various ways, are adding some smart filters to this mass of content and tagging it as they go. You have a whole bunch of people also deciding whether these tags were any good or not. Net result: Google can tell what feeds are good sources for information in particular areas. Not just mechanically good (as in has lots of text and a high PageRank), but really good (as in people really want to read it). Google control the environment in which this occurs, and to some degree they control the input too. Somewhere in amongst all of this the engineers at Google are sitting on a goldmine of human-filtered information, and they probably know it!
Spam, by the way, is something I have even more on and I'll tackle shortly. For now I need sleep!
Google Reader 'folders' #
There's a new feature on Google Reader - at least I haven't seen it before. It's mildly confusing, but interesting in an 'information geek' way.
In the Subscriptions tab (of Settings) you now have the option to 'Add to a folder...'. If you have no folders, you can create a new one. So i did; I called it test123.
The blog then appears in the folder test123 in your main reader view.
Ok, but there doesn't appear to be a way to get rid of this. You can't drag the feed back out of the folder (very un-web 2.0 ;) ), so I flick back to settings. In the tags tab, you can see the new 'folders' are actually tags.
From here, feeds apparently belong to tags, not folders. This is a little confusing.
Finally, it appears (is this new?) that you can share tags (aka folders) as public feeds in themselves, much like you could with 'Your shared items'. Click the little broadcast-icon and you get:
Your "test123" items have been made public. Now, anyone can read them in Google Reader or subscribe to their feed.
Neat, so it appears your can accumulate a selection of feeds based on tags/folders and share them with the world. Isn't this one step from OPML reading lists?
An Acceptable Meal #
I normally subscribe to Simply Recipes. It is there to inspire me to make good food - unfortunately my culinary skill extends to cheese on toast, and the budget to similar extents. Laziness is also a factor. This evening, I decided to have a go at something new and exciting. I'm determined that one day I'll invent something that people will fall over themselves for - a new food that nobody has yet discovered, enough to have Nigella Lawson salivating at the mouth; enough to entice angry student protesters out of hunger strike; enough even to stop war and solve poverty & starvation worldwide.
I have yet to come near that goal. Tonight's attempt was pretty close though - for all its mad beginnings it turned out to be quite nice. I call it the Acceptable Pancake. Here is the obligatory macro shot:
And here's the recipe (open to interpretation...):
- Take about a handful of flour. Put it in a saucepan.
- Take about the same amount of milk and mix it in.
- Crack an egg (don't pummel it into submission like I did) and add it to the mix.
- Get a bit of margarine - roughly a tablespoon I guess - and add that.
- Find some suger. About two tablespoons should do.
- Put some salt in. When you wonder 'ooh, have I put too much in' stop there. You have put just enough in.
- Get your hands in there and mix it all up. Eventually it'll all mix together and smell vaguely nice. If it's too liquidy put more flour in. If it's too doughy put a bit more milk in. It's just right when you lift your fingers up and it sticks but also drops a bit back into the saucepan.
- Wash your hands.
- Get a baking tray, pizza tray, or something similar. Put a bit of marge in it and mix it all around until the base is covered.
- Pour/scoop/coax the mixture into the tray. Try and spread it out. If you have the mixture just right, it'll spread out of its own accord.
- Put it in an oven, 250oC for about 20 minutes. Spend this time gloating to your friends about how well you can cook.
- Either when the 20 minutes is up, or the smell of burning kitchen is apparent, take the pancake out of the oven.
- Sprinkle sugar liberally. You might also enjoy golden syrup, which is fine. Lemon is also acceptable.
- Eat and enjoy.
Infinite Flickr #
I came across a Flickr group called Infinite Flickr today. Neat idea: you take a picture of you next to your screen, which has the most recent photo in it. Add it to the group and it becomes the most recent pic for others to do the same. The result is a long line of 'infinite Flickr photos' in succession. Works quite well.
Photosynth Technology Preview #
Photosynth, a new development from Microsoft is available as a technology preview. As far as I can tell this is a sort-of "proof that we're really doing this" release, which lets you navigate around pre-built images. Unfortunately you can't add your own: that's going to need a lotof computer oomph apparently.
Also, unfortunately I can't load it on my laptop; it doesn't have a D3D-capable card. I'll have to wait until I get home before I try this.
Still, this looks like a very interesting program and I'm looking forward to putting my billions of miscellaneous photos on it.
IE7 Menu Bar #
Internet Explorer 7 is out, and one of the most noticeable changes is the absence of a menu bar. It still exists, but is hidden. Just press the Alt key and the good ol' menu bar appears again.
For what it's worth, I quite like the absence from a usability point-of-view. Office 2007 takes a while to get used to (most programs are missing a menubar, instead opting for a context-sensitive 'ribbon' of tools) but it's definitely an interesting usability move. I have a feeling it's definitely a love-hate thing though.
Tip: Opening New Windows #
Chris is complaining in a round-a-bout way that I link to other websites in the same window. I do, because in turn I can't stand websites that insist on opening links in new windows. I used to care more, but Firefox naturally lets you fiddle with the settings and force them to work the way you want to work.
Anyway, if you want to click a link on a website and have it open in a new window, simply hold down Shift while you're clicking it. If you're using a tabbed browser, like Firefox or IE7, hold down Ctrl and it'll open in a new tab.
If you're in IE, as far as I know there's no way to do the reverse - ie. force links set to open blank to actually open in the same window but maybe somebody else knows of a way.
In any case, my links are (usually) set to open in the same window, so with the Shift and Ctrl keys you can control how you view the site and its outgoing links.
iTunes #
I have no idea why I'd never noticed this before. You can listen to a preview of a song in the iTunes Store by selecting it then clicking the Play button.
Right now you're either shouting 'what? Everybody knows that you great lummox', or 'amazing. I never knew that. This makes iTunes Music Store* so much better'
Anyway, for me it's new! Tonight saw the following albums wind their way to my compootah:
- Vienna Teng - Waking Hour
- Matson Belle - Goodbye Juggernaut
- The Weepies - Say I Am You
- the new Eels album Blinking Lights and other Revelations (funky, but getting a little tired of the same sound);
- Zero 7 - The Garden, a bit of a mixed bag but Throw It All Away is cracking.
- Conjure One - Extraordinary Ways - brilliant album, from the people who brought you Delirium.
- Various odd singles, including T-Rex - Jeepster; Nerina Pallot's Everybody's Gone To War; Johnny Cash with Ring of Fire; Scissor Sisters' I Don't Feel Like Dancin' and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's rendition of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture.
* The program is still awful. And DRM sucks.
Outlook 2007 and Grisoft AVG #
A big warning (that I've already fallen foul of):
Don't run Outlook 2007 Beta and the mail scanner of the virus scanner AVG. It wipes your messages - starting with the inbox and working its way through to the archives.
Thankfully I make backups quite regularly, but I've still lost a few bits of mail: they really are wiped empty.
You can turn off the E-mail Scanner in AVG by going to the Control Center, double-click Email Scanner then click Disable Plugin.
Many thanks to Beyond-Teck for having the information that led me to this
The End of the Internet #
Oh no - the end of the Internet. Now what are they going to index?
The Annoyance List #
Things that have been pissing me off recently (I feel like a bit of a rant):
- iTunes for Windows. It steals focus from your other windows, seems to crash all the time and refuses to close if the Store won't load for whatever reason.
- The Mars bar advert in Lord of War Region 2 release that you can't fast forward through. Is the DVD any cheaper in return? Like fudge it is, but they steal 30 seconds of my life every time I want to watch that film.
- RSS feeds that only show the first few words and make you go to th .... I get why they're annoying now I've started using aggregators.
- Paper milk cartons. Bloody things are impossible to open properly.
- Call centres where... how shall we say this.... where English is not the first language. How much does your bank want your continued custom? They want you so much they slash their front-line customer support team and ship it offshore. That's really saying something.
- Unnecessarily noisy cars. I get a hole in my exhaust sometimes, it's not nice and I go to the garage to get it fixed. Some people make their car sound that way.
- Trackbacks mixed in with comments. So very unhelpful.
Free Utilities #
Some websites are just useful.
Recently I've had a need to watch file resources. I wanted to know why my hard disk was perpetually active (thinking the worst: a virus). Then I remembered a useful utility on a website called Sysinternals.com - it's called Filemon and lists disk activity in real time (which processes are opening which files; it's quite interesting in a sad way).
Sysinternals.com has a load of other freeware goodies, all for looking after your computer. As of this evening, Sysinternals looks like it's been taken over by Microsoft which makes a lot of sense considering how many of their KB articles reference its very handy tools!
BartDart.com appeared on another dig, and hosts a bunch of slightly more obscure tools for various bits.
AnalogX is an old favourite: lots of useful applications for fun and work.
Any other useful (preferably free) sites crammed with the authors' work around that I've missed?
Birthday Paradox #
While on some crazy hunt to find information about Random Number Generators on computers, I came across this page on Wikipedia about the Birthday Paradox.
Simply put, it's the probability that two people in a room will share the same birthday. With just 23 people there's a 50% probability that at least two of them will share a birthday.
I like to think about these puzzles in different ways to explain them to myself. I am usually fooled, like most people, when I first think about it (23 just seems sooo low...) Then I start to think about it more rationally... there's a 22/365 chance that somebody has the same birthday as person A, and a 21/365 chance that somebody matches person B...and so on - they all add up (don't quote me on the maths nor the theory...)
In fact - the helpful bods at Wikipedia have created a category of probability theory paradoxes - enjoy!
Flash Earth #
Flash Earth is a flash tool that allows you to compare the satellite photos of a number of online mapping sites, including Google, Ask, NASA and Yahoo (Ask do maps now?).
It's very neat, incredibly responsive, but is taking the photos unofficially so it'll be interesting to see for how long all those sources stay online.
Via Google Operating System
Google Reader Next Button #
While we're on the Google Reader subject. On the 'Goodies' tab (click Settings in Google Reader) you can now add the 'Next' bookmark.
Every time you click the bookmark you are taken to the next unread item in your browser, in its original context. So, for example, if you subscribe to a bunch of blogs, you'll be taken to the new posts within the blogs themselves. This is an alternative to the "traditional" reading of feeds in aggregators, and was one of the lame complaints about aggregators I originally cited to Scoble ;-P
It means you don't even need to load Google Reader into your browser before reading articles, which definitely scores points on my aggregator checksheet for speediness. It also means you can see an up-to-date list of comments and -if they're your thing- trackbacks. Of course, you do have the page loading times, DNS, etc. to add on.
It's going to be a preference thing, and the best way I can explore it is to load it up and give it the test of a few days.
Further down on the Goodies page you also have the Subscribe bookmark, which lets you subscribe to the current page in Google reader (assuming it has a feed). Firefox, IE7 and Opera (I think/am sure) all do this now, but it's always handy to have.
I have another post brewing about all of this [sighs of restlessness from the back seats] but it's taking a few days to brew. You could always subscribe to this blog in the meantime ;-)
Google Reader #
Google's new feed reader is neat. Very neat.
Okay, it's not new any more, but in the few weeks it's been out I've been able to give it a real test drive. After my unnecessarily long rant about life, the universe and feed readers back in July I decided to give Google another go.
My main requirements for a decent feed reader are straightforward but demanding:
- It's got to be FAST. And I mean fast. This thing is going to be used several times a day, every day. Any delay/slowness is a negative and will be noticed! Google's reader is quick, responsive and elegantly handles large numbers of feeds. We're assuming here that I already have a browser open (which I do, nearly always). Even better - because the application is always running (when you think about it...) it already has my unread items ready before I've even opened it. Compare this to desktop readers, where you have to wait.
- The less clicks the better. So showing all unread feeds in a single view is a plus. I just scroll down with Google (you can also use keyboard shortcuts).
- It needs to be reliable. No complaints here yet.
I have further thoughts on the Reader. As soon as these fall out of my head I'll be sure to post them.
Blik op de Weg #
Blik op de Weg is a Dutch TV show following the traffic police of the Netherlands. It's a lot like Police Camera Action in the UK. Through my vague understanding of the Dutch language, I managed to enjoy this week's episode with a particular focus on tractors.
Among the mix was a 24-metre long tractor (had about four large trailers on the back of it), a 3.8 metre-wide tractor with large metal spikes (!) on each side. Cars and cyclists had to get well out of the way. After the police finally pulled it over, they attached some metal framework around the spikes and let him go!?
The little 'feature' of a bloke who'd been pulled for driving a quadbike on the road was a bit odd(I think they're legally required to drive on the fietspad - cycle path). After the police had a chat, the programme then did a short interview with the teenage driver, including some footage of him showing off his souped up quad, driving at speed (80km/h!) on a cycle path. I'm sure if they did that in the UK somebody would complain about condoning reckless driving or something.
Anyway, Blik op de Weg also has a website, including one section where readers are invited to send in their own pictures 'from the road'. Here are some of my favourites - I've seen a few before elsewhere on the net but some are new and very funny. Although the site is in Dutch it's still fairly easy to navigate:
- Grolsch lorry accident - noooooo!
- Definitely a private car park (strong language...)
- Somebody doesn't like cyclists
- School Outing
- End of the world!
- "You're driving too fast"
- Try your brakes *
- The Sunshine State
A new browser #
Now that Firefox 2 is out, I decided to give it a go. A while ago I switched from Firefox to Flock, as it has very nice built-in tools for Flickr and blogging.
The only significant problem I've ever had (with Firefox and Flock) has been with the browser locking up for 20 seconds at a time, particularly (but not exclusively it seems) when loading a Flash-intensive page. Downloading a Flash blocker didn't help, and I've trawled the (huge) Firefox bug tracker lists looking for solutions but to no avail.
Fortunately, touch wood and all that, Firefox 2 doesn't seem to suffer from this problem. It's a nice neat browser, fairly compact and seems to have a very quick, responsive interface and better loading times.
I can do without the Flickr niceties, so that isn't a problem. Blogging capability is available using the Deepest Sender plugin (the About page cites 'Depressed Teen' as one possible anagram of this. ironic if you've even seen some of the blogs on Myspace ...)