Archive for the ‘Google’ Category

Editable Google Maps…

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

Now that’s interesting. Apparently you can now edit any business entry in Google maps. For example, these guys tried to change the web address of a local Republican Party office to fleshbot.com. Lovely.

To see recent edits, you can go here, but from what I can tell it’s just an unstoppable moving map showing each recent edit in order.

I really have no idea how they plan on stopping vandals from basically ruining their map. Wikipedia does it with a small army of dedicated folks who have good guidelines on how to deal with vandalism. Right now I don’t see anything like that on Google Maps. Guess everyone will have to keep an eye on their address to make sure it’s in the right spot (I already changed mine so that it actually points to my house instead of a block down the road). Businesses especially will have to keep a sharp eye out since anyone can change anything on the map, even the business’ name.

safari and google stuffs…

Thursday, November 15th, 2007

I don’t know if it’s due to the recent update of Mac OS X.4 to 10.4.11 (which came with a non-beta version of Safari 3) or if it had something to do with the recoding of Gmail or both, but I just noticed that Gmail and Google Reader both work a lot better than before in Safari. Google Talk integration seems to work in Gmail now, more Gmail shortcuts work (like hitting Tab then Space while composing a message sends it), and Reader doesn’t have that annoying bug where if your list of entries were long enough the page wouldn’t scroll down as you navigated through the entries.

Awesome, it was small things like this that prevented me from using Safari more regularly. As much as I like Firefox it’s slower and takes up more memory on my machine so if I can regulate it to “use when necessary” status (for when I’m developing a website or researching Zotero for instance, got to love those plugins) I’ll be a happy camper.

finally…

Monday, September 25th, 2006

The best way to use Google Maps. Beer Mapping.

Google Life…

Sunday, August 20th, 2006

Google recently opened up their document editing webapp, Writely, to the general public. It’s in beta (of course) but it looks like they are pretty far along as I’ve already made a nice document with it and didn’t have much trouble. It worked so nicely in fact, that it gave me an idea.

You see, classes are about to start here in Chapel Hill and I wonder if webapps have gotten to the point where I could replace my office software with nothing but these online applications. So starting in a few days I will spend a month using the online tools and see how they effective they are in helping me get my work done — papers, organization, and number-crunching for research. Other work, like web design and development will still be done with my normal text and image editors, but I will attempt to organize that work with the same applications. Speaking of which, here are the apps I’m going to use.

Now you realize why I called this post Google Life.

Of course, there are other issues surrounding all this such as privacy and the sanity of keeping so much data on the web, but I won’t be addressing that. I’m only focusing on functionality. I’m really interested in seeing how this will effect collaboration with other students as my school likes to use a lot of group projects. Hopefully I can convince some of my classmates to use the collaboration features of these applications and I hope that I don’t mess up other people in their work.

Wish me luck!