Monday, January 5, 2009
Blogora, Blog + Forum Platform, Released as Alpha
David Mulder just Alpha-released Blogora, “a project to create a blogging platform tightly integrated with a forum”... and a project spun off by looking at how the Blogoscoped blog and forum functions.
A bit of a back story: You might have noticed that Blogoscoped is both a blog and a forum, and that there’s some integration between the two parts. For instance, sometimes a forum thread will later on also be blogged, in the case of which you’ll see something like “12 + 8” comments (meaning that 12 comments were made before, and 8 after this was blogged). Sometimes there were questions on whether the whole Blogoscoped code could be released as open source, and while I have many open source projects around there was one obstacle with this – I would basically have to rewrite large parts to turn it into a neat module manageable for anyone (managing not by jumping into a specific SQL table or code line like I do when I want to tweak X or Y to get a certain result, knowing where to look), including the task of locating and removing those parts which are too specific to this site to be of general use in other contexts.*
Now David took on him the job to start craft the core platform ideas of Blogoscoped, and a bunch of features not available here, into a completely new, open source framework called Blogora. Using CodeIgniter as web app development framework, David reached fast early results. He is looking for help on this project, so you might want to reach out to him if you’re interested.
*The code base has grown from the times back when these were just helper scripts to fill in holes with Google’s Blogger – Blogoscoped in the beginning was based on Blogger, using FTP export, and had neither comments nor forum... nor a master plan for what the whole thing would one day look like, which turns out and continues to be a step-by-step evolution over the years based on lots of feedback and using it. Blogoscoped features come and go and are often starting out as experiments, like chat room integration**, YouTube player integration, showing country flags based on member IP, pulling comments from backlinks into threads as a kind of trackback, nofollow “rot,” ads in RSS, automated profile pages without registration and things like that. (The site search alone went through mulitple iterations, being based on things like Google’s SOAP API or the Google Custom Search Engine before, and now a mix of the Google REST API and MySQL.)
**On that note, the chat is open source...
Google Euro Logo
Here’s a Google logo doodle for 2009: Googl€! This was showing on the Google homepage in Slovakia as the country shifted from Slovak Koruna to Euro currency.
The idea behind this doodle is plain enough to have been around before, and indeed it was. Not only do we have the spelling Micro$oft (with the connotation of evil money-hungry empire), but the following unofficial Euro doodle by Berlin’s Johannes Schubert was the winner of Logoogle.com’s logo award in February 2005:
[Thanks Ehmo, Opaquit – who made a screenshot – and Roger Browne!]
As Lively Goes Down, NewLively Springs Up
Google’s 3D world Lively, as announced last year, was stopped on January 1st after being live just a couple of months. Their homepage is now displaying a good-bye message, and if you were among the (not so lucky) early adopters, your embedded rooms will now show a hand-waving and posing avatar crowd.
However, an unofficial contender for a replacement sprung up from 3D developers in Beijing, China: New Lively. I only tested this via BrowserPool* as I didn’t feel like installing an executable on this computer today – just as Lively did it, New Lively runs as an exe-powered plug-in to your browser – so I wasn’t able to see how fluid this worked. However, what little I saw looked indeed remarkably like the beginning of a Lively clone (probably close enough for Google lawyer’s to get that C&D itch, though I’m not sure they have any incentive for that).
Not Lively, but New Lively
The NewLively creators – who say they “work in various fields of 3D and computer programming” – in their FAQ explains their motivation behind creating this clone:
We created Newlively for three reasons: 1) to restore Lively users their lost cyberspace; 2) to put our strengths to test whether our executive management are functional; 3) to test and prove to ourselves that our skills and abilities are in fact cutting-edge.
The FAQ also answers the question of how long NewLively was in the works. According to the team, “From decision-making to the release of the trial version, it took approximately one month.”
[Thanks Ionut!]
*I can’t access the BrowserPool.de website for some time now, though their virtual computer tool still works when you have it installed.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
What Do You Wish From Google in 2009?
Brinke Guthrie in the forum started a Google wishlist thread. Please add your comment – what would you like to see from Google next year?
On a similar note: what would you not like to see from Google? And what would you like to see from Google’s competition?
[Thanks Brinke!]
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Google Stops Research Datasets Program
Google is cancelling their Google Research Datasets aka Palimpsests program. Its aim was to provide large data sets for others to use. Wired in January this year wrote that Palimpsests’ storage “will be free to scientists and access to the data will be free for all.”
Now, according to Alberto Conti, Google sent out the following mail:Dear Google Research Datasets user,
Thank you very much for trying out Google Research Datasets, providing interesting datasets, and giving us extremely useful feedback. (...)
As you know, Google is a company that promotes experimentation with innovative new products and services. At the same time, we have to carefully balance that with ensuring that our resources are used in the most effective possible way to bring maximum value to our users.
It has been a difficult decision, but we have decided not to continue work on Google Research Datasets, but to instead focus our efforts on other activities such as Google Scholar, our Research Programs, and publishing papers about research here at Google.
The Google Research Datasets service will remain active until the end of January 2009 during which time any datasets may be downloaded. For those datasets that are impractical to download, we will also happily provide interested users with a copy via hard drive shipment.
Google confirmed the cancellation to me in a mail. Wired has a follow-up post about this with a quote from stem cell biologist Attila Csordas: “It’s a sad story if it’s true ... Assuming it is true that might mean that Google is still a couple years away from directly helping the life sciences (on an infrastructural level).”
[Thanks TomHTML!]
Saturday, December 20, 2008
Restrict Google Images to Clip Art, Line Drawings
There are two new options in the Google image search content selection box: clip art, and line drawings. The former will show colorful drawings and the latter black-and-white style sketches. As usual you can combine these selections with the site: operator, so you could find say all (indexed) clip art on CNN. The other content options at the moment are any content, news content, and faces. [Via Bret -> Google blog.]
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Google Earth Setup Defaults to an Installation of Chrome As Well
When you want to install 3D map Google Earth, Google now pre-selects an option reading “Include Google Chrome, a new web browser for Windows.” (Whether or not you uncheck the option, the footnote reads “By installing, you agree to our Terms and Conditions, Google Earth’s Privacy Policy and Google Chrome’s Privacy Policy.”)
A long time ago on a web page far, far away, Google said:
We believe any situation where multiple applications are being installed should be made very clear to users, so that if you were to ask them several months later – “What’s this?” – most will know where it came from and why it is there.
In this case, the bundled Chrome option is embolded and shown on top, along with a screenshot. It follows a button that read “Download Google Earth 4.3”. What do you think, would Google succeed or fail its self-proclaimed litmus test?
[Thanks TomHTML and Moustafa ZA!]
YouTube’s High-Quality Videos Category
YouTube now has a page listing videos specifically available in high definition. Also, these HD videos now open in a larger player than before, pushing features like comments, the ad box, or related videos down the page a bit. Note you still need to click “watch in HD” when on the video page.
Google-owned YouTube continues to experiment with additions and changes. Some of these are neat while others are partly distracting, like when YouTube shows a search box when you start an embedded video and hover over the video box. Other overlays include AdSense ads – cool, I am offered to buy “Www You Tube De” on eBay! – and creator-added links. A yellow box reading “Try YouTube in a new web browser! Download Google Chrome” is also put on many or perhaps all YouTube pages rather indifferently these days.
[Via Waxy.]
Google Earth Updates 3D New York
Desktop app Google Earth has seen an update to its New York 3D buildings, Frank Taylor of the Google Earth Blog reports. Frank compares what the scenery looked like in January 2007 vs today.
You can also open Street View imagery within Earth these days, like you can in web-based sibling Google Maps (the distinction between Google Earth is further blurred by the fact that Maps received a more Earth-like interface recently, and that Google Earth is also available as a browser plug-in by now).
In other recent news, Google discontinued Google Earth Plus, which had cost $20 per year. Still available are the free version as well Google Earth Advanced (it costs $400, and lets you export movies) and Google Earth Enterprise.
[Thanks Frank!]
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
What Do You Dislike About Google Chrome?
A while ago Google’s Matt Cutts posted reasons why he likes Google’s browser Chrome, but now followed up with another post talking about what he doesn’t like about Chrome so far. It’s refreshing to see Matt take such a balanced stance. I wanted to forward the question on here too: what do you currently dislike about Chrome?
So far, while there may be a number of quirks with Chrome, only two reasons kept me from switching to this nicely uncluttered browser for a longer trial time:
- ... that you can’t completely turn off tabs. As I’m already using tabs in the Windows bar, I prefer to handle browser instances in multiple windows, but Chrome’s tabs – while relatively unobtrusive if you don’t use them (e.g. the top tab bar also works well as a mere title bar) – still make themselves be seen in a couple of places.
- ... that you (seemingly) can’t completely disable the special quick start homepage. Even when I set the different options accordingly to show only “about:blank”, hitting Ctrl+N on a window will still show that quick start page. (I’m using Ctrl+N on windows all the time, and one other issue Chrome had – that new windows don’t open maximized – could be resolved by starting chrome.exe using the parameter “-start-maximized”.)
Google Czech Republic Xmas Special
Český Google (that’s Google in the Czech Republic) put up an Xmas special where you can click on the faces of employees to make them sing in choir. (Note a face you click on may not begin singing immediately because the singing is timed to be in sync, I guess.)
[Thanks TomHTML!]
US Patriot Act’s Silencing Gag Provision Ruled Unconstitutional, ACLU Reports
The American Civil Liberties Union writes:
A federal appeals court today upheld, in part, a decision striking down provisions of the Patriot Act that prevent national security letter (NSL) recipients from speaking out about the secret records demands. The decision comes in an American Civil Liberties Union and New York Civil Liberties Union lawsuit challenging the FBI’s authority to use NSLs to demand sensitive and private customer records from Internet Service Providers and then forbid them from discussing the requests. Siding with the ACLU, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit found that the statute’s gag provisions violate the First Amendment.
I’ve asked Google if they ever received such a “national security letter” coming with (what might now be a former) silencing provision, but they tell me “we do not comment publicly on law enforcement requests.”
[Via Reddit.]
PageMap Meta Data for Advanced Google Snippets
Search Engine Land writes about a Google experiment which shows advanced snippets – including such things as the average rating and the number of ratings for a review page – made possible by a commented XML-style portion within the HTML. The following structured data (slightly reformatted here) is from the CitySearch.com page show in the screenshot:
<!--
<PageMap>
<DataObject type="item">
<Attribute name="name">Hide Sushi</Attribute>
<Attribute name="category">Japanese, Sushi, Restaurant</Attribute>
<Attribute name="pricerange">$$</Attribute>
</DataObject>
<DataObject type="review">
<Attribute name="summary">No fuss, just fish at ...</Attribute>
<Attribute name="ratingstars">4.5/5</Attribute>
<Attribute name="ratingcount">55</Attribute>
<Attribute name="reviewdate">11/26/2008</Attribute>
</DataObject>
</PageMap>
-->Danny Sullivan comments, "Should you go out and start marking up your pages now? I wouldn’t bother. Right now, enhanced listings at Google only work for the sites in the test program ... In addition, the syntax might change".
[Via Google OS. Screenshot courtesy of SEL.]
Google Results That Let You Jump to a Part of a Page
Search Engine Land reports that Google is testing a web search result style that allows you to jump straight to an anchor within a page. In the screenshot, the link text within “Jump to BUYING PROPERTY” is likely taken from the page itself and pointing to “http:// ...tripod.com/monorules.htm#buyingproperty”. This could allow users to more directly reach relevant content (though it might require some rethinking for those webmasters who would like to place visible ads in positions that would now be skipped over). I can’t reproduce this experiment so I suppose as usual it may only be showing to a portion of searchers and searches.
[Via Google OS. Screenshot courtesy of Search Engine Land.]
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