Google Blogoscoped

Wednesday, July 21, 2004

AdWords API?

Rumour has it there might be a Google AdWords API (Beta) coming.

Google Theme Logos

Jenny Hinrichsen from Germany created a variety of amusing Google logos with film, games and food themes. Other new Google logos can be found at Logoogle.com.

Google News Map

Take a look at the Google News Map. This tool gets the latest headlines from Google News and matches them to their respective countries on a map. Author Douwe Osinga also makes the Python source code available as download.

Pop Automat

What a wonderful way to create your own pop song lyrics: provide Popautomate with a text (like “give back my heart”, or anything else made of popular words) and it creates an instant MP3 sound collage. You can also search for individual sound-bites.

Google Power Status

“I Google my ex’s – just so that I can feel better that they have less Google results than I do. And, of course, so that I can read up on what they are doing, and hopefully feel even better when I discover they aren’t doing anything all that interesting. Unfortunately, that can backfire when you discover that they DO have more Google results than you, and they ARE doing way more interesting things than you ever imagined. That’s a downer. Because, of course, for some of us, Google is a Power Status marker. The more Google results you have – the cooler you are – the more well known you are on the World Wide Web. And you certianly don’t want your ex to be higher on the Google totem pole than you!”
– L. A. Vess, Google Gaga

NuSOAP Fix For the Google API

If you are using NuSOAP along with PHP, here is a small fix to get the “filter"-parameter of the Google Web API to work. Either download the NuSOAP file from my server, or search for the following line:

case (is_bool($val) || $type == ’boolean’):

... and replace the lines below it with:

$val = ($val) ? “true” : “false";

Googler Licence Plate

Via Wikipedia comes this licence plate, reported to have been seen at Googleplex. (And then, there’s this retouched photo with a Google out of job.)

On Microsoft Buying Lookout

Joel on Software wonders: Could Microsoft have possibly bought Lookout just to shut them down?

“One of the biggest weaknesses of Microsoft Outlook has been the search feature. It takes so long for Outlook to search that the feature is almost useless.

Searching is not a hard problem, and a lot of plug-ins sprang up to solve this problem. Lookout was one of the best.

So what happens? Microsoft buys Lookout. That’s nice, good for them.

But look more closely (...) MSN?! Lookout is going to be part of MSN? What about Outlook?”
Joel on Software, July 19, 2004

A Link From Google

How much is a link from Google worth?
Picasa is doing digital-photo management software and was recently bought by Google. Not only that, but they received a link to their page from the Google homepage as well. According to NetImperative, this resulted in a “staggering 6,000% increase in visits among UK sites”.

Robot Librarian

“Researchers at Universitat Jaume I in Spain are designing a robot librarian of sorts. The three-wheeled bot listens for verbal book requests, heads to the approximate location of the title on a shelf, and uses digital cameras to read the spines.”
– David Pescovitz, Robot librarian (Boing Boing), July 21, 2004

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