You know they’re mainstream when Donald Trump has blog a in the top links list at bloglines.com
(#13).
RSS on the other hand - while available with almost all blog software, is not mainstream even within the blogging community. A study by the Neilson Group shows that out of 1000 members of their research panel who are blog readers; 66% of the blog readers have never heard of RSS, and only 11% of the blog readers use it.
link - O’Reilly Radar
Like Flickr.com, you can create a free profile and upload media. In this case it’s short video clips instead of images. Like flickr, they use flash to display the media, making it more difficult to copy off of their site. They also include features like links, and RSS feeds.
Simple, straight forward Flash movie player interface is a major plus.
For example,
office sports
extreme 747 landing
Links like this make me wonder how long they can go without a lawsuit…
Family Guy Season 4, episode 8
A few months ago Kottke.org went pro. Jason quit his job to work on his blog full time. He generated the money he needed with a short PayPal driven donation drive where people could, and did, donate whatever amount they felt comfortable with from a couple of cents to hundreds of dollars. In typical kottke fashion, he even posted the results of the drive on his blog.
Another blog that I visit regularly, The Jason Calacanis blog talks about the business behind weblogsinc.com. They make over $2,300 a day - just from google ads. That’s just shy of a million dollars a year. With money like that, it’s easy to see how they can afford to pay bloggers to blog. Is that the simplest ways to make money from your blog?
For business advice, FastCompany is another blog I visit. They recently posted a list of Top Business Blogs - I was astonished to find PolymerCode was not one of them 
FastCompany was one of the blogs that made Forbes list of best Small Business Blogs. The most recent Forbes - Best Of The Web series features Blogs That Matter - their list of top blogs which include blogs on a variety of other subjects as well.
The unfortunate thing about these lists is their heavy focus on the US. Being Canadian, not all of their advice is relevant. Where are the top Canadian Business Blogs?
Even if you’re not being paid to blog, there are other ways to make a return on your investment. Heidi Cohen is getting a lot of traffic lately after she wrote an article about measuring the ROI of corporate blogs; A very good article that mentions some of the tangibles and intangibles that blogs bring to a business irrespective of what country you call home.
It seems that google is the hot topic lately. After posting about it last week, a number of other Google related articles have come to my attention.
For a number of years Google has been publishing various search statistics on Google zeitgeist. Whatsuppop.com has turned zeitgeistinto an rss feed for them. Get your daily does of zeitgeist delivered straight to your aggregator.
LifeHacker has another couple of interesting google links. The Google search index of Google’s free community and discussion group service, Google groups, now supports email alerts. The article also points to more information on the Google blog - Staying Alert. Another article links to GMail Drive shell extension a nifty tool that turns GMail into a 2Gig drive on your computer. All it requires is IE 6+. I’m going to try it out tonight.
Both LifeHacker and Google blogs have links to the announcement that Google maps now supports Hybrid mode. Hybrid mode is a tight integration of the street map mode a satellite image mode of google maps. I like that it is very easy to use, does a good job of displaying the information the user (me) expects to see, and that they easily provide the ability to switch between the 3 modes at the click of a button. They do it all and keep it simple - a very good addition.
Trying to keep up, and building a half a product, is a competitive offering from MSN - msn virtual earth. MSN Virtual Earth is the equivalent of google maps - without hybrid view, missing satellite photos of many locations, and some of their satellite images are not current.
Searching for Vancouver BC on MSN virtual earth displays one result - International House Vancouver BC University Worldwide. At least it’s in Bellingham , just a couple hours drive from Vancouver. Google seems to know where Vancouver is(65 results).
MSN puts in a good effort - but like many Microsoft products it focuses on being feature rich instead of being simple. To get the above permalinks to Vancouver and Bellingham, I had to select the appropriate search dialog, then popup a new window then copy the text in the new window. With Google all I had to do was click the permalink button and copy the contents from my address bar. MSN did offer the ability to display multiple search results, while google does one at a time. But the quality of the google search results, as well as the quality and relevance of the satellite imagery definitely makes google maps my choice; at least for now. MSN should have ironed out its quirks before launching.
The popularity of these products is primarily driven off of the technologies they employ, not the quality of product they deliver. Anil Dash points out that
From around the blogosphere this morning came the news of Google’s latest Map application - Google Moon.
I wasn’t going to mention it since everyone else is already on that bandwagon. Then I wandered upon a couple more great Google Hack blogs.
If you like GoogleMaps, you’ll want to check out Google Maps Mania, a blog about Projects that use the Google Maps public API
O’Reilly Radar has another Map Hacks collection.
On a similar vein is the Google Earth Hacks blog, that things like the Tour De France race routes, some great close-ups of famous theme parks like Disney land, other Random Cool Stuff.
Of course, google has a search engine too. There are a couple of interesting search blogs that post news and notables about Google and their uber-secret search technology. I check out John Battelle’s Search blog every now and then.
Another impressive search blog is Henk van Ess’s Search Bistro. This blog got some notice with it’s first posting about google labs. If you read the article, he goes into some detail about how he used functionality provided by Google to hack the url, and find out just what the http://eval.google.comis. Luckily (?) for him, Slashdot picked up his first post - so naturally he was hammered with traffic. What a way to start!
I have been totally hooked on Tour de France this year. Unfortunately our VCR bit the dust - we’re pretty sure it died in its sleep. Instead of buying a new VCR, it gave me the excuse I needed to buy a PVR card for my computer. I bought the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 150 personal video recorder.
It connects to regular coaxial cable output from your local cable provider and installs easily into a standard PCI slot. It comes with software for viewing, recording and scheduling recording of TV programs. The programs are a little shoddy. The video quality is not great, to be fair, my VCR wasn’t all that hot either… It also comes with a remote control that I haven’t used yet as my office is so small it is easier to reach for the wireless mouse bother with a[nother] remote.
I rate it 2.5 out of 5. It got the extra .5 because it’s affordable at less than $100.00.
The main thing is, I can schedule it to record Lance on his quest for 7 each day.
Other techies out there also appreciate the sport. 37Signals has a great post about the history of the yellow jersey. And of course, some people have been mapping the tour with google earth.
Using googles own caching feature, Hank van Ess was able to unlock the secrets to the mysterious url eval.google.com. It looks like google hand-tunes its search results indexing. Google’s response makes sense to me - google needs to perform evaluation of their results to be confident the results are good.
Good detective work Mr. van Ess!
Add LifeHacker to your RSS list. It’s the site that geeks like me need.
Their description: Computers make us more productive. Yeah, right. Lifehacker recommends the downloads, web sites and shortcuts that actually save time. Don’t live to geek; geek to live
And they live up to it. Everything from articles on How to be a good customer, links to geek-NEWS articles like this one about Microsoft Office adoption of XML, or some advice if you’re trying to Give up caffeine.
Too often geeks like me forget that there’s more to life - and more to work - than knowing the latest technology or the latest gadget. Those soft skills that make people successful are invaluable. Sadly, for far too many geeks those skills are completely absent. LifeHacker helps us out with Life Hacks, their blog category for everyday things that make your life better. It makes use of that quirky, imaginative and creative geek brain - and applies it to everyday.
Ever had a need for Verbal Conflict Resolution Tips?
How about Matt’s strategy for Kicking Sugar to the curb?
There’s way too much goodness there.
Open Source News
It’s raining code (Hallelujah?) - why open source is good for CIOs.
On a related note - Sun VP of technology Jonathan Swartz recently blasted the GPL. Slashdot has a good discussion regarding Jonathan’s point of view.
New Sites of Interest
O’Reilly launched Code Zoo a neat, new code repository/search engine.
Asynchronous browser communication
Using XML and JavaScript. It’s the same technology makes Gmail so slick - AJAX + Struts online how-to tutorial < drool />
Pure Java Servlet implementation example without Struts.
Rapid Web Development/Prototyping
Lately there has been a some talk about Rapid Web App development/prototyping using Ruby and Rails - Ruby+Rails vs Java+Spring+Hibernate analysis test - the results are all red.
Web Design
Javascript events in Flash - now for Mac
Web Statistics
The problem: many web stats programs use cookies to identify returning users but a large number of people regularly delete their cookies. Want a ‘better’ way? use flash to track return visitors
Content Management
CMS interoperability - talks about the lack of standard, and a little on the direction the community is going.
One the lighter side…
Sur-real life Rocky Balboa. It’s amazing what some people will get away with because they look crazy.
Applying mathematics to sports - How to determine the true NBA MVP?
- The true MVP is the player that adds most value to their team in the category that has the most meaning - Wins.
