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  Joe 18:24 on May 31, 2007 Permalink
  Tags: API ( 8 ), Google ( 13 ), nice photo sharing site, Panoramio.com   

  Google buys Panoramio 

  The Spanish startup Panoramio.com has been acquired by Google. This is not very surprising, as they already were linked very intimately with Google Earth.

  For those who don’t know Panoramio yet, it is a clean, nice photo sharing site. Its specialty is that every photo is geographically marked. Select photos appear on Google Earth and the site itself is organized around Google Maps, where every location marks available photos with an icon or a small thumbnail.

  The announcement in the blog post does not provide many specific details, but for now not much will change:

  For now, our user interface will not change; accounts, urls, features… We will keep working for Panoramio as a team, but this time using Google infrastructure as Panoramio further integrates into Google’s mapping technologies. We will also keep answering e-mails directly as much as possible.

  Oh, and by the way, they also have an API – released just earlier this month…

  panoramio google photo geo google-earth acquisition

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  Joe 08:12 on May 31, 2007 Permalink
  Tags: Cory Doctorow, data web, GPS ( 5 ), Henry Story, RDF ( 10 ), semantic web approach ( 2 ), semantic web tools   

  Context as Metadata 

  More than a year ago, Henry Story blogged about Keeping track of Context in Life and on the Web. It is about the context of the story you’re telling, as essential background information for the general audience and distracting bloat for the initiated at the same time.

  The conclusion is that, using a semantic web approach, you could provide links to as many contextual facts as you like, without the need of directly exposing these to the observing end user. Just use those links for queries and matching algorithms wherever appropriate.

  In other words: don’t bug me with redundant metadata if I don’t need it. This might be even more true for content creation: just read Cory Doctorow’s Metacrap article again and you know why.

  Years ago, almost immediately after I bought my first digital photo camera, I started to realize why metadata is important. In a few words: taking pictures is easy, storage space is cheap and deleting images is a pain. You need to carefully compare and make sure to pick the best one. So, hundreds, soon thousands of images started to pile up in the form of un-imaginatively named blobs, like “IMG_1123.JPG”. Essentially, these images get lost as the proverbial needle in a haystack.

  Now you could put all those images in folders, labeled after an event, date, person or whatever. But this is a tedious job and only provides a very flat view (you don’t even want to think about creating nested or linked structures on your file system).

  Then, I soon found out that every digicam image has embedded EXIF meta data, which proved to be of huge value for tracing back those lost images. If I know that a shot was made during some event, I only need to look up the events’ date and browse all images shot during that period.

  Then iPhoto came around, with the possibility to add tags (with a terrible interface, use Keyword Assistant instead!), ratings and multiple album folders. Providing even more metadata and control to find your images at a later time.

  There’s just one problem left: entering and assigning all that meta data by hand is still much work if you have hundreds of images to go. Errors are quickly made and hard to detect when you’re focused on other things, such as composition and image quality. (More …)

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  Joe 12:40 on May 9, 2007 Permalink
  Tags: Albert Einstein, HTML ( 9 ), microformats ( 2 ), posh ( 2 ), real semantic web, semantic web ( 6 ), semantic web people   

  On Simplicity (POSH) 

  This year will be the year of the semantic web for the common man, in the first place because of the success of microformats. And because of the original semantic web people, who in general have a very positive attitude towards the grassroots adoption, helping a hand with tools and specifications like GRDDL.

  This whole movement has led to another change as well. That is, as I see it, people getting to finally understand what the meaning of the original HTML specification was all about: it is the semantics, not the presentation in the first place.

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  Joe 11:50 on May 9, 2007 Permalink
  Tags: excellent tools, Google ( 13 ), HTML ( 9 ), MeasureMap, much better tool   

  Google Analytics updated 

  Yesterday Google announced the new, updated version of their Analytics tool.
  
  Under the hood, most data is captured just like the current version. But the user interface and data presentation is a whole different story. A flash demo shows many excellent tools to analyze trends and zoom in to visitor navigation paths, decision funnels, trends over time and all you could possibly want to know about keyword conversion (organic as well as paid-for Adwords).

  The basis for this overhaul has been the acquisition of MeasureMap in 2006.

  Over the next few weeks every current Analytics account will be migrated to the new version, so most of us need to wait in anticipation of a much, much better tool. Again, Google sets the industry standard at a very high level, though times for the competition to catch up.

  Read the official announcement on the Analytics blog.

  (on a side note: I tried writing this review with WordPress plugin Structured Blogging. This review would be marked up according to the hReview microformat standard. It didn’t quite work out, maybe html is not allowed in the review body. More to come…)

  [ratings]
  

  google analyics webstats user-interface review

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  Joe 08:38 on May 8, 2007 Permalink
  Tags: Adding Fleck;, Alex King, cluttering;, gif, php ( 8 ), RDF ( 10 )   

  Adding Fleck to ShareThis plugin 

  You may have noticed that I just added one of those immensely popular social bookmark sharing plugins to this blog. It is called ShareThis, developed by Alex King. I especially love the stylish, RDF-like Share This icon.

  I felt the ShareThis functionality overlaps the Fleck plugin for a great deal, so instead of having both of them cluttering every blog post, I just added Fleck to the ShareThis set.
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  Henri van den Hoof is discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    Henri van den Hoof 16:06 on May 18, 2007 Permalink

    Ziet er goed uit. Ik heb zelf een plugin geschreven en daar ook Fleck in meegenomen maar vind deze Share This ook wel erg geslaagd. Misschien eens kijken of ik ’em ook kan gebruiken en customizen 🙂

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  Joe 13:55 on May 7, 2007 Permalink
  Tags: set 30 ;, Vodafone   

  Joost: Now for Friends 

  The latest Joost beta version is no longer numbered with a version number, but rather labeled with the tag line “Now for Friends” (or NFF short).

  

  The tag line refers to the fact that any current Joost tester now is allowed to invite an infinite number of friends. And of course there are some more improvements as well.

  • Stability – no problems during a few hours watching the Brazilian Music Channel.
  • Links to content descriptions on the Joost site (see link above)
  • Following a link from Joost minimizes the window to an always-raised state and loads the website in your default browser (at least, Safari is opened on my mac).
  • Advertising seems to have changed, I only got a small “sponsor overlay” from Vodafone occasionally in the right lower corner, without interrupting the program. Clicking the overlay opened the Vodafone website as mentioned above. This is far less obtrusive than the 30 seconds interstitials, much preferred!
  • Improved user interface again. Prettier icons, more logical layout of main controller and a minimized controller for small window sizes.
  • A set of 30 “launch partner” advertisers has been selected, content channels are being added; see the Now for Friends blog post for details.

  Update: some clever folks have discovered that you can run Joost with multiple user profiles, the same way you would do with any other XUL Runner app (e.g. Firefox). It boils down to invoke the Profile Manager, with setting “Never ask at startup” unchecked. Nice!

  [ratings]
  

  joost tv pvr beta

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  Alex Bocanegra and Agustin are discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    Agustin 14:53 on May 7, 2007 Permalink

    Hello, my name is Agustin. I`m new in this blog.
    I will like to know more about the joost system.
    Best regards,+
    Agustin

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    Alex Bocanegra 03:29 on May 13, 2007 Permalink

    Hi there, I’m really interested to know about more Joost. How I can’t get an invitation to join it?

    Alex