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Interactive map (powered by, what else, Google Maps) showing which area will be flooded when the sea level rises. Here’s what parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens will look like if the sea level rises 7 meters.
ASCII Maps, a fully-functional version of Google Maps represented in ASCII. Doesn’t work in Safari tho. (via infosthetics)
Keyword Cartoons chronicles the adventures of GGirl, a character whose daily activities correspond with high-paying keywords on Google AdSense, like laser hair removal and asbestos cancer.
Must be something in the water today…Paul Boutin has a story on Slate today that makes the same point about BitTorrent, YouTube, and Google Video that I did this morning (although somewhat more succinctly and entertainingly):
The guys behind YouTube hit the sweet spot. Most important, they made it head-slappingly easy to publish and play video clips by handling the tricky parts automatically. Given up on BitTorrent because it feels like launching a mission to Mars? If you’ve sent an e-mail attachment, you’ve got the tech skills to publish on YouTube.
The final paragraph of the article contains this interesting bit:
The same Alexa plots that show MySpace and YouTube obliterating top sites reveal that Flickr, Digg and del.icio.us have plateaued with audiences barely bigger than Slate’s. Photos, news, and other people’s bookmarks just aren’t as interesting as bootleg TV and checking out the hotties. The easier it gets to use, the less geeky the Net becomes, and the more it starts to look like real life.
Expect more bootleg TV and hotties from kottke.org in the future…I need some Alexa love.
The other day I realized that within my little online social circle, there’s been a lot less mention of BitTorrent lately. It used to be that someone would link to a cool video, the site hosting the video file would go down because of high traffic, and then someone who grabbed the video before the outage would put it up on a torrent site so that everyone could see it again.
And then YouTube and Google Video came along. They offered free hosting and fast (free) bandwidth for videos so when people want to put some neat video of something on their sites, they just slapped it on YT or GV and pointed to it. And more important to the point about BitTorrent, they work completely within the browser environment. You upload videos to YT in the browser (GV has a standalone app for uploading) and the Flash-based viewer works in the browser (most Web users have Flash installed). They offered a seamless end-to-end solution to finding and watching videos all in one application.
Compare that with how you typically watch a video with BT. First you download a torrent file, then open that file up in your BT client (which you need to have previously downloaded and installed), then the file downloads, and finally you open that file in a media player, generally QuickTime, Windows Media Player, or some other player that needs to be downloaded and installed…and hopefully you have the right versions and codecs for the video in question. And that’s just the viewing side of things…publishing videos via BT was even more difficult, particularly for non-technical folks.
That BitTorrent took off at all is a testament to the utility of downloading files from multiple sources simultaneously, but it’s also telling that once an easier-to-use alternative came along that offered many of the key advantages of BT, people switched1…and really quickly too. Eventually BT will have to find its way into the browser (AllPeers is promising a Firefox extension that will do just that) and somehow overcome the multiple media players problem in order to find success.
[1] For videos of the type I’m talking about anyway. BT is by no means unpopular these days, particularly for feature-length movies, lossless music files, and other really large files. YT and GV are only taking BT’s “marketshare” in the realm of short video. ↩
Google can be used for finding scientific papers that are more popular (and influential?) than their number of citations would otherwise indicate. “The technique might also emerge as a more useful measure of scientific impact than merely the number of citations alone.”
kottke.org: #1 Google search result for “nude paddleball players”. (thx, jonah)
Videos from presentations at Google, including John Battelle, Seth Godin, Antarctic meteorites, Hal Varian, and Sergey Brin. (thx, jf)
John Battelle’s book, The Search, is not available on Google Book Search because his publisher, Penguin, is suing Google over Book Search. On Penguin’s decision, Battelle says, “I totally disagree with it” and “It’s very irritating to me”. (via jb)
Want to learn how to be a doctor? Check out these surgery videos on Google Video.
Jonathan Crowe ran an Olympics-themed weblog for Athens 2004 and Torino 2006. Interestingly, the 2004 version got a lot more traffic, but more recent one made him more money via Google AdSense. “Whether [the increase is] due to better ad block positioning, ‘better’ ads (more on-target or more lucrative), a ‘better’ audience, or simply a more mature advertising network, I have no idea.”
Meghann Marco, the woman who was upset at her publishing company for 1) not putting her book on Google Print, and 2) instead suing Google, has finally gotten her book listed on Google Print.
Church of the Customer takes a look at how a Northern California restaurant called Cyrus competes with The French Laundry in attracting local customers, particularly those from wineries with big expense accounts for entertaining clients:
1. Match your competitor’s exceptional quality.
The food at both restaurants was cooked perfectly and beautifully presented. Both delivered flawless service. By matching the quality of its better-known competitor, Cyrus removes the primary barriers of opposition.2. Allow your customers to customize.
The French Laundry offers three prix-fixe menus of nine courses each. Cyrus allows its customers to choose their number of courses and the dishes.
Local competition still matters. You usually think of restaurants like The French Laundry as competing on a national or international level. Over the years, Keller’s flagship has made several short lists of the best restaurants in the world. But as this article demonstrates, having to compete for the same pool of local customers can drive competitors to achieve a high level of excellence, higher perhaps than they would have achieved without that competition, and that excellence could lead to wider recognition. Even companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Amazon who compete on a global level and don’t interact with their customers face-to-face still have to vie with each other for local resources, particularly employees.
Google buys Measure Map, Jeff Veen leaves Adaptive Path to work at Google.
This article on how Google and eBay are poorly designed seems really wrongheaded to me, although it may just be that essays that use the word “suckass” and mistake style for design will fail to convince me of anything.
If you like to eat (and have a Ph.d), Google looks like a good place to work. (via afb)
Esther Dyson: Google is blind evolution, Yahoo is intelligent design. I’m not sure that’s the right metaphor to use if you want to put Yahoo on the same level as Google.
Neat “center of gravity” calculator for Google Earth. Inspired by Cory’s map of the center of gravity of Manhattan’s Starbucks.
Business 2.0 imagines Google’s future: as The Media, as The Internet, its death, and as God.
In 2002, Dave Winer of Scripting News and Martin Nisenholtz of the New York Times made a Long Bet about the authority of weblogs versus that of NY Times in Google:
In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times’ Web site.
I decided to see how well each side is doing by checking the results for the top news stories of 2005. Eight news stories were selected and an appropriate Google keyword search was chosen for each one of them. I went through the search results for each keyword and noted the positions of the top results from 1) “traditional” media, 2) citizen media, 3) blogs, and 4) nytimes.com. Finally, the scores were tallied and an “actual” winner (blogs vs. nytimes.com) and an “in-spirit” winner (any traditional media source vs. any citizen media source) were calculated. (For more on the methodology, definitions, and caveats, read the methodology section below.)
So how did the NY Times fare against blogs? Not very well. For eight top news stories of 2005, blogs were listed in Google search results before the Times six times, the Times only twice. The in-spirit winner was traditional media by a 6-2 score over citizen media. Here the specific results:
1) Hurricane Katrina hits New Orleans.
Search term: “hurricane katrina”
3. Top citizen media result (Wikipedia)
13. Top media result (CNN)
56. Top NY Times mention (NY Times).
61. Top blog result (Kaye’s Hurricane Blog)
Winner (in spirit): Citizen media
Winner (actual): NY Times
2) Big changes in the US Supreme Court (Rhenquist dies, O’Conner retires, Roberts appointed Chief Justice, Harriet Miers rejected).
Search term: “harriet miers”
4. Top media result (Washington Post)
5. Top citizen media result (Wikipedia)
8. Top NY Times mention (NY Times)
11. Top blog result (TalkLeft)
Winner (in spirit): Media
Winner (actual): NY Times
3) Terrorists bomb London, killing 52.
Search term: “london bombing”
1. Top media result (CNN)
2. Top citizen media result (Wikipedia)
21. Top blog result Schneier on Security
No NY Times article appears in the first 100 results.
Winner (in spirit): Media
Winner (actual): Blogs
4) First elections in Iraq after Saddam.
Search term: “iraq election”
1. Top media result (BBC News)
6. Top blog result (Iraq elections newswire)
6. Top citizen media result (Iraq elections newswire)
14. Top NY Times mention (NY Times)
Winner (in spirit): Media
Winner (actual): Blogs
5) Terri Schiavo legal fight and death.
Search term: “terri schiavo”
2. Top blog result (Abstract Appeal)
2. Top citizen media result (Abstract Appeal)
4. Top media result (CNN)
65. Top NY Times mention (NY Times)
Winner (in spirit): Citizen media
Winner (actual): Blogs
6) Pope John Paul II dies and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger appointed Pope Benedict XVI.
Search term: “pope john paul ii death”
1. Top media result (CNN)
3. Top citizen media result (Wikipedia)
58. Top blog result (The Pope Blog: Pope Benedict XVI)
No NY Times article appears in the first 100 results.
Winner (in spirit): Media
Winner (actual): Blogs
7) The Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.
Search term: “gaza withdrawal”
1. Top media result (Worldpress.org)
31. Top blog result (Simply Appalling)
31. Top citizen media result (Simply Appalling)
No NY Times article appears in the first 100 results.
Winner (in spirit): Media
Winner (actual): Blogs
8) The investigation into the Valerie Plame affair, Judith Miller, Scooter Libby indicted, etc..
Search term: “scooter libby indicted”:
1. Top media result (CNN)
15. Top blog result (Seven Generational Ruminations)
15. Top citizen media result (Seven Generational Ruminations)
43. Top NY Times mention (NY Times)
Winner (in spirit): Media
Winner (actual): Blogs
And just for fun here’s a search for “judith miller jail” (not included in the final tally):
1. Top media result (Washington Post)
3. Top blog result (Gawker)
3. Top citizen media result (Gawker)
No NY Times article appears in the first 100 results (even though there are several matching articles on the Times site).
In covering the jailing of their own reporter, the Times lagged in the Google results behind such informational juggernauts as Drinking Liberally, GOP Vixen, and Feral Scholar.
Winner (in spirit): Media
Winner (actual): Blogs
Here’s the overall results, excluding the Judith Miller search:
Overall winner (in spirit): Media (beating citizen media 6-2).
Overall winner (actual): Blogs (beating the NY Times 6-2).
Some observations:
The eight news stories were culled from various sources (Lexis-Nexis, Wikipedia, NY Times) and narrowed down to the top stories that would have been prominently covered in both the NY Times and blogs.
The keyword phrase for each of the eight stories was selected by the trial and error discovery of the shortest possible phrase that yielded targeted search results about the subject in question. In some cases, the keyword phrase chosen only returned results for a part of a larger news story. For instance, the phrase “pope john paul” was not specific enough to get targeted results, so “pope john paul ii death” was used, but that didn’t give results about the larger story of his death, the conclave to select a new pope, and the selection of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI. In the case of “katrina”, that single keyword was enough to produce hundreds of targeted search results for both Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Keyword phrases were not tinkered with to promote or demote particular types of search results (i.e. those for blogs or nytimes.com); they were only adjusted for the relevence of overall results.
The searches were all done on January 27, 2006 with Google’s main search engine, not their news specific search.
Since the spirit of the bet deals with the influence of traditional media versus that of citizen-produced media, I tracked the top traditional media (labeled just “media” above) results and the top citizen media results in addition to blog and nytimes.com results. For the purposes of this exercise, relevent results were those that linked to pages that an interested reader would use as a source of information about a news story. For citizen media, this meant pages on Wikipedia, Flickr (in some cases), weblogs, message boards, wikis, etc. were fair game. For traditional media, this meant articles, special news packages, photo essays, videos, etc.
In differentiating between “media” & citizen media and also between relevent and non-relevent results, in only one instance did this matter. Harriet Miers’s Blog!!!, a fictional satire written as if the author were Harriet Miers, was the third result for this keyword phrase, but since the blog was not a informational resource, I excluded it. In all other cases, it was pretty clear-cut.
Eyebeam’s Mike Frumin has released OGLE (OpenGL Extrator), a software package for extracting 3-D data from Windows applications. This means you can do stuff like grab the 3-D likeness of your World of Warcraft character and print it out on a 3-D printer or insert him into a Manhattan landscape (grabbed from Google Earth). Announcement here.
The beauty of simplicity. “Blame the [lack of simplicity on the] closed feedback loop among engineers and industrial designers, who simply can’t conceive of someone so lame that she can’t figure out how to download a ringtone; blame a competitive landscape in which piling on new features is the easiest way to differentiate products, even if it makes them harder to use; blame marketers who haven’t figured out a way to make ‘ease of use’ sound hip.”
kottke.org favorites Andrew Zolli and Marissa Meyer (from a little company called Google) are going to be speaking at Core77’s panel on Design 2.0 in NYC at the end of February. Looks pretty interesting.
This blog cites a Target store advertising on Google Maps (by painting their logo on the roof), but it’s more likely that the bullseye is there for the benefit of airline passengers landing at nearby O’Hare (as this slightly wider view shows). (via bb)
A world map of cultural prejudices, compiled by asking Google what different cultures “are known for”. (via waxy, who is known for good links)
Affirmations Google Should Consider Putting on Its Search Button Other Than “I’m Feeling Lucky.” Not a great list, but “I Deserve to Google and Be Googled” should be put on a tshirt.
Update: You don’t need to wait too long around here…here’s a “I Deserve to Google and Be Googled” tshirt. (thx, rickey)
Best Google logo yet…a Braille version to celebrate the birthday of Louis Braille.
Chris Anderson has one of the best descriptions I’ve read of collective knowledge systems like Google, Wikipedia, and blogs: they’re probabilistic systems “which sacrifice perfection at the microscale for optimization at the macroscale”.
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