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Expanded Street View
I discovered yesterday that the Street View feature on Google Maps now has vastly expanded coverage. When it was first added in the UK I could see all the places I had lived by dint of having lived in a good proportion of the areas they used to start the service, like York and Oxford. Now I can "visit" friends and family all across the UK.
In fact, while I haven't tested the theory, I suspect that I can now revisit almost every road I've ever travelled down in my life!
- Technorati Tags:
- maps
- streetview
What Buzzes?
I am still pondering the virtues of Google Buzz (following on from last month's Buzz post).
At that point it was new and I had connected up several of the sites I use to post information but I have now unlinked everything. All those places, like Twitter and Flickr, already have readily available feeds that people can follow in a number of ways. They may not care to see them again and, to be honest, I'd rather not have my list of "buzz" cluttered with repeats from them either. If something was interesting (and it often is) I would probably have responded already elsewhere.
What I would really like though is an option to look at what the people I follow link to and decide which of those I would like to see. That would give me a list of what might interest me but without duplicates from what I've seen elsewhere. Likewise, I could link multiple streams to my Buzz account but be confident that it won't be overloading my friends with duplication. Icing on the cake would be if I could also get notification of when someone uses Buzz to reply to the things I've chosen to ignore, so that I can partake if this become the space of choice for a particular conversation.
I hope Google will work on improving Buzz. Products like Reader and Mail have certainly been greatly enhanced over time. Mind you, I'm also hoping that Google Wave won't languish forgotten — I still think that would be an excellent communication medium if only a few more people actually used it!
- Technorati Tags:
- buzz
- wave
- communication
Video Editing
Today I am working on getting some videos from work (from the Joint Ventures series) up onto our YouTube account. The complication is that the files are too long and so I need to chop them into shorter chunks. However, the tool I have for doing that (iMovie) can't read the WMV format and FFMpeg, my normal choice for converting between formats, chokes on something about the files.
After some experimentation, I have stumbled across a chain of applications, starting with VLC, which can read and transcode the files albeit with a small glitch - I have to do the video and audio separately and then recombine them in iMovie.
All in all, quite an arduous process. On the other hand, at least I've got the tools to get this done and the fact I can put videos up where you (and the rest of the world) can benefit from them is still amazing.
- Technorati Tags:
- youtube
- video
- ndorms
- jointventures
Google Buzz
By now, most Googlemail accounts have probably had the new "Buzz" feature made available. This feeds snippets from people you know, such as their tweets or blog articles they have marked for sharing, and allows you to make comments on them.
To some extent that is a great idea, facilitating contact and conversation. However it does seem like a rather daunting stream. My particular concern is duplication of items I have already seen elsewhere. Seeing them once is interesting but having them pop up again is redundant. Also, it risks conversation about the points raised being lost. It aggregates blips of information but disassociates responses from the original source.
So far, my take on it is interesting but not entirely welcome.
eBooks
I thought I would follow up my earlier post on eReaders as today I downloaded a free eBook. This was Growing Deeper by Chris Smith, a volume about how church communities can make "... connection in a disconnected age". I might review it sometime although, to be honest, it is quite nice to get a free book that I don't have to review!
So, I have all 9.4MB downloaded to my computer desktop and I am considering when I might actually read it. Ideally, I would like it available in more than one place as lunchtime at work is probably a good location but having it at home too. I could download it directly there but each time causes a bandwidth hit for the supplier and, since I'm not sure I'm going to donate any money for it, I am trying to think of alternatives.
My bright idea was that it might be another opportunity to use Google Wave (I have some invites available if you want to try that out, by the way). It would then be available wherever I have an internet connection and I can use the wave to jot down some notes at the same time. The trouble with that concept is that it is taking an appreciably long time to copy the file up onto a new, private wave. The same would be true if I'd picked Evernote or just emailed it to myself. Isuppose I could put it on a memory stick but I suspect I'd forget to open it up.
Meanwhile, I have taken a quick look through the book. Most of the fifty ideas it delivers look quite short; I suspect it is the use of lots of images that has pumped the size of the file up. Wouldn't it be more convenient if this was on a website rather than presented as a "book"?
There, I think, is the rub. HTML would be a perfectly good format for most eBooks, particularly ones that are being shared for free. Production and distribution costs would be lower and the content would be readily accessible using a simple web browser. I haven't read the book yet (and, since it still hasn't uploaded, might not get round to it today) but I'm definitely having my doubts about the medium even if the message is still to be tested.
eReaders
Last week I went to a session at the computing services department about eBooks and eReaders. The University has an increasing range of books available in electronic form covering all manner of subjects. I was more interested though in discussion of the devices designed to make these available on the move.
They had two devices to pass round, the Amazon Kindle and the Sony PRS-600. Out of the two, I preferred the Sony unit on the brief inspection I was able to give them. It has a smaller size but larger screen because, rather than the Kindle's joypad and keyboard, it has a touchscreen.
Neither really grabbed me though. Perhaps a chance to play more closely would convince me but, for the time being, I'll stick with the dead trees.
Pigeon-speed
This morning I went to a meeting about a project at work, where I was pleased to find that the files we were talking about transferring are likely to only be a few MB in size and not the potential GB I had been starting to look at options for. That means that I do not have to look at finding solutions for greatly increased capacity and also that bandwidth costs and speed will not be an issue for either ourselves or our contributors in the project.
Along with the relief came the memory of a recent article about research in South Africa which showed that a carrier pigeon can still get the edge on broadband for data delivery speeds! No need to get the pigeons in for us just yet!
