“We are sorry but we don’t have maps”. Then what do do they have?
Almost as funny as Gmails infamous “ Cross your fingers and try again in a few minutes” message.
Tags: Google, Maps, Google Maps, Humor
Picasa Photo Sync on Multiple Computers
Posted on November 19, 2005 ·
Update: this is an old post, describing an obsolete solution. Please read How to Use Picasa on Multiple Computers – The Updated Definitive Guide instead.
A while ago I wrote about Google’s otherwise excellent Picasa photo management program, complaining that all your editing, labeling, captioning information gets lost when you move / copy your photos to another computer.
That’s because Picasa does not store such information in the photo files itself, rather uses a set of system files. This is actually a good concept, you can experiment and safely revert back to the original – as long as you view / process pics only within Picasa. However, with thousands of photos, who would not want a backup? That’s when the nightmare starts .. which files / directories should be copied? Yes, I know … I should be on Flickr.. call me old-fashioned, I prefer to have a local copy of my images.
Well, unbelievably, Microsoft comes to help with this Google application:-) Since they recently acquired Foldershare, it is now a freely dowloadable application. Install it, then set up the following directories to be auto-synchronized between your computers:
- My Pictures (or wherever the Picasa photos are) with all subdirectories.
- C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Picasa2
- C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Picasa2Abums
This will synchronize not only your photos, but all the edit / label ..etc information between any number of computers, over a local network or the Internet. Btw, the program can be used to sync. any filetypes, not just your photos.
Communication a Two-way Street? Not (quite yet) on the Blogosphere.
Posted on October 31, 2005 ·
There is an abundance of tagging / tracking / linking / stat’s tools to enhance the Blogosphere, but they are all one-directional, missing a major part of the “Conversation”.
Steve Rubel talks about RSS being a passive “receive medium”, and how RSS is one-way, feeding info to those who passively consume it – but there is no “active” feedback channel where a business / organization could subscribe to the feed of all those interested in their product, service, or simply those that expressed a particular interest.
I’ve been thinking about a similar problem, but specifically limited to why blogging is still an incomplete conversation. “ You’re linked to me, I’m linked to you. That’s a conversation.” – says Ethan at OnoTech. Well, almost. There is just the small issue of manageability.
If you’re a Technorati top 100 or even 500 blogger, most of the conversation happens around your own blog, in the form of comments and trackbacks from other blogs. However, for the the rest of us, the other 20 million bloggers, chances are the conversation really takes place outside our own blog, and I for one certainly can’t keep track of all comments I left on other blogs. An occasional Google search on my name reveals lots of these “half-conversations” where I left a comment, the blog owner or other readers responded, but I’ve never seen the response, since I forgot to go back and-re-read all those blog-post.
Jeff Clavier points out that Blogware, one of the lesser known platforms (which I happen to use) can send emails when comments are made on a post you have commented on but that is email, and that’s not great… what about the other platforms? The current crop of tracking / linking services all have a top-down publisher-centric view, everything revolves around a blog and related posts, totally missing this other, “bottom-up” half of the conversation. Don’t we all need something that shows an integrated view of all conversations where we are participating per subject matter (blog title), whether we started it or someone else?
Jeff in his post quoted above invites creative minds to come up with a solution, and so does Steve Rubel: “boy is that a business for someone”. At the recent TechCrunch BBQ I heard Dave Winer complain that he hasn’t seen a major breakthrough innovation around blogs for quite a while – I bet half the crowd at the event (200 techno-crazy minds) could create what we need here. C’mon guys, what are you waiting for?
Update (11/7) : Here’s a somewhat manual workaround. Still not quite the real thing 🙁
Update (11/9) Jeremy Zawodny discusses comment tracking – some of the comments on his post are also worth reading.
Tags: Blogs, Blogging, Weblogs, Tags, Tagging, Tracking, Conversation, RSS, Feed, Technorati, TechCrunch,
Flickr Print Arrives
Posted on October 27, 2005 ·
Finally, Flickr now offers printing, either by mail or local pickup at Target. (hat tip: Search Engine Journal, TechCrunch).
Too bad they did not match Snapfish’s 12c price (4×6 prints) – Flickr’s prints cost 15c.
And too bad Flickr went to Yahoo, instead of Google .. integrating with Picasa nicely:-(
Powered By Qumana
Tags: Flickr, Snapfish, Photo Printing, Yahoo, Google
Zvents. Probably the Best Event Calendar in the World!
Posted on October 26, 2005 ·
Probably the Best Event Calendar in the World! 
(Updated)
OK, I am biased. How could I not be, when we have the in common?
Seriously, it has the most user-friendly interface of the bunch: Eventful (formerly EVDB), Upcoming (acquired by Yahoo) and of course Zvents. Ease of use is really important, as this dummy (yours truly) never fully figured out how to work evdb, so for me it really doesn’t matter how powerful it may be if I can’t even pull an event into sevaral calendars.
Zvent is the only one of the crowd to serve up a Google Map of your event location, and it’s loaded with features: private / public / group events, subscriptions, blog integration (check my right sidebar) … just to name a few. The database currently has events of the San Francisco Bay Area only – btw, the database itself is another significant differentiator, as they scout the web and scrape events off the entertainment venues themselves.
This wealth of information is also a problem in certain situations: if I do a search based on date / location, I may have to flip through dozens of pages of generic entries like wine-tasting, permanent exhibitions ..etc. It would be nice to find a way to optionally turn off display of these recurring programs, and list only the real “happenings”. For example if I search the Napa area, I don’t want to see hundreds of regular tastings – those are non-events, but if one of them has a Chef’s dinner with wine-pairing, or a musical / theater show, that’s definitely an “event”.
The ability to exclude search arguments would also be nice, e.g. “-wine” should skip everything tagged as wine, wine-tasting ..etc.
There are lots of reviews on zvents, including here, here, here, here, and here – the last link happens to be Ethan Stock, Zvent CEO’s blog. Hmm… I don’t see any way to leave a comment or trackback – what happened to the “conversation”, Ethan? 
Update (10/27) Apparently zvents set the standard for future competitors. See Ethan’s post: The Sincerest Form of Flattery…
Update 2 (1/21): Stowe Boyd’s Eventful calendar is all messed up. Hey, Stowe, time to give zvents a try!
Tags: zvents, evdb, eventful, upcoming, yahoo, events, calendar, social calendar, event calendar, web 2.0, techcrunch, techcrunchbbq
The Long Tail Stolen…
Posted on September 11, 2005 ·
Tomorrow Marc Benioff will unveil Salesforce.com’s AppExchange, or “eBay for Enterprise Software”. A Marketplace where customers can try and buy on-demand applications.
“The power of that is you can reach this long tail of applications. SAP and Oracle may deliver 10% of the applications you need to run your business, but there’s this large percentage of your business that won’t be managed by Oracle or SAP. This is the long tail of applications.” says Benioff.
This is his way of fighting the All-In-One players, including NetSuite, which is more in his league, but also SAP, Oracle. “It looks great on PowerPoint, but on planet Earth, it won’t fly,” predicts Zach Nelson, CEO of NetSuite. Who is right remains to be seen, but clearly a key factor is the ease of integration between the additional app’s and salesforce.com, or even between the other app’s themselves.
Salesforce.com may be the first one to bring us the AppExchange, but for all I know, credit for applying the Long Tail theory to Software goes to Joe Kraus of JotSpot (and previously Excite). And it’s clearly not just theory.
JotSpot is clearly not just about wikis, the intent is to become a widely used platform upon which the long tail of software applications is served up easily and affordably. So does that make JotSpot an Application developer? I seriously doubt it, although they developed sample app’s they can’t be the jack-of-all-trades. Although Joe never talked about the business model associated with being “the platform”, I’ve always thought they will one day introduce a Marketplace, where third party developers and the user community find each other. But first they need critical mass – something Salesforce already has.
I’m eager to see JotSpot’s next move…
Tags: Salesforce.com, NetSuite, SaaS, On-Demand Software, On-Demand, AppExchange, JotSpot, Joe Kraus, Long Tail, ASP, CRM, ERP, SAP
Splogs / Clogs getting Iced
Posted on August 16, 2005 ·
IceRocket owner Mark Cuban has warned Blogspot bloggers that their blogs may soon be excluded from IceRocket and other search engines due to their domain being overwhelmed by spam blogs. (via the Search Engine Journal and the Blog Herald)
He says: “Blogger is by far the worst offender. Google seems to be working hard to adjust their relevancy indexes to exclude splog from having influence on search rankings, but they don’t seem to be doing anything more than removing reported splogs (spam blogs). Kind of like going after the zombies one at a time with a shovel.”
I doubt exclusion of a major service is the right way to fight spam. In fact if this becomes a trend, i.e. IceRocket, Technorati, Bloglines, BlogPulse … etc. will boycott the Blogspot domain, wouldn’t that force Google to accelerate either by development or acquisition it’s plans to “own” the blog search space rather than see it’s bloggers flock away?
On the other hand, how important is it for Google to maintain Blogger as a free service? Any individual blogger can afford a symbolic price, say $3 /month which would still add up to significant cost to spammers who create blogs by the thousands automatically. An even better option may be to slap them with a one-time blog creation fee.
It may be less elegant .. geeky … whatever.. .but when technology fails, why not use economic means to fight spam?
Update (8/17): Frank has created a site called Splog Reporter where anyone can flag Splog/Clog. Frank, will Rel 2.0 be a bookmarklet (“this is splog”) that pre-populates the fields? 
Tags: Blogs, Blogging, Blog Spam, Spam, Technorati, IceRocket, BlogSpot, Google
This is Where My Post Would Appear …
Posted on August 1, 2005 ·
… had I not used Qumana:-( Two posts, to be exact.
A blogger’s worst nightmare scenario: finish editing a fairly long post, hit “save” only to see all the work gone due to a momentary server outage. Bummer. But wait, Offline Blog Editors to the rescue!
Qumana is a new, free contender in this field, comparable to BlogJet, Ecto, w.Bloggar ..etc. I’ve been experimenting with it for a while, and my only major complaint was about the tag-soup it produces. However, for the last two days it let me down bigtime.
Yesterday I had to stop editing an almost finished post, so I saved the contents to a file – this morning, trying to open it I discovered Qumana created an blank html file of 1k size … all my work is gone:-( This afternoon I wrote a somewhat longer piece, with several references to other sites, that simply took a while to pull together … finally, I’m done, click “post”, and voila! – Qumana exits, no post to my blog, and no saved copy either:-(
I’ve had it with Qumana – I’m considering writing all my posts in Onenote or Evernote, and just paste it in the online editor.
Update: BlogJet, here I come! (In fact I am writing this update using BlogJet)
Brilliant (Blog) Button Maker
Posted on July 28, 2005 ·
Easy tool to make cute or not-so-cute buttons for your Blog. Here are a few samples:
Found on the 
Technorati Tags: Blogs, Blogging, Button, Buttons, ButtonMaker, Software, Software Tools, Utilities
MSN’s Apple-free Virtual Earth
Posted on July 25, 2005 ·
Lot of buzz about MSN’s Virtual Earth today … Jeremy Wright gives it the thumbs up over Google Maps – althought I think it’s a bit of unfair comparison, Google Earth is certainly a more comparable product.
Isn’t it funny how the whole world talks about these two only, Google and MS, when there’s another very similar product downloadable from none other but the NASA? (hm.. does it say something about the difference between Government and Private sector?)
As I wrote before, Patrick was the first one to publish a four-way visual comparison.
There may be more in the name than we thought … “Virtual Earth” meaning “the Earth as Microsoft would like to see it” – some folks report to The Register that Microsoft’s Earth Deleted Apple HQ.
Take a look at Apple’s Cupertino headquarters from Google and MSN’s rival map sites. Both sites offer aerial photos alongside maps. MSN’s version is here and Google’s is here.
The Search is on … who else did not make it to Bill’s New World?
The Register also notes that the twin towers of the World Trade Center are still there in all their pre-9/11 glory.
Update at 11:10am, 7/25: now we know who else did not make it. “Hey, Sun and Oracle are gone too, and at Google’s address, there’s just a charred hole” reports Siliconvalley.com.
Technorati Tags: Virtual Earth, MSN, MSN Virtual Earth, Google Earth, Google Moon, Mapping, Apple, NASA
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