Shallow Reader

I don't like to read feeds in Google Reader or in any other feed reader. After subscribing to sites that seem interesting, Google Reader makes them boring and uniform. All the subscriptions lose their identity and become random bits. There's also the pressure of having to read the new posts and clean the "inbox" which makes you skip interesting posts or just skim them.


"Skim = To read or glance through (a book, for example) quickly or superficially." (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004.)

When you open Google Reader and there are 400 new posts, each article becomes a mission from a hopeless game created by yourself. You want to be free again, so you pretend to read some of the articles or just their titles, without a context and without seeing the full picture. "Mark all as read" is your only ally, but you don't want to admit that you need it.

"Subscription - Contractual agreement between a seller and a buyer to provide the buyer with a service or product to be delivered (served) over a period of time specified in the contract at a total price that is dependent upon the duration of the service." (Dictionary of Marketing Terms. Barron's Educational Series, Inc, 2000.)

Feed readers seemed a good alternative to newsletters because you gain access to more content without having to reveal your identity, you can always unsubscribe and it's easier to share the content. But newsletters were less frequent and had a personal touch.

"Shallow - Lacking physical depth; having little spatial extension downward or inward from an outer surface or backward or outward from a center." (WordNet)

Reading becomes a mechanical task that needs to be completed, instead of a rewarding intellectual activity. You no longer pay attention to details because you're anxious to "read" everything.

"Read - To examine and grasp the meaning of (written or printed characters, words, or sentences)." (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004)

APIs for Finding Location

Google launched two APIs for finding the location of a user from a web application. The most simple way, which is also the least precise, is to derive some information about location from the IP. Google AJAX API has an object named google.loader.ClientLocation that includes "metro-level granularity properties": country, region, city, low resolution latitude and longitude. This could be useful if you want to customize a web page for a specific country or to prefill information about location. You probably noticed that google.com automatically redirects to the appropriate international domain and that when you create a Google account your country is already selected.

To get a more precise location, you could use the new Geolocation API from Gears 0.4. "The Geolocation module provides the best estimate of the user's position using a number of sources (called location providers). These providers may be onboard (GPS for example) or server-based (a network location provider)." The API includes a method that lets you track the changes and perform an action based on the new location. Unlike the AJAX API, this requires that users have Gears 0.4 installed and they explicitly allow the application to obtain location information. Unfortunately, Gears is only available for Firefox, IE and IE Mobile, but the team promises to extend the availability to other browsers. Gears for Safari will soon be released, so S60 and iPhone support shouldn't be far away. Google Mobile Blog has two examples of sites that already use the Gears API.

Meanwhile, Yahoo has developed a very interesting platform called Fire Eagle which connects the applications that obtain location information to other application that use the information. "The service has two major functions for users—it allows a user to update their location and then gives them full control of how and where they share that location. A user can perform these functions on the central site, but can also update or access their location data using any other authorized 3rd party application - on the web, on a desktop application or on a mobile device."


As more people start to use Internet services on mobile phones and the devices become more capable, location will be used in almost all applications to deliver more relevant information: a social network could displays the friends near you, a photo sharing service could show photos taken near your location, while a shopping search site could find the best price for a professional digital camera in your area. You can already find interesting applications for Symbian S60, iPhone, Android, but they will become really useful when everyone will broadcast the location.

Export Google Notebooks

Google Notebook provides options to export each notebook as HTML or in the Atom format, but it's not very easy to export all your data. A Greasemonkey script automates the tedious work by reformatting the mobile page and adding links to the HTML or Atom version of each notebook.

The default format is Atom and you should use it if you want to edit the notebooks on your computer and then import the files to Google Notebook. It's a good idea to use the HTML format for archiving your notebooks.

This script requires Firefox, Greasemonkey extension and a download manager like DownThemAll that saves all the files linked from a page or some of them.


After clicking on "Export notebooks", right-click and select "DownThemAll!". Choose a folder where to save the files, type nbid in the "Fast filtering" box and click on "Start".


Peter Shafer wrote a similar script for exporting Google Docs documents.

Photosynth Launches

Two years after the first technology preview, Microsoft officially launched Photosynth, an interesting way to combine overlapping photos from a place and explore the place in detail from different angles. "Using techniques from the field of computer vision, Photosynth examines images for similarities to each other and uses that information to estimate the shape of the subject and the vantage point the photos were taken from. With this information, we recreate the space and use it as a canvas to display and navigate through the photos."


PhotoSynth requires a Windows-only plug-in that also lets you create synths, but the results depend on the number and quality of your photos. Microsoft suggests to "start by taking a panorama of your scene, then move around and take more photos from different angles and positions. When moving around objects, try to get one photo every 25 degrees or so. That will make the synth work better."

There are some interesting places that can be explored, but this technology will become really useful in conjunction with geocoded photos from sites like Flickr or Panoramio. Google Maps already overlays photos from Panoramio, so the next step could be to combine these photos using "Panoramio Look Around", but the results won't be anywhere close to Photosynth.

{ via Data Mining Blog }

Translate YouTube's Search Results

YouTube tests a new option that translates the search results into your language using Google Translate. Now that you can independently select the interface language, it would be nice if the user-generated content was available in the same language.

YouTube didn't translate the titles and descriptions for all the videos, but it decided to use Google Translate's JavaScript API to perform the translations when they are needed, much like Twitter Search. If you click on "translate results into my language", YouTube sets a preference and all the search results will have titles and descriptions in your language, assuming it's supported by Google Translate.

The translation API offered by Google can be easily integrated in web applications, especially that it can now preserve HTML markup. I expect to see a lot of applications that take advantage of the API, from webmail services like Gmail to browsers and IM clients.



In other machine translation news, Google Dictionary has a new interface and it now supports more language pairs. There's also a section for definitions found on the web.


{ Thanks, Aleksandr. }

Google Widget for Custom 404 Error Pages

Google Toolbar 5 for IE (and soon for Firefox) has a useful feature that adds custom 404 error pages. If a site doesn't customize the error page and you click on a broken link or mistype the web address, Google Toolbar shows a list of suggestions: the site's homepage and some searches that could help you locate the right page.


Google implemented a similar error page for google.com and now you can add it to your own site. If you have access to the web server and you can customize the 404 error page, Google provides a widget that enhances the page. "The 404 widget is a quick and easy way to embed a search box on your custom 404 page and provide users with useful information designed to help them find the information they need. Where we can, we'll also suggest other ways for the user to find the information they need, thus increasing the likelihood that they'll continue to explore your site," explains Google.

The widget can be found in Google Webmaster Central, by selecting a site from the dashboard and clicking on Tools > Enhance 404 pages. Unfortunately, it requires JavaScript, so a small number of visitors will not see it.


Google has some recommendations for creating useful error pages: informing visitors that the page could not be found, recommending popular pages from the site, using a consistent design and preventing 404 pages from being indexed by search engines.

The Webmaster Central Blog mentions that this feature is experimental and that not all the sites show great suggestions.

More About Android and HTC Dream

Five months after the last released version, Google and the Open Handset Alliance publicly launched Android 0.9 SDK beta.

"Back in November, we made some SDK builds available that we referred to as early look SDKs. The goal was to give developers insight into the platform as early on as possible, and to get some initial feedback. Since then, we've been working with our Open Handset Alliance partners to incorporate much of that feedback, and finish the first devices. Since those devices are shipping in the fourth quarter, the platform is now converging on a final Android 1.0 version," explains Dan Morrill.

The release notes include a lot of changes: a new Home screen, context menus, two removed APIs (Bluetooth and GTalkService), but the good news is that the next versions will not have major changes.

The first mobile phone that will run Android, HTC Dream, has been approved by FCC and is on target for a launch until the end of the year. New York Times speculates that T-Mobile will be the first carrier to offer HTC Dream in October.

A video posted last week on YouTube claimed to show the smart phone, which looks anything but impressive:


TmoNews has some specifications of the upcoming phone: touch screen, full Qwerty keyboard, 3G/Wifi, 3MP camera with no flash, easy access to Google applications. "We have confirmed that the Android device will be available for current T-mobile customers online, for pre-sales, on September 17th. The Pre-sale will last for one week, with the device being delivered on October 13th, which happens to be the national public launch of the device."

Of course, it's good to keep in mind that Dream is just one of the mobile phones that will use Android and users primarily buy the device for its design and features, not for the operating system.

Update: some new specs (528Mhz Qualcomm 7201 processor, trackball, 1GB MicroSD card, POP/IMAP/SMTP, AIM/MSN/YAHOO/GTALK messaging, Google Calendar sync, Google Streetview with built-in compass, 3.17″ screen with HVGA, 5.6 oz weight).

A Directory of Google Reader Shared Pages?

Google promotes on the homepage a site called "Power Readers in Politics", which lists the Google Reader shared pages for US political journalists and the campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain.

"You can read what they read, and see what's on their minds as they share and discuss news. Each participant has created a reading list with a feed you can subscribe to in Reader (or any other feed reader), and is also publishing shared items," says Google Reader blog.

While the ad from Google's homepage is misleading ("read what Barack Obama and John McCain are reading with Google Reader"), the idea of grouping related Google Reader shared pages could be expanded. Users could choose if they want to add their shared pages to a directory categorized based on the items that are usually shared. Google Reader could show the number of subscribers for each shared page and might even recommend shared pages related to your current subscriptions.

Sites like ReadBurner and RSSmeme let you discover people that share interesting things, but I feel that Google Reader could greatly improve this process. Shared pages act like a filter: instead of subscribing to tens of blogs about the US elections, you can subscribe to 3-4 shared pages that summarize the most interesting news and debates.


Update: Here's my shared items page and the corresponding feed. I mostly use it share blog posts about Google or technology in general, but it would be great if Google Reader added the option to separate the page in sections.

Knol's Advanced Search

Knol has recently added a search toolkit that lets you build advanced queries, a feature that wasn't available at launch. Many of the options from Google web search can be used in Knol: phrase search, negative terms, OR search. You can also restrict the search to titles, summaries, authors, reviews, recent knols. Google offers three options for ordering the results: by relevance, by creation date, by last modified date and an interesting "reverse sort".


The advanced search option should be a good way to discover knols related to a topic, but it fails to properly rank the knols. In a search for [Google Reader], the top result is a page copied from Google Reader's help center that has a higher rating than the second result, which is more relevant. If you don't use the advanced search, Knol shows less but better results.

A search for [the] returns 29315 results (507 edited in the past 24 hours), which should be close to the total number of knols, but many of them include content that already exists on the web, aren't very detailed or well-formatted. You can still find some good knols, but the signal-to-noise ration seems to be low. The knols that receive some attention are those that are featured on the homepage, but Google only features 5 hand-picked knols daily.

Google Calendar Agenda in Gmail

GmailAgenda is a Greasemonkey script that shows your Google Calendar agenda as a sidebar in Gmail. The script uses Google Calendar's embedded view and it includes an option to add events to the main calendar. The sidebar can't be minimized, so it remains visible even when you don't need it.


An alternative way to keep an eye on the Google Calendar agenda is to add the iGoogle gadget in the sidebar, as explained in this post. The advantages are that you don't need the Greasemonkey extension, the sidebar is visible even when you don't visit Gmail and it can be closed.

Automate File Upload in Google Docs

Google Docs has an option to upload files from web addresses, but it's not very convenient if you want to load many documents or you want to add a link for uploading a document. Here's the direct link that can be used to open a document from the web in Google Docs:

http://docs.google.com/?action=updoc&formsubmitted=true&uploadURL=DOCUMENTURL

This works for documents (.doc/.txt/.html/.rtf/.odt), spreadsheets (.xls/.csv/.ods), presentations (.ppt) and PDF files.

In Windows, you can easily create a batch file that automates the upload of multiple files to Google Docs, assuming that the browser is open and you are already logged in to a Google Account. For example, the following text can be copied in Notepad and saved as a .bat file. After executing the .bat, the two PDF files will upload to Google Docs in separate Firefox tabs.

start /d "%PROGRAMFILES%\Mozilla Firefox" firefox "http://docs.google.com/?action=updoc&formsubmitted=true&uploadURL=http://www.fireworksafety.com/pdfs/FireworkSafetyTest.pdf"

start /d "%PROGRAMFILES%\Mozilla Firefox" firefox "http://docs.google.com/?action=updoc&formsubmitted=true&uploadURL=www.fs.fed.us/fire/safety/wct/2002/brochure_2002.pdf"

A similar option is available in Google Toolbar for Firefox, which lets you open documents from the web in Google Docs.