Category Archives: Google

Feedburner frees their TotalStats and MyBrand services (previously part of the PRO subscription)

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image It would seem that those of us who use Feedburner are seeing an early payoff of the acquisition by Google – per the Feedburner blog announcement today:

Beginning today, two of FeedBurner’s previously for-pay services, TotalStats and MyBrand, will be free. Not in the sense of soaring high above the clouds or recently sprung from the hoosegow, but free like you’ll no longer gladly be billed on Tuesday for a burned feed today.

Very cool to see!  I’ve already activated what is now called “Feedburner Stats PRO” on my main feeds and am looking forward to seeing what other stats I wind up getting.

I’m also VERY pleased to see the “MyBrand” service being made free.  One of my biggest concerns about using Feedburner all along is that people subscribe to the RSS feed at Feedburner’s site.  They are essentially all now Feedburner’s customers (well, now Google’s!).  If for some reasone I ever want to move my feed to some other site, or to host it myself, I basically lose all those folks who have subscribed to the feed via Feedburner.  I have to somehow get them to re-subscribe to my new RSS feed.  The beauty of “MyBrand” is that instead of having an RSS feed set up as:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/DisruptiveConversations

I can instead have the feed appear off of my own domain name like this:

http://feeds.disruptiveconversations.com/DisruptiveConversations

While this URL does look a bit repetitive, the point is that should I need to move the RSS feed elsewhere – or should Google someday shut down Feedburner (which I can’t see happening) – the feed URL is under MY control!  I might need to do a web redirect to point “/DisruptiveConversations” to some file like “/rss.xml” but that is something that I can do on my server or service provider.  I’m no longer locked into Feedburner’s service and systems.

Now, I have no reason whatsoever to leave Feedburner.  I’m a very happy user who is not paying a dime and enjoying the stats and all the other many capabilities that Feedburner offers.  But that’s today… and who is to say that sometime in the future I might want to move my feed to somewhere else?  The MyBrand service gives me this flexibility and “insurance”.  Sometime in the next few weeks I’ll make the time to make this transition for all of my feeds.

Thanks, Feedburner team, for making both of these services available to all of your users!

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At least Google Maps has a sense of humor with regard to trans-atlantic travel (Vermont to Stockholm!)…

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image Curious to know approximately how many miles it was from here in Vermont over to Stockholm, Sweden, I hit the “Get Directions” link on a Google Maps window I happened to have open.  I was a bit surprised and very amused to get the response shown in the graphic on the right (click on it to see the larger version), particularly step #16…

Yes, indeed, I’ll go do that right now… drive down to Boston and dive right into the Atlantic!  🙂

Nice when a company has a sense of humor in its products!

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Google’s "Web History" lets you search your searches and history: there’s a catch, of course, involving privacy…

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 Being a user of Google products, I was naturally curious when I saw a link on one of the various Google product screens (Gmail, I think) saying that I could look at my “web history”.  Indeed, Google has rolled out a new app, named, in the very simplistic Google style, “Web History“.  You can see the login screen to the right along with the various statements about what it can do:

  • “View and manage your web activity” – you can search across the full text of pages you’ve visited. You can also remove pages from your web history.
  • “Get the search results most relevant to you” – using the data in your web history, Google can personalize the results to the most relevant sites.
  • “Follow interesting trends in your web activity” – what are the sites you visit the most and when do you visit them?

This last one, while a bit Big Brother-ish, is actually kind of intriguing to me.  The whole package is, really.  I mean, if you remember seeing a web page but you didn’t bookmark it, wouldn’t it be great to search back through all the pages you went to in order to find that page?

Of course, there naturally is  a catch. As shown in the image on the left, this really only gives you the full capability when you install and enable the Google Toolbar. Now, the toolbar itself sounds not too bad… you can search various sites, have better searches, easily blog or email web pages – or bookmark them (using Google Bookmarks, which would like to be my bookmark service, a role currently filled for me by del.icio.us). In fact the latest toolbar for Firefox has a whole host of goodies.

On one level, the toolbar could be a great thing that allows you to maximize your usage of Google’s applications.  Perhaps many of you are already running it. Part of me is curious to run it for the PageRank display alone.

But recall this… I’m a “security guy” with a relatively high degree of paranoia about privacy and disclosure of information, even in aggregate form.  I know that Google has a lengthy Toolbar privacy policy, but part of me does worry about the usage of my browsing data.  From their policy:

  • We process your requests in order to operate the Google Toolbar. For example, by knowing which web page you are viewing, the PageRank feature of Google Toolbar can show you Google’s ranking of that web page. Likewise, by processing the text on a web page, SpellCheck can offer spelling suggestions and AutoLink can provide useful links to information.
  • In addition, we use log information about aggregate Toolbar usage to improve the quality of Toolbar and other Google services.

So by using the Toolbar with its Advanced Features (which are some of the more interesting) you are basically consenting to let Google monitor everything you view on the web.  Of course they “log information about aggregate Toolbar usage” because it is a phenomenal way for them to understand the browsing habits of web users.  I would, too, if I could convince enough people to install a toolbar like this into their browser window.  In fact, there are a lot of unethical companies out there who try to install these type of browser add-ons, but in the security industry we generally call those “spyware”.  And I guess that’s my dilemma – is the Google Toolbar “spyware” or is a tool to help us be more productive in our web searches?  Is the difference really only one of perspective?  In many ways, it comes down to:

Do you trust Google and their “Do No Evil” mantra?

Overall, I personally do generally trust Google… I know enough people there to know they are very serious about privacy and safeguarding information.  But do I trust them enough to install the Google Toolbar?   I don’t know…

Do you trust Google?  Have you installed the Google Toolbar?  Have you used the Web History function yet?  What do you like best about it?

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Google to add PowerPoint/presentation capability… but will it work when you are presenting offline?

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You knew it had to come. Google already had documents and spreadsheets-  the remaining major office category was, of course… presentations.  And so yes, sure enough, here comes word from Google that they’ll be adding presentation cababilities this summer through the recent acquisition of a company called Tonic Systems.

As a huge user of PowerPoint, I’ll certainly be curious to check it out.  From a collaboration point-of-view, I could certainly see the benefit.  It also makes it rather easy to get your presentation to the conference staff or display it, i.e. no need to plug in your laptop to the display, just pull up a web browser and login.

However, I think about the fact that very often when I am presenting I am either:

  • At a conference in a room/facility with NO Internet access.
  • At a conference in a room/facility with crappy/overloaded Internet access.
  • At a customer location presenting behind a corporate firewall – and not always with Internet access.

In all of those places, you really need an offline version.  Perhaps Google will provide a way to export to PowerPoint or PDF.

For public presentations I could certainly see the utility.  Many of my own presentations include proprietary info, though, and so I wonder what the security of the system will be… will companies feel comfortable putting their data up into Google’s servers?

It will also be curious to see if Google just puts it up as a presentation tool or whether they will include social networking aspects like those in SlideShare.

Anyway, it’s interesting to hear about… I look forward to seeing it whenever it comes out this year.  Meanwhile, I’m still waiting to see what Google does with JotSpot, which is annoyingly still undergoing “integration” with Google.

Google’s home page in Arabic helps me not at all… (but is amusing!)

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Logging onto the Internet here at the hotel in Cairo (for the glorious sum of $26 USD/day) had a rather amusing consequence – the main page for Google is entirely in Arabic! (click image for larger image) The text you enter in appears on the right side of the search box, and the results, as shown on the right (click image for larger image) appear on the right side as well.  Google icon on the right… essentially everything the reverse of the way it appears on the English page (as is appropriate for the way it would be in the Arabic language).

Now, there’s a link there that allows you to easily get to the English search page… but I did have to say that this was definitely an entertaining side note of connecting to the Internet from an IP address range obviously known to be Egyptian!   No, Toto, I’m very definitely not in Kansas anymore…  🙂

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New "Podcast Google Gadget Widget Kit" will let users easily put your podcasts on their Google Desktop pages

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The ever-amazing Christopher Penn over at the Financial Aid Podcast has put out the word that next weekend at Podcamp Toronto he will be releasing the Google Gadget Widget Kit. I have to say that his example with his own podcast is very cool (picture on the right of it installed on my own Google Desktop).  I’ll look forward to trying it out for Blue Box once he releases the kit.  Chris indicates that it can be added to any web page, so I’ll be intrigued to play with it a bit more once it’s out.

Thanks, Chris, for sharing these tools… and for all the other little projects you are doing. 🙂

Google launches "Build Your Campus in 3D" contest… and linking SketchUp to SecondLife?

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 Per a post in the Google blog, Google is launching a “Build Your Campus in 3D” competition to encourage students to create a 3D version of their campus using Google’s SketchUp tool… that are then linked in with Google Earth, of course.

As a guy who used to play around with creating 3D objects in the now ancient era of VRML in the mid-1990s, it’s intriguing to see how far the tools have come.

It also makes me wonder… while many folks are experimenting with building 3D objects in virtual worlds like Second Life, is Google evolving its own 3D world that might have a similarity to our own real world?  (Right here they will be getting, I am sure, a good number of campuses submitted…)

Another interesting question – could SecondLife someday import things created by Google’s Sketchup?  (Well, it seems people are working on exactly that here and here.)

Note to self: add Google SketchUp to the already insanely long list of things to check out sometime…