Damien Mulley

Found lots of good stuff on Marc Canter’s blog:

First up is NetVibes. Another one of these start pages. A Digital Lifestyle Aggregator Marc calls it. I suppose it would be like moving your taskbar online. The RSS reader is meant to be fantastic with NetVibes. Protopage is another thing like this. A start page with all your fav online activities all glued together. Start.com is another though I doubt it’ll allow you to use Google as the default search engine.

As APIs become the norm for every web app, these Start pages are going to become a lot more powerful. Doesn’t Google have a deal with Firefox for access to their start page? Be nice of the firefox start page had all this kind of stuff. Speaking of APIs LastFM and Audioscrobbler now have APIs. More to add to the start page.

Moving on comes the fact that the IMDB is doing tags. Sweet. I’m sure the genuises will start to play with this more too.

Datablogging. Ok, I’m not getting this. How is this a blog? This to me is just data entry. This is information that is not shared or viewable and is used soley for sales. Is this just not a CRM system with feeds?

Fantastic presentation at OSCON2005. Very interesting stuff about Identity but even if you’re not interested in this, the presentation style is quite captivating.

Tags: MarcCanter oscon2005 identity dla

Google has officially commented on George Bush being a miserable failure. Kind of cool that they used the phrase Googlebombing. Also glad they said they would not adjust their results just because of this. Though they’d do it for China wouldn’t they?

I really like that
Google Maps shows the Whitehouse for Miserable Failure.

Bonus link: Google Earth mixed with National Geographic.

Google Google Google Google. I spend an awful lot of time talking Google. However, I feel of all the companies out there, they’re the ones who can do the best job at various things.

Google Desktop is helping everyone find what they want on their desktop, and GMail is helping organise people’s email. What about text messages and phone messages? Wouldn’t it be handy if Google did a tie-in with the main mobile companies out there so that every txt message to and from my mobile would be stored in a special section of my GMail? Tie that too into online txt messaging services and one could suddenly have a massive amount of additional information to organise. Hell, I wonder could they also integrate with live billing so you have a record of who you called and who called you?

Come to think of it, why is Google Talk not storing your conversations in a section of GMail? Would make sense no? Take it off the desktop.

Via MeFi: The Hotmail Team are beta testing a new interface for hotmail. Looks good, they took their time responding to GMail though. It’s not just about space – functionality and speed matter too. Good luck with dealing with the massive amount of Hotmail spam too, that was a nightmare when I used the service a few years back. This looks like a nice Outlook style interface. I’m surprised they don’t call it Outlook Online Mail or something. Be good to tie their Exchange OWA service with Hotmail and with the Outlook desktop client. Strenghten the brand or something.

Woah. From the initial pics I thought it looked pretty crap and that they needed a lesson in design from Sony or Apple but Russell Beattie pointed to this video of the Nintendo Revolution controller in action. This looks pretty damned good. Forget form factor for now, I’m sure they can fix that in the next version. I’d go with sexy technology and applications rather than form-factor.

Susan reports that AOL could be sold to MSN or Google. Wow, it took Time-Warner long enough to get rid of that embarassing wart on their face. To think a few years ago that wart was more beautiful and promising than them.

Google Blog Search is out. Remind me again how long ago they bought Blogger? Google has turned into that Battleship they should never have been. Does it really take this long to build a blog search engine? Everyone else is way before them on this, when they actually had the chance to be first on the market.

Besides it should be called Google RSS Search, not Blog Search. I get Irish Examiner RSS feeds in the results. They don’t do blogs. I’ve also noticed a few spam blogs in the first few results for certain searches. Some are blatantly obvious too. Perhaps there should be a “Flag This” next to the result or would that allow some jealous people to try and rig results?

When I typed in a search for my own name I had assumed I’d get results back with people mentioning me on their blogs, as I do with pub sub and IceRocket and so on. Nope. It returned back all the posts on this site. That’s shite. Hardly any of those blog entries mention my name in them, it’s just the name of my site. Rejig the algorithms Google. This is a monumental let-down.

Steve Balmer coming to Dublin.

The Irish Times tells us today that Hobbes threatened legal action over an article in the Village. Publication today was halted but it is to go ahead tomorrow with nothing changed, allegedly. Handy that it gets a mention in the Irish Times now. Should boost numbers.