Got Burned, Changing my feed!!

My current feed is run by FeedBurner. That means most of you are getting this feed from http://feeds.feedburner.com/dlinsin and thanks to FeedBurner you see stuff like "Digg This!" or "Submit to Reddit" at the bottom of each post.

FeedBurner was acquired by Google and is moving all accounts to Google Adsense by the end of this month. Since Google doesn't want me to use Adsense, I can only switch back to my old feed. So if you want to keep reading my stuff, simply switch to http://dlinsin.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/. However, the FeedBurner feed will still be alive for the next couple of weeks.

Staying On Top Of Things

In fact you don't have to stay on top of things, as 43 folders knows, because:

The world won’t end without you knowing it. Trust me, your mom will call.

The future is here

James Gosling kinda responed to my "no paper post":

One of the things that's always interesting about visiting Japan is looking at all of their cell phones. I've seen some great things here on this visit. ... You can use your cell phone to book airplane (and train) tickets, and use the cell phone itself as both the ticket and the boarding pass. Zero paper. To check in, you just swipe your phone on a reader as you're dashing to your seat. Very fast and secure.

This reminds me of Singapore, where you can use your mobile phone for virtually everything. You can even use sms to pay for a can of coke at a machine.

I love that idea! I simply want my mobile phone to be an "all-in-one" (Eierlegendewollmilchsau) or "silver bullet" device, which can do everything. As I pointed out, I use my mobile phone to schedule stuff, write down notes, surf the web and write emails. I wanna be able to pay for a cab, get tickets and order seats for a movie.

Unfortunately in Germany that's somehow not possible - for various reasons. One of those reasons is security concerns. Some folks would wack out, if you could pay stuff with your mobile phone. Think of bluetooths hacks, bugging or stealing your identidy!! They are excessively disturbed security freaks preventing innovation!

I know that there are security issues, but I'm sure we could solve them, if we'd just relax a little. I also think we should give everyone a chance to innovate and put his/her's identidy "at risk" if they chose to. Almost everybody is using a wireless network at home and thus already making a choice that they accept the risk of being compromised.

However, there are folks out there, that are not aware of the security problems and I think it's important that the before mentioned security freaks point out those issues for them. What they shouldn't do is create FUD, cause it hinders adoption and thus innovation.

Google Mail 2.0

A couple of weeks ago Google Blogoscoped reported about a new Gmail UI, which improves contact organization. This morning I was surprised to see it enabled in my Gmail account, especially after waiting forever to get IMAP. It looks really slick, especially the new box that pops up when you hover a contact on your chat list.

Me @ friendfeed

On Friday I got an invite to friendfeed, which seems to be similar to jaiku. The difference so far is that friendfeed seems to update, whereas jaiku still shows updates from a couple of days ago. Below is a nice little script that shows your latest feeds.

Me @ Jaiku

Since Jaiku was acquired by Google and my friend Dominik was kind enough to send me an invite, I thought I'd check it out. So far I cannot really say much, except that it shows old entries of the feeds I added. Well, maybe it just the Google effect and Jaiku needs a scalability boost.

Google's spell checker rocks

Yesterday I blogged about James Gosling and I accidental spelled his name wrong as Google's spell checker told me.


I think this is amazing! Think about it, it does present me the correct suggestion of James Gosling's name. Okay it's a pretty well known name, I give you that. For instance it doesn't suggest correct alternatives to my misspelled name, not yet :-). But I still think this is really cool and very helpful.

Listphile

Yesterday I checked out the new site Listphile, which offers you a Google Base like web 2.0 application to create and share multimedia lists. You can read a short analyzes of the site over at TechCrunch.

I really like the site, but I can't think of a use case without having an API. Maybe my sentiment about applications like Listphile are mostly driven by thinking too much like a software engineer. Or maybe I'm just too lazy to submit data by hand, I don't know. At least I could think of something to do with Listphile, if I had an API to fill a list with data.

As a side note, I really like that they have an openid integration, so there is no need to setup another account and create another profile!

Yahoo pipes behind proxy

The Yahoo pipes site does not display properly when I access it from my workplace. When I'm at home it works without any problems. No matter if I'm using IE 6/7 or the latest
Firefox, it still looks like this:



The only difference between my workplace and home is the company's proxy. I assume there's some weird caching magic going on that doesn't with Yahoo pipes.

New Google Reader interface

I had this Google Reader interface yesterday morning already, but after a while it disappeared. Now it's either finally live or I get the chance to have another test run.



The tree view navigation can be minimized now so you have almost the full screen to read your feed.



The search feature lets you search through all or selected folders. It's amazingly fast and searches unread and read feed items as well.



Does anyone else have this interface too?

Upload Videos

You can now upload your own videos directly in blogger and annoy your readers with your self made amateur clips like this one:

Embeddable Google Maps

I've waited for this quite a while and so far I've used Vinny's useamap to embed maps into blog entries or web sites. Google released the feature today and now I'm able to embed good old Hagsfeld into my blog posts.


View Larger Map

Get Ready for BlogDay on August 31st

I don't know about you, but when I saw this logo I immediately thought: "What is 310 gram day?". Well anyways, it's called "Blog Day" and here are the FAQs:

What is it all about?
Get to know other bloggers.

How does it work?
* Find 5 new Blogs that you find interesting
* Notify the 5 bloggers that you are recommending them
* Write a short description of the Blogs and link to them
* Post the BlogDay Post (on August 31st) and
* Add the BlogDay tag using this link: http://technorati.com/tag/BlogDay2007 and a link to the BlogDay web site at http://www.blogday.org

And then?
Celebrate!

Visual Search

Go2web2 featured this cool site called SearchCrystal, which represents search results visually. It lets you zoom in on various aspects of the result set of your search, in that it shows you a neat preview of a website that was found. On top of that you get the corresponding rank of the website found, for various search engines.

Pownce API

Techcrunch reported that Pownce will open up and provide an API. In my opinion that's a little late, maybe too late. They should have provided an API first, even before their Desktop integration. I think these days an API is a killer criteria for an application. Without a clean and useful API your application can't be used in mash-ups and therefore won't be interesting to a lot of users.

Pownce Invites

You don't need to buy your Pownce invite on ebay, you can just ask me! Leave a comment!

Geotagging with Picasa Web Albums

Picasa Web Albums have a great new feature since yesterday, it's called 'Map My Photos'. I don't know why they didn't call it geotagging or geocoding, but then I'm not an expert with those expressions or their definitions. All I know is that it's really cool! I've mapped my latest pictures and I guess I'll spend hours on doing the same with my other pictures. Why? Cause it's just fun!

Another new feature is Picasa Web Albums for mobile devices, but right now I only get a 404 when I click on the official link.

web 2.0 baton

Although I lost focus I catched Dominik's baton:

Do you use Social Bookmarking/Networking sites like Digg, Yigg, Mister Wong or del.icio.us? If yes, which?
Only reading digg but not participating

Are you watching videos on sites like youtube, seveload or dailymotion?
If yes, what kind of videos are you mostly watching?
Hardly, if I'm watching online videos ist mostly music videos

Do you know resp. use Flickr?
I know it but I prefer picasa

What do you think about services like twitter or frazr?
I love them, especially plazes

How many rss feed subscriptions do you have?
66

Are you reading them daily?
If they publish daily, yes

How many blogs do you maintain?
only this one

Do you leave comments on other blogs? If yes what are you commenting about?
Yes, mostly stuff that I have something to say about.

Who is your king of blogging in Germany?
Dominik, obviously.

Do you think blogs are here to stay or are they a temporary hype?
Don't know, don't care

Do you think your blog(s) are still gonna be around that time?
Definitely

Who are you gonna pass the baton to?
Sutini, someone I absolutely don't know FSUG (searched Google's blogsearch with the first thing that came to my mind: Singapore) and finally someone I'm interested in hearing his opinion: vinny from useamap

Google Warning

When I clicked on a search result, Google redirected me to a warning site, though I have
not installed any Google related 3rd party application.

Follow up on Custom Google Maps

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Google releasing it's new custom map feature, which I've used a couple of times so far. I mentioned that it might get other map mashups like useamap into trouble.

On the comments Vinny Glennon from useamap.com replied, saying that he doesn't think so, since "Google will not try to swamp out its community of developers as they realise that the developers can quickly change over to another mapping source like Virtual Earth." I responded, saying I don't think it's possible to quickly adapt an application to another map tool. I also ask Vinny to prove me wrong and he did. Today I received this email:

Hi David,
Challenge accepted:). After coding for the weekend, I have been able to allow people to view their maps in Virtual Earth(Microsoft),Yahoo Maps and of course Google Maps. Of all the other open mapping api's,I believe these are the best of the bunch. If you know of another one,otherside of Mapquest and Multimaps, I would love to hear them.
As far as I know, this is the first time, that they 3 maps can be displayed together, but I could be wrong.
Another check it out at Here to see it for yourself.
Vinny

Vinny you did it and you won the challenge ;-) I haven't checked it out thoroughly, but from a quick look it works great! I'll definitely write it about it after looking into it more precisely.