About three weeks after RC1 was unveiled, Firefox 3 RC2 has just been released. Get it here!
No word yet on what’s new, but I expect it’s mostly bug fixes and things of that nature. If you know of any substantial improvements, please let us know in the comments. Given how great RC1 has performed, I’m quite excited to fire up RC2.
By now, you’ve probably heard all about Twitter, the very popular micro-blogging service. If not, here is a short video explaining it:
At our church, we struggled for a while to find a good way to use this to help reach our congregation, but we’re finally starting to use it effectively. We’ve come up with a few good uses for it so far:
Other churches are starting to get on board. Oak Leaf Church has just launched a Twitter feed. There’s not much there yet, but they plan on adding things such as important announcements, prayer requests, etc.
The great thing about Twitter is that it works for users of any skill level. If you just want updates, click the link and read them. Want an RSS feed? Subscribe. Have your own Twitter account? Follow ours. Want to stay even more informed? Follow ours and enable text messaging.
All of this Twittering leads to a growing problem: fragmentation. Using our church as an example, we have a YouTube account, a SmugMug account, a blog, three podcasts and five twitter accounts. How to keep up? Enter FriendFeed.
FriendFeed is a quickly growing service that helps pull together all of your various feeds. We have a FriendFeed account that pulls all 11 of those feeds onto one page. I have a page of my own that pulls information from 14 sources. We haven’t started promoting it for the church very much yet, but I’m making sure our account is as connected as possible, because the service is growing very quickly.
How does your church use Twitter? Have you started working with FriendFeed yet? Or any other similar services?
The 4,500 resident city of North Oaks, MN has demanded that Google remove StreetView imagery of their town
. However, they’re not a typical town, in that all of their roads are owned by the residents (meaning they’re private) and the city enforces a trespassing ordinanace.
While it’s certainly unique, since no other city has made a similar request, it seems that they’re well within their rights to request that, since the roads are private.
It makes me wonder if other cities (with public roads) will request this. It would be interesting to see what happens with those.
I’ve been waiting for this for a while, but FeedBurner publishers will soon be able to insert AdSense ads in their feeds
. I’d love to insert some insightful commentary here, but there’s not much else to say. If you don’t know what AdSense or FeedBurner are, then I don’t know why you’re on an SEO blog. 🙂
It’ll be interesting to see how well it works. I have a couple of very large feeds (not this site – ha!), so I’m anxious to give it a shot. They’ll be rolling it out to a small group of publishers next week, and the rest of us “soon”. Once I’m able to try it, I’ll be sure to post my findings.
, a Swedish search and mapping site, has just released a 3D map of Stockholm that works in virtually any browser in any operating system.
The technology is powered in part by C3 Technologies
, who explain their software as follows:
The technology is based on high-resolution aerial photography with carefully calibrated cameras. For every picture, the camera’s position and angle are calculated with extremely high precision, using a very advanced navigation system. This is what enables us to give each pixel its geographical position with decimetre accuracy. Then, using stereovision technology, we combine two sequential pictures to measure the area’s height profile.
The result is an aerial photograph with each pixel positioned in three dimensions. Over an entire city, thousands of such photos are combined into one coherent 3D model – through an automated process in our unique 3D-processor.
Thanks to all this, there is no one today who can take pictures with the same precision and speed as we can. One example is when we filmed all of Stockholm in October 2007 and created a realistic, yet zoomable and turnable, 3D model of the city in just 3 days.
It seems to be a pretty cool technology, considering cities can be created so quickly and it works on such a wide variety of platforms. The detail is far worse than what Google Earth and Virtual Earth have, though it renders trees and “any object larger than a VW bus”.
Ogle Earth has a post that gets into a bit more detail and is well worth reading.
We got a brand new Target store near us not too long ago. It’s very nice. I’ve been there maybe 4 times, and Kelly has been there a good bit more often. However, neither of us have parked in the underground deck before.
Yesterday we were out when a pretty hard thunderstorm began rolling through. We were heading to Target anyhow, so it worked out great. We parked underground, got what we wanted, and got out.
Here’s the kicker: they built the deck simply to provide enough parking for the area. The bonus is that it is directly contributing to the sales at the store. Given the weather, we certainly would have simply gone home if the underground parking wasn’t available. Instead, we went, we shopped, we spent some money.
It’s really pretty nice, too. Very white and clean. I’m sure part of that is simply because it’s so new, so we’ll see what it looks like in a couple years.
Google Earth Blog has a story about a digital earth product called Earthscape. Earthscape is a desktop program that aims to be similar to Google Earth (and others). It may end up being a decent product, but that’s not the point of this post.
At Where 2.0 last week, GEB author Frank Taylor was shown an iPhone application that uses their product. Not only does it handle the top down view (like Google Maps Mobile), but you can pan down into a 3D view! Taking it a step further, the application responds to tilting, so you can move the phone around in your hand to change the view.
The application has some work to be done before it can be released, but it shows a ton of potential. Below is the video that Frank took and you can read more about it in this blog post:
This isn’t a new plug-in, but it’s new to me and I love it!
I recently converted one of my sites from a custom CMS to WordPress mu. I manually 301 redirected some of the popular pages, but decided to let the rest of them die off. However, I just installed the Redirection plug-in
and I’m cleaning it up like magic!
It automatically logs 404 errors on the site, then lets you turn that 404 into a 301 redirect with a single click. I point the 404 to the comparable page on the new blog, and things are quickly falling into place. I should see much less of a traffic drop-off now that I’m using this.
It won’t be a terribly useful plug-in for most blogs, but if you’re converting any site to use WordPress, this is a great way to get things tidied up.
About a month ago, Google added items from the New York Times
to Google Earth. Now they’ve taken it a step further by adding Google News entries as well. This is pretty cool.
The New York Times addition was cute, but didn’t add much. There simply aren’t enough stories to make it especially useful. However, Google News brings in items from 4,500 new sources, so there are literally thousands of items on the map. This is excellent, because it allows you to zoom in tight on an area, and see the latest news items from around there.
To activate this feature in your copy of Google Earth, just click on the “Gallery” category in your “Layers” tab, and check the box next to “Google News”.
How have I not seen this before? A friend showed me Jing a few days ago, and I’m in love with it. It’s a software program for Windows or Mac that makes it very easy to capture screenshots or video clips and share them.
I had seen Skitch a few weeks ago, and thought it looked awesome. The problem with it is that it’s Mac-only. A Windows version is “coming soon”, but not here yet. In addition, Skitch only does image capture, while Jing does both images and videos.
To explain how easy Jing is, I’m going to do the following:
Here we go…
Done! 32 seconds.
https://www.mickmel.com/jing/2008-05-20_2230.png
It’s great! For another brief example, here’s a quick video I just made so you can see how those look:
https://www.mickmel.com/jing/2008-05-20_2246.swf
You’ll probably find quite a few uses for this. I even grabbed the Jing logo at the top of this post by grabbing it from their site using their own software. Give it a shot and let me know what you think.
