9th June 2008, 10:40 pm
Editor’s note: The actual quote was “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” The full presentation is available here: http://sites.google.com/site/io/the-worlds-information-in-context
“Our mission is to make information available and make it useful.” — Michael T. Jones, Chief Technology Advocate, Google
When Michael Jones uttered that line at the recent Google I/O conference, I about fell over. Waitaminute, I thought, isn’t that the roll of the newspaper? I mean, if Google’s mission is to make information available and make it useful, how is that any different from the traditional newspaper mission?
Continue reading ‘Making information available and useful online and why newspapers aren’t very good at it.’ »
15th November 2007, 10:34 pm
A while back I pontificated about finding other hosting for Lectroid.net. I ultimately blew it off because none of the commercial options seemed like a good fit. But then Google started supporting IMAP in GMail.
As they say, this changes everything.
IMAP support means the wife and I can continue to use Apple’s Mail.app on our Macs just as before. Not only that but Mail.app really integrates well with GMail by allowing you to select which online folders to use for “Drafts”, “Trash”, “Sent” and “Junk”. Not only THAT but GMail’s IMAP supports SSL for both IMAP and authenticated sending. Just freakin’ awesome.
And of course GMail obviously offers a web interface meaning we can get our email from anywhere if need be - a feature I really didn’t have before.
Setting this up through Google Apps let me uninstall and stop worrying about Dovecot and procmail, turn off OpenBSD’s spamd, untweak all the sendmail.mc changes I’d made and close port 25 forever. For free.
Oh and as an added bonus you get GTalk and since I was running ejabberd for similar functionality that’s another set of software that went bye-bye. Did I mention for free.
Yeah, you get to wonder about privacy issues and you “only” get 4 gigs of space, but for the needs of a small home domain, these are total non-issues.
Next up… Google Calendar
7th June 2007, 05:06 pm
Google Mapplets
Ok, work with me here: you go to Google Maps and you see “FooNews.com” listed. *click* and you add the last 7 days of stories and photos.
And garage sale ads… ooh ooh and classified ads… no wait! Upsold ads!
Now THAT would just so rock!
I was thinking that you’d have to give writers and photogs GPS units, but no, Google can do geocoding. All I’d need are addresses. You get addresses with your stories, right?!?
I’m gonna float this to the various online folken I work with and see how far it goes.