Archive for category Google

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Posted by Jason Birch in Google, Rant on October 21, 2009

Ever have something you can’t get out of your head? How about two things?

The first thing stuck in my head is the idea that Google is moving wholesale into the content business. They aren’t creating their own content, but they aggregate external content into a “walled garden” and encourage users to host content on Google properties, both actions ensuring that value remains solely exploitable by Google. For product and service folks this won’t matter much, but for people reliant on web content for their income the contraction of the web into mega-portals is definitely a business threat to be aware of. I personally worry that this business tactic may affect the vitality of the web in the long run. Case-in-point, with the recent launch of the real estate layer in Google Maps, realtors are incented to funnel their listings through Google Base rather than posting them openly on the web as GeoRSS or KML. This echoes the aggregation that is occurring in Google’s “Place Pages“, and is a worrisome trend.

The other thing stuck in my head is that stupid Sesame Street pinball counting song… actually I kinda dig it, which is probably why it’s staying stuck.

What I really want to do is to stop thinking about these things. I figured that maybe if I combine the two it will help me exorcise both demons, so:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 !!!!

-J

anti-web, content, Google, sesame street

2 Comments

Google Place Pages Indexable? Not really…

Posted by Jason Birch in Google on September 24, 2009

Mashable hints that Google’s new Place Pages are potentially indexable. And indeed, they are. If you click on the Link button on any of the places pages, you can see that Google has given each of them a pseudo-URL:

While these URLs are certainly interesting, on closer inspection you can see that they aren’t exactly following Google’s established best practices for publishing dynamic web content. They can be reached by any number of URLs, and Google does not use the Canonical meta tag:

http://maps.google.com/places/ca/nanaimo/wallace-st/455/-city-of-nanaimo-city-hall

http://maps.google.com/places/455/wallace-st/nanaimo/-nanaimo-city-hall

http://maps.google.com/places/nanaimo/-nanaimo-city-hall

Not only does this mess up indexing, but it means that there is no common URL for things like Google SideWiki to latch onto for aggregating the comments made on these pages. For instance, you can see a comment at this URL:

http://maps.google.com/places/ca/nanaimo/-city-hall (or here if you don’t have SideWiki)

But not at this one:

http://maps.google.com/places/ca/nanaimo/wallace-st/-city-of-nanaimo-city-hall

It appears that rather than treating each place or business to its own unique hierarchical identifier on the web, Google is instead just parsing the URL for search terms, turning slashes into commas and dashes into spaces (mostly – special case for business names).

This is unfortunate, because if this hierarchical system was in fact in place, then this series of URLs would be very cool and spatially related:

http://maps.google.com/places/ca/bc/nanaimo/wallace-st/-city-of-nanaimo-city-hall

http://maps.google.com/places/ca/bc/nanaimo/wallace-st

http://maps.google.com/places/ca/bc/nanaimo

http://maps.google.com/places/ca/bc

http://maps.google.com/places/ca

(most of these but the last give you what you’d expect, so I was initially fooled into thinking this was more intelligent than it looked for a while).

While there is lots of potential for Google Place Pages to be cool, as it stands it’s just a slight advancement on using mod_rewrite to turn your URL into parameters. As @ajturner said, they’re using the web, but not part of the web.

-J

No Comments

Dear Google Maps,

Posted by Jason Birch in Google, KML on February 19, 2009

I love you. You have disrupted me for the last four years, changing my life forever.

I feel that you must return my feelings. After all, you indexed the entire KML collection of my city’s RESTful property database.

You seem shy to admit your love. No matter how hard people look, you won’t reveal our secret. Instead, you show a cold public face of centreline geocoding and pretty pictures.

Please Google Maps, won’t you shout our love from the rooftops, exposing our deep data relationship to the world?

Yours Unrequited…

-J

Google Maps, love, please

4 Comments

Google Latitude is cool, but…

Posted by Jason Birch in Google on February 4, 2009

Like any good fanboi, I have to post about this, but a few questions immediately come to mind:

How long until I start getting micro-targeted advertising? When I do, will these be phone-only, or will my location be used to target advertising on all Google services when I’m logged in?
Where’s the API or the ability to update external services? Having more than one app fight over my GPS makes it go nuts. I want to be able to update my Twitter location, Fire Eagle, and more, from a single app.
It’s missing history and export functions. Can’t even get my location as a KML? For added bonus, allow me to expose a network link of my current location
Um, I can haz blog gadgit?

-J

Google Latitude

2 Comments