Bored by Google’s minimalistic user interface?
Can’t see the wood for the trees in Yahoo!’s portal approach?
Try Ms. Dewey, powered by Microsoft’s Live Search. Definitely not the fastest, but one of the most entertaining search interfaces!
a personal website slash blog
Monthly Archive for November, 2006
Page 2 of 5
An agreement on the INSPIRE-directive between the European Council and Parliament has been reached last night. The press release doesn’t provide many details but it looks like that public European geodata will remain where it is now:
Data search services designed for the public will generally be free of charge, although the directive allows fees to be charged for access to data that has to be updated frequently, such as weather reports.
Basically I think INSPIRE is an important step for a common European data policy. But still I wish our governments would have taken the chance of pushing the European geospatial industry by agreeing on a more courageous directive.
I didn’t know Flickr’s Camera Finder yet: browse photos by and compare any camera model used on Flickr.
Besides of being a very interesting camera guide – see what photos can be done each camera or discover some unknown potentials of your existing equipment – photo businesses will be happy about Camera Finder since they got almost a continuous photo market monitoring tool which makes any market research kind of obsolete.
My personal feature request: a Lens Finder – find, browse and compare photos taken with different lenses.
I never really got too much into YouTube, though it’s fun sometimes, you find all sorts of video clips and I often used it as resource to watch movie trailers, but never spent too much time on the site.
Liberarted films is somehow similar: film makers can publish and promote their work there, mostly shorts and indie features, while other registered users comment, tag and rate the films. As far as I understood each film is reviewed before it’s going to be published on the site. Sounds more sophisticated than YouTube. So you won’t find any Mentos-Coke light experiment, but therefore, as far as I’ve seen by now, a manageable selection of some good short films.
According to a study on behalf of the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology, 8bn EUR of potential added value lie safely behind closed doors in the form of public geodata.
A few interesting posts about the Geo Business Kongress on the German Geograffiti blog lead me to the conclusion that the aim of the European geodata policy is probably to vaporize its potential by doing nothing but creating one working group after another until some private companies have caught up, can substitute national mapping agencies and do their job with less effort and better license agreements.
I remember quite a similar study about the situation in Austria, stating an immense economic potential by freeing public geodata. What did it help? Nothing.
European geodata policy seems irrational and mainly driven by political lobbying.
Whenever I have to deal with the European Environmental Agency, I’m deeply impressed by their data service. Basically it’s very simple, no or little fancy online mapping applications, but therefore it offers fast and easy to use data searching and data browsing features. I wish more European Agencies would offer such a service. Finding the right data or indicators can be painfully and, at the worst, take ages.
Besides the downloads, a very convenient feature is that the EEA data service manages your agreements. Especially in the case of national data sets (e.g. Corine land cover) in cross-border regions it’s very useful and time saving. You select the data, fill out a form and the data service takes care about the agreement with each involved national agency. You see all given permissions and details in one single overview, without the need of finding the right person to ask in each country.
Well, finding and talking to the right person can result in new projects, but in this case I was only interested in getting the data quickly.
As you might have noticed by the new huge ad badge in my sidebar, I’m now a proud partner of Performancing. Even though it’s pretty straight-forward, you still have to add a few lines of Performancing code by hand to your WordPress theme in order to integrate Performancing into your blog.
I wanted to place Performancing somewhere on my sidebar. Since my sidebar is managed by the fantastic Widgets plugin, I was looking for a Perfomancing widget. No luck, couldn’t find one. So I quickly wrote one by myself. Well, I took an existing GPL Widget and modified it to fit my needs.
If you want to use it too, feel free to download it here.
Installation is like with any other widget: unpack and upload it to your plugins/widgets folder, activate it in your plugins menue and then drag it somewhere onto your sidebar.
There are only three Widget options to set:
- Widget title (default: Performancing Partners)
- Blog ID (obligatory! your blogid given by Performancing)
- Widget alignment (default: center)
If you have any suggestions or troubles please post them here.
Right a few days after Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft agreed on a common sitemaps standard protocoll, the Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress got an update to support Google’s new friends, besides some other improvements of course.
The Plugin automatically generates customized sitemaps in WordPress each time you update your blog. Even if it’s still in beta, it works very well. I’m using it for a couple of months now and never encountered any problems so far.
If you like web insects like robots and spiders and want to help them indexing your content than this plugin is the right thing for you.
And of course a must have for every WordPress SEO junkie!
If you’re in Vienna right now, you should cancel your plans you’ve made for the weekend and for next week:
HTU Cinéstudio is running a Captain Future marathon from today till Nov 30th, showing the entire Captain Future anime collection!
Go watch and worship the best Sci-Fi superhero ever!
[youtube kq-QBPATey0]
God, I was so addicted to that TV series when I was a child…
Just put a new item on my list: a suitcase racecar game. Looks like a fantastic meeting ice breaker! (via Boing Boing)