Matthew Gifford

Portland was added to Google Maps street view today. Here is a shot of my MINI next to Ryan’s red Rabbit.

A week or two ago, I ran across a song from the new Menomena album. I thought it was good, but wasn’t totally sure that I’d like the entire album. Today, Jason Calacanis wrote about Hype Machine, a site that allows you to search songs posted to music blogs. A search for “menomena” brought up two other songs from their new album. Now I definitely want to buy it.

It’s too bad that it’s probably going to end up being shut down by the music industry. Because, you know, helping people find new music hurts the music industry.

I doubt that this news will directly affect any of my regular readers. However, when a company breaches the trust of its users on this scale, it needs to be disseminated as widely as possible.

AOL must have missed the uproar over the DOJ’s demand for “anonymized” search data last year that caused all sorts of pain for Microsoft and Google. That’s the only way to explain their release of data that includes 20 million web queries from 650,000 AOL users.

The data includes all searches from those users for a three month period this year, as well as whether they clicked on a result, what that result was and where it appeared on the result page.

If you searched for something on AOL this year, you might want to think about what keywords you used and which links you clicked on.

gada.be is the site that I said Chris Pirillo would be unveilling two weeks ago. It’s a really cool metasearch tool that allows you to subscribe to searches from several different sources. The really cool thing is that it generates an OPML document of all the feeds so you can subscribe to all of them at once.

On June 28th, I wrote the following about Google Video:

However, I have to say that once again Google has disappointed by creating a Windows-only product. This is especially confusing considering that the Google Video Viewer is based on VLC, which runs on just about every operating system on the planet.

Today, my coworker Rudy pointed out that you no longer need to download the viewer to watch the videos. I have to say that I’m impressed by the changes.

Steve Rubel discovered that Yahoo is testing an RSS search application. (via Scripting News)

So, the long-awaited iTunes 4.9 was released this week. It’s another sign that RSS and podcasting are all grown up now. It’s another blow against “old media”, which I think is a great thing. Of course, this has its downsides, too. Apple hasn’t done much to acknowledge the people who actually did all the heavy lifting. If the iTunes Music Store were your first exposure to podcasting, you might think it was all brought to you by Apple, ESPN, ABC, and Adam Curry. (This is not a jab at Adam. It’s a jab at the people who think he is the first and last word in podcasting.)

And that funky RSS extension spec. Ugh. First of all, why did Apple choose to publish it as a PDF? Last time I checked, it was pretty easy to use HTML to make black and white documents with unreasonably small fonts. Google was able to do it. Either way, be sure to bring your microscope.

Sam Ruby, one of the authors of the FeedValidator, asks:

What happens when the authors of the FeedValidator can’t decipher a specification?

What about the average developer? Ideally, they try to start a conversation with the spec’s author(s) to try to get some clarification or suggest improvements. The problem is that Apple has no developer blogs. No wiki for the spec. Nothing that would indicate that they’re interested in working with the developers in the trenches. I hate to say it, but there are some people at Microsoft who are doing this much better than Apple. They came to Gnomedex to speak with people about what they were doing. After taking their lumps, they set up a wiki and proposed a change to their spec. Yes, Microsoft is still Borg, but there is progress being made. (I don’t want to go too far with my praise for Microsoft, however. They are trying to buy the company formerly known as Gator, after all.)

In the absence of being able to communicate with the spec’s authors, what can developers do? Some will choose to ignore the spec. Others will do the best they can to implement it and hope things work out. I’ll probably end up falling into the latter group. The marketing types are very excited about podcasting these days. Of course, things don’t always work out how you want them to. We implemented Yahoo’s Media RSS module on a couple of our sites several months ago. To date, we have seen zero results from this effort. As far as we can tell, we have implemented the spec correctly. There is no validator. Yahoo’s bot reads our feeds every day. But our videos never show up in their video search, even if you search for our company’s name. I spoke with someone from Yahoo about this at Gnomedex. We’re definitely not the only ones who are having problems. So now you have my business card, Yahoo. This is a test.

Today Google launched (via Boing Boing) the Google Video Viewer, which allows you to view videos in its video search. The company I work for participated in Google’s video upload program, hoping that would help our clients. Based on the relatively small number of videos in the database, I’m sure it will. However, I have to say that once again Google has disappointed by creating a Windows-only product. This is especially confusing considering that the Google Video Viewer is based on VLC, which runs on just about every operating system on the planet.

Clay Shirky’s latest essay on classifying information is a must-read for anyone interested in search, directories, tagging, or similar subjects.

spotlight.rb is a small Ruby program that I threw together a few weeks ago. It allows you to perform Spotlight searches and launch items returned by those searches from the command line. I’m not sure if it will actually be useful to anyone. I just thought it would be fun to make.

If you’d like to try it out:

1. Make sure you’re running Mac OS X 10.4
2. Download the program
3. Unzip the archive
4. Open a terminal window and change the directory to the location of the program
5. Type ruby spotlight.rb

The program understands the following commands:

• s or search: Searches Spotlight for the string following the command. For example, s opml.
• f or forward: Displays the next twenty results of the search.
• b or back: Displays the previous twenty results of the search.
• q or quit: Ends the program.
• To launch one of the results of the search, simply type the number of the result.

If you find spotlight.rb useful and would like to see it developed further, let me know. Please keep in mind that this is only my second Ruby script.