I know this has launched already some days ago. But I am fascinated by it nevertheless!
Googlemaps now offers 360° views of the streets of some of the major cities in the US. But not only view from selected hotspots. You can virtually „drive down“ fifth avenue by clickin on the arrows in you can see in the screen shot in the middle of the road.
Here is a cool 60 minutes video of a David Weinberger presentation on his new book „everything is miscellaneous„.
A video used to be embedded here but the service that it was hosted on has shut down.60 minutes is quite long. But it is very much inspiring, if you’re into the categorization of things, the order of information, data vs metadata, etc.
Steve Rubel writes about the changing landscape of blog search. Google killed it, he claims, and it seems plausible.
For one, there is good reason why the attractiveness of search engines like technorati has faltered:
The improvements are nice, but I have to admit that I don’t use Technorati nearly as much as I used to. Link authority was a good metric a year ago, but it’s not nearly as worthwhile today when you consider all of the centers of influence one may wish to search and track. Link authority doesn’t tell me who’s an influencer on Facebook or which video artists are rising on YouTube. It was great in 2005, ok in 2006 and really has faded from relevance in 2007. […] While we still use vertical search engines today to dig through news, blogs, video, etc., their days are numbered. The lines are blurrier. Google News, for example, has lots of blogs. More importantly, the big web search engines are going becoming sophisticated enough to make an educated guess as to what information you’re seeking. It won’t care if it comes from the live or static web. It will serve up relevance and soon time-stamped sorting.
Is there anything that will put an end to Google’s dominance? Probably not. But it was never within their own fields that big monolithic companies were beat. IBM still offers some of the best servers. Microsoft is still a quasi-Monopoly in PC OS.
Whoever „beats“ Google will have find a totally new field of activity.
By the way, I love to take sneak preview of what Google is toying with…
This guy lets people shoot at him with a paint gun via the web. It’s meant to show the daily struggle people living in Iraque face…
At YouTube you can see his VideoBlog, where he gives updates about everything, including where he’s been hit. You can see the walls being covered in paint, it’s amazingly cruel. But it certainly makes you think, and that was the point.
OK, regular blogs won’t have any influence on mostly nothing. But here is a story about Egagdget – the top blog worldwide according to technorati – which posted a story, apparently without solid research on the information, something most bloggers forget about… Only this time, it cost 4 billion dollars:
Last week, technology blog Engadget wrongly reported that the FCC had failed to grant Apple a license for its iPhone. When they published a report based on a hoax Apple employee email that was sent to the offices of Engagdet it caused a drop in Apple stock by $4 billion. When they found out their mistake, Engadget quickly apologized and stock rose again when Apple finally announced that the FCC had approved the phone. The lack of fact checking by blogs has stirred the journalist vs blogger debate yet again.
Question is: will Bloggers have to face this responsibility? Do they have the same obligations as main stream media, only because they have a similar sized readership? Before, I would have doubted this, but reading that story, I don’t know. But where do you draw the line? At a 1.000 readers per day? Or more than 1.000 links on technorati? What is the threshold for moral obligations?
TechCrunch lists the many german copycats of web 2.0 sites. Didn’t know there were so many. And it makes you wonder: How come that we moved from a nation of thinkers and inventers to a nation of copycats?
“Web 2.0†is a term that brilliantly translates around the world, but many of the sites that are commonly associated with it have a language barrier for international audiences […]. While English certainly isn’t foreign to Germans, it has still slowed their adoption – and network effects, which have been a driving force, are often tied to language and reach as well. What’s been the consequence in Deutschland? A mushrooming of German copycats that have localized and copied their US role models, sometimes down to the last pixel.
But is not only about the adoption amongst users. It is also our inhibiting environment:
In short: Germany is buzzed right now and the biggest question for the startup scene is how the many look-alikes will develop over the next year. You’ll often hear that investors are hesitant to invest in ideas that “haven’t been proven in the US yet†but there are several other factors at work here: Germany is generally more risk-averse, the bureaucracy is more cumbersome, and entrepreneurial networks like Silicon Valley aren’t as strongly developed.
Sad, but true.
Wo ich sonst so bin...