Techhawking

Remember googles innovative image labeler idea ? They seem to be doing it again with getting the masses to build maps for Google in india. India unlike US and many other western countries doesn’t have well documented maps for its streets. Eicher is the only organization I know about which actively maps and provides printed maps in india.

Here is what Braddy Forrest has to say…

“Google has been sending GPS kits to India that enable locals to make more detailed maps of their area. After the data has been uploaded and then verified against other participant’s data it becomes a part of the map. The process is very reminiscent of what Open Street Map, the community map-building project, has been doing. The biggest difference is that the data (to my knowledge) is owned by Google and is not freely available back to the community like it is with OSM.”

Am I the first one to figure out that google now has “customized driving directions” ? This is really cool… I always wanted to see how much longer or shorter a specific route is/can be. Now I can.

Google started it, but sitemaps has since been adopted by most of the large search organizations out there. If you own a website, and have a lot of static content, you probably should be investigating at creating and updating sitemap on regular basis.

Sitemap is basically an XML file which describes the contents and change frequency of the site. If you ever had pages hidden deep inside your website which were not getting indexed before, sitemaps is an excellent way of advertising those pages to the search engine.

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site. Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.

Google has released a newer version of Google Talk. This one allows you to leave Voicemails.

File and photo sharing in Google Talk works like you’d expect: Simple, fast, and fun. Simplicity means that you can drag and drop one or more files directly onto a chat window. As soon as your friend clicks ‘Accept’, the bits will start flowing. When the transfer completes, the recipient can open the file or find it on disk with a single click.

File transfer is fast. Google Talk makes a direct connection to your friend’s computer whenever possible, enabling the fastest speed available. And even if your super-secure firewall won’t allow a direct connection, we’ll still get it there at a decent speed, because we’re nice like that.

Photo sharing is fun! When you drop up to 10 photos on Google Talk, smaller previews automatically appear right inside the chat window, so you can chat about them right away. The previews adjust to the size of your chat window, so just enlarge the window when you want to see more detail. To view the images at full size, or to save them for later, click the ‘Download Originals’ link.

Google checkout is out, and as expected its so lean and mean that I couldn’t figure out if it was actually a new google component. With froogle already in place, Google checkout can cash on the goodwill people have for its froogle service. I think this news is a big one for other business organizations, but probably isn’t as significant for end user.

Remember Microsoft Passport ? Now think Google Single Sign on. I noticed a story about it being released and pulled yesterday due to some unkown reason. Personally I’ve always supported Federated authentication system, because it can reduce security problems due to reduced number of passwords one needs to remember. However, using a 3rd party single signon over which we have no control is like the government trying to control/monitor our income. That being said I’m still ready to subject myself to Google’s Single sign on if it reduces security risks.