Gears

Google Buzz and hybrid blogging - O'Reilly Radar Tim O’Reilly and DeWitt Clinton are both experimenting with Google Buzz as a long form — well, longer form — publishing tool. It’s an interesting adaptation for Buzz, and I think they’re on to something. Here’s why: Blogs are great for getting people to a site. A fall sweep We aspire to build great products that really change people’s lives, products they use two or three times a day. To succeed you need real focus and thought—thought about what you work on and, just as important, what you don’t work on. It’s why we recently decided to shut down some products, and turn others into features of existing products. Here’s the latest update on what’s happening: Code Search, which was designed to help people search for open source code all over the web, will be shut down along with the Code Search API on January 15, 2012.

What is Pack-Rat? - « Back to Help Center Packrat is a feature that gives you unlimited deletion recovery and version history. By default, Dropbox saves a history of all deleted and earlier versions of files for 30 days for all Dropbox accounts. If you purchase the Packrat add-on for your account, Dropbox will save your files for as long as you have the feature, so you won't have to worry about losing a deleted folder or file. Packrat is available to all Dropbox Pro accounts for $3.99 per month or $39.00 per year, depending on your billing cycle. It is included without any additional cost for all Dropbox for Business accounts.

Vision Statement: Mapping the Social Internet Analysis by Mikolaj Jan Piskorski; visualization by Tommy McCall Click here for a larger image of the graphic. Blogs. A fall spring-clean Technology improves, people’s needs change, some bets pay off and others don’t. So, as Larry previewed on our last earnings call, today we’re having a fall spring-clean at Google. Over the next few months we’ll be shutting down a number of products and merging others into existing products as features. The list is below. Judge orders defendant to decrypt laptop The judge ordered the accused woman to surrender an unencrypted hard drive by February 21. Colorado woman accused of bank fraud ordered to allow prosecutors accessJudge Robert Blackburn rules that Fifth Amendment protection does not applyPrevious case involving child pornography resulted in the same ruling (WIRED) -- A judge on Monday ordered a Colorado woman to decrypt her laptop computer so prosecutors can use the files against her in a criminal case.

Visualizing the Wikileaks Data A group of hackademics took the Wikileaks activity data from the Afghanistan war and mapped it, creating a video visualization of the events. The 91,000 documents track events including friendly fire and civilian injuries and death over the course of the last six years. According to Mike Dewar, a post-doc student at Columbia University's School of Engineering, the heatmap, which runs at ten days per second, was based on the "number of events logged in a small region of the map over a 1 month window." "The intensity of the heatmap represents the number of events logged.

Google Desktop Update In 2004, Google launched Google Desktop, a program designed to make it easy for users to search their own PCs for emails, files, music, photos, Web pages and more. Desktop has been used by tens of millions of people and we’ve been humbled by its usage and great user feedback. However, over the past seven years we’ve also witnessed some big changes in how users store and access their own data, with many moving to web-based applications. There has been a significant shift from local to cloud-based storage and computing, as well as integration of Google Desktop functionality (like local search) into most modern operating systems.

BEinGRID - Business Experiments in Grid: BEinGRID BEinGRID, Business Experiments in GRID, conducted real-world experiments to provide, use and validate Grid technologies to meet today’s business challenges. Launched in June 2006 and completing in late 2009, BEinGRID was at the time the European Union’s largest integrated project funded by the Information Society Technologies (IST), part of the European Union’s sixth research Framework Programme (FP6). A large consortium of 98 diverse industry and academia partners drove the project, where small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) collaborated directly with the continent’s leading R&D centers. The BEinGRID project identified clear business needs to be met by Grid technologies. Its 25 business pilots - covering industrial sectors such as finance, architecture, advanced manufacturing, agriculture and health - focused on solving real problems using different Grid technology solutions for collaboration, performance and enabling new services.

Update on Slide's products and our commitment to our users We wanted to give you all advance notice that in the coming months, a number of Slide's products and applications will be retired. This includes Slide's products such as Slideshow and SuperPoke! Pets, as well as more recent products such as Photovine, Video Inbox and Pool Party. Mob-sourcing: the prejudice of crowds As more web content is crowd sourced and crowd moderated, are we seeing only the wisdom of crowds? No, we're also seeing their prejudice. The Internet reflects both the good and ugly in human nature. Mob-erating the web Over the weekend I listed some stuff on Craigslist. PowerMeter We launched Google PowerMeter as a free energy monitoring tool to raise awareness about the importance of giving people access to their energy information. PowerMeter included key features like visualizations of your energy usage, the ability share information with others, and personalized recommendations to save energy. We partnered with device manufacturers and utilities around the world. Many of our partners now have new options available for accessing energy information.