http://google.com/insights/search/
Six Degrees of Wikipedia Ever heard of the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon? If you haven't, it works like this: Every actor gets a Kevin Bacon number. Kevin Bacon has a Kevin Bacon number of 0, actors who were in a movie with Kevin Bacon get a Kevin Bacon number of 1, actors who were in a movie with someone who has a Kevin Bacon number 1 get a 2, and so on (Everybody always gets the smallest number possible, so if you were in a film with two people, one with a 4 and one with a 6, your Kevin Bacon number would be 5). The same idea could apply to the articles Wikipedia.
Cystats: Our new favorite Wordpress Statistics Plugin We just found the new WordPress statistics plugin Cystats, and have fallen in love with it. This is a powerful little tool that we found searching through the 83 statistics plugins listed in the WordPress directory. It’s so powerful that it even has stuff that Google Web Analytics doesn’t have- and displays it all, in your dashboard to help you analyze your WordPress site. Cystats plugin is easy to install and set up;upload the files to your wp-content/plugins directory, and then activate it in the backend. Exploring Old Rome Without Air (or Time) Travel Soaring above a virtual reconstruction of the Forum and the Palatine Hill or zooming into the Colosseum to get a lion’s-eye view of the stands, Google Earth’s 400 million users will be able to explore the ancient capital as easily “as any city can be explored today,” Michael T. Jones, chief technology officer of Google Earth, said Wednesday at a news conference at Rome’s city hall. Ancient Rome 3D, as the new feature is known, is a digital elaboration of some 7,000 buildings recreating Rome circa A.D. 320, at the height of Constantine’s empire, when more than a million inhabitants lived within the city’s Aurelian walls. In Google Earth-speak it is a “layer” to which visitors gain access through its Gallery database of images and information. “In this case the layer is above ground and not below where it should be” from an archaeological point of view, said Bernard Frischer, the director of the ’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities.
Fifty Ways to Take Notes I am constantly writing notes. Whether it be for my blog, work, meeting, new ideas, or just basic notes, I am always jotting something down. So I started thinking about all the services I’ve used for taking notes and thought it would be a good idea to share them with you and while I’m at it, to make a list of any others that I find.
The Twitalyzer for Tracking Influence and Measuring Success in T Twitalyzer's Data Use and Privacy Policy Twitalyzer makes use of publicly available data in all cases, regardless of source. We rely on public Twitter streams, publicly available data from Klout, PeerIndex, and Rapleaf, and reserve the right to add other data from the public domain from time to time. We do not use direct messages or any other type of private information in any of our processing or reporting. Google Sets Its Sights On Your Sight Google has published a bit of an insider’s look on how the company conducts eye-tracking studies to evaluate the effectiveness of its search results. In addition to holding interviews, field studies and live experiments to improve the usability of its products, Google has special hardware and software that tracks test participants’ eyeballs as they scan results for the perfect link. The official blog post doesn’t detail any groundbreaking discoveries that have been produced by this testing technique. It sounds as though it has mostly helped Google confirm the obvious: that the first few results it returns are indeed usually the most relevant, and its so-called “universal search” effort (where it mixes rich media results like images and video thumbnails among the standard text results) doesn’t distract users too much but has actually proven rather useful. Perhaps most intriguing is the following video provided by Google that shows how quickly users glance around result pages:
GMDesk GMDesk is an application that lets you run Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Maps as a stand-alone application to do all your mail handling, calendar event reading etc with. No need to open it up in a web browser, or have it clutter your workspace. Fire up GMDesk, and just alt-tab (on Windows or Linux) or Cmd-tab (on Mac) to shift between this application and the other ones you are running. GMDesk offers an easy menu as well as keyboard shortcuts to switch between different Google services, and you can specify what default service you want the application to start with. Google’s PowerMeter Project: For When The Web’s Data Is Not Enough Google has announced its plan to help consumers gain better information about their personal electricity usage. The plan, which is listed on Google’s philanthropic website, promotes the adoption of smart electricity meters in homes across the world. These smart meters are better than regular meters because they can provide detailed information about usage rates throughout the day, theoretically letting consumers make smarter decisions about when to leave the lights on or when to run the dryer. But since installing these devices in homes won’t automatically make the information they gather available to users, Google is also developing a software tool called Google PowerMeter (presumably a web app) that puts this information at people’s finger tips. We can only guess that the graph below is something that this application would produce, since Google hasn’t showed any of it off to the general public yet.
Marissa Mayer On Charlie Rose: The Future Of Google, Future Of Search Charlie Rose, who’s been focusing lately on Silicon Valley personalities, interviewed Google Vice President Marissa Mayer last night. In a long and broad ranging discussion, Marissa talks about the product development cycle at Google as well as the future of search and other key areas of technology. At one point in the interview Rose ask Mayer about Yahoo. Her diplomatic answer – an independent Yahoo is best for the web. She also says the biggest problem facing them is their loss of human talent over the last couple of years.