Category Archives: Google

Hans Rosling: Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you’ve ever seen

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This video is absolutely amazing!

You’ve never seen data presented like this. With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, Hans Rosling debunks myths about the so-called “developing world” using extraordinary animation software developed by his Gapminder Foundation. The Trendalyzer software (recently acquired by Google) turns complex global trends into lively animations, making decades of data pop. Asian countries, as colorful bubbles, float across the grid — toward better national health and wealth. Animated bell curves representing national income distribution squish and flatten. In Rosling’s hands, global trends — life expectancy, child mortality, poverty rates — become clear, intuitive and even playful.

You can see the Trendalyzer application running here. Thanks Patrick for the link!

How to export “shared” Google Reader items?

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If you are an avid Google Reader user (like me) you must be surely be “sharing” items that you read, for you or for your audience; in my case, you can see my recent “shared items” in the sidebar at the right side of this screen.

But can you export these shared items to a file? Google Reader does not allow you to do that from the interface, but you can use the URL below to do that. Just replace {USER_ID_HERE} by the ID of your user ID (it might require your Google authentication), and you’ll get the last 10’000 items that you shared in the form of a long Atom XML file, that you can download and store.

[source:php] http://www.google.com/reader/atom/feed/http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user/{USER_ID_HERE}/state/com.google/broadcast?r=n&n=10000 [/source]

Update, 2009-11-06: The URL has changed (thanks to Jordan Peacock for the heads-up!); try this URL instead now:

[source:php] http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user%2F{USER_ID_HERE}%2Fstate%2Fcom.google%2Fbroadcast?r=n&n=100000 [/source]

Update, 2009-11-06: Check out this project on Github, which has a set of scripts to help you download your shared items to HTML pages in your own computer for later reference.

Google Everywhere

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It all started with the search engine. I think it was sometime back in 2000, while I was working in Argentina.

av_logo.gifI was an avid everyday AltaVista user; I found it quite useful since 1996 (when I started browsing using Netscape at the University of Geneva) and I was frankly happy with it; I was not looking for another search engine. All the others I had used were not as good, so I kept using AltaVista for years. I knew how to cope with the poor result sorting, and I would usually find what I was looking for, typically as a link buried in page 4 or 5 of the search results screen. It was like that, it took time, and more often than not, I did not find what I wanted.

However, one day I saw a colleague at work looking for something at a new search engine, called “Google“. I asked her the URL, typed it on my browser, and started to use it. I haven’t stopped since. Google was (and is) amazing. It is rather unusual for me to have to go to page 2 or 3 of the search results: I usually find what I’m looking for, right in the first page. The “I’m Feeling Lucky” button is the sign that shows how smart the backend engine is (as well as the team that created it). Joel Spolsky was among the first to notice this at the time, I think.

early.png

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Have your office online

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Need to collaborate with others for the creation of some document? Need to share information with your peers? Want to stop sending those bulky (Open | MS)Office documents via e-mail?

Here’s what you need:

Lately more and more of my documents are going online. I must say that while I love Gliffy.com, I would like them to offer more export options, particularly to some other diagramming formats, such as Visio XML (as OmniGraffle does) or even dot.

But apart from that, it is a great tool! I think that this is what should have been possible to do with Java Applets, but was never possible to do. Flash appears to be a great development environment after all…

Do-it-yourself, now and then

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Beginning 1998, nearly 9 years ago, I created this tool at my former employer‘s site. It allowed customers to create their own web page, for a small fee, using all the interaction available at the time of Netscape Communicator and Internet Explorer 4. You could type some text here and there, choose some (awful, really) colors, and publish your page in a couple of minutes. A good number of people used it until 2001, when I left the company. Since then they’ve changed the graphic style of the page, but as far as I’ve seen, nothing else has changed. They have even left the 1998 Netscape and Internet Explorer logos…

And today I found Google Pages. Basically it does the same, but sooooooo much nicer and interactive and fast and coherent and AJAX and Web 2.0… Just go and play with it! You’ll love it.

Google project hosting

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This is something that existed for a while but I just did not notice, at all: http://code.google.com/hosting/. You can host there any kind of project, open source of course, and you get for free:

  • Subversion
    • Password-protected;
    • Over a secure HTTPS connection for committers;
    • Also open to others to freely checkout using HTTP;
    • Browsable online, using something similar to websvn.
  • Issue tracking

Very neat! However, if I could make a wish, the only things that I would like to see there in the future are:

  • A wiki;
  • A project planner, similar to Trac.

I will upload there some of my own projects, for sure!