Custom WordPress Theme Design

I am sure you have heard by now about Google’s Video Search, but it is much more then just a video search. Here is what Google says:

Our mission is to organize the world’s information, and that includes the thousands of programs that play on our TVs every day. Google Video enables you to search a growing archive of televised content – everything from sports to dinosaur documentaries to news shows.

To this end Google has created a in-browser video playback proggy Windows Only ) based on VLC. I’ve used for a number of years when it was my only option, here’s hoping that with Google’s backing in can turn into a world class media player.

One of the most interesting features is that video producers can charge for their videos. As of now they are only making available the free videos. One caveat - even the free video may not be free for end users if “you upload a high definition file that’s 500 MB and it becomes extremely popular” then Google plans to charge end users and keep the fees to cover expenses.

As I have pontificated previously, I think that the interweb has the potential to transform TV, movies, etc. For just one example ( and as an example of why P2P is not the devil ) see Global Frequency.

I’ve uploaded my first video and it has been accepted. Details to follow.

Looks like JD and I were both quoted by Wired.com on their story about tag cloud:

“I’m a big fan of the whole folksonomy thing,” said James Kendall, who writes the Online Music Blog. “But I do think this is innovative in that I don’t know of any other services where you can go and with a couple clicks build this and put it on your site.”

Not the most eloquent phrase I have ever uttered…

Yep, I whipped up a new theme for This damn Blog, like it? I had to hack some PHP as well as CSS so if something does not work quite right please let me know.

And the colors are kinda wonky ( damn gifs, png’s turned out to be way too large ) depending on what browser, monitor, color depth, etc. that you looking at it with. Unless you are looking at it on a Mac, and then it looks just right…

Back in the day, all of the search engines ( Altavista, Infoseek, etc. ) wanted to become portals and become sticky. So they poured millions into free e-mail, shopping apps, horoscopes, stock quotes, you name it - and they lost their users to an upstart that focused on search.

Fast forward to the present - I was reading this ZDNet analysis about Yahoo! and Google and it, and the second hand insider info that I have been getting about Yahoo! lately got me thinking about the original portal ( Yahoo! ) and the search engine that kicked the portals collective asses that is slowly but surely morphing into a portal.

Google is obviously the media darling at this point - and it has a larger market cap - but imho Yahoo! is catching up in search and Google looks like it is starting to move away from its single minded focus on search. search.Yahoo!.com is really pretty good, in fact in some of my admittedly non-scientific tests it performed even better than Google.

Beyond search, both companies are buying up smaller companies - some obvious ( blogger, flickr, overture, etc. ) others make you wonder ( blo.gs, Picasa, etc. ) but more interesting to me is the homegrown apps of both companies. Yahoo! 360° is not a serious blogging tool as of yet, but the combination of blog and social network is indeed a good idea. Google’s desktop search, Web Accelerator, and even Froogle are interesting if not ground breaking.

Google’s Acquisitions and beta services have a number of folks theorizing about the Google Browser and even the Google OS. It does seem to me that Google is planning some sort of platform.

Yahoo!’s new CEO seems to want to make Yahoo! the web’s media destination, and that is not a bad idea, but it is yet to be seen how this will jive with being a web portal. Often overlooked is the depth of Yahoo!’s services, for instance just the number of users playing games at Yahoo! at any one time is impressive - not to mention Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Stores, etc.

There is no way that I can positively know this - but my feeling is that the culture and atmosphere at Google is more conducive to innovation. Google’s policy of giving its engineers 20% of their time to work on a pet project combined with some recent second hand info that I got about the inner working at Yahoo! confirm this in my mind.

All of this ignores Microsoft’s online offerings. While MS is at best the number three destination site on the web, it has the money to continue to get it wrong and continue to try again. The new homegrown MS search is not as good as Google or Yahoo!’s search, and it’s news service is not very good at all - but you gotta figure that they are not going to throw in the towel and let Google and or Yahoo! be the standard bearer.

With all of the services, acquisitions, and new technologies, the bottom line for me is search. Sure, I like Gmail, and blogger is a good service ( except, why can’t you give your poor bloggers an rss feed standard? ) and I’ve played fantasy football at Yahoo! - but what I really want is quality search results.

And I have news for both of these companies - neither of your search technologies is good enough. Search is still in its infancy, make it better - index everything and return the best of exactly what I am looking for - quickly. Don’t get so enamored with the hollywoodization of the web or creating a web platform to compete with Windows that you forget the lessons of Infoseek.

I have been using 37 Signals Backpack for a while now, and I have to say that it is as advertised: Simple software that does just what you need. It’s easy to use and does help one get organized. I have tons of digital flotsam scattered across /home directories, websites, email, etc. Once I started pulling all that data together and being able to access it in one location I was not only saving allot of time, but I had a better handle on what I was working on.

Conversely I found Basecamp, 37 Signals project management software cumbersome and unwieldily. It definitely did not do what I needed and just what I needed. In fact it did things that I didn’t need and did not have some of the functionality that it’s little brother - Backpack - does.

So I use Backpack to keep my projects organized, the only problem is that 37 Signals terms say that you cannot share you Backpack account, so even if you like it better ( and are paying $20 a month for the premium version ) then Basecamp you have to use software that does not fit your needs as well if you want to have multiple people login to your backpack account.

So it is not exactly just what I needed….

JD has created a cool little app called GCensus based on the U.S. Census data and Google Maps:

The map tool that is located on the home page of this site is a combination of technologies. The map and all of the images belong to Google and come from maps.google.com. The data is extracted from the 2000 United States Census and can be downloaded from www.census.gov.

JD recently completed his Masters program at The University of Mississippi where one of the projects was processing large quantities of data and Google had just released its map technology. The two were a perfect match and GCensus is the result.

The Ninja has done it again, he has turned his wildly popular Yahoo! News Tag Soup into a service called Tag Cloud:

A working product showing off the cool stuff that can happen when folks, in this case Yahoo! opens up content and services for a developer to use in his own applications. Folksonomies & Tagging are all the rage lately (See Flickr and del.icio.us for the most popular examples), so we thought it would be fun to see what happens when you automate the process.

Way to go John, too bad you weren’t given the time and resourses to do cool stuff like this while you were at D2, if so, maybe there would still be a D2… You can see an example of this in action here.

Update:

I asked John if he thought it would scale:

ok, let’s answer your questions. i think it’ll scale. Database is normalized. I don’t fetch anything I don’t need to. Yahoo API allows 5000 calls per IP per 24 hours, so I have a round robin system that uses a table of servers. It knows how many calls each server has made, and optimizes. I wrote the remote fetch script to take an interface parameter, so for instance, I installed it on one server with 23 IPs. I only had to install the script once.

Then I asked him what customization he was planning:

As far as customization, eventually I’ll do something like adsense ad customization, but for now, I think some well written css tutorials will suffice. I also want to add a parameter so that you can specify a number of results. So if you only want a tiny cloud, you could add /25 to the url and get only that number of tags.

I’ve just posted a new contest on Online Music Blog - we teamed up with Awaken to give away 5 $250 gift certificates.

Awaken converts your CD collection into an organized digital music library - and $250 goes a long way at Awaken, have them rip and organize hundreds of CD’s for you. Sign up now, the drawing is on June 26th.