David Carrington

Bryan Person heard about it from Marketing Over Coffee and thinks it’s a good idea, as do his two commenters. Bill Deys wrote about it too.

Scoble refuses to not do it:

“My link blog is for keeping what I think are the most important RSS items of the day, including mine.”

The positive side of doing it is that you’re potentially pushing your blog into more people’s RSS readers. The only negative feedback I’ve read so far consists of one of these two arguments:

• Duplicates - This is reasonable, hopefully Google Reader is now smart enough not to show an item twice. If not, it’s probably something they’re trying to do.
• “I don’t like your blog” - People saying this have a fair point. For now, their only choice is to put up with it or unsubscribe.

I’m personally going to add this to my own Shared Items (david.carrington AT gmail DOT com if that helps).

I’ve used Google Reader for ages, and I’ve been using GTalk with Nick for ages. Annoyingly, Reader flat-out refuses to let me add Nick as a friend to see his shared items in the new interface.

Since then, I’ve managed to add Scoble and Chris F. Masse, but still no Nick! Does Google not like him? Has he offended somebody?

Here’s what I’ve tried so far:

1. Removing him from GTalk and re-adding
2. Deleting the whole GMail contact and re-adding

What can I try next?

Google Reader has become slightly more social lately with the addition of recommended feeds. I’ve just come across another tweak to the interface which helps a bit with the social aspect: a Shared Items improvement.

The screenshot above shows that not only did Scoble share the feed item in question, but my colleague Nick Clarke also shared it. Previously, this would have come up as two items for me to read, once in Nick’s shared items feed and again in Scoble’s feed.

This is a slight step forward to the point where items with more “shares” are promoted for reading. I don’t think there’s a current interface to accomplish this though.

Google Blog is covering Gmail’s latest new feature: AIM support. Has anyone else noticed that this isn’t new at all? I’ve been using Gmail (or more specifically, GTalk) for ICQ and MSN since January 2006. I don’t have any need for AIM, but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t add that too.

I’ve already got Gmail storing my MSN logs, my ICQ logs, and everything else. Pretty much all Google have accomplished here is to a) sign a deal with AOL to create an official Jabber transport for AIM, and b) change the Gmail interface slightly.

I’m not all negative though! With Google comes stability. I’ve had to switch Jabber transports quite a few times for MSN, since I’ve had trouble finding stable servers. I’d really appreciate if Google could create a stable transport for MSN and offer that out in the same way.

After looking through various KML samples on the web during lunch today, I spent a little time experimenting with converting my existing location data into something that Google Earth could read - allowing people to track my location in real time.

Manual labour

About 6 times per day, I press a button on my phone and it sends a text message to my website with my current cell tower ID. My website then takes over and does all the smart stuff by itself. If I’ve traveled somewhere new, it automatically looks up the cell ID in a large UK database using their API to find the latitude and longitude of the cell tower I’m currently connected to. But big decimal numbers showing my current latitude and longitude aren’t all that interesting on their own.

Sidebar widget

The next step in my process was to add the widget on the side of my website to show everyone my current location. It’s not particularly fascinating - either I’m in my home town, at work, or traveling somewhere in between. But I’ve just added something a little more interesting.

Google Earth

Whereas before the link on my current location just took you to the coordinates where I’m currently sat, it will now load up a KML file showing a nice picture of a man standing on my current location, and hopefully a number of little cell towers which will show where I’ve been over the last 7 days.

The historic data isn’t all that interesting in Google Maps, but if you open up My KML file in Google Earth then you’re exposed to seeing the timeline control and you can choose to see where I was at different times and even animate my location over time.

What’s next?

I’ve got a habit of always wanting to do more.  I’ve cleaned up my location database so I could add in other locations (i.e. not just cell towers) and try plotting even more data. I’d like to try the following:

• Load up GPS data for any hikes I go on
• Add a few key locations onto the map such as the Scout hut, my brother’s place in Canada, anything relevant to me
• Add some kind of refresh so that it updates automatically when I’m on the move
• Create some kind of JavScript timeline interface for Google Maps