|
Tips for Linking to Google Presentations
If you publish a presentation at Google Docs, you'll receive a simple URL that can be used to view the presentation online. Unfortunately, if you go to that URL without being logged in to a Google Account, Google will ask you to log in:
The explanation is that Google Presentations offers some advanced features that require authentication: chatting with other people that view the presentation and joining a presentation that's already in progress. To view the presentation without logging in, click on the small link from the bottom of the page: "View published presentation in a new window".
If you want to link directly to the presentation and skip the authentication page, just add "&skipauth=true" to the URL provided by Google and replace "Presentation" with "Present". Here's an example.
URL provided by Google:
http://docs.google.com/Presentation?docid=ID
Modified URL:
http://docs.google.com/Present?docid=ID&skipauth=true
(replace ID with the presentation's ID)
Most people will also want to download the presentation, but Google doesn't offer this feature in the view-only interface. You can link to the PPT file by using this format:
http://docs.google.com/MiscCommands?command=saveasdoc&exportFormat=ppt&docid=ID
Sun, 11 May 2008 16:25:06 +0200
Yahoo Search's Differential Features
Yahoo's strategy to increase the search market share is to add features that can't be found at Google or somewhere else. The problem is that these features need to be distinctive and useful enough to attract the attention and make people switch to Yahoo or at least use it a secondary search engine.
The first innovative feature added by Yahoo was Search Assistant, an integrated pane that combined autocomplete and related searches. Search Assistant was heavily inspired by Ask.com's left sidebar, but it included a distinctive feature that made it less obtrusive: the pane is only displayed if you stop typing for a couple of seconds or when your typing slows.
Google also tests a query suggestion feature and places a list of related searches at the top of the page, but Yahoo's implementation is more interesting.
This week, Yahoo started to add SiteAdvisor's warnings next to search results. "Safety ratings from McAfee SiteAdvisor are based on automated safety tests of Web sites and are enhanced by feedback from volunteer reviewers". Yahoo only shows warnings next to sites that use browser exploits, offer malicious software or send spam. Google also shows warnings next to web pages that may install malicious software, but McAfee SiteAdvisor seems to offer a more comprehensive protection and more information about the potential threats (you can also install a plug-in for IE or Firefox that works with the most popular search engines or manually find the testing results for a site).
Probably the most impressive new feature in Yahoo Search and the only one that's not yet live is SearchMonkey (an unfortunate play on GreaseMonkey), a way for site owners to enrich the snippets with structured information. "Site owners will be able to provide all types of additional information about their site directly to Yahoo! Search. So instead of a simple title, abstract and URL, for the first time users will see rich results that incorporate the massive amount of data buried in websites -- ratings and reviews, images, deep links, and all kinds of other useful data -- directly on the Yahoo! Search results page."
Yahoo uses semantic web standards to retrieve structured information from web sites, but users are the ones who decide if they want richer search results from a site. Yahoo will support a small number of microformats (hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom, XFN), "some of the vocabulary of Dublin Core, Creative Commons, FOAF, GeoRSS, and MediaRSS, as well as RDFa, eRDF, and the OpenSearch specification".
Google chose a different approach - plus boxes that show additional information automatically detected: addresses, stock symbols, products etc. Google also lets you add subscribed links to search results pages, but very few sites took advantage of this feature.
If Yahoo manages to promote these features and site owners build interesting applications for SearchMonkey, people might discover that Yahoo has a pretty good search engine and search is not synonymous with Google. Exploring different ways to present search results will lead to a better user experience and to an improvement for all search engines, since the best features are usually copied by all of them. Yahoo Search hopes to become a serious alternative to Google by having a distinctive voice, but the history of Ask.com or Opera shows that being innovative is not the only necessary ingredient for becoming popular.
Sun, 11 May 2008 15:18:41 +0200
Reorder iGoogle Tabs
iGoogle finally offers a way to reorder tabs: just go to google.com/ig/settings and use the arrows displayed next to each tab name in the Content section. This solution is not very elegant, compared to other services like Netvibes, where you can reorder the tabs using drag and drop.
If you're wondering how to access the settings page from iGoogle, click on the small arrow displayed next to the name of the current tab and select "Edit this tab". The settings page is also the place where you can select your location, choose to automatically open links in a new tab, change the name and the layout of a tab or backup the iGoogle page. Oh, and don't forget to click on the barely noticeable Save button every time you change the settings of a tab.
It's amazing to see how simple and intuitive Netvibes' interface can be: the tabs can be reordered using drag and drop, tab names can be changed using a simple click and switching between different tabs doesn't reload the page. iGoogle still has a lot to learn from Netvibes in terms of user friendliness.
Sat, 10 May 2008 17:01:37 +0200
Using Google's N-Gram Corpus
Two years ago, Google released a collection of n-grams from web pages and made it available on Linguistic Data Consortium's website. "We processed 1,024,908,267,229 words of running text and are publishing the counts for all 1,176,470,663 five-word sequences that appear at least 40 times. There are 13,588,391 unique words, after discarding words that appear less than 200 times." Here are some examples of 3-grams, followed by their frequencies:
ceramics collectables collectibles 55
ceramics collectables fine 130
ceramics collected by 52
While this huge corpora is useful to build linguistic models, there are other ways to use it. Chris Harrison created some visualizations for bigrams and trigrams that start with pronouns. "These visual comparisons allow us to see differences in how the two subjects are used - both where they are similar and diverge. For example, among the top 120 trigrams, 'He' and 'She' have many common second words. However, they differ on some interesting ones, for example, only 'he' connects to 'argues', while only 'she' connects to 'love'."
Chris DiBona from Google works on IsolWrite, a word processing program that will include a text prediction option. "I gotta get my greasy hands on an open version of our published n-gram data (which is ranked) and incorporate that, if it makes sense."
{ via information aesthetics }
Fri, 09 May 2008 23:13:37 +0200
Picasa's Hello Discontinued
Hello, Picasa's obscure instant messenger, has been discontinued and will be completely shut down on May 15th. Hello's last major update was released in January 2005, six months after Picasa was acquired by Google.
According to its site, "Hello is a program that lets you connect directly with your friends to share your digital pictures. (...) With Hello, you just pick what pictures you want to show off, and click Send. That's it. Hello takes care of all the hard work. And you and your friends can download full resolution, print-quality pictures from each other, while you're doing more important things, like talking about your pictures. (...) With Hello's file sharing technology, [your friends] only have to download high quality versions of the [pictures] they really like. Everything else comes in at a smaller size, optimized for viewing on-screen."
"Hello enables users to instantly share images securely over a peer-to-peer network and chat about them. Hello currently has more than 250,000 users and can be used with or without Picasa, the company's flagship digital photo organizing software," mentioned Picasa in a press release from May 2004. It would be interesting to know the number of active users as of today, but it's probably much lower than 250,000.
The instant messenger was integrated with Picasa, so you could select the photos from Picasa and send them to Hello, but also view in Picasa the pictures you receive. Like Picasa, Hello was easy to use and shared the same clean interface. Despite its usefulness, Hello should have been a feature in a more powerful IM client, not a stand-alone application.
If you haven't tried Hello, you can still download the application from http://updates.picasa.com/hello/651/Hello651.exe. You and all your contacts need to have Picasa accounts. According to hello.com, you can still use the application one more week.
Here's Hello's goodbye:
"We originally embarked on a mission to make photo sharing easier and more fun with Hello. We plan to keep carrying that torch in new projects to come. We hope that you continue to enjoy the other sharing products Google offers including Picasa, Picasa Web Albums and Google Talk."
and here are some reactions:
"I live on Hello because it allows me as a designer to show my clients the screen I am working on real time. It also allows me to communicate with other designers who work for my business and mentor them through the design process, or get myself some mentoring!"
"i credit hello for leading to some very good friendships of mine all over the US, and i credit hello for my transition from crafter to artist. i do not want to lose this program."
"PLEASE reconsider the decision to shut down Hello. It is an invaluable tool for the digital scrapbook community, especially the designers. I can't imagine what I would do without the ease Hello provides to show off screen shots and get critique on my Designs."
"I use Hello daily in conversation and to share photos with family members out of state. It has also been very useful in learning and teaching applications by using real time screen shots. There just isn't anything else that compares that is so easy to use!"
"My mother who has no idea what IM even stands for, uses Hello everyday. We send her pictures of her grandkids, she shows us pictures she's taken, its awesome! She only uses it because it is simple and user friendly. IM programs like Google Talk, Yahoo, MSN or Goober are way too complex for her to figure out and I doubt she is the only one in this situation."
{ via Google Blogoscoped }
Fri, 09 May 2008 11:25:26 +0200
|
