Writing on feeds, search, widgets, and the social web.

Niall Kennedy's weblog, newest first. Page 16 of 72.

Blog*Spot, Hammertime

MC Hammer is now a blogger and podcaster. He signs off each post with “–Hammertime.” Video on demand will allow you to see my art, my life and work on demand and without the infection of those who have hidden agendas. This is the revolution and it is on demand. There is no stopping this movement and you can’t contain it. The music was built from the vibrations and the call of the people.We will dance. Hammer talks about his huge dance pants and plans to launch instructional dance videos. The videos and blog posts had me laughing in…

One hallway at Google

I was walking around Google tonight after a party and noticed Udi Manber, formerly of A9, working late. A few offices down from Udi was Andy Hertzfeld. That’s just one hallway in Building 43 but I’m sure there are seriously smart people all over the place. I kept an eye out for Guido but no luck….

Linuxcaffe serves up coffee and Ubuntu

Linuxcaffe is a small Toronto café with free WiFi, organic food, and lessons in Python and Ubuntu with a view of the park. You can burn any of over 80 linux distributions, rent a laptop, and become a member of the café with benefits such as hard drive backup privileges and web hosting. It’s serving the community in unique ways and has become a geek tourist landmark. I especially like the membership features of the café similar to what I proposed in my elements of an ideal café blog post a few months ago. Photo by mtl3p Tags: internetcafe…

Making technology simple

As Silicon Valley debates the worthiness of Ajax vs. Flash and the best new way to add tagging everywhere, my parents’ VCR still blinks 12:00. My mom listens to her favorite music and radio stations on a $40 clock radio because she can never figure out the complex home theater system. In our quest for the latest and greatest technologies we may be overlooking the masses of users waiting for technologies to enrich their lives. My mom’s a blogger but doesn’t know it. She passes along chain mail and jokes to family and friends on an almost daily basis. Each…

SF Tech Sessions next Thursday

The first SF Tech Sessions is less than a week away! Joyent, Kerio, and Zimbra will each present their groupware product and introduce their company to a room full of 100 bloggers, journalists, and small business owners. It all starts at 6:30 p.m. next Thursday, February 23, at CNET headquarters in San Francisco. More details are available on the SF Tech Sessions blog. Tom Bridge is flying in from Washington D.C. just to attend the event! The event competes with a billionaires dinner alongside the invite-only $5000 TED conference in Monterey. After you see Einstein the talking Parrot at TED,…

Online privacy podcast

In this week’s episode of Om and Niall PodSessions we discussed the current state of online privacy and the options presented to users with their choice of product and features. Do users pay any attention to EULAs? Does anyone realize what data is being stored about them online and shared with advertisers and potentially governments? This week’s podsession, Online privacy: who’s watching you?, is 29 minutes long and a 13 MB download. Tags: privacyonlineprivacy…

MSN Search and Win

MSN Search is giving away prizes to searchers who pay close attention to ads in its search results. If you see a sponsored link with the words “MSN Search & Win” and click on the ad you may have won a new snowboard or maid service. A pretty clever way to get users to pay more attention to ads in search results. Users may change their search behavior to try and trigger a prize response for sponsors such as Bugaboo, Crate and Barrel, and Design within Reach, an average $2.50 CPC on Google AdWords….

Continued interests

I’ve been digging into a few new areas of interest over the past few months I feel still need improvement in search, discovery and tracking. I’ve spoken about most of these topics in my podcast series with Om, but it’s worth mentioning again in text. I’m interested in continuing my work in these areas and perhaps helping to solve some existing problems. Feeds We have RSS 2.0, and Atom 1.0, the world is starting to understand how syndicated content makes sense, but I don’t see a lot of future thinking for handling multiple locations, personas, and personalized content. Advertising is…

Seeking new horizons

I am leaving Technorati to pursue new opportunities. I submitted my resignation letter this morning and I will be a free agent on March 1. I joined Technorati in February 2005 excited about changing the world of weblogs and introducing people to a new kind of search. Almost a year later my passions at work have eroded and it’s time to find new horizons. Valentines Day is the perfect time to rekindle lost flames. The company has accomplished a lot in the past year, emerging from what many people viewed as a commodity space into a market leader. The Alexa…

Odeo audio messages

Odeo introduced some new features last week including extended profiles and the ability to send any Odeo member an audio message. I’ve been asking Ev for audio comments for a few months and I’m glad it’s finally here! Anyone with a Flash player can send an audio message to an Odeo member. You can add a special button to your podcast site and instantly collect audio comments for each episode. Choose from over 20 pre-made buttons to include on your site and you can enable audio comments in minutes. I added a “Send me an Odeo” button to my contact…

Image submit buttons and Movable Type

Do you use Movable Type and want to submit forms using an image? You’ll need to edit your Movable Type installation to work around a 4 year-old bug. Movable Type is listening for the “post” or “preview” parameter but if you use an image as a submit button these parameters have x and y values corresponding to your mouse click. You need to teach Movable Type how to listen for these different parameters before your comments will work. Fix it Open MT/App/Comments.pm inside of your server’s Movable Type installation. Search for “So we hack it” to find the commentary around…

Ma.gnolia group bookmarks

I spent a little time today playing with Ma.gnolia, a new social bookmarking site currently in beta. Ma.gnolia was built in San Francisco by Larry Halff using Ruby on Rails and some design help from Jeffrey Zeldman and Happy Cog Studios. Ma.gnolia includes standard bookmarking features such as a title, a description, and some tags but the application does a good job of connecting those bookmarks to other groups of users with similar interest. You can browse groups to find like-minded users and subscribe to a group pool of interesting links. Groups allow members to stay involved even if…

Startup round-up

Om and I discussed the latest startup companies that caught our interest in our latest episode of Om and Niall PodSessions. We talked about some companies presenting at the DEMO conference as well as companies who are bootstrapping to deliver an interesting new product with a different approach. The startup round-up podsession is 22 minutes in length, a 10 MB download. A full transcript is also available. Tags: podcastsmallbusinessstartups…

Google Maps to carry ads

Google employees confirmed in person today plans for local advertisements within Google Maps, including their Web APIs. Google will overlay blue markers on the map to highlight local business advertisements directly within the graphical search result. A corporate logo and advertising message will be displayed inside of marker info windows complete with a paid link. API developers will have the option to display the ads or to signup for a commercial relationship with Google. Combining local search targeting with graphical ads should yield extremely high payouts for Google. Google is currently paying data fees for maps used in a…

Story of Google Reader

I had lunch today with the Google Reader team and learned a bit more about the group, their success and challenges, and how new projects at Google are sometimes formed. This is the story of how a side-project intended for someone’s blog became a feed aggregator integrated into one of the largest Web properties in the world. It all started with a love of blogging. Jason Shellen and Chris Wetherell were both members of the Blogger team and working on different ways to trick out their personal blogs. Jason kept various blogs including a link blog and wanted a way…

Feed exclusion using categories

Many current and future feed publishers create content targeted at individuals for personal use and are not meant for widespread consumption. You may have a customized feed from Netflix, FeedBurner, or WordPress.com to track your movie queue, subscriber count, or blog stats respectively. Some feeds offer privacy through obfuscated URLs and others are just a one-time token exchange at the time of subscription. Given the current merged back-ends of online search aggregators with search and other methods of open discovery, how can a feed publisher opt-out of a public index? One solution using existing element sets may be to overload…

Overheard in a San Francisco cafe

I am at Ritual Roasters this morning in San Francisco’s Mission district. This city is so geeky it’s not uncommon to see WordPress and TypePad screens on people’s laptops as they bask in free WiFi. Today is completely different. A man in bright striped pants, a t-shirt with a stretched neck line, and a modified sport coat is chatting up girls he thinks would be perfect for Suicide Girls. I have no idea if he actually works for the company or if this is some sort of new geek pickup line, but it’s hilarious to listen to. Especially with Johnny…

Site redesign complete!

I’ve been a bit quiet over the past week while making some changes under the hood of this website. This morning I unveiled a new site design I hope will convey a more professional look and experience for everyone viewing my pages in a web browser. I wanted to add more visual structure to each post to match what I try to accomplish in my markup. I wanted to help visitors discover new sections of the site and click around a bit to learn more. I also wanted to improve the friendliness of search and commenting. I worked with…

SF Tech Sessions

Companies should not have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to present their product to a technical and knowledgeable audience. Everyone is burned out on big conferences, big ticket prices, and we want to create more interesting in-depth experiences. I am proud to announce SF Tech Sessions, a new free monthly event that will highlight the latest technologies, products, and companies live and in-person in the San Francisco Bay Area. Every month a small crowd of journalists, bloggers, small business owners, and other interested individuals will gather to learn about a new industry from a small group of companies…

VoIP, not just for cheap calls

The latest episode of Om and Niall PodSessions is now available. This week Om and I talk about VoIP and the new applications with seamless integration of new voice technologies. A recent study by In-Stat found 73% of all VoIP subscribers have migrated to VoIP without making a conscious decision to adopt the new technology. On Sunday my dad asked me about Vonage, and the various boxes he saw advertised with the services in the Sunday newspaper inserts. To him, Vonage was just another long distance provider and happened to have cheap rates to call Ireland. He had no clue…

Google Toolbar button Movable Type template

Want to create your own Google Toolbar custom button? If you use Movable Type just copy and paste this template code into a new template ending with “xml”. Users can view your Atom feed from the toolbar, search your blog from the Google search box, or select text on the web page and click your blog button to find out what you have written about that topic. Your icon will be the Movable Type wrench unless you change it. Once you have generated the file, just add a special link to your blog to let your readers add your button…

Google Toolbar API

Google Toolbar version 4 allows developers to create custom buttons using a custom XML descriptor and extended functionality using RDF, RSS, and Atom feeds. The Google toolbar button API can be used to display the latest entry titles from a feed, execute a keyword or URL search, or continuously communicate data at a glance. I created custom buttons for this blog and Technorati. The Google Toolbar can now serve as a feed reader for any feed with a custom Google Toolbar icon. You can even specify in your button file a different icon you would like to display when new…

Google Bookmarks

Google just introduced version 4 of Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer including support for centralized bookmark tagging and notation from multiple computers. The new feature allows any toolbar user with a Google account to store bookmarks within their Google search history for synchronization and editing. Google bookmarks can also be added and edited via a web interface. You can add a new Google bookmark anywhere on the web when logged in by passing Google a few URL-encoded values. http://www.google.com/bookmarks/mark title the title of the bookmark bkmk the bookmark URL labels comma separated labels or tags annotation A note or…

Dog.com buys Fish.com for $1 million

Chris Andersen: “The owner of Dog.com just paid $1 million for Fish.com, in hopes of starting what amounts to a new Pets.com.” Online shopping for your pets is big business again but this time the company is focused on selling smaller items such as dog treats instead of 50 pound bags of dog food. Is the fish food market worth a $1 million domain name? Graphic by Wired News Tags: dogspetsfish…

MSN Spaces upgrade: more photos, more locations, and search

Microsoft just announced major upgrades to MSN Spaces. Highlights Search MSN Spaces blogs using MSN Search. The search index is still being populated and found no results for “kitten.” MSN Spaces member search Mobile versions of all MSN Spaces blogs, including search. Xbox gamer card integration. MSN Spaces is now available in Latin America, South Africa, New Zealand, Malaysia, and Singapore. Members can now upload up to 500 photos each month. The new photo uploading feature supports photo descriptions and comments. It’s now easier to make money with Kanoodle contextual ads or Amazon’s associates program. Over 100 themes to choose…