Let's all collectively thank the glorious bit of technology that is Google Street View for letting the world know about the rare and mostly undocumented breakout of Elephantitis in Canada's deer population. Unlike the human form of the disease which is generally characterized by the swelling of a single body part, deer Elephantitis apparently morphs the hapless affected creatures into real-life elephants. If you're driving in the area, extra caution is advisable.
It seems that this street sign was spotted by a Google Street View camera car somewhere in Vancouver. We're not sure how it got there or if it's nothing more than a funny prank, but it is most definitely real. Oh, and for the record, the proper medical term is really Elephantiasis (thanks, Wikipedia!).
No matter whether you're a web-developer, blogger or website owner, you've no doubt heard of metatags. These small snippets of information are great for hinting at the page's content - however since their inception, these tags have been open to abuse in attempts to game search engine results, none more-so than the "Keyword" metatag.
In recent years, Google has long-ignored the keyword metatags - and a post today from Google's Matt Cutts confirms that the search engine's results remain unaffected by any keyword metatags you may place in a page (and it's important to remember that Google continues to support other metatags as part of their Page Rank algorithm). One other metatag - the description metatag - is also ignored in determining results, but normally the description tag's data is used as a snippet to describe each hit on a results page.
Google Street View makes it easy for people looking for directions to find identifiable landmarks using Google Maps. It also lets you take a virtual walk or drive across any part of the globe that Google has photographed. And plenty of web sites have already popped up that are dedicated to showing interesting, unusual, or funny photographs captured by Google. One artist in Kentucky has found another way to use the service. He paints scenes found on the web using Google Street View.
Bill Guffey has about 3 dozen oil paintings in his Street View series online, although it sounds like has painted even more. Some depict rural scenes, while others capture a moment in time in an urban environment. There are pictures from Amsterdam, London, and New York. But Guffey says he hasn't actually visited most pf the places he's painted.
Those of you who are tired of reading about all the great features Google has been packing into Chrome's beta and developer channel builds, it's time to break out the Guinness. A fortnight after Google Chrome's first birthday, Google has bumped the stable version to 3.0.195.21.
So what does that mean, exactly? The stable version now includes features like the updated new tab page, improved omnibar, and themes support. Oh yeah, there's also the Javascript performance boost -- at last check, the V8 engine's power level was well over 9,000. Or 150% better than Chrome's first beta release, anyway.
HTML5 support has also made its way into the stable channel, making it possible to take advantage of things like the <video> tag (try it out here) and <audio> and <canvas> elements. Check out Chrome Experiment #50 to see audio and canvas at work.
Bookmark syncing and extension support still aren't included - those are still reserved for the daredevilish types running the beta and developer channels.
Insert snide remark here: Three major versions in a year, huh? At this rate, Google will be pushing Google Chrome 7 by the time Mozilla ships Firefox 4 in 2010.
Google has decided that you're not getting enough news in your balanced diet of information. Equatable to hooking up an IV of coffee to get your necessary caffeine, Google Fast Flip, a new Google Labs project, aims to provide you with more news than you probably want, faster than you probably want it. Fast Flip provides a magazine-ish interface to news stories from (currently) three dozen popular news publishers.
You can flip through news articles based on popularity, news sections, hot topics, or publishers. On the home page, you can scroll through a strip of stories to find the first one you're interested; once you've selected a story, you can use the big left and right arrows on either side of the story to go to the previous or next story in the section. You can also scroll through the section's stories using a pop-out sidebar on the left side of the page. Also, the iPhone and Android versions let you actually flip through the stories using touch gestures, making the whole experience more fluent.
Google makes loading the news stories faster by caching them as images; this way, to read a news story, you don't have to load the entire publisher's web page (with all of its graphics and other elements) making load times significantly faster. Instead of having to wait ten seconds for a news site's page to load, the next story's screenshot has already been downloaded and cached in your browser.
Fast Flip also provides recommended results for anyone with a Google Account; it can automatically track the stories you read as well as base recommendations on articles you click the "Like" button for.
You may have caught my post about Dateline, a cool, minimal calendar that sits right on your desktop. Dateline's great, but it's Mac-only. Windows users don't have to feel left out anymore, though. Thin Calendar is a Dateline-inspired Windows app that does much the same thing, but gives you access to your Google Calendar appointments instead of the Mac-only iCal.
Thin Calendar has a semi-transparent, unobtrusive interface that won't get in the way of your other windows. It's great for people who frequently need to use the Google Calendar web interface. When you can't find a desktop client you like, sometimes it's better to have a quick, attractive-looking way to get to the website. You can't change the look of Thin Calendar the way you can with Dateline, but it looks nice enough that you won't mind seeing it on your desktop.
Looking for a corkscrew? If it's a bottle of wine you're looking to open, we're afraid we can't help you there, pal. But if you want to take an interactive look at one of America's best race tracks, Mazda and Google have come to the rescue.
The Japanese automaker has captured the Laguna Seca race track (which it sponsors) from every which angle and placed it on Google Street View, making it the first circuit available on the online service. The interactive feature allows you to check out the track from start to finish, Andretti hairpin to the famous Corkscrew downhill kink, all from the comfort of your own home.
In "Wait, they really didn't already have that?" news, Google's publishing platform, Blogger, now supports jump breaks in posts. Users have been splitting their posts by hand for a while now, so no one can blame you if you thought it was already a supported feature. Besides, you've seen this before on practically every other blogging platform - heck, I remember LiveJournal having jump breaks 10 years ago - so it's good to see Blogger catching up with the times.
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Mac users are tired of hearing about how Chrome is the greatest thing to hit the web since, well, Firefox. While Windows users have been happily using Chrome for a year now, the Mac version of Chrome is only now starting to reach a usable beta state. Unfortunately, Google tends not to update the official Chrome beta for Mac very often, at least compared to the multiple-builds-per-day that are occurring to Chromium, Chrome's developer build. The latest versions of Chromium are quite usable, but you can get out of date in a matter of mere hours. Fortunately, the folks over at TechCrunch hacked together a script with an Automator process for the purposes of checking for and downloading the latest Chromium build. The net effect is that you can now download a small app called Chromium Updater who's sole function is to update Chromium, then launch it. Of course, all the scary hand-waving beta software warnings apply: don't use a beta browser for mission critical tasks, etc. But if you feel comfortable dealing with beta software, you will probably be pleasantly surprised by the current state of Chromium, and the rate at which it improves.
Yesterday, people were tripping over themselves writing about big news from Google. TechCrunch almost got it right, snidely calling it "the mother of all updates." Unfortunately, that's where the humor ended.
The rest of the post -- like nearly everything else that was written up about the change -- was a pretty dry look at the mind-numbingly dull addition of a few extra pixels in width to Google's search box.
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