Then I moved my mouse.

The graphic made a noise. OISOME! The logo makes sounds.

But wait, there’s more. You can record your sounds at a URL you can share! Woah neo. Like most of you, I then made noise and tweeted it – here is my first song, recorded below as a video:

But then I figured out you dont have to strum with your mouse, the keyboard plays things, so I got a little bit farther from Pure Noise — http://goo.gl/doodle/Ocja, though far from Les Paul, for whom today’s logo is made in honor of.

And there is more- see from PC Magazine
How to Play The Beatles on the Les Paul Google Doodle — there is a strc ture to all of this, the four rows on your keyboard all control the same string, (so 1, Q, A, Z all play the same string), and moving to the left goes up an octave… and thus, the clever folks at PCMag rendered a version of Here Comes the Sun

And this, is the obviou,s why Google is cool.

Maybe I don’t have to sell my computer–

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

This apparently lists results that have both your search keyword and a date. I cannot figure out how I got there, but if you take any standard results, say the big wide search on technology. From the results, on the left side bar, click the link for timeline.

Now you can adjust the time range, or change the search terms, this time, say I wanted to create a search history timeline for China

It could be an interesting activity/exercise to create other timelines.

Google embeds surprising functional bits i search results. Looking to calculate a currency exchange? Just google “currency exchange” and you get a widget calculator right there.

Have you found other embedded tools in search results?

Thanks for the surprise serendipity (as if there were any other kind!)

I’ve been a few weeks into using Google Chrome, and sorry Old Fox, the shiny metal is looking and feeling good.

With Firefox, it was a long running period of spending time I’d rather be browsing waiting for Mac Beachballs to stop spinning, or that pause when a cursor goes into a form field and the fox must be tapping its feet or scratching itself before allowing me to enter anything.

The tipping point for me was the direct availability in Google Chrome of most of some 40,000 Greasemonkey scripts. I’m not going hog wild with scripts and extensions, my lean set now includes:

• Flick CC Attribution Helper my own humble script that adds to any Flickr photo page that is cc licensed, two different cut and past attribution html codes- one for embedding in blog posts (used above) and another just for text (say in a document or presentation). I use this daily, or if I blog daily, I use it. A lot.
• Obviously Scrub Google Redirect Links Another key helper- I use Google search every 10 minutes to locate URLs, but their search results do not provide links you can copy easily (hmmm, it seems to change every few months, sometimes you get the links sometimes they are redirected cruft crap). This script adds a link that is the actual search result.
• GPE provides previews of full web pages from RSS view in Google Reader- rather than opening in another tab or blowing out your reader, it opens it right in Reader. Well, it used too, in Chrome it seems to want to open in a tab.
• Delicious Tools Extension cause I love to tag stuff.

Hmm, it looks like 2 of my 4 might not even be needed. Not sure what else I really need, maybe one of those scripts that provides MP4 download links from YouTube.

But the speed and responsiveness, the lack of beachballs in Chrome has been wonderful. It feels like a new springy web (that said, some of the back end pages of our NMC drupal site seem to be loading more in a staggered fashion. Not sure if it is me or the browser).

But wait there is more… A few weeks ago I started experimenting with adding Google Translation to our NMC web sites. This was really for one of our new Horizon Projects that is doing a new report for Spanish speaking countries, so all of the content is in Spanish. We had our wiki content translated, and Wikispaces nicely provides localization of the interface, so we have a nice Spanish wiki

The challenge that arose was that as part of the process, we wanted the advisory board for this project to review content on our main horizon wiki, which is all in English.

Just on a whim, in the mniddle of a meeting on this project, I surfed to the Google Translation site which was typical of all the other translation sites back to Babelfish (hey look what Yahoo picked up)– you enter either a phrase or a URL in a box and it redirects you to either the translated phrase or to a reload of the web page in the other language.

I did notice a few weeks back, that on the Google Translate site, it was actually starting to translate as you were typing in the box. Woah. Try it yourself, that is the best demo.

They offer under Translation tools, a quick and easy way to create an HTML widget you can add to your site, so if you are running any template driven site (blog, wiki, etc), it is likely one chunk of code to add. This does the translation right in place, offering something like 50 languages! And it is pretty fast– not 100% accurate, but enough to get the gist of a page in another language. In a few minutes, I made 8 wikis have this translation feature, as well as the main NMC web site

So what is even better, is say, when I have the NMC web site appear in Arabic, As I hover over a translated section, it puts the original language in a hover box, and from the menus at the top, you can quickly rever to the original language

So…. that was a long tangent of something that is a quick and easy add on to any web site to internationalize its contents, but…

I remember thinking to myself, why aren’t they rolling this directly into a browser? I mean already, GMail is already detecting when an email is in another language, and offers in place translation…

Well, it is in the newest version of Chrome, the dev version 5

Google Chrome 5′s dev build has a feature that detects the language of a web page and lets you translate it without opening a new page. The feature is borrowed from Google Toolbar, but Google Chrome is the first browser that translates web pages without requiring an add-on.

When you visit a page written in another language, Chrome shows an infobar that asks if you want to translate the web page. You can ignore the message, change the language that was automatically detected or translate the web page. If you click on “Translate”, Google Chrome will translate the page and will no longer prompt you when you click on a link from the page.

Here it is at work on the Spanish wiki- when the page loads, the browser can detect it is another language and offers translation. Slick

I may have crammed two blog posts into one as I started out talking about my being Chromed and ended up on language translation.

Just call me a króm hundur (I leave it as an exercise to the reader to identify the language)

Taking a page from Google, there is new announcement from the automobile industry:

BillyBob and Melba Bootwaddle, the original creators of the reverse flow corn cob floating ball carburetor, will take the stage to unveil their latest project, Ford Wave. As BillyBob describes it, “Knowing what we do about automobiles, we set out to answer the question: What would cars look like if we set out to invent them today?”

That is exactly the right question, and one that every US car maker should be asking him or herself. The world of cars has changed, profoundly, yet so many of our cars bear the burden of decades of old thinking. We need to challenge our assumptions and re-imagine the vehicles we take for granted. It’s perhaps no accident that this project, carried out secretly at Ford’s Locus Bayou office over the past two years, had the code name Old Yeller. That’s the Arkansas old time tradition of going off for an extended period to retrace the skunk hunting trails and learn the world anew.

lifted and parodized from O’Reilley Radar and done so only in fun and respect from that Web 2.0 coiner

Ford Waves are available only by a secret invite down to the shed from your cousin Earl or his brother Earl.

Yes, I am mocking Google Wave, but I think Chris Lott went and Ruimated my sentiments exactly in his post today Google Wave Hype or Hope?

I thought Google Wave was a solution in search of a problem. It’s probably more accurate to say Google Wave is (thus far) a clumsy solution to a very small problem that can be productively solved with existing, better performing tools—including a few applications provided by Google itself. This may change in the future: I can understand, even if I don’t buy, Google’s positioning of Wave as an email killer, combining functions of email communication with rich media, chat and wiki facilities. But for now it’s simply a slow, buggy, painful experiment for which I’ve yet to see a practical use with benefits enough to outweigh the cost.

[Side-note: the debut of highly hyped products like Google Wave tends to bring the worst out of many in educational technology, (sometimes inadvertently) confirming the unfortunate characterizations of my community by those outside. First are those who immediately start looking through the wrong end of the telescope and start conversations based on questions like “how can we use Google Wave in education?” It’s not that this is, at heart, the wrong question, but in posing it that way we appear to be the very “geeks obsessed with every shiny new toy” that many think we are. Second are those that latch onto features provided by a product and highlight/elevate them without any evidence of their value in the first place. For instance, Wave may very well be useful for collaborative note-taking, but what supports the contention that collaborative note-taking is of any value in the first place? Just because a cool product does it?]

Like Chris, I am trying to do some wave attempts but am not feeling any thing close to shine.

But then again, I lack the shrewd investigate prowess of our leading spotlight of technology

and I cant wait to be proven wrong. But you should see how fast a ride that Ford Wave really is!

As much as I recall being smitten by the original Google Wave Preview video (I watched the whole demo, its still on my iPhone), I’ve felt not more than tiny ripples of interest, and until just a few minutes ago, was curious why I was not feeling the giddy euphoria I see elsewhere.

Yes, I am still on my medication (just kidding, the only meds I take are the ones my pancreas stopped making in 1970).

Maybe it was the let down of all the anticipating for my golden ticket invite, after barking a lot on twitter, I ended up with about 6 invites.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Witheyes

After all that, well, if I was a cliche movie figure, I’d be in bed smoking a cigarette wondering if the invite had been good for her.

Over my years in the tech game, I’ve learned to pay attention to some more or less gut level instinct when a new technology comes along. It does not always happen on first exposure (like twitter), but there is some moment, when I feel that “aha” sensation that fuels my excitement.

And I have just not felt it yet for Wave. I don’t mean that it wont happen, but, there’s just not that spark. The spark usually comes small at first, yes, like the smallest of ripples, and it’s my senses that detect that there is some there there.

So what is different with Google Wave is that a tremendous amount of hyper and expectation was built up first– it was brilliantly done, I admit, but now we have this Large Thing Which is Supposed to Be Cool and Revolutionary and what I see is a whole lot of frantic scurrying to jump on the Wave Wagon.

People talking about Wave as the next LMS, Or replacing email. People in wave trying to figure out what the best “curricular unit” for a wave is or already talking about the most effective uses of Wave in the classroom. EDUCAUSE has already 7 Thinged it.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by StephenMitchell

Speculation is fine, but I see the cart so far ahead it is not even sure it needs a horse.

So far, like others have noted, I feel underwhelmed and over stimulated looking at that wave screen. If Wave does replace email, I wish the entire GTD movement the best of luck; you’ll run your self ragged getting to WaveBoxZero.

The demo was lovely when it was just the 3 or 4 people from Google on stage. It looked managable, even fun. Yet I find the long waves, with 50, 90, 150 people “blipping” almost impossible or undesirable to unpack and muddle through. It’s… a mess. I see noise, and little synthesis, or outcome, just lots of swirls and eddies and little current or flow.

I’m not being closed to the possibility, and I am eager to poke around wave, in my own way, and figure out whether the spark is there. What I am dismayed of is all the froth and foam when this is a technology that has not even done anything.

And as a person who lives and dies by the metaphor, I am thinking to the physical properties of ocean waves, that the size of the wave is proportional to the depth to ocean floor… and I am in wait mode to see whether Google’s wave is just a ripple in a shallow pool or of there is more to its size than the hype. Taking it even farther from the ‘pedia, it seems people have the sense that waves are these things that fly and rush around, but its an illusion:

There is little actual forward motion of individual water particles in a wave, despite the large amount of energy it may carry forward.

I could go down a longer path of standing waves and hydraulic jumps, or even the speculation which way the Australian waves swirl, but that gets nowhere.

Don’t paint me anti-Wave, and this might not be the first time I ate the words, but I don’t feel any tech mojo tingling when the expectation is set up that I should. And that’s what is bugging me- like there is an assumption that Wave is the Next Big Thing, so I have to try and be the early bird say it. To me the way my interest in technology flows towards a new tech, not that the tech flows towards me.

I’m headed down to Phoenix Friday to hang out with some fellow edtech geeks and am ready to maybe have my wave mind opened up some more, bring it on, you wave giddy hippies.

I have had a hair tearing hacked WordPress blog experience here over the last 2 days. I don’t know why, but it really knocked my knees out, and I am reeling to figure out why this has gotten to me on an emotional level. That even sounds silly seeing those words.

But I am not rolling over. Yet.

It all surface, like many things, in the act of doing something else. I left a comment Sunday on someone’s blog about something rather inconsequential, and got an email later asking me if I knew my blog was riddles with spam links.

Sure enough, I looked at the source code, and at the bottom, written with CSS to hide the display (but not hide from google) was a long list of every variation of PPC (pill/porn/casino) link one could imagine, maybe 120 of them.

It’s kind of like discovering someone you did not invite snuck in a window and shat all over your basement. Just for the kicks.

I had some ideas where to look, cause it happened before when I had my template files set with writable permissions (lazy so I could edit in WP), and sure enough, I could see in my header.php template file a PHP include statement (calling in code from elsewhere on my site) and then another line calling a function I knew did not belong. I got rid of those quickly.

I noted the date of when this was changed (9/1/2009) when also I recalled a big spike, way above my normal, in blog views. Here I thought it was something I wrote, when it was really someone launching blog spam form my site.

The path that it was reading its source from was bizarre, because it was added inside the wp-includes/js/jquery directory– another directory was added here and inside were PHP files that had code hidden by base64_encoding (it takes normal looking code, and renders it as a long string of random looking numbers/letters; PHP can actually execute this code that looks like gibberish by an eval() statement).

And there was another directory with something like 14 Mb of small text files, each one a few paragraphs of jumbled sentences and HREF links- it looked like the random stuff you get in spam blog posts. Jeez, this meant that someone was using my site to launch spam at others.

It was easy to see that this did not belong by comparing to the download archive of the latest WP.

I made sure there were no other things festering in my templates. I decided to delete all of the WP code files, and re-install them.

I was relieved when this was done, and my site no longer included secret spam.

But it returned a few hours later. Damn!

I started to suspect the WP-Super-Cache plugin (from a twitter tip); it was a writable cache directory and might be a place to hide malicious code. I got rid of that, reloaded the entire WP code, and it was clean again.

I also exported my database to see if anything awry was in there, and did a whole bunch of searches on things that could indicate spam. Nothing.

I switched my template, and the crap was still there, suggesting the cause was somehow being written into the core Wp code (because the spam appeared after the closing <html> tag- and if the template was not adding anything, it seemed like it would have to be the WP code or a compromised plugin- but because it went away when I replaced thee WP code, my hunch is that something was being backdoored to modify WP itself (I am guessing wildly).

I read a lot of blog posts like Old WordPress Versions Under Attack which was not seemingly the case, no hacked permalinks… (although it was 9/1 when I upgraded from WP 2.8.3 to 2.8.4).

This was really getting to me, as I was feeling powerless as someone remotely was taking over my blog. I got rather down about this, and honestly contemplated closing up the site, or maybe moving it to WordPress.com

Not yet. Another twitter link I got was Top 5 WordPress Security Tips You Most Likely Don’t Follow, and while I agree that some of them are just things to obscure things with a thin film, I employed most of the suggestions, including changing my FTP, database, and WP passwords (I only have one account and it ain’t “admin”).

So far, over the last 30 hours, the site has not been re-infected, yet I am still lacking a real indication of what happened. The malicious code I did find does not look like what was modifying my own blog.

And I am not about to feel any sense of victory here.

I admit, that there are a lot of hackers, including the one who peed on my site, are a lot more technically savvy than me in these areas, I’d rather focus on silly pictures and snarky prose.I know that. But this whole experience did rock my own confidence a lot (maybe bring it to a real level) and has left a nasty taste in my mouth.

Still, there is a large gaping silhouette of s shadowy powerful figure who is at the heart of this.

It is a dark hole with the shape of Google.

Google has built a successful, sprawling empire based on the elusive gold coin of the realm, link rank. Google provides the incentive that drives shady businesses to hire the 6 legged critters that crawl around and in try to inject unwanted links to the pill/porn business into the sites of innocent bystanders.

And Google continues, in my eyes, to do absolutely nothing to help out the independent hosted blogger who spends inordinate amount of time battling spam or just giving up.

Oh yeah, “no follow” was really effective. Yep. Google with all their super human brain power cant figure out a way to dis-incentivize “people” who game link rank by blasting links in every open web form on the net.

And no one holds their brightly colored logo to the fire for this.

Except me.

Google- I blame you for the last two days of hell trying to oust a spam hacker form my site, and I have every reason to believe I cannot rest at all.

Google- I lift my leg on you.

You would think in an advanced electronic era that has brought us tools to broadcast our breakfast dilemmas and make our rock and roll dreams come alive that we might perhaps… maybe… improve the collection of information via @$#%#ing paper forms.

There is no excuse for wasting my time with bad forms.

I am putting my paw down on these offenses:

1. Badly Designed Paper Forms My handwriting is already bad enough for me to masquerade as an MD, but forms that do not allow appropriate space, ones that have me repeat information already entered, or request information hardly relevant is a huge waste. My time is wasted chicken scratching in tiny boxes and some poor staff person’s time is wasted trying to interpret what I wrote and re-enter it into some computer system.
2. Fax Me That Electronic Form I find alot of forms sent by email or downloaded form web sites that require me to…. print them out (waste paper), fill them out by hand (see #1 above), and then fax them or mail them back in (more waste). If you send it to me digitally, let me return it digitally (see below).
3. A Word Document With Lines for Items is Not a Form. I still get a lot of requests for information that come in the form of a Word document that someone labored to make look pretty with lines for me to…. write in by hand (see #2). If I even try to edit the form in Word, it becomes a jumbled mess almost useless as I replace those single entered underlines. I don;t want to edit your document, I want to type in information. There is a virtually unknown feature in MS Word that allows you to make documents act like forms; e.g. I can only edit in areas the author defines. I learned how to do this in 2002! And have all the details on how to do this rusting away in the Maricopa Learning eXchange http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx/slip.php?item=383.

   What I want to do is type in the info you need and then be able to return the document by email / file sharing etc. This can be done without wasting a shred of paper or touching a fax machine. This can be done today.

4. Got PDF? If you are serious about collecting information in a structured form, for *******’s sake, get a copy of Acrobat Pro, and generate a PDF with editable form fields. It’s not that hard; the end user (me) can do this with the free Acrobat Reader, and you get back forms in an exact format was you design.
5. Skip the document, go web Depending on the nature of the information collected, just create a web form to collect it- be it any number of free tools or even the dead easy Google Forms

I have zero expectation much will change, so I am keeping my printer loaded with paper and the fax machine on standby for the next stupid form I am asked to fill out.

Don’t belittle me for not knowing how the great Google Machine works, but I am feeling like someone took my piece of pie.

For more than a year, at NMC we’ve been running Google Apps Enterprise Edition for Education. I am more than happy not running desktop mail applications, we have the office sharing calendars and doing collaborative work in docs. That’s great.

Yet, I am baffled why in this Enterprise Application package, we are missing a key tool for collaboration- Google Groups. Along with Maps and Google Reader, it requires us to keep an “out of enterprise” account open at Google to use these orphaned services.

Where it gets really goofy, and twisted, is that for many of its own services, Google runs support through Google Groups- so to get help for Enterprise Apps, I have to access this service via my personal Google email address. We have a long list of projects and instances where we’d love to have a group environment– but its not an option.

Is it just a vain hope that Google will add these services to their Enterprise package? I mean (and tweeted out to the vacuum of space) that its not like they need to invent anything new.

Google, oh Great and Powerful Google, give us Groups. And Reader.

Pleeeze?

As a first example, I am cleaning up an older WordPress site I use for logging my running/training; in the past, I kept a spreadsheet on my desktop for keeping a run log and then manually transferred the totals/averages/graphs to my web site by pasting into some text files (they are embedded with a PHP include). It worked, but it did have that tedious manual smell for something that should be more automated.

It seemed to make sense to transfer the spreadsheet to a Google Doc. I’m not going to detail all the bits in there, but essentially, for every run, I enter a distance and time on the appropriate date line, and the sheet calculates total/averages per week and on a final summary page.

This is just the data; I have another sheet that is just the table for the weekly totals of miles and time spent running; from here I can simply use Google’s built-in Publish Chart which provides a URL to embed this graphic:

This is subtle but powerful– this is an image, but not an image- as the data changes, so will the graphic. So I know longer have to manually make a graphic and upload it to my web site; I can simply use the HTML

<img src="http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tMIPDwydKpay-5Oq0_G769w&oid=4&output=image" width="100%"/>

The other piece uses Google’s ability to publish a worksheet as CSV- this is data you can then parse on your web site. So I have a sheet that simply does averages/totals for my running log:

To access this data, I click the Share button and select Publish As Web Page

The options in the top make it so the published data is made current whenever I request it; in the bottom I select the option to have it published as CSV (comma separated value), and I select just the spreadsheet I need.

Thus, this URL always gives me the data on the spreadsheet in a form I can use in my code…. this bit takes some PHP savvy to manage, but I use the same logic almost everywhere.

I use this on the sidebar of my blog to display an up to date listing of my totals. In my WordPress sidebar, I use a statement to bring in the code from an external file named totals.php that sits inside my theme directory:

<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . "/totals.php"); ?>

I could have simply inserted the code into my sidebar template, but going modular like this makes it easier to separate code from format…

The basic logic is using the php file command to read int a remote file, which puts the contents into an array; where each array item is one line of data.

// get the CSV data as an array from the remote URL
$lines = file('http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tMIPDwydKpay-5Oq0_G769w&single=true&gid=0&output=csv');

// get rid of header row
$headers = array_shift($lines);

// Loop through data- therer is only one line hear
foreach ($lines as $line) {
	$ldata =  explode(',', trim($line)); // split row to its own array of elements

	if ($ldata[0] == '') break; // an empty line means we are done, so exit the foreach loop

      // now we can just output the information as an HTML list, referencing the appropriate array items
       echo '<li>Total Miles Biking  <strong>' . $ldata[0] . '</strong></li><li>Total Miles Running  <strong>' . $ldata[1] . '</strong></li><li>Total Hours Running  <strong>' . $ldata[2] . '</strong></li><li>Ave Pace Running  <strong>' . $ldata[3] . '</strong></li>';
}

And what is cool is there does not seem to be much of an impact of hitting Google each time. It must be ‘a caching. Good stuff.

This is pretty simple example. I am running some more complex examples on the NMC Virtual Worlds site where the reason to do this was to have a larger amount of tabular data be displayed in a more readable fashion on our web site– and to make it so someone other than me can be in charge of keeping the data up to date bu simply editing a Google doc (note that a spreadsheet used for this purpose must be public viewable, so don’t mix in any company secrets in there).

So for example, our Clients listing is coming from a google spreadsheet, and the parsing tests the existence of certain items to format the output– e.g. if the organization URL column has a value, we echo the name as a hyperlink; if we have the coordinates of their land in Second Life, we add a teleport link. The code that generates this page also sorts it on output.

This one technically is not hitting the spreadsheet every time…. I set this up so a unix cron (a timed script) calls every hour a PHP script which generates the formatted content as a text file on the web server, so the web page actually just reads it in via an include statement… this is a simple form of caching.

Another page has actually two chunks of data that are generated from different spreadsheets. Out current land availability page lists plots of Second Life land available from NMC for rental.

The main body content is a list of land with the output formatted around data in a spreadsheet. And the current land prices on the right side come form another sheet- this way we can make adjustments to the web page at any time simply by editing a spreadsheet, and never touch the web page- again it works like this:

1. Every hour a cron script on the server calls a PHP script.
2. The PHP script reads in CSV data, sucks it into an array (one line as an item), marches through items, and parses each item as an array representing the cells, and outputs the formatted as HTML to a small text file.
3. The WordPress page simply uses an include statement to display the content (I use the Exec-PHP plugin to be able to run statements in a page).

I am thinking more and more how I can use this process….

Of course, this is all baby stuff compared to the masterful data wrangling by the Jedi Master Tony Hirst….

I still regularly review content RSS feeds in that archaic, pre-twitter-is-all-i-need thing called a “Feed Reader”. Me and 3 other holdouts.

Go ahead, call me a throw back.

Recently, in using Google Reader, I am seeing signs that the Great Google is subtly slipping in more social network features, that have me wondering if Google is becoming more like Facebook is becoming more like Twitter? Is the bird wagging the Goog?

Blog experimentation notice- I am trying the Lightbox 2 plugin switched to z-Lightview to embed images… clicking will load in an overlay to see full size… if it works.

Oddly enough, we have the most unlikely technology prognosticator, Conan O’Brien, to credit for peeking ahead to YouTwitFace

and oddly enough, despite the Google -YouTube Connection; the Big G is not part of the acronym. But they are doing things in the space, all of which may be a tease once the Wave crashes on shore (or ends up being just a pond ripple no one notices).

First of all, Google has been expanding the notion of a profile, which has been in the services region a while, but never been clear what one does with it.

As far as other social media profiles, the Google one is rather start for now- mine has my icon, a feed of flickr photos and links I picked. Google has some quirky questions that are not clear what the use is (maybe pure fun or their evil harvesting of our beings? but the examples were funny).

Is there any use for this? Dunno.

• Something I still can’t find on Google well yeah, an honest answer might give them ideas, but for now I list my car keys and lost youth. Snark is plentiful.
• My superpower. Yeah very useful. I listed blogging since no one does it anymore, blogs are dead, yadda yadda.
• Interests open ended, kind of facebook-ish. I would guess some connections could happen here

It all rather pales (for now) in comparison to say the fun new service card.ly — I whipped this up in about 8 minutes http://card.ly/cogdog.

I am guessing there are Bigger Plans out there.

But back to Google Reader.

They now provide some social networking hooked on the piece of reader that allows you to pick stories to “share”- this has always seemed a useful educator tool as you can pick among the pile of feeds you read to mix and match stories you think are relevant- you can share them via a URL or an RSS feed or even widgets for your blogs. They’ve added 4 “Styles” which are pretty lame- just cartoon banners, but would expect user defined themes are near:

But now, the people you associate as contacts or enable via the sharing- you can see an aggregated view of what they are sharing, and add comments as well.

That is sort of interesting, as you can then follow what other people are sharing. But they have also added a twitter/facebook status like “notes” feature so you can just blurt out stuff to the emptiness of web space:

I’m not yet seeing a whole lot of “there” there unless people start using this; maybe the future Wave is being able to do this for any piece of web content?

And lastly is the new “Liking” feature- where as you go through stories in Reader, you can one click (or shortcut “l”) to attach a Facebook-like stamp on news stories.

You’ve always been able to indicate “Liking” by sharing or starring, but now– “Liking is Public” so the reader stories feature of a count of how many times it has been Liked and even list the Likers.

Hmm, like others out there, the value here is a mixed one. A new story has fewer likers. Like none at first. Maybe we should get points for being the first Liker. But what does it say? Its a quasi vote, and Google can weave some ad magic with knowing what stories are more liked.

I guess with the New Age notion of friendship being just a click on a strangers profile (friends online with people we’d never have a friendship with in real life) so is “liking” now a throw away opinion.

I’m not sure where Google is going with all this, but I bet they have a plan somewhere.

What do you think?