Posts tagged with "Google"
Google CEO Eric Schmidt Talked Open Data, Innovation
Schmidt Talks About Smart Policy and Openness Will Benefit Us
In a talk put on by the New America Foundation today, Google CEO Eric Schmidt talked about how government policy should spur innovation, and how it can. It was good to hear Schmidt emphasize the benefits of opening up government data – and how that would lead to more technical innovation, more analysis of that data, and more citizen-driven policies coming from a better informed and more engaged populace.
We’ve been thinking a lot lately about open data, in part because of our work last week on two mapping mashups that used data released by the DC government. This work was an experiment to see what could be done with open data like this, and the result was a lot of interesting mashups that let DC residents find out a lot more about where they live, a lot easier. Beyond this recent work, we’ve also been talking about open data with a lot of our clients recently, who know that other organizations working towards a common cause could greatly benefit from having access to this data but don’t know a good way to give it to them. It’s great to see the support for open data and the common standards that come with it gathering steam, and it would be amazing if the federal government threw in their support behind this and even better participated and opened up much of their own data.
You can watch Schmidt’s entire discussion in this video.
Mapping Content to Better Tell a Story: Refugee Camps on Google Earth
Using Maps to Convey Information and Get People More Involved
Yesterday's announcement that the UNHCR and Google are mapping humanitarian work in refugee camps is a really encouraging sign of what's to come in online advocacy. Maps are incredible for the amount of digestible information they can quickly convey to a reader.
Here's the part I loved most from what the UNHCR is saying about it:
Highlighted are not only the physical area of the camp and surrounding country, but key parts of daily life such as education and health in photo, text and video format. Within seconds, Google Earth brings the daily life of a refugee camp into your home thousands of kilometres away.
UNHCR is doing great work on the ground in places like Darfur, and they're generating content that really wouldn't have as strong an impact displayed in another way. In one glance, you can quickly get a sense of the water resource situation in this camp and the gaping lack of a health care facility.
Washington DC Google's Summer of Code Event: Get Your Drupal Project Sponsored
Understand the Application Process, Find a Mentor, and Learn More This Thursday
We're taking Summer of Code local to university students in Washington, DC. On Thursday we're hosting an event on Google's Summer of Code for Drupal for students interested in participating this year. Past and future participants will be on hand to talk more about Drupal and Google's Summer of Code and to guide students through the application process. Specifically, we'll
- Walk through the application process and deadlines, and give tips on how to get your project accepted
- Help pair students with potential mentors who are experts in areas they want to work in
- Discuss your project ideas and give feedback, and discuss ideas coming from the community
Come out on Thursday, March 20 at 4:00 pm to learn more. I know it's short notice, but the deadlines are coming up fast and the faster you move the more likely your project will be sponsored. We're at 1534 U Street NW, Suite 2 and the closest metro is U Street Cardoza on the green line. Map
If you're looking for a summer internship that will give you the
chance to lead a programming project, work with some of the best open
source developers out there, and make a little money, then you should
look into Google's Summer of Code.
This prestigious program has turned out some very innovative projects
over the past three years and has really helped move forward open
source platforms like Drupal. This year Google will sponsor several projects for Drupal (last year it was 20).
These projects turned out some really great new functionality for Drupal last year and had many local participants - mentors and students. It will be great to get even more local students involved this year.
If you have any questions, email me or post your questions here. See you on Thursday!
FeedAPI 1.0 Released
New Flexible Aggregator for Drupal Ready for Use
After being in development for about seven months, we released FeedAPI 1.0 nearly two weeks ago! This is really exciting for me and everyone else who has been craving a more flexible aggregator for Drupal.
We wanted FeedAPI to be as flexible and as fast as possible, and I'm happy to say that the end result has reached those goals. All feeds are represented by nodes. Feed items remain independent from the node system - you can choose, whether you would like to store them as nodes or fast flat database records. Per default, FeedAPI is configured to use SimplePie as a feed parser, which works perfectly in most cases. But if you have particular requirements, you can switch to the alternative Common Syndication parser or write your own.
A particularity nice thing about FeedAPI is that you can configure your feed processing preferences on a per content type basis. Cron processes are performance optimized and work on a time limit rather than a number of feeds limit - a big relief for tuning cron performance. FeedAPI also collects important statistics for monitoring wicked huge aggregating sites. Additionally, FeedAPI has a straightforward configuration and is easily extensible through an API. (Just to know: The content-type preset (among others) is entirely Alex's concept and work, and Jose did a lot to make FeedAPI faster.)
In the near future, we plan to further tune FeedAPI's performance and make it more feature-rich (as I type this blog entry, we are working on committing new features that aren't included in 1.0 :) )
For now, I'd like to share with you what you can do with FeedAPI 1.0:
- Install it on a PHP4 or PHP5 site with a MySQL or a PostgreSQL database
- Cache feed downloading to save bandwidth and time
- Turn feed items into nodes
- Turn feed items into lightweight items – use FeedAPI like the good old core aggregator
- Adjust cron processing of feeds based on elapsed time. No more php timeouts
- Get statistics about feed processing
- With Feed Element Mapper, map feed item elements to CCK fields or taxonomy
- Import your feeds from anywhere with OPML import
- Export OPML
- Inherit taxonomy and organic group settings from feeds to feed items
- Views support, having a predefined views for exploring feed items for a specific feed
- Content-type based configurable presets
- Promote items to the front page according to your settings
- 1-click feed creating block. Just supply the feed url and the feed is created
- Purge or not purge outdated feed items – it's your choice
- Automate tests (simpletest module yeay!) - easy checking for problems on your installation.
- Auto-detect feed URL, you do not have to know the RSS/ATOM link, you can just supply the site URL, for example http://drupal.org
- Access to a documented API, you can write parsers or processors and use FeedAPI’s power in feed management
- Ready-to-translate .po files in the package
- +1: low turnaround time issue queue-based support :D
We found out today we'll be mentors for two of Google's Summer of Code projects, and we are excited. In sum, 20 Drupal projects were accepted in the Summer of Code, which is great news for the community.
Myself along with Ted Serbinski from Lullabot will mentor William White. Will's project will incorporate SMS elements into Drupal websites, and I'm particularly excited to work with the driver based API he develops to integrate with SMS service providers. It will be great to see what kind of use cases there are out there first so that whatever system Will comes up with incorporates common SMS elements into Drupal websites.
Our client Haiti Innovation recently received a Google Grant and we’ve been helping them on their AdWords campaign. In the past few months they’ve been blogging pretty aggressively to try to increase website traffic, and it’s worked. So when they came to us looking for ways to put their grant to use, we thought what better way to capitalize on what is already driving people to their site than to post ads that pertain to their daily blog posts. Now in addition to ads that appear when people search using phrases like “Haiti news,” Haiti Innovation’s ads appear in more specific keyword searches like “Haiti kidnapping” and “sustainable environment.” And they’re updating them with each post.
Urchin (link via the google cache) a web analytics company and a division of Google has just been drawn deeper in, been transformed, rebranded, and now re-emerged as Google Analytics. The business plan of what had been Urchin has been remade into the google mold as well. Google only acquired Urchin back in March, but what was then a $199 a month service is now free.
Currently the service seems to be experiencing a few growing pains, but I know that one this period of transition is over we'll be using the service, and I know some of our clients will to.
Google Speak
Adding content to Google Base and thinking about Drupal
A couple weeks ago when the not-yet-released Google Base briefly
popped up online, a bunch of tech bloggers became really excited by
this mysterious, new service to organize classifieds and other
listings, possibly similar to eBay or Craigslist. Honestly I looked at
a couple of screenshots, went back to playing with a new ringtone, and
totally forgot about it.
But as I was looking back over
some news, I finally had the time to see what all the hype was about
and wondered why I hadn’t heard anything about it lately. Well, to be
fair, the reason there hasn’t been more hype is because there isn’t
anything new to report.
What really strikes me about all this chatter is the lack of discussion on how to communicate with gbase.
For
example, this screen shot looks like a step by step guide to uploading ‘an item.’
Yet the description on the main page of gbase reads:
The new google desktop is great until it starts thinking your computer is idle when it is not. I installed it a few weeks ago and loved the searching and was enjoying the feeds, the little notepad and looking at our flickr picts randomly role through. Then Google Desktop freaked out and started consuming 50% of my cpu... It wasn't that the machine was going really slow or anything but this is a Dell Inspiron 9100 (huge laptop don’t get one unless you just want to keep it around the house) with some exceptionally loud fans and it sounded like the computer was going to take off... During my concern I even updated the bios to address fan power usage but nothing would stop them from going at full speed until I uninstalled Google Desktop... has anyone else had this issues?
Writeboard (http://writeboard.com/) came out this week, as did Google Reader at http://reader.google.com. These two releases spurred two separate but related conversations, the first about Writeboard and how Drupal can work as a Wiki, and/or do just as well what Writeboard does.
Two links related to this conversation are here http://drupal.org/node/32916 and here http://drupal.org/node/32888. Charlie Lowe, from the Professional Writing Department at Purdue University has instructions for "Creating Wiki Functionality" on the Drupal platform. Boris Mann at Bryght.com also links to instructions on how to setup a wiki on Drupal, and which is actually running on a Drupal-based wiki.