Google BargeView

What happens when Google StreetView encounters this expanse of river?

Oh dear, looks like the road ends, what to do?


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Google Barge View!


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New Knol: Helicopter Underwater Escape Training

Ever wondered what it's like to plumet into the ocean in a helicoptor?

Ever wondered if you'd have the nouse to escape and survive should that chopper roll over, trapping you below the surface?

Helicopter Underwater Escape Training may be just what you're looking for.

(Brought to you as part of my continuing experiments with Knol)

Knol Rant

I posted this in the Blogoscoped forum, thought I'd put it up here too.
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I think a lot of people have misunderstood the basic premise behind Knol.

It is not trying to encourage current Wikipedia users to create a new collaborative Wiki of knowledge.

It's specifically trying to get people who are subject matter experts to 'drop some knowledge' on the rest of us. In essense, if you're not an expert on a given subject the Knol doesn't really want your input. That probably rules out a fair number of Wiki editors, who (by definition) are modifying articles based on information they foudn elsewhere.

Knols are about sharing a expert knowledge from an individual perspective.

Importantly 'expert knowledge' in this context isn't limited to a PhD in a subject, if I lookup the 'Knee Surgery' Knol I'd love to see a detailed post by a surgeon detailing how the surgery is performed, but a personal account of what the surgery was like from a patient would be just as 'expert' in this context.

Both of these annecodatal accounts would be very useful, but neither is really suitable for Wikipedia. It's that sort of thing that's the target.

It's the sort of thing you see posted on Lifehacker, those incredibly detailed answers you sometimes see in AskMeFi, and all the knowledge and experience regular people don't have anywhere appropriate to put.

The 'editing other people's Knol' debate is a sideshow. Occassionally people will spot an error (typo, specific detail has changed over time, etc) and they'll use this mechanism to help the author fix it. But for the most part it will be single a author (or multiple in collaboration) per article, with multiple articles on a given subject.

As far as the 'dead branch' problem if an author stops updating an article... so what? If it's the sort of subject that needs constant, regular updates Knol probably isn't the right place for it.

Book Prices in Australia and Competition

Interesting piece on the ABC this morning on lifting book import restrictions.

Publishers can say what they like about local "lingo" disappearing from books published in the states, but as a book reader living in the UK at the moment you can't help but notice that Aussie book buyers are getting royally shafted. Besides month long delays for new releases real hard covers have been almost entirely replaced by ghastly 'trade paperbacks'.

For example, the next Greg Bear book -- City at the Edge of Time comes out in a couple of weeks. In Australia it is a paperback only release. No hardcover. And it's STILL far more expensive than in both the UK and US:

Australia (Dymocks): Paperback - $35AUD
UK (Amazon): Hardcover - $27AUD
US (Amazon): Hardcover - $18AUD

Paperbacks in US/UK markets generally go for about half the RRP of a hardcover so for this book you're looking at a 400% premium to buy in Australia.

You can get the new hardcover, shipped from the states via Amazon, and pay a total of $27AUD, that's 25% off (plus you get it in hardcover rather than paperback).

Blogger iGoogle Posting Gadget

If you're reading this then Blogger-in-Draft's new iGoogle gadget works like a charm.

It's a nifty little gadget that makes it easy to posta new blog entry directly from your iGoogle homepage. Not sure how well it'll handle things like links and markup text though, but it's still going to make it more likely that I start posting things to this blog again.

EDIT: Judging by the HTML in the above text I'd say that it handles markup quite well. Excellent.

New Year, New Opportunities

Between Google Reader's share function and FriendFeed's aggregation I've not found myself posting much to this blog lately. Now rumour has it that GMail will soon be offering a version of FriendFeed of its own. The result? Off The Cuff is probably going to see posts of a more personal nature. We'll see.

Along those lines, 2008 is shaping up to be a big year. Wedding and honeymoon this January in the Maldives followed by our first return to Perth in 3 years. Professionally I'm going to be writing my first book(!), and I'm going to look to learn some new stuff by playing with WPF and Android development - both of which I think are going to be massive in 2009 - so I'll spend 2008 becoming a ninja master in both.

Writing a book means I need more practice writing, and I expect that the book is going to drive a bit of extra traffic to The Radioactive Yak, so I've made the focus more targeted and professional. Again, we'll see. I might even get around to launching Soap Drop, god knows Hollywood is giving me more than enough provocation...

When Too Much Sport is Barely Enough

I'm living in London by my sporting heart beats proudly with West Australian blood. Luckily for me I could not care less for the Eagles or Dockers fortunes, so the Australian summer is where it's at. To keep track of what's happening in the 'real' summer of sport I've written a couple of mashups and iGoogle gadgets.

First off is an iGoogle gadget that shows the current NBL ladder...

...and Hit For Six is my home of cricket:


It's got a map that locates the exact position (center of the pitch where satellite coverage allows) of every game that's got a live score available, a map of upcoming matches everywhere they enjoy the sound of leather on willow, and a continuously growing map of every cricket ground in the world.

There's two iGoogle widgets to go along with it, Live Scores Map and Cricket Schedule Map.

Everything I've mentioned is written with the Google Mashup Editor, which I've found myself spending a lot of time playing with lately. It's a compelling tool, gives me the ability to put together a web site that looks the way I'd like it to without too much faffing about with CSS and Javascript.

It doesn't hurt that the GME team are responsive to feedback and aren't shy about releasing new features and bug fixes.

The Google Powered Book Catalog

Oh hell yes.

Google's just added the ability to create a book catalog powered by their Book Search site (details at RadYak).

I've already got the ISBNs for all my books thanks to my efforts obsessively adding my collection to The Nexus, importing them into 'My Library' was a 10 second job. And because Google makes your library public, you can browse my library.

Two things you'll notice, it's:
1) pretty limited in what you can enter (review, rating, labels) -- and it won't let you import these prepopulated.
2) biased towards American releases, so it missed more than half my books; and we miss out on lots of covers and most of the better details you get for American books -- but I'm thinking that will improve as more publishers get on board.

There's an 'export to XML' functionality that's just begging to be used. Hell, if I'm lucky they'll provide an API to write stuff back to their online library and the Google Book Search library will become the back-end for The Nexus.

At the very least I'm thinking a diff tool that takes multiple libraries and outputs a Venn diagram of books in common. Oh yes, that will do nicely.

Attention Whoring

When it comes to the online world I'm pretty much an attention whore. I love seeing my articles and web apps referenced on other blogs, so this past week has been pretty sweet.

I'm most proud of this, the Google Mashup Editor people seem to like what I've done with their (excellent) product, 'cause they got me to write a guest post on their official blog (sweet!). Probably not my best piece of writing, but it's my first on an official Google blog so I'm well chuffed with that.

Related to that, my Earthquake mashup has been getting a lot of press, notably from Google Maps Mania and The Google Mashup blog itself.

The WA Petrol Price mashup's been pretty well received too. I got a nice email from one of the guys who worked on the original FuelWatch site and the mashup got a mention in the Tech section of the Melbourne Age.

Just to round things off I did a little guest post on Google Blogoscoped about the new 'embeddable maps' feature in Google Maps.

I WNT PZA

If Domino's Pizza wasn't so horrifically bad, this would be one of the coolest things ever.