AdSense ads finally coming to FeedBurner

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

I’ve been waiting for this for a while, but FeedBurner publishers will soon be able to insert AdSense ads in their feeds

buy prednisone online prednisone online

.  I’d love to insert some insightful commentary here, but there’s not much else to say.  If you don’t know what AdSense or FeedBurner are, then I don’t know why you’re on an SEO blog. 🙂

It’ll be interesting to see how well it works.  I have a couple of very large feeds (not this site – ha!), so I’m anxious to give it a shot.  They’ll be rolling it out to a small group of publishers next week, and the rest of us “soon”.  Once I’m able to try it, I’ll be sure to post my findings.

OS independent 3D map of Stockholm released

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Hitta.se

, a Swedish search and mapping site, has just released a 3D map of Stockholm that works in virtually any browser in any operating system.

The technology is powered in part by C3 Technologies

, who explain their software as follows:

The technology is based on high-resolution aerial photography with carefully calibrated cameras. For every picture, the camera’s position and angle are calculated with extremely high precision, using a very advanced navigation system. This is what enables us to give each pixel its geographical position with decimetre accuracy. Then, using stereovision technology, we combine two sequential pictures to measure the area’s height profile.

The result is an aerial photograph with each pixel positioned in three dimensions. Over an entire city, thousands of such photos are combined into one coherent 3D model – through an automated process in our unique 3D-processor.

Thanks to all this, there is no one today who can take pictures with the same precision and speed as we can. One example is when we filmed all of Stockholm in October 2007 and created a realistic, yet zoomable and turnable, 3D model of the city in just 3 days.

It seems to be a pretty cool technology, considering cities can be created so quickly and it works on such a wide variety of platforms.  The detail is far worse than what Google Earth and Virtual Earth have, though it renders trees and “any object larger than a VW bus”.

Ogle Earth has a post that gets into a bit more detail and is well worth reading.

I love the Target parking deck

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

We got a brand new Target store near us not too long ago.  It’s very nice.  I’ve been there maybe 4 times, and Kelly has been there a good bit more often.  However, neither of us have parked in the underground deck before.

Yesterday we were out when a pretty hard thunderstorm began rolling through.  We were heading to Target anyhow, so it worked out great.  We parked underground, got what we wanted, and got out.

Here’s the kicker: they built the deck simply to provide enough parking for the area.  The bonus is that it is directly contributing to the sales at the store.  Given the weather, we certainly would have simply gone home if the underground parking wasn’t available.  Instead, we went, we shopped, we spent some money.

It’s really pretty nice, too.  Very white and clean.  I’m sure part of that is simply because it’s so new, so we’ll see what it looks like in a couple years.

3D Earth product in the iPhone

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Google Earth Blog has a story about a digital earth product called Earthscape.  Earthscape is a desktop program that aims to be similar to Google Earth (and others).  It may end up being a decent product, but that’s not the point of this post.

At Where 2.0 last week, GEB author Frank Taylor was shown an iPhone application that uses their product.  Not only does it handle the top down view (like Google Maps Mobile), but you can pan down into a 3D view!  Taking it a step further, the application responds to tilting, so you can move the phone around in your hand to change the view.

The application has some work to be done before it can be released, but it shows a ton of potential.  Below is the video that Frank took and you can read more about it in this blog post:

WordPress Redirection plug-in is perfect

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

This isn’t a new plug-in, but it’s new to me and I love it!

I recently converted one of my sites from a custom CMS to WordPress mu.  I manually 301 redirected some of the popular pages, but decided to let the rest of them die off.  However, I just installed the Redirection plug-in

buy cenforce online buy cenforce online

and I’m cleaning it up like magic!

It automatically logs 404 errors on the site, then lets you turn that 404 into a 301 redirect with a single click.  I point the 404 to the comparable page on the new blog, and things are quickly falling into place.  I should see much less of a traffic drop-off now that I’m using this.

It won’t be a terribly useful plug-in for most blogs, but if you’re converting any site to use WordPress, this is a great way to get things tidied up.

Google News now in Google Earth

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

About a month ago, Google added items from the New York Times

to Google Earth.  Now they’ve taken it a step further by adding Google News entries as well.  This is pretty cool.

The New York Times addition was cute, but didn’t add much.  There simply aren’t enough stories to make it especially useful.  However, Google News brings in items from 4,500 new sources, so there are literally thousands of items on the map.  This is excellent, because it allows you to zoom in tight on an area, and see the latest news items from around there.

To activate this feature in your copy of Google Earth, just click on the “Gallery” category in your “Layers” tab, and check the box next to “Google News”.

Jing is awesome!

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

How have I not seen this before? A friend showed me Jing a few days ago, and I’m in love with it. It’s a software program for Windows or Mac that makes it very easy to capture screenshots or video clips and share them.

I had seen Skitch a few weeks ago, and thought it looked awesome. The problem with it is that it’s Mac-only. A Windows version is “coming soon”, but not here yet. In addition, Skitch only does image capture, while Jing does both images and videos.

To explain how easy Jing is, I’m going to do the following:

  • Pull up ESPN
  • Grab a screenshot
  • Add some arrows pointing to interesting items
  • Annotate it a bit
  • Post a link to the final, uploaded image
  • Time the whole process.

Here we go…

Done! 32 seconds.

https://www.mickmel.com/jing/2008-05-20_2230.png

It’s great! For another brief example, here’s a quick video I just made so you can see how those look:

https://www.mickmel.com/jing/2008-05-20_2246.swf

You’ll probably find quite a few uses for this. I even grabbed the Jing logo at the top of this post by grabbing it from their site using their own software. Give it a shot and let me know what you think.

Bad stuff from the China House in Marietta

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

We had a fun time getting dinner tonight.  We ordered a couple of meals from “China House” (about 2 miles away from our house) at around 6:00.  We were told “under 45 minutes”.  45 minutes would have been kind of late for us, but we figured it’d be alright.  At 6:50, we gave them a call to see where the food was.

“The driver is on the way to your house, but rush hour traffic is bad.”  What?  Less than one mile up East Piedmont Road is “rush hour”.  C’mon!

Still, we waited.  At about 7:05 we called again, this time to cancel.  He assured us that the driver was almost there, but we canceled anyhow.  No apologies, nothing.  Quite a bit of silence on their end, which was quite odd.

Even more interesting was at about 7:20 (after Kel had already made some pancakes for dinner – score!), the driver called to make sure he had the right address.  Ha!  He seemed quite put off that we had canceled the order a while ago.

Needless to say, we won’t be calling them again anytime soon.

3D version of Disney World coming to Google Earth

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

According to the Google Earth Blog (via USA Today), there is a great new 3D version of Disney World coming to Google Earth.  It’s due to come out as soon as next Tuesday (May 20).

It will include 3D models of items in Epcot Center, Animal Kingdom, Disney Hollywood Studios and 22 hotels and resorts.  There will also be interactive features on the map, such as videos and the ability to make reservations.

We’ll post more info about it once it is released.

Firefox 3 RC1 now available

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

We’re getting pretty close to the official Firefox 3 release, with the new release of Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1

buy super-kamagra online cheap pharmacy

.  The beta versions had surprisingly few problems, so I would expect that this RC would be pretty solid.

You’ll probably want to install this program, if for no other reason than to make sure your sites render properly in it.  You can download it here.