I recently decided to re-visit the online calendar issues I wrote about previously. Since writing that piece, Bernard informed me of a site called iCal Exchange which allows publishing and subscribing of iCal calendars. This service was ok but I had connectivity issues with it from time to time plus I didn’t want to have to publish from all my machines, and then subscribe to them all to keep track of all my data! There had to be a better way.
Narendra from 30Boxes contacted me to tell me about their Import function which would, he said, allow me to import my data from iCal into 30Boxes. However when I tried it I was presented with a list of the over 300 items in my iCal export and asked to select all the items I wanted to import individually! This would have taken waaaaay too long so I didn’t bother (why couldn’t they have a simple Select All button on the Import page? How difficult would that be?).
So I decided to trial Google Calendar and I quite liked it.
The Pros:
- The interface is slick and extremely straightforward
- The Quick add works brilliantly to simply add events
- The sharing facility allows you to share your calendar with named individuals or to have it completely open. People can subscribe to your calendar using an RSS reader of an iCal compliant app.
- The Import facility just works
The Cons
- There are reminders on the events but they are not granular (i.e. you set a reminder time like 10 minutes before and you are alerted 10 minutes before every event!)
- The biggest gripe I have with Google Calendar is that the Export facility is not obvious (you have to go into the Settings -> Calendars ->Sharing ->Calendar Details to find the subscription address to download your calendar via iCal or RSS!)
Conclusion:
The reminders issue is trivial and I am sure one which Google will address in time. The fact that the Export facility is hard to find may turn people off using Google Calendar (for a while i didn’t think there was a way to Export from Google Calendar and this would have stopped me from using it). Other than that, Google Calendar is a great app - as long as you don’t mind Google knowing your every move, I strongly recommend it!
PodZinger is a search engine for (audio and video) podcasts. It listens to the audio content of podcasts, transcribes the content and makes it searchable. This is quite a useful service because transcribing podcasts manually would take waaaay too long.
I published an interview I conducted with Alex Laats, president of PodZinger, yesterday on the PodLeaders.com site. It was only after I published the interview that I thought of the one question I should have asked Alex - “Why doesn’t PodZinger provide transcriptions of the podcasts back to the podcasters?”
As a podcaster, PodZinger listens to my content, transcribes it, and makes it searchable on its site. It has Google ads on its site so it is profiting from my work. I am not a lawyer, but my podcasts are licensed using a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License and this would seem to me to breach the non-commercial part of that license.
What do I get out of it? I get the opportunity to allow people to view my content transcribed on the PodZinger site. I would far prefer to have my content on my own site.
I can see why PodZinger are doing this - they want to bring all the traffic to their site. This is real old school thinking. Alex, if you provide the content back to the podcasters, you will create enormous good will and PodZinger will still be the only place where people can search content across all podcasts.
UPDATE:
I have been contacted back by PodZinger about this post and will be talking to their president, Alex Laats about this post on next Monday (8th) - if you have any questions or concerns about Podzinger that you’d like me to put to him, leave them in the comments.
I received an email this morning from Ken Carroll of ChinesePod telling me that China has blocked Technorati at the great firewall - it would appear that Technorati will no longer be available to anyone to use in China.
Co-incidentally, when I interviewed Technorati’s CEO David Sifry on the PodLeaders show a couple of weeks back, Ken submitted the following question for David -
Do you have a China strategy? What do you foresee there in terms of blogging and blog search?
Does this mean Technorati isn’t censoring search results into China like Google, MSN, Yahoo are? And if this is the case, will Technorati now have to start doing the Chinese government’s censorship job for them if they wish to be seen in China once more?
I have posted about this topic in the past and, in my naive opinion, unless all the search engines come together to formulate a common China strategy, China will continue to pick them off one by one.
UPDATE:
I see the Mad About Shanghai blog is also reporting that Technorati is being blocked in China.
FURTHER UPDATE - it looks like a couple of sites are now reporting that Technorati is available once more in China - can anyone else confirm that?
I did a couple of tag searches on Technorati this afternoon - but they came up empty - I wasn’t so surprised with one or two of the more obscure ones I tried but when my search for the tag Google came up with the following message:
There are no posts with that tag yet. Please try again later or post one yourself! To contribute to this page, just post to your blog and include this code
I began to suspect there Technorati may be having some technical issues!
SFGate.com is running a story on how Google’s plan to give San Francisco free wi-fi will mean that Google will be able to track the location of anyone logged into its wi-fi network.
Privacy advocates are raising concerns about Google Inc.’s plans to cover San Francisco with free wireless Internet access, calling the company’s proposal to track users’ locations a potential gold mine of information for law enforcement and private litigators.
The Mountain View search engine intends to use the geographic data to match users with advertising so that they would see marketing messages from neighborhood businesses such as pizza parlors, cafes and book stores.
Aw, come on guys - sure this will allow Google to log your whereabouts - so what? Your mobile phone is already broadcasting your location to your mobile operator all the time it is switched on. The police can (and do) subpoena mobile operators for suspect’s location data.
Privacy has been an illusion for quite some time now.
UPDATE - I see AP have picked up this story now as well.
There’s an article in today’s New York Times which claims that journalists are now writing their article headlines with search engines, not human readers, in mind!
The search-engine “bots” that crawl the Web are increasingly influential, delivering 30 percent or more of the traffic on some newspaper, magazine or television news Web sites. And traffic means readers and advertisers, at a time when the mainstream media is desperately trying to make a living on the Web.
This is sounds like a really bad idea in my humble opinion - sure you need to bear search engines in mind when writing articles and titles but don’t let them dictate your post titles to you completely. Why? Sure you need to be listed in search engine results - but you also need a human reader of the results to click on your link. If your title is a really boring title designed solely to attract search engines, no-one will click through to read the article and your search engine optimisation is in vain.
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