Pito’s Blog

I bet you’ve not heard of another crazy-cool service from Google, Google Sets. I first read about Google Sets some months ago but didn’t bother looking until today, Sunday, when i saw this interesting article about Google Set’s patents.

This is from that article:

“Google Sets is one of the first services that were added to Google Labs and it’s a cool way to find list of related terms. Google Sets is a tool that generates lists from a small number of examples by using the web as a big pool of data. You enter some items and Google Sets finds other items that tend to co-occur frequently with your examples. For example, you could enter Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani and get a list of US presidential candidates.” (from Google Operating System)

So, think I, this would be a cool thing to use for competitive analysis. You know, answering the question, “What other companies are in this space?”

So being of a single track mind, I tried suggesting the following list: “BlogBridge, Google Reader, Net NewsWire, NewsGator and FeedDemon.” Can you tell what they all have in common? Oh yeah, they are all rss reader / aggregators, a space that I have wasted too much of my life getting expert on.

According to Google Sets, the competitors in the space of RSS reader/aggregators are:

feeddemon, blogbridge, google reader, newsgator, netnewswire, bloglines, feedreader, sharpreader, rojo, pluck, newzcrawler, rssowl, jyte, netvibes, amphetadesk, awasu, newsburst, pageflakes, google, newsfire, feedster, rssreader, rss, feedlounge, 订阅到抓虾, feedburner, yahoo, technorati, feedness, firefox, msn, pluckit, newsmonster, aol, bottomfeeder, gougou, sage, myaol

Dang! That’s a really good list. All the RSS reader aggregators I know are on that list, some that I don’t know, and a few products which are closely allied.

Welcome to the new force in competitive analysis!

Technorati Tags: blogbridge, competitive analysis

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For you slow pokes who have not yet upgraded to Leopard, my continuing experience might be of interest (then again it may not.) If you are a real slow poke you may not know that Leopard is Apple’s new generation operating system for the Mac line. My reference above to Vista is mostly tongue-in-cheek. Here’s what my log book says so far:

• Tried to upgrade my old iBook G4. The DVD spent a long time making reading noises but nothing seemed to happen. Waited about 4 hours. Then gave up. Couldn’t get the DVD out - the iBook continued to book back to the DVD. Called Apple. Got a barely trained tech on the phone that really annoyed me. Finally figured it out myself.
• Leopard doesn’t like getting installed on a 4 year old iBook with 256M of memory. Duh. Why didn’t it just say so?
• Next upgraded my 2 year old Mac G5 tower. Went, soup to nuts, with no hiccups at all. Wonderful.

Next post: What’s different that matters in Leopard, at least to me.

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Usually more on the bleeding edge than this, I decided to wait until now to upgrade my macs to Leopard which is the name of the new Mac OS X release. If anything interesting happens I will let you know. Hopefully nothing interesting will happen

•  Why does the Leopard update begins with an exhaustive and lengthy “checking of the DVD for consistency”? process? I haven’t heard much about DVDs getting mysteriously turned inconsistent. Maybe they are doing something else and just making up a more tolerable exuse for the 30 minute do-nothing delay.
• I have a 4 year old iMac G4 notebook. I wonder if Leopard will like it.

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This is relevant to the discussion about congestion pricing, mesh networks and avoiding traffic jams, a topic that I am getting interested in as you could see from this previous post.

[… snip]  Now help is at hand. As satellite-navigation devices become more widely used, networking effects are making them more powerful. This is because vehicles themselves are starting to relay real-time traffic data—and he more that do so, the more accurate traffic information will become.  [snip…] (from The Economist)

Read the whole article and you will see that it’s more than just GPS devices that are being called to duty: cell phones as well as verbal reports can get integrated together into an overall picture of where the traffic is and how to avoid it.

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It’s rare that I watch/listen to a whole Youtube. But here you go…

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Check out this very interesting article that suggests that placing mesh network nodes in cars is a far better way to implement congestion pricing than what has been tried so far.

The short paraphrase is that you can place mesh network nodes in cars and they can talk to an urban network to gain access and pay for access to the cngestion pricing zone.

And, here’s the cool wrinkle, in doing that also get an urban wifi network ‘for free’.

You have to read the whole article to follow the chain of reasoning but it’s quite interesting.

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I am starting to follow the world of mesh networks and things related to that.

One immediate question that has popped up is: now that there are cell towers everywhere, what advantage might there be to creating a new national or global or mobile network based on mesh technology? I am just an ignoramus so far on this, but in that quest, I came across this article.

“It was the first step in an initiative Verizon began last fall
in an effort to open up its network to entrepreneurs interested in
creating devices and mobile applications not sold through the company’s
retail stores.” (from Verizon Details Its Open Wireless Plans)

Does this allow the creation of a new class of device placed in homes or cars or what-not that uses the cell network as it’s backbone?

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You know I follow the vagaries of computer voting machines, right? Here’s an interesting article about how one e-voting machine maker is trying to prohibit a researcher from studying the security (= trying to hack into) one of their machines:

“Princeton Professor Edward Felten astonished Congress and increased doubts about electronic voting two years ago when he showed a House committee how easily he could open a Diebold touch-screen machine, insert new software and alter vote totals.

Now, Sequoia Voting Systems, the other large voting-machine maker, has sent Felten an email suggesting legal action if he tries the same thing on its equipment.” (from the Wall Street Journal)

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I found my way onto Robin Chase’s blog, Network Musings. She writes about lots of stuff I am interested in. Starting with the top post right now, “Should Casinos Subsidize Car Travel?” where she says:

“The Governor of Massachusetts has asked state legislators to seriously consider encouraging the building of several new large casinos in the state in order to raise revenues, the majority of which will be used for transportation shortfalls.” (from Network Musings)

In the Youtube video, which is short and worth a listen, the bon mot:

“Legalizing Casinos in Massachusetts […] is introducing a second addiction to pay for our first addiction: low cost driving”

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So my little toy pedagogical application needed a pretty popup box. Actually I wanted one so I could see close up some of the alternatives. In the process I came across three different code snippets, each one doing it in a little bit different way. For you and me, here are the links:

• The DOM-popup kit, by Stuart Rackham
• The FAMSPAM Facebox package by Chris Wantrath
• The Bubble Tooltip kit by Alessandro Fulciniti with an assist by Annalisa Afeltra

I tried the first two, but the third looks cool too. I liked Facebox the best. Your mileage may/will vary.

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