Tech Weekly

Doing some traveling this Holiday season and flying. Check out this handy little feature that Google is now offering. Just enter your flight number into a Google window and you will be able to see if there are any delays with your flight, when it will take-off and land. A lot of the different airlines offer this kind of information however you have to dig thru their site etc... with this its one click and your done.

Labels: Google

Picture credit: Google

I am sure we have all seen those helpful maps at the mall or some other larger place showing all the shops etc... laid out and a big arrow designating the current maps location with the words "YOU ARE HERE".

Well today Google release something similar for Mobile Google Map for Mobile which is called My Location.

See your location on the map, with or without GPS. Save time and tedious keystrokes finding where you are, what's around you, and how to get there.

If you have a GPS-enabled device, this blue dot corresponds to your GPS location. At times, or if you do not have a GPS-enabled phone, you might see the blue dot surrounded by a light blue circle (as shown on the right) to indicate uncertainty about your location.

Labels: Google

Every standards-compliant, Google-sensitive image reference should contain 5 key items:

1. A src attribute specifying the URL of the image
2. A width declaration in which the width of the image is specified in pixels
3. A height declaration in which the height of the image is specified in pixels
4. An alt attribute that describes the content of the image—this is the #1 element of image-oriented SEO
5. A title attribute that contains text to be displayed when the user hovers his/her mouse over the image

For this example, we’ll use the image of a yellow hot air balloon at right, which is 220 pixels wide by 212 pixels high.

When we apply the five key items from above with the elements from our example image, we end up with an XHTML image reference that looks something like this:

<img src="http://www.mysite.com/yellow_hot_air_balloon.jpg" width="220" height="212" alt="Yellow hot air balloon" title="Yellow hot air balloon" />

This advice VIA

When I first read the above referenced article I was blown away with how simple something like this should be to have done from the begining. Unfortunately I have not been following these 5 simple steps to make my image postings Google image compliant. I will have to struggle thru correcting this on all of my image postings as I would like for them to be properly indexed. And who knows according to the articles author doing this will have the benificial side effect of eventually garnering more page views. Which is something that I could certainly use.

Labels: Google

YouTube has just made a new site available called Test Tube this is the first of what I am sure will be more to come. New things that they have been working on over at YouTube. To start with there are two choice's at the site for you to try. AudioSwap and Streams.

I gave both of them a quick try. And I am sure that I will go back and fiddle with them a little more. Especially since I have a couple of videos loaded on YouTube that does not have any audio currently. What's that have to do with anything you say? Well AudioSwap can fix this problem. Once logged into it you can pick from a granted small list of musicians and there music that YouTube has negotiated deals with to allow on their site and you can add one of those songs to your video clip to spice it up some.

A couple of things that I notice right away is as is to be expected there are not that many artists or tracks yet. I am sure that YouTube will court more by the time this goes mainstream. If MySpace pages can now feature almost any soundtrack available I see no reason why those songs cannot be added to a video clip that you have uploaded. The content will not be downloaded or piratable since you test and listen to everything in the AudioSwap preview screen. I was able to add a song to one of my clips in about a minute. Have a look HERE to check it out.

One little feature that I sure would like would be for AudioSwap to allow you to upload your own music to a video clip you have already and allow you to add it to the clip. Of course the music industry would I imagine frown on this.

When I logged into Streams the first thing that struck me was how similar it is to how the first chat rooms online used to be back about 10 years ago. Kind of clunky and crammed together. The idea of Streams is that you can sign into an active Stream. There are not that many yet, but with as many videos that YouTube has I am sure that will change very quickly as well. Once you are signed in you can chat with other folks that are there and even add videos to the stream. Another thing that I noticed on each of these streams is that they are very similar in appearance to MySpace pages the difference being that instead of people coming and visiting a page and leaving a comment they are all there listening to the same music video or funny commercial while they are chatting away on the side.

It is really nice to see something come out of the blending of Google and YouTube. Both of these new services are a little rough around the edges. But one can only hope that YouTube will look for some feedback from users shortly and take into consideration what we have to tell them. In the meantime have fun with them and check back often as I can imagine just like all the off-shoots of Google we are liable to see many new and interesting things in Test Tube. Some of which just like with Google will never go beyond a Beta phase so to speak.

Labels: Google

Technorati Tags: Google - TV - Online - Gadget - Widget

Labels: Google

Montage-a-google is a simple web-based app that uses Google's image search to generate a large gridded montage of images based on keywords (search terms) entered by the user. Not only an interesting way of browsing the net, it can also be used to create desktop pictures or even posters. This is a really easy to use web-site that is kind of fun to play around with and see what kind of montage's you can make. As you can see on theire website some folks have used this to make posters for their children's room. I was able to use it to pull together quite a few pictures from my previously favorite show "The Screen Savers" from TechTV. Technorati Tags: Google - Montage - Photo Tweaks - Fun With Photo's

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