BlackDog is a a USB powerd linux server that’s about the size of an iPod mini. Plug it in to a host computer’s USB port and it takes over the monitor, keyboard, mouse, and network connections. Remove it and everything on the host is returned to its original state. It’s powered by a 400Mhz PPC running Debian with 64M RAM and 256 or 512 MB of flash memory. Cost? $240 for the 512M version.

Google finally adds RSS/Atom support for Google News.

The new feature will allow Google News users to set up RSS (Really Simple Syndication) or Atom content syndication feeds for specific Google News sections, such as entertainment, business or world news, and for specific terms users search for on Google News, such as “George Bush,” “diabetes” or “space shuttle.

More..

I am more interested in “specific terms” and how good(fast) a job Google does on it. Very soon its going to cross paths with Technorati’s Watchlist.

(Via Andrew Lark)

Flickr delivers a new ranking mechanism. Results at Flickr Explore. A very good example of what social+technology can do — building on PageRank.

There are lots of things that make a photo ‘interesting’ (or not) in the Flickr. Where the clickthroughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite; its tags and many more things which are constantly changing. Interestingness changes over time, as more and more fantastic photos and stories are added to Flickr.

More ..

A listing of top uploads in the last 24 hours is impressive. Explore / Interestingness / Last 24 Hours is surely worth a bookmark (del.icio.us count).

(Via John Battelle)

Technorati launches Technorati Mobile.

(Via The Blog Herald).

Recently both Yahoo! and Google released their Map APIs. Both have interesting and unique features – while Google map is easy to customize and embed in your website or application, all you need to do with Yahoo Map API is provide it with the XML formatted data for
plotting information on the map. The nice thing about Yahoo API vs Google API is that you do not need to specify the exact latitude and longitude information and it does the geocoding for you using the address.

Having played with both a little, I hacked up an application that would extract the latest news from Yahoo! US News website and display on the map. You can view it in action here and it has also been added on the yahoo developer network’s featured application list here.

These APIs provide a simple way for anyone to visualize geospatial information and I hope that such nifty applications would motivate people to provide metadata information such as OPML or geocoding in images.

Following up on RSS Readers: Narrowing Down Your Choices and Danny Ayers’s post on blogging hosts — here’s our attempt at ranking blog hosting websites. These statistics are based on Technorati’s index. Software used (MT, WordPress etc.) are not part of the statistic.

Technorati API allows 500 queries per day. We picked query words randomly from an english dictionary. We then collected the top 100 results (most live blogs) between 9:00 AM and 1:00 PM EST over a period of the last 18 days. We eliminated duplicate blog home pages to create a list of 173192 unique blogs.

Note: Technorati ranks results by freshness — our statistics are hence for the “Live Blogosphere”.

We do not claim our statistics to be representative. These are the biases –

1. Technorati index.
2. US Blogs, given our query time-frame.
3. Blogger — spam blogs are very live.
4. Self hosted blogs. Our numbers only use URLs to classify blogs. For instance, a blogger weblog hosted at a personal website is not classified with blogger. Blogger blog’s are identified by “blogspot.com” being part of the URL.

Even with these biases, our numbers should give a good estimate of blogging host popularity.

Based on our collection here’s how blog hosts compare.

Technorati API also provides inlink information of blogs. We normalized inlink for these blog hosts to find the the number of inlinks/blog for each of these hosts. Total inbound links in our collection is 1.8 Million. The mean inlink/blog is 10.64

The impact rating – inlinks/blog

The Rest .. includes many blogs which are self-hosted. Self-hosted blogs, as is evident are the most popular.

Thanks to Jim Mayfield for suggesting the use of technorati.

Google Earth is a Java-based GIS application that allows users to find places on the face of the Earth. The users can zoom from space down to street level and combine imagery, 3D geography, maps, and business data to get the total picture in seconds.

I love it! If your computer meets these requirements, give it a try.

It took me 15 mins to find the place where I used live in Hong Kong in Google Earth.

This is a fictionary 8-mintue mini-movie speculating the evolution of media from 1984 up until 2014 .

• ’2005 – In response to Google’s recent moves, Microsoft buys Friendster. ‘
• ’2008 sees the alliance that will challenge Microsoft’s ambitions. Google and Amazon join forces to form Googlezon.’
• ‘In 2011, the slumbering Fourth Estate awakes to make its first and final stand. The New York Times Company sues Googlezon…’
• ‘In year 2014, New York Times has gone offline.’

source: http://www.robinsloan.com/epic/; transcript

source

As shown in left picture, professor Hiroshi Ishiguro of Osaka University has build a humanoid robot. It looks more like a human being than the one in the right picture.

‘When a robot looks too much like the real thing, it’s creepy,’ Repliee Q1expo developer Ishiguro said. ‘But if they resemble human beings, it also makes communication easier.’

Trading virtual objects may sound zany, but it seems people can get motivated enough to kill for them, like this tragic incident.

Who owns virtual resources? Can there be rights over objects/artifacts in virtual gaming worlds and for that matter the Internet? Do we own email messages sent or received on Hotmail or Gmail? Is this really different from privacy? Is this DRM?

$9m trade revenues on eBay for such artifacts, gives an idea of the scope of the problem.

IBM seems to have captured the gaming console market, becoming the sole chip provider for PS3, XBox 360 and Nintendo.

Apple moves on in search of greener pastures, switching to Intel x86 chips. Mac users will probably see dropped prices and increasing support for x86 applications by end of 2007. Seems to be win-win situation for Intel, Apple and Mac enthusiasts! We might finally see non-linux robust software on x86 after all .

The specifications of the new XBox 360 and PS3 are amazing. Not only they look good, but also they are built with the latest technologies — e.g., Blu-ray, super fast CPU, Bluetooth controllers, removable hard drivers, Wi-Fi, video chats, and HDTV output.

I think video game consoles will gradually evolve into multi-purpose electronic devices that will serve people beyond video gaming. In the future, probably we will use video game consoles to communicate with friends and families, send email messages, order products online, watch movies, and download music. It will be interesting to see how things will play out between the video game consoles and the digitial entertainment centers.

Side effect: I think the sales of game consoles with HDTV output may boost the sales of HDTV.