Archive for the ‘web’ tag
Twitter Vs. RSS
It is wild, how on one day a topic can be discussed so wildly on the internet. Today it seems like RSS is the hot topic.
- First I noticed this post on camendesign: complaining that RSS won’t be on the top GUI layer of the new generation of web-browsers;
- Oliver Gassner wrote about it (in German): The RSS reader is dead, but not RSS per se, because notifications are important and RSS is the underlying technology;
- even Seth Godin wrote about it: In contrary to Oliver Gassner, who uses it to keep track of only a few blogs, Seth Godin uses it to keep track of many blogs;
Here are my thoughts:
- RSS is dead and twitter took over its role. This is the impression I get at least often when using twitter. A lot of people seem to use twitter to announce their blog posts. I think this is not what twitter is good for and neither what twitter is intended for. Why waste twitter posts?
- It still is very useful for me to use an RSS reader. This is how I keep track of blogs that are of interest to me
- It is easy and tempting to subscribe to too many blogs or RSS streams. I am trying to unsubscribe to blogs on a regular basis
Google Earth
Here I am in 2010 writing a blog post on Google Earth. You know, the thing has been around for a while, and most relevant people to this blog are aware of it. However, I just came across to posts on the Google Earth Blog, that demonstrate what a how this thing gets continuously updated and improved:
- There are updated historical images, and quite a few in Germany have been updated. The resolution is not the greatest, but it is still interesting! Instructions: Activate “Historical Views” by selecting “View” from the menu bar and then check “Historical Imagery”. Then a little slider appears in the top left corner of the map screen in GoogleEarth, which you can slide in order to “travel through time”.
- The Google Earth Blog blogged about a kml file from the National Snow and Ice Data Center. The great thing about this kml file is that it is animated: A voice tells a story, the globe spins to places the voice talks about, and related images pop up. Cool!