JayMcCormack.com

Google Docs have recently started working with offline functions through the use of Google Gears.  Gears is their engine that allows for you to perform some functions while not connected to the Internet and then synchronises when you get a connection again.

I’ve been waiting for this for Gmail for a while.  I love the interface for Gmail, but get a little frustrated when I don’t have a connection, an offline version would be great.

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If you haven’t heard about mahalo.com, go have a look.  I personally don’t think much of it but I’m sure it has an audience.  Primarily it’s marketed as a human powered search engine.  So where Google relies on computations to rank web page search results mahalo gets people to make the same decisions.  i can see value in that as long as they have lots of humans (and I think they do).

What interested me tonight though was a search for ‘open office’ at Google, screen shot below.

What surprised me was the mahalo item at the top of the search results, and for a number of reasons:

• I see mahalo as a business venture.  It’s one organisations view on the what should be ranked, how and when.   It doesn’t represent the consensus at all.
• The mahalo block seemed to appear a second or two AFTER the actually search results.  I’m not sure if this is by design or something weird with FireFox 3 Bet 5, but it caught my attention too much.
• This to me is also an advertisement, although it doesn’t clearly state as much.
• They get a cool little flower icon appear next to their results.

Now it should be said that I’m not in competition with mahalo in any way, so I have nothing to gain from having a rant except to say that there must be some incredible deal between mahalo and Google to make this actually happen.

Normally Wikipedia appears at the top of these search results, a community driven non-profit, and as much as I don’t think much of the Wikipedia content at times I do recognise that that content is written by the people, you and I.

So how did mahalo get there?

Update: Just realised that this appears in my google search results only because I have installed a sharing addon for firefox… there’s an option for showing the mahalo top 7 in the results. Why didn’t I see it before now I wonder.

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I plan on writing a few posts over the next couple of weeks around Google docs, Google’s online document system, but to get started wanted to talk briefly about what the application is attempting to do.

If you think about the average document what normally springs to mind is something like a letter or a proposal and typically you would use a word processor to write it up.  Something like Microsoft Word, OpenOffice Writer are the normal tools you think of too.  If you think a little harder though about the actual process you use for assembling a document you may be in a position where you need to move the document around your organisation/friends/family to finalise it… everybody needs to put their 2c in.  The problem this presents is that you need to manage this process, you need to send it to each person and then get their responses back into the document.  If your organisation is anything like ours then everyone does it in their own way too, some people just change the document, other’s might ‘mark up’ the changes for approval.  Some people might add comments inside the document and finally others might just respond in an email with the changes they want made, ahhhhhhhh!

Google docs is designed to make this process of collaboration easier.  When you are in a situation where more than one person is building the document then you can open up or share your document with other people and all work on it at the same time.  Thankfully Google takes care of knowing who changed what and allowing you to track back through the changes.

It does by providing a web based interface to these tools, so using only a web browser you can open up a document, make changes, save and close.

Right now Google offer three different document types:

• Documents
• Spreadsheets
• Presentations

So your basics are covered.

Now some people talk about this being a replacement for Microsoft Office, I just don’t think that’s the case.  The functionality in these applications is just not rich enough yet to compete with the offline tools.  You get the ability to do a lot of what you can do in things like Word, but not enough to through away Word altogether.  I think it’s a matter of the right tool for the right job.

If you don’t already have a Google account, you can get one right now and it’s free, and then you can start working online and sharing your documents.

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JenSense.com says AdSense is going rich media.  What a shame, AdSense to me has always been the mercedes benz of advertising on the web.  They do everything with subtlety, providing content sensitive advertising without annoying the reader.

I think this is going start a new swarm of annoying ads.  I must tell you that my wife run’s a great site NewAgeStore.com and if it wasn’t for the AdSense ads we would not be in a position to afford the hosting.  However under no circumstances will I let a pop-up flash audible ad hit the site.

You see, even though AdSense pays some bills it’s not why we build sites.  We build sites to provide users with the things they need at the time they need them, it is a consequence of this that we get paid for the advertising.

Hey, all you plug-in developers out there, start building a way to block these ads now so we have something to install when they go live.

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My wife and I have been looking for the perfect family home for a while now.  We know what we want, however can’t always rely on the descriptions given in the newspaper or on the internet for property.

There are a few things to really annoy us about these descriptions, mostly however it is the distinct lack of mentioning anything about the power lines that cross over the property, or just next to the property, or the main road that’s just over the back fence.

So in an effort to come up with a better way of disqualifying properties before wasting our time actually walking through them I came up with a combination of things that will get me the information I am looking for without leaving my office.

Firstly, you’ll need the following:

• Google Earth installed
• Access to some tool that will give you longitude and lattitude for a street address.  In the US this is a little easier than in Australia.   Luckily however in both Victoria and New South Wales there are government websites that can give you this information.  No doubt the other stats have them too, for the example below I will be using Land Victoria

Here’s what we do:

1. Find the property you are interested on your favorite real estate website.  We use realestate.com.au almost exclusively, I’ll tell you why later.
2. Get the physical street address of the property.

 

 

3. Find this address in your land search tool.  At http://www.land.vic.gov.au/ you go to the “Interactive Map� and then do a search on the left side of the screen.
4. Having located the property find the longitude and lattitude coordinates.  In the example below the co-ordinates display on the status bar at the bottom of the screen.

 

 

5. Take these coordinates and put them into the search box in Google Earth.

 

 

The format that you enter the coordinates into Google Earth needs to be presice, it has very little tollerance for malformed searches.  In the above example the format was 38 3′ 29″ S, 145 20′ 0″ E

Google Earth will pinpoint the property location for you exactly.  Now that you have a marker you can even relable it and put some notes in so you hae it as a permanent reference.  Further if you want to you can also put in the original URL of the property back on your realestate search site.

Coming soon… find out how to get an overlay of the land boundaries in Google Earth and why it is that we always use realestate.com.au.

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