I am a bit behind the times when it comes to using Google Maps, approximately 6 months or so. While at the Kelsey SES Local Conference the Director of Google Maps demonstrated a very cool feature.

You can type in an address and it will zoom you right into that location and you can look around 360 as if you’re standing there, right in the middle of the street. This is not a satellite view! The last time I played with this type of stuff was using satellite view and all you could see were roof tops of homes and buildings. This is a much different experience and is very sweet!

I chose to stand on the corner of Marine Dr, San Francisco to look at the Golden Gate Bridge.

1. Go to maps.google.com and type in an address. On the top right of the map notice an icon called “Street View”
2. Certain areas on the map should turn blue and a little orange person appears.
3. Move the orange person into any part of the blue area.

I will be attending SES Local in Los Angeles this week. If anyone who reads this blog is going to be there, look me up!

Over the past few weeks I’ve been noticing referring traffic from Streamy.com so I decided to check them out.

Holy Flock batman! There appears to be a deluge of aggregators who want to make our RSS reading / social networking life much more cohesive.

Streamy has not launched yet but they do have an interesting video demonstrating their product offering.

When I went to write this post I found I was having some difficultly describing Steamy in basic term so I read one of their blog posts “Why We Won’t, and Don’t Intend To ‘Kill’ Digg”

“We have created a system that aggregates syndicated content, channels it through your new and existing social networks, and creates a sum that is greater than its parts.”

“Basic services on the Web – messaging, “microblogging”, social networking, reading and writing – really do belong together, and we believe we are creating a sound solution.”

Perhaps you will get a better idea by watching this video.

As you can probably tell I am messing around with Flock. I have it tied into my YouTube, FaceBook, and Flickr accounts.

Click This Image to see my screen:

Just when I thought I was staying up to date with the status of my Facebook friends, Flock brings it one step closer. Now while browsing the web I get to see who’s doing what all the time. Lets see whats going on:

Barry is twittering, Richard is hungry and Rebecca is happy some one brought in food that has holes in the center.

Thats good stuff!

At the top of my browser I have Flock tied into my Flickr account. I suppose this is really narcissistic of me because almost every picture I am looking at is of me. Perhaps to get the best use of this I should have it tied into my friends Flickr account but lets be real, most of my friends are not as nice to look at and if I have to look at faces all day long while browsing the web, they might as well be mine.

In all seriousness my first impression of Flock is that it is busy, but I guess thats the point. Its a social persons browser.

I like to think I am a social person and I can see at some point this type of product would be useful once it ties in all things such as Instant Messenger, video conferencing, document sharing and Skype. Thats my idea of a kick-ass browser. Let me share, view and speak with everyone at once, in real time.

I think right now having all these “social” things in front of me while working is more of a distraction, at least for what I do on a daily basis. Then again, if your one of the few who manage to make a living by being social then I think Flock is for you.

This is a test to see if I like posting to my blog via Flock

Blogged with Flock

Tags: Flock

A message to the developers working on Google Docs.

1. I would like to be automatically notified when one of the members of my “Share With” group updates the document. Curently I have to check back just to see if any changes were made and thats a waste of time. My understanding is we can use an RSS feed but the last thing I want is to make any of our project documents public.
2. Members should be assigned a unique color by default, thus making it easy for everyone to see what items that member has added or amended. Currently our team has to change their text manually to a specific color. This is quite time consuming on a large document which requires many changes.
3. Auto insert a member tag id such as initials to help us decipher what member has said what. Our members are adding their own initials (along with color chanigng their own text).

Of course the final document could remove all the formatting, but the way it works now its sort of a pain to edit the same document with a large group.

Other than that, I think Google Docs has a lot of potential. Currently I create projects in Word Documents requiring group members to edit the one document changing the version number each time.

I may actually stop using Word and switch to Google Doc’s full time but more features are needed to make things easier when working with a group of people.

I noticed the other day when doing a keyword query in Google for one of my private projects a word document I’d attached several months is showing up in the Googles SERPS.

I had attached a word document during one of my regular Private Message Board exchanges. In fact, I uploaded many documents during that exchange but somehow Google indexed it.

When I am outsourcing projects its very common for me to upload Visio’s, Word Doc’s and Excel Documents.

I called and explained my issue with Elance and at first they told me what I was saying was not possible.

I gave them the keyword I used in Google and they remarked at how this never happens. I explained that it did happen and they need to check their server configuration because Google is finding its way to our attachments.

The support guy said “Google has gotten very powerful” and went on to tell me how all mighty and powerful the Google crawler has become. Nice, huh!

This situation sort of reminds me when a few months back a IT guy for a school left a path to their secure documents open and then blamed Google for indexing all their private information for the world to see. If I recall they claimed Google hacked their secure site.

While on the phone with the Elance support rep I gave them the full path to the file (which he also had by looking at the Google result) but he said it was very difficult to remove the file. He even said I should call the provider first and asked them if they did anything to make this happen.

I explained I don’t want to spend all day working on this issue and that they should just remove my file from the server. After a few minutes on the phone I was told that they “think” it should now be removed. Although when I check Google, the file is still there.

I am told it might take a day or so for their system to update and delete the file.

It’s a total pain in the ass, but if you’re using Elance or any service like it, secure all your documents.

Who has time to read a top 100 or even top 1000 + type blog posts? That’s all I have to say about that!

At first I thought I was going crazy. One of my sites is getting flooded with referral traffic from MSN for a keywords which I rank well with in Google. I follow the URL back to MSN Live with the keyword already embedded and my site is nowhere to be found.

Today I logged back into my analytics tools (I am using IndexTools and Google Analytics) to find that there has been an explosion of new hits coming from MSN. Still, when I try to track back the source with the corresponding keyword I am not able to find any reference to my sites in the organic serps.

Its not as if the keywords coming to my site are not relevant. These are keywords I know I rank well for with Google. Its so strange…

American Gangster is one of the best movies I’ve seen for years. Go see it!