I just saw this presentation by Google on youtube and thought that I would share it with you. The presentation in it self is about an hour long (but still worth watching!), but if you don't have the time, they've released 2 short videos about the 2 main subjects of the presentation.
The first one is Google Goggles and is searching by picture. It lets you take pictures of books, landmarks and other things, and then gives you the informations it thinks your asking for.
The other one is Real Time Search. It lets you search a subject and then shows you the newest information on it, from twitter to serious news sites. It also takes you location into consideration, so the posts being shown is different from place to place.
Another cool feature that was announced was voice search in Chinese and Japanese. They also demonstrate an audio translate feature to android phones. They can all be seen in the presentation here.
For more than half a year, I've been using google chrome as my standard browser. This because of to factors.
1) I've found it to be much faster than any of the other browsers.
2) There almost no "waste of space"
Both IE and Firefox has from my point of view a lot of space that is wasted. Both on extention, but they also have a window-box wich creates a line in the top and in the bottom of the screen that isn't used for anything relevant. In Chrome the top line have been merged with the tabs, and the bottom line only appears when loading a page.
The only minus have been the lack of extensions. But not anymore!
Now it is possible for the beta version of chrome to add extensions, and it doesn't make the interface any bigger. All it does is make your search-bar a little shorter and add the extension.
As you can see I currently have three extensions installed. The first from the right is myAdThwart that works like Adblock plus for Firefox. The next two is my Gmail and my Googlewave. Both let me know if there's any new messages in any of the two, and in this picture I have one in each. If you want to see what kind of extensions are available you can look at this page https://chrome.google.com/extensions .
Otherwise you can see this short video explaining extensions for Google chrome.
This video from Google is from the conference for Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age with the focus in this video on Literacy 2.0.
The first 36 min. is about what's possible in education today, and how connecting formal learning with informal learning can help the students learn in their own pace. They also talk about the new form of literacy that is required in the digital age, like using and creating new visual information and finding the information you need.
The people from Google then talks about searching, saying "searching is learning", and how the internet have changed what we need to learn. Almost every piece of information is available through the internet, so people no longer need to know, but they need to differentiate the information and use it in a creative context.
After that the panel takes questions from the audience.
Today (the 30th of September) Google have opened Google wave for 100.000 beta testers. I'm unfortunately not one of them but it's still a big step towards the upcoming launch.
If you still don't know what Google wave is or just don't want to watch the 80 minutes long video, Google have made a new video explaining Wave in just 10 minutes (acutally 7.52). Enjoy!
Everybody knows Wikipedia, but not everybody thinks that it's "safe" to use. Because everybody can write and edit any post on wikipedia some people fear that the information might not be true. There are several arguments for that. 1:The person who wrote it might actually not know what he's writing about. 2: Someone wanted to write their own personal opinion about something like how the earth was made or maybe write badly about a "famous" person. 3: They intentionally wrote something they knew was wrong, also known as Wiki-vandalism. The first argument is for me not really a problem. There are so many people who knows so much about so many different things that I think it would be corrected almost right away. The second, asuming that it's no a direct lie, only requires some basic understanding on how to see if a person is uttering a personal opinion. The third however is a little more difficult. In cases where people edit a post, making it "untrue", I guess the answer to the first argument would apply. If they just plainly make something up, like inventing a city, I don't think it would affect me since I use it to find information on a, for me, known subject which make it hard to be "fiction" as described before. One of the obvious reasons for using wikipedia over some "old" encyclopedia is that wikipedia is often updated minutes after the change has occured where as the old ones takes a longer time to get up-to-date. That is why some people argue that wikipedia is more "safe" to use when wanting relevant information. Some people complain about wikipedia being filled with "useless" information about "indifferent" things. I however think that that is the main force of wikipedia. It contains information about anything that somebody found important enough to write about. That is something you won't find in the professional encyclopedias. Here's a little video by Collegehumor about the topic:
Delicious. com is a website that lets you create a profile to which you can add bookmarks.
You can either import the bookmarks from your internet browser or go to the website and add them manually. You then have acces to your bookmarks from any computer by logging in to your profile on delicious.
This is very usefull if you work at different computers and or use a puplic computer and need a certain website that you don't remember the address to. You can also create a network and share your bookmarks with friends and colleagues.
An extra bonus feature is that you, if you use firefox, can install a delicious application that lets you have acces to your bookmarks directly from your browser. This might be a good way to organize your bookmarks if you have laptop and stationary computer.
One of the other websites, presented to us by our professor, is LibraryThing.com. It's a website that lets you search/browse several archives to find the books you have read/own. You then make your very own list of books and let other people see your collection. You can now rate and make review of the book. The idea is then to let you see others, who got the same kind of books that you have, so that you can get inspired to which book you are going to read next, or simply let the website generate some suggestions automatically based on the books in your library. I think I'd rather see what people I know have read before trying the other feature. I thought it was very fun to find the different books I've read, but so far I have yet to get excited about the "Recommended" feature. That being said I find it very nice to be able to show off and even recommend the books I've already read.
I've never really used RSS feeds before. I didn't really know what it was and didn't really know how to start using them. I then discovered that I've been using something very much like RSS feeds for a long time by using iGoogle. In iGoogle I've chosen a number of news sites that I would like to get news from and they each get a box on my iGoogle page in which the 3 latest news appears. A good idea then to get news from minor sites that doesn't have that many news is to use RSS feeds. I'm using google reader and a little widget(add-on) to my iGoogle which makes a box on my iGoogle page in which my feeds now appear. In addition to making this blog I've also subscribed to a number of people I would like to follow. It so happens that I can also use google reader to see blog posts from the people I'm following. So now I've got all my news on my iGoogle page, which of course is my homepage, and I'm starting to see the real potential to RSS feeds although I would advice using it together with iGoogle.
I've always thought that you ought to have something to say before making a blog. Nevertheless I now have a reason for making one since we are integrating it into our lectures. I now hope that it will blossom into a great blog of knowledge or die trying!
Delicious. com is a website that lets you create a profile to which you can add bookmarks.
