Connect Web Sites Using RSS And Yahoo Pipes

By Michael Fötsch, on October 2nd, 2010

Maybe you have a blog, a Twitter page, a Flickr photostream, and a bunch of other sites. And maybe when you post to one of your sites, you want the post to appear on all your other sites automatically.

I currently do this with RSS and Atom feeds and some Yahoo Pipes magic.

Flowchart of connected sites

Flowchart of connected sites

If the web site has an RSS feed (and which site doesn’t?), it is very easy to connect it to Twitter, identi.ca, and other social networks by using Twitterfeed. Basically, you create an account on Twitterfeed, tell it the address of the RSS feed, connect it to your Twitter account (using OAuth), and whenever there is a new post on the RSS feed, it will be posted to Twitter.

My Google Profile also has an RSS feed, and it already pulls in content from a variety of sites, including my blog, my Flickr photostream, my Google Reader Shared Items, etc.

In order to connect a site to your Google Profile, you first add a link to it in the profile settings. Make sure to tick the box that says “This is a profile page about me”. Then, on the linked site, you add an XFN link with a rel="me" attribute back to the Google Profile. This can be either a visible link using the <a> tag (which is what Twitter and other sites use for the web link that you specify for your profile page there), or using the <link> tag inside the page header:

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Is Google Instant Search More Personalized Now?

By Michael Fötsch, on September 8th, 2010

When Google launched “Instant Search” earlier today, commentators applauded and/or criticized the way Google predicts what you’re searching for.

If you haven’t seen Instant Search yet, see Google’s announcement or watch a video.

In a nutshell, when you start typing in the search box, a drop-down list appears suggesting possible completions. What’s new and actually quite exciting about Instant Search is that the results page for the topmost completion is automatically displayed in the background. You don’t even have to click the Search button.

So, when I type “p”, the topmost suggested completion is “pandora”. While I’m typing, the search results for “pandora” are displayed, just as if I had pressed Return.

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The Worst Arguments Against “Google Street View”

By Michael Fötsch, on August 15th, 2010

This is a translation of a blog post by Stefan Niggemeier on BILDblog.de.
Unlike other parts of my web site, this post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Germany license.

The media is full of opinion polls. But knowledge polls would often be much more interesting. For example, if people weren’t asked about their opinion on government reform plans but about what they actually know about these reform plans that they are to judge.

The “Bild” newspaper [Germany's top-selling tabloid] did this today—unintentionally, of course. They asked lots of people what they think about “Google Street View” and whether they will make sure that their houses are not being shown in the controversial offering[1]. (“Google Street View” combines the maps of “Google Maps” with images of entire streets that the company has photographed, and for the first time this year it will show views of 20 German cities.)

The responses of many people that are given a voice by “Bild” show one thing above anything else: how little the respondents know about the offering. Many seem to believe that it consists of live recordings and that Google virtually monitors the whole world around the clock. In addition, people faces and license plates are blurred in the photos.

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