TED speeches

I recommend watching these free Google Videos on the TED (Technology Entertainment and Design) Conference. Particularly good was a speech on supporting creativity in education made by Sir Ken Robinson.

Helping Google with Image Labeler

In the event that you're bored and have the desire to help corporate research then you can try the Google Image Labeler game where you are paired up with another person with the goal of matching up terms that you associate with a given image. Kind of neat, it's cool to think that the users can be so connected with Google engineers' research. This reminds me of a recent Google blog post that has to do with Neven Vision, an image recognition company Google just acquired.

Blogger Beta review

Since I use Google's Blogger for all of my online work, I wanted to post my reaction to the new beta version. The bottom line is that it's fantastic to finally have a dynamic infrastructure that's more akin to Gmail than a dinosaur web program from 2001. It was almost an embarrassment that Google was allowing the old Blogger to just sit there given its popularity and connection to all their other world-class applications.

There are the obvious bugs that come along with a beta version and the personal wished-for features. For me, I would most like to be able to edit the new templates with my own html raw coding. Also scheduled time-released publishing would be nice in order to pace my posts without me having to pace out my time. It just makes sense for me as a publisher and for readers who would rather have a steady stream throughout the day as opposed to a few massive batches of blog posts.

I'd also like to see an autosave feature with the new blogger beta, as Gmail does. However the other new dynamic features overshadow the absence of this. The new dynamic template editor runs like a polished version of Google Page Creator ( a simple, smart web based WYSIWYG editor) and gives you nice options too. You will notice, however, that I have not switched over to the new templates yet because it eliminates a few back-end modifications that I like to have in place. Other nice additions: post labels, more detailed template customization (fonts, colors, backgrounds, buzzwords), and of course the integration with your Google account (finally).