CivicActions

Google is announcing Friend Connect tonight, a service advertised to "help website owners grow traffic by enabling any site on the web to easily provide social features for its visitors." Friend Connect employs OpenID and oAuth which is a good start, but how it puts them together is lacking vision and, disturbingly, may raise significant privacy concerns.

After a couple months of development. The google appliance module is now published on drupal.org!

This module allows drupal developers and site administrators to plug into google's enterprise search offerings (the GoogleMini and the Google Search Appliance).

I've written a little how-to and announcement on my personal site entitled Google Appliance Integration with Drupal

It is currently in beta, so any lucky google appliance users out there, please bang on it!

Thanks,
J

Surf Canyon, one of my favorite search add-ons to improve Google search, auto-updated today - reminding me that I've been meaning to share this for the Way We Work.

Basically, Surf Canyon helps you find information deep within the search results. As you search in Google (or Yahoo or MSN), the results you click go on to train Surf Canyon to find links more relevant to what you are looking for.

In the case of the example image below, searching for the Media Mover module in Google, I am able to quickly find the Drupal Video Group as well, pulled in from page 3.

Surf Canyon works with Firefox (and Internet Explorer, if you must).

It is time for Google to put its mouth where its money is.

The Internet search and advertising delivery giant has again opposed shareholder resolutions that would have required it meet minimum standards of internet freedom. These are very modest proposals, that if adopted would have allowed Google to demonstrate that it understands that a totalitarian internet is evil, and that Google will not be evil.

2 months ago we launched the Witness Video Hub. Last week the Hub Map's full-screen mode was finally released!

It features an original full-screen-mode switcher which puts the map in to, and out of, fullscreen mode without a full page reload.

Google will pay high school kids aged 13 to 18 up to $500 for their participation in their newest endeavour to promote open source in the general public.

Google Highly-Open-Participation Contest is a new programme that follows on from the success of Summer of Code. The first round is a bit of a trial and has only ten projects involved, and Drupal is one of them! The others are;

• Apache Software Foundation
• GNOME
• Joomla!
• MoinMoin
• Mono
• Moodle
• Plone
• Python
• SilverStripe

It is both impressive and interesting how many of them are web-content tools (CMS, web-application frameworks, wikis etc).

I'm proud to announce that I'm participating in the Season of Usability programme. SoU is similar to Google's Summer of Code, but is sponsored by Open Usability and has a focus on usability, not code, in Free/Libre/Open-Source Software. The goal of my SoU project is to improve the usability of drupal.

As part of the programme I need a technical mentor (a drupal developer) and a usability mentor (usability expert). Mentors help to maintain the direction of the project. Zoey and Ron, information architects at CivicActions, have offered to be the usability mentors. Now I'm seeking a technical mentor. The technical mentor will help to ensure that the results and deliverables will be valuable to the drupal community and integrated into the Drupal project.

The rumor is that Google is planning to fight Facebook on the "social networking" front...

If the story is true, Google will announce a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google’s social graph data and will be an attempt to connect the currently closed communities of Tribe.net, Bebo, Friendster, Twitter, Digg, LinkedIn and more...

I've been watching some feeds recently for particular terms, for example, DRM on technorati, google news search, google blog search, digg and delicious. What I have noticed is that the same story gets blogged about on a 100 blogs, mostly pretty little, and many with very little extra information. There is nothing wrong with blogging stories like that. I do it all the time. But it sure can get tedious wading through to find the good one, maybe the one with some new info, or the one worth linking too.

Public Radio is reporting this morning that border agents on the US Canadian border are looking way back into people's past to find ways to deny them entry to one country or the other. Border agents are even using Google. One case mentioned in the story was of a Canadian Psychoanalyst who was denied entry after agents found an article he wrote in 2001 about his use of LSD in the 1960s.

I imagine the day is not far off when border agents use facebook or myspace!