Edinburgh Coffee Morning - 1st of June 2007

By Jamie | June 1, 2007

With Mike AWOL this morning it was left to Fraser Edwards, Nev, Fraser, Douglas, Andy and myself. So here is a quick summary…

Gooooooooooooooogle

Google Gears - Browser extension that allows online applications to work off line, I wrote about this yesterday with much excitement!

Google Reader New Feature (Trends) - It seems Google is listening to our little coffee mornings. Ewan (Reboot Reporter) mentioned a couple of weeks ago about how many RSS feeds he subscribes to. We thought it be a nice idea to have some statistics that show which feeds you read the most, ditch the ones you don’t. Actually just done a little more digging and this feature has been around for a while, hrm I never noticed it?

Google Maps (Street View) - Now you can see pictures of the street level when you zoom in (USA only!). Not only that, you can the virtually drive around Google Maps. More…Top 15 Google Street View Sightings

Mobile Maps - I’ve recently installed Google Maps on my mobile, built on the Mobile Java platform. Fraser E showed me Microsoft Maps alternative on his mobile, seems a lot smoother. Having said that I was using GRPS and Fraser was utilising Centotre Wi-Fi.

Other stuff

Photosynth - Okay a enough Google for one day. Microsoft’s Photosynth, using photo’s taken from the public sources(Flickr in this case) to create panoramic views of famous places. Maybe this will be 3D in the not too distant future?

Journals, Wikis and RSS Feeds - Only two of us left, Andy and myself discussed his idea for a better way to manage, publish, subscribe etc to all things related to Academic Journals

There are many, many academic journals, books and other resources and many, many readers, subscribers, libraries…
So RSS has got to be a significant tool for publishers wanting to get regular updates out to info-swamped librarians, readers, authors … hence projects such as ToCross and Ingenta’s work with Grazr I guess.