mrshl | blog

I’ll let Duncan Riley explain:

Users who type the word “gay” into Google are being presented with a little extra in their search results: a rainbow flag between the results and ads.

The rainbow flag (also known as a gay pride flag) represents an open statement of support for the LGBT community, and can commonly be seen in businesses or on vehicles of members of the LGBT community or by those who support this community. By display the flag, Google is sending a message that it supports gay rights.

Now there is absolutely nothing wrong with Google’s stand, and credit to them for making it, but gay rights and the religious right in America don’t make great bedfellows. Google is making overtly political statements in its key search area, a stand that for Google is actually unprecedented as far as I can recall. When the right wing media and blogosphere find out that Google is making these statements, it’s only a matter of time until someone calls for a boycott.

Wait, you think the same right-wing nut jobs who mistook Rachel Ray and her scarf as apologia for Islamic extremism might have a problem with Google expressing clear support for gays and lesbians? 

Google has already been getting flack for not being patriotic enough to honor certain holidays with one of their famous doodles:

Perhaps the most extreme condemnations come from the editors of the populist WorldNetDaily.com, who have all but accused Google of advancing the cause of godless communism. "Google consistently ignores patriotic American holidays such as Memorial Day and Veterans Day," WorldNetDaily’s editors wrote last October, "but today it acknowledged an accomplishment of the communist Soviet Union, which launched the Sputnik satellite fifty years ago." The news site, which has also complained that Google’s search rankings keep its stories in the basement, even ominously reported that the company misspelled its logo when commemorating Valentine’s Day last year. "Previous Valentine’s Day logos for Google, obtained by WND, have no such possible confusion for spelling," the site noted. Could Google even have it in for love?

If these dorks can’t get over Sputnik, they’re going to have a really hard time tasting the rainbow. Wake me when it’s over.

Today Google Maps introduced a very useful new feature. If you find an address that doesn’t look quite right you can fix it, so that the address you’ve entered matches the actual map.

Having just purchased a new house, I was able to try the new map correction feature because my address was incorrectly listed as belonging to a house five doors east of my actual home. As you can see below, Google allowed me to correct the error. Note that if you move the marker more than 200 meters, a moderator has to approve your changes before they appear live on the Web.

Also notice the "Show original" link above, which is pretty handy if you want to check your work.

This is a feature I’ve wanted to see for quite a while now, but it took a guy working in his spare time to implement a feature that should be basic. Google engineer Steve Lacey explains what it is and why he did it:

As a blogger I like to include a blogroll on my site so that friends, family and other readers can take a look at what I like to read. It’s also a nice way to give a shout out to the authors of the blogs that I like. However, maintaining a blogroll can be a bit of a pain as your subscriptions ebb and flow.

As a heavy user of Google Reader, I figured that the best way to get a blogroll would be to have Reader generate it for me, based on my subscriptions. This didn’t seem to hard, so I chatted to the Reader team and then set about implementing a this feature in my 20% time.

Well, now it’s ready for prime time! Head over to the "Tags" section on the settings page, make one of the tags you use for subscriptions public, and click on "add a blogroll to your site." For an example, head over to my personal blog, and you can see my blogroll in action over on the right.

I actually went over to Lacey’s blog and spotted something quite odd. Above, Lacey says he’s a heavy user of Google Reader, but his blog links to his personal Bloglines account, which is GOOGLE READER’S MAIN COMPETITOR.

I understand why Lacey links to Bloglines, though. Google Reader offers a superior way to read your feeds, but until now there’s been no easy way to share your feeds with your pals. Sure, Google let’s you create a running list of items you’ve shared. But Bloglines lets your friends look at your actual Bloglines account. And the company has supported blogrolls since forever. Google Reader is just now catching up. Thanks to Lacey.

Oh, if you still don’t know what a blogroll is, check out the life partners and cheap thrills lists in the right-hand column. Those are blogrolls I made using del.icio.us. Like blogrolls created using Google Reader or Bloglines, I never have to edit my blog or use HTML, I simply have to add a link to del.icio.us, and it shows up in my blogroll. Effortless.

Searchmash is an innovative and attractive alternative to Google. And it’s owned and operated by Google.

The main attractions?

• Visual preview of every page before you click.
• Cycle among image, video, map, and blog search without having to reload the page.
• Use your keyboard to navigate between search results.
• Autohide search history and options panel.
• Flash and HTML interfaces (flash version pictured).
• Same great Google-quality search results.

I’m not going to bother with an extensive review. It works just like a regular ole search engine. Except this one just might replace your regular Google.

Well, it’s not called PowerPoint, and it lacks quite a few of the power features you get from Microsoft’s market leading desktop presentation software. But, as Dwight Silverman at the Chron points out, Google’s newest “doc” application solves a couple of big problems for the millions of people who aren’t PowerPoint users: 

App by app, Google has been building an impressive online office suite with word processing and spreadsheets. Now the search giant has added a presentation manager, which is slick and solves two common problems — sharing presentations when the recipient doesn’t have PowerPoint, and needing to give a presentation to an audience on a computer that lacks software.

Presentations at Google Docs lets you both build presentations in your Web browser, as well as upload ones you’ve built in Microsoft’s PowerPoint. That makes presenting on any machine a snap — you just have to hope that, if it doesn’t have PowerPoint, it can at least get to the Internet

Silverman doesn’t dwell on it, but perhaps the biggest selling point for Google’s Office products is the ability to collaborate on documents in real time and track changes with easy-t0-use versioning. Microsoft’s excellent Office 2007 product also offers these capabilities, but it doesn’t come cheap and it’s not near as easy to set up.

Oh, yeah. Google’s product is free. 

I discovered this on my own, but Google Street View added Houston about two weeks ago. Looking at some of the pics, it looks like they used lower resolution pictures(you can’t zoom in far and still retain clarity). Maybe to the privacy concerns that cropped up in other cities? Most of the areas covered are on freeways or downtown. The picture quality on pretty much everything I’ve looked up is so terrible, it’s almost useless.

The damned Landmark Greenway 3 sign that I had to change many many times. Looks like somebody finally wised up and stopped putting the titles on the side that no traffic will see.

The River Oaks 3 theater. Man, just about every shot looks pretty terrible. I see the sun shining…did they forget to clean the lens?