by Roger Kondrat on April 24, 2006
This is was such a subtle feature increase that I didn’t even think to blog about it until I stumbled across it on Ajaxian.com. They always keep up with these small tweaks, they are a very alert group.
Anyway you may have noticed this yourself but Google Maps has a new miniture map overlay in the bottom right hand corner of the screen (Ajaxian calls it a widget). Its not such a fantastic feature so much as a tweak because you don’t need it when using the mapping service but you sure appreciate it now that it is there. Its like the gift you didn’t realise you wanted until you got it.
Take a look here: Google Maps for a quick visual
See bottom right corner for new widget.
Now the widget has been minimised by clicking the small arrow in the corner
These images may be over kill but I thought why not. Most people have to squint when looking at some website images so why not make easier to view.
by Roger Kondrat on April 24, 2006
Jeff Jarvis picked up on my post the other day about GData, Is GData knocking down Google’s walled gardens, or enabling a new kind of portal? Google’s new syndication protocol which is an extension of both RSS and Atom. Like most people, Jeff isn’t sure what this means - and neither is Dave Winer. I’m in the same boat, but what I do know is that Google has taken a sudden interest in extending RSS and Atom. Check out this Google Base documentation, for RSS 2.0 and for all syndication formats. This is all about enabling bulk upload of items into Google Base, which you’ll recall is Google’s potential giant database of structured data on the Web. Google is obviously eyeing RSS (or syndication in general) as a means of getting people to upload data to Google Base. Here’s how they’ve extended RSS 2.0 for example:
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[tags]rss,atom,google,google base,2.0, rss 2.0,gdata,api,[/tags]
