Tag Archive for 'google'

Can you tell me how to find Topshop?

Published by Mike Nolan on August 28, 2010 in Just for fun. 0 Comments Tags: argleton, google, google maps, maps, ormskirk, topshop.

A couple of weeks ago my Twitter Search alerts for “Ormskirk” picked up the following:

Katie on Topshop

I was intrigued so searched Google Maps for “topshop near ormskirk” and sure enough, not one but two mystery Topshops were marked on the map.

Topshop near Ormskirk

Obviously this isn’t the case so why are Google showing them on the map? The addresses of the shops match Dorothy Perkins and Burtons – both other brands in Arcadia Group, owners of Topshop – but that doesn’t explain why they’re there. As with Argleton, it may well be another case of Google mining data from whatever sources they can get their hands on and forget the accuracy. I’ve reported the problem to Google, let’s see if they fix it.

Flickr’s photo page Ajax trick

Published by Mike Nolan on June 24, 2010 in Development. 0 Comments Tags: ajax, chrome, facebook, flickr, google, google maps, javascript, photos.

Flickr recently started previewing their new photo pages. They’re quite nice but it does something that’s been driving me mad and I can’t work out how it’s doing it. It only happens in Google Chrome 5 and I’ve only seen it in a few places.

Take a look at this screen capture of Flickr’s new lightbox view. Note how the URL updates each time I click through to a new view. Nothing surprising there until you realise it’s not doing a full refresh of the page and is actually an Ajax call back to the server. (You may want to hit the full screen button, bottom right.)

Contrast that with what happens in Firefox – it’s still doing Ajax calls to make flicking between photos quick but the URL changes after the fragment

This technique is pretty common – Facebook have been using it for a couple of years and we even use it to give tabbed pages history on our site. It’s necessary because JavaScript isn’t allowed to set the full page URL without a page refresh, or at least that’s what I thought!

Google Maps has been doing the same as Flickr for a couple of months but I’ve still no idea how! Anyone care to read the Chromium source code or dig around Flickr’s JavaScript to see if there’s something different?

Update: also works in Safari, thanks Ross.

Google Street View

Published by Mike Nolan on March 11, 2010 in Just for fun and We're looking at. 5 Comments Tags: argleton, google, google maps, google street view.

I was right – it took almost three years to arrive in Ormskirk, but this week Google launched Street View across most of the country including Ormskirk.

Argleton might have been wiped off the main Google map but it’s still there in Street View as you can see in the above Street View of ~~Argleton~~ Aughton Village Hall.

Edge Hill’s St Helens Road and Ruff Lane entrances are present but you can’t (yet!) look around the campus or Ormskirk Town Centre:

Strangely on Ruff Lane the section immediately past the entrance is missing. I don’t think this is a conspiracy, it’s more likely the route the Google Street View car took.

Post links to any interesting things you’ve found on Google Street View.

Top 10 of 2009

Published by Mike Nolan on January 6, 2010 in About us, Blogs and Web Services. 0 Comments Tags: 2009, argleton, google, search, twitter.

It’s that time of year where you have to post an annual wrap-up of the previous year’s posts.

10. Google Apps Mail – POP/IMAP/iPhone

Just sneaking into the top ten is Steve’s introduction to some of the ways to access email for users of the new Google powered email.

9. New Departmental Sites

Sam introduces a summer’s worth of hard work (not so much from me – I was driving across America!)

8. Create a better search engine than Google

A post from late 2008 writing up a presentation I gave at BarCamp Liverpool and repeated at IWMW 2009.

7. Twouble with Twitters

An attempt to balance out #2 in the list by taking a sideswipe at those who are maybe a little too addicted

6. Argleton goes national!

A write up of some of the early coverage of the Argleton meme.

5. Rise of the Mega Menu

Coming soon to a website or portal near you – still a few things to iron out but we hope you’ll like what we do.

4. Roy Bayfield at the TV advert filming

Live on the set of the forthcoming TV advert and testing out the new Flip Camera we’ve got.

3. Browser stats

Everyone loves web stats, okay maybe it’s just me! Six months on and Internet Explorer has dropped to 76.9%, Firefox down a little to 13.5%, Opera has held steady while Webkit-based browsers, Safari and Chrome, have jumped to 5.6% and 3.6% respectively. Breaking down IE shows IE6 use continues to fall (down to under 11%) while IE8 usage has trebled. There’s hope for a standards-based-browser future yet!

2. What should @edgehill do on Twitter?

Little did I know when I wrote this post that it would unleash such a debate! Ironically we’ve just had the 2’ of snow that benefitted Bath’s uptake so we’ll see whether usage grows!

1. Google Renames Village

And in at #1 is a little post I fired out about a typo on a map

Argleton goes national!

Published by Mike Nolan on November 1, 2009 in Just for fun. 19 Comments Tags: argleton, aughton, geocoder, google, google maps, ormskirk, ormskirk advertiser, teleatlas, telegraph.

It seems Argleton just won’t die! Late to the game behind the Ormskirk Advertiser, Mister Roy’s visit and my post about the village some 13 months ago, the Daily Telegraph yesterday revealed the mystery of Argleton, the ‘Google’ town that only exists online.

It’s a nice article with exclusive interviews from Joe Moran from LJMU and, of course, Roy Bayfield. They’ve also managed to get answers from Google and their data provider Tele Atlas. Google’s spokesman said:

“While the vast majority of this information is correct there are occasional errors. We’re constantly working to improve the quality and accuracy of the information available in Google Maps and appreciate our users’ feedback in helping us do so. People can report an issue to the data provider directly and this will be updated at a later date.”

Ah yes, report the fault… that’d be what we’ve done on several occasions without success and may be the reason why Google have decided to take corrections into their own – or more accurately the user’s own – hands. It seems that drawing the attention of a national newspaper has caused Tele Atlas to pull their finger out:

“Mistakes like this are not common, and I really can’t explain why these anomalies get into our database.”

Let’s try a bit harder, shall we… is it because there is no process for checking data before it’s added? Is it because you’ve chosen not to buy additional sources of data to verify against? Is it because your error reporting procedure is so poor that 13 months later it’s still in the database? No?

For Google, errors like these are annoying. They recently announced Google Maps Navigation for Android 2.0 offering turn-by-turn directions similar to Tom Tom and other devices but for free. Accuracy of maps and the ability to keep them up to date will be one of the big selling points.

But time may be nearly up for Argleton “A spokesman [for Tele Atlas] said it would now wipe the non-existent town from the map.”

Update: Mister Roy appeared on Radio 5live’s The Weekend News (starts at 25 minutes).

Google Story in 2 minutes

Published by Janeth Howarth on October 30, 2009 in Blogs, Just for fun and Marketing. 0 Comments Tags: google, google video, Marketing, youtube.

A (very) quick look back at the Google story over the last 11 years. From Stanford to Mountain View and around the world, featuring many different products, starting with BackRub (Search) up to Go..

Excellent video covering the origins of the most powerful company in on-line media today.

The end of Argleton is nigh!

Published by Mike Nolan on October 12, 2009 in Just for fun and We're looking at. 1 Comment Tags: argleton, aughton, geolocation, google, google maps, mapping, openstreetmap.

I mentioned Argleton a year ago, Mister Roy has walked there and even the Ormskirk Advertiser has covered the issue but soon its days may be numbered!

Google has announced a new feature to allow users to report problems and suggest changes to maps. It’s currently only available in the US but you can see how it will work on this video:

I’ll be slightly sorry to see Argleton go but I’ll be glad to have my childhood home back!

Via Webmonkey.

Location, Location, Location

Published by Mike Nolan on July 16, 2009 in Development and We're looking at. 0 Comments Tags: geolocation, google, latitude, location, roadtripusa.

Location-based services are – so they say – the next big thing. In essence, LBS capable devices can use GPS (or cell tower location if GPS isn’t available) to provide tailored information based on where you are. This could be the location of a cash machine, games or where your friends are.

In the last few weeks Google have introduced a couple of new services for the latest version of the iPhone operating system. The first of these was search with location where a standard query could contain results relevant to where you are.

The second news was the long awaited announcement of Google Latitude being available for iPhone. Latitude was announced earlier this year for several different platforms but iPhone was notable by its absence. It allows you to share your location with friends and see who’s near you.

The interesting thing about the iPhone version of Latitude compared to that available for other phones is that it is browser-based instead of a dedicated application.

It sounds to me like Google and Apple had a bit of a disagreement over this!

After we developed a Latitude application for the iPhone, Apple requested we release Latitude as a web application in order to avoid confusion with Maps on the iPhone

The blog post goes on to lament the lack of background processes on iPhone OS which results in your location only updating when you have Latitude open in Safari.

The decision to use the browser shows the power of the W3C Geolocation API and I suspect use of it will grow massively now that it has a large installed user-base.

Using it within web applications is easy too. This demo uses just a few lines of JavaScript to try to work out where you are. It’s not supported by all browsers, but the Google Gears extension adds support to desktop or laptop machines by using wifi hotspots and IP addresses to determine location when cell tower or GPS information isn’t available.

So now you all want to know when you can see it in action. I’ve still got a few details to finalise but I’m hoping to do some location tracking for my road trip across America. We leave on Friday so I’ll try to post more details before then.

Crowdsourced holiday plans

Published by Mike Nolan on June 22, 2009 in Just for fun. 6 Comments Tags: delicious, google, iwmw2009, roadtripusa, twitter.

I’m looking for help. No, not that sort of help… or that sort… I’d like you, dear readers, to help plan my holiday. While this might sound entirely selfish I will be using it as an experiment in crowdsourcing:

delegating a task to a large diffuse group, usually without monetary compensation

In this case definitely without monetary compensation!

Here’s the details. My brother and I fly out to San Francisco at the end of July and have 18 days to travel across the country to New York via lots of hopefully interesting places. There’s more details over on my personal blog [Edge Hill University is not responsible for the content of external websites!] but I’ll repeat the key bit here and explain how I’m hoping it will work.

Here’s the initial route we came up with:

So: San Francisco, CA; Los Angeles, CA; Las Vegas, NV; Grand Canyon, AZ; Denver, CO; Chicago, IL; Toronto, ON; Boston, MA; New York, NY.

If you’ve been to any of these places, or have heard of good things to see and do, let us know in one of the following ways:

Twitter: DM or @ to MikeNolan or AlexNolan. Use the hashtag #roadtripusa.
Delicious: Tag roadtripusa and for:mikenolan.
Comments: Leave a comment on this blog post.
Google Docs: Request edit access to our itinerary on Google Docs.

How is this different to the usual way of planning holidays? You’ll normally ask friends and family who’ve been before for suggestions and things to do and places to visit and my crowdsourcing plan is indeed very similar. The difference is twofold.

Firstly the range of people I hope to reach out to for ideas is far greater. Even before I made any real effort to spread the message I had people responding on Twitter with suggestions. Some of them I’m never met in person but they’re part of my extended personal or professional “network”.

Secondly, by engaging people with the process of planning, I hope to get more people interested in what we’re doing and hence get more and better suggestions with different people’s ideas building on each other.

I’m not going to spam this blog with my holiday plans any more, but I might blog about some of my observations about the crowdsourcing process. If it all goes well then I may even use the experience as the basis for a BarCamp session at the Institutional Web Management Workshop immediately before I fly out!

What’s in a name?

Published by Mike Nolan on June 15, 2009 in Marketing and We're looking at. 3 Comments Tags: facebook, google, identity, jabber, openid, twitter, vanity url, xmpp.

At 5:01am on Saturday morning I was up and logged into Facebook. That might not be unsual for many people but last weekend Facebook launched usernames – the ability to give your profile or page a vanity URL – an easy to remember name – rather than a long number.

I was trying to bag myself “mikenolan” to match my accounts on Twitter, Delicious, Friendfeed and several other services, and I’m happy to say I was quick enough to do so. I was also registering a username for the Edge Hill University Fan Page. After much discussion we decided on facebook.com/edgehilluniversity.

Aside: with 1004 “fans” as of 31st May 2009, we were only just eligible to register a vanity URL for the Edge Hill fan page. This restriction doesn’t apply to regular profile pages.

At first glance the fuss over usernames is a little over the top, but for Facebook this is deadly serious. Usernames are all about Facebook’s attempts to become your online identity of choice and a random number means nothing to most people. While there have been few announcements about what they’ll be used for, we can have a few guesses:

OpenID Provider: Facebook are being forced to become more open, and one way which gives the illusion of openness is OpenID. It’s similar to Facebook Connect and an easy thing for them to offer while still forcing you to log in with them.
Jabber/XMPP: They’ve already announced that they were going to open up Facebook chat to connect with third party services such as Google Talk. It will be based on XMPP which uses email-like addresses to reference accounts. A username is almost essential for this to be easy to use.
Email: Many – especially younger people – already use Facebook mail considerably more than regular email accounts so I imagine they’ll allow you to use your username@facebook.com as an email address. I just hope they’ve got good spam filters!

What other uses can you think of?

With Google’s public profiles, and Twitter recently launching Verified Accounts, the battle for your online identity is well under way.