OR the past 4 months I have been syndicating 7 distinct news feeds. The feeds contain search results for keywords of interest, which pertain to computer vision. I syndicate from a couple of sources, which makes the scope even broader; the total number of feeds is 14 at present.

I needed to keep myself regularly informed about developments in computer vision. That field is not only important to my research. It it also serves some required content, which enables me to extend The Computer Vision Digest. For the task of news ‘digestion’, I have been using RSS feeds from Google News and Yahoo! News. Both merely serve as aggregators, encapsulating and centralising news from agencies from all around the world, niches included.

As much as I respect and even fancy Google, I am disappointed with their news service. I am almost reluctant to say that their news aggregation is filled with (if not plagued by) commercial sites that attempt to sell stuff rather than provide news items. It is not only implied by the .com suffix, but also by content, which is glaringly promotional. This is of course a real deterrent, which becomes appalling at times. Others have noticed similar issues, so it is not a matter of coincidence, but a recurring pattern. I have come to take every link that spot in Google News with a grain of salt. Rather often it leads me to what can only be described as news spam — an attempt at sales that is shrewdly disguised as a news item.

To syndicate news, import any of the following templates into your feeds reader. Replace KEYWORD1 and KEYWORD2 with keywords of interest and isolate keywords using a plus (the + symbol).

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=KEYWORD1+KEYWORD2&ie=UTF-8&output=rss

http://news.search.yahoo.com/news/rss?p=KEYWORD1+KEYWORD2&ei=UTF-8&fl=0&x=wrt

This time, for a change, my warm recommendation goes to Yahoo. They simple manage to isolate real news from the ‘noise’.

Related items on feed-based services:

• Google News Feeds
• Yahoo RSS
• Search Results as RSS
• Weather RSS Feeds

ETTING in touch with Google is no easy chore. It has actually become a widely-known fact; even a notoriety to say the least.

Google Groups has is often becoming a gateway for spammers, from which to hit UseNet en masse. The Google Groups complaints address, namely abuse@google.com, has proven to be waste of one’s time. “Dissatisfied with the results” seems to be another time killer that rarely leads to anything productive. I have tried these myself in vain and heard from others about similar experiences.

There are exceptions, of course, which help us ‘little people’ voice our desires and be heard by the almighty Google. Examples:

• Removing pages from the Google index or removing posts from Google Groups, which mirrors UseNet.
• For unjustified site penalties, one can file a reinclusion request. It needs some careful and strict keywords, however, in order to be channelled to the right department.
• The yet-not-so-public Google telephone number: +1 605 330 0100. This enables you to get an E-mail address with a daily passphrase, which gives it priority and makes it be read. For queries about one’s site and a conversation with an actual person, the route (’code/digit maze’) is presently 5, then 3.

I truly believe that a large company such as Google, whose dominance in IT is undeniable, ought to take user queries seriously and make points of contact more trivial and responsive. If you show you care, others will care for you too. Reciprocity is gold.

Occasionally, communication belongs to Google

As an arbitrary set of useful links:

• An academic homepage provides a description and listing of mathematical symbols in HTML.

Nice examples like the following equations have been put together:

∆u  =  Δu  =

n ∑ i = 1

∂2u/∂xi2

+∞ ∫ −∞

exp(−x2) dx

=  √π

The above is valid HTML, but as expected, it makes heavy use of tables although data is not truly tabular. From a standards perspective, this may be frowned upon.

While on the issue of rarely-used symbols, below lie my related ‘pocket links’:

• HTML accents table
• HTML symbols

Media slowly becomes redundant
while network-based services take over

HE interesting item come from the Financial Times and discusses Microsoft’s wishful (and thus far unsuccessful) strategic move to providing on-line services, e.g. MSN and so-called Live Software.

For long-time Microsoft watchers, there was a strong sense of déjà vu about Bill Gates’s description this week of a new vision for the future of software.

The future, he declared, lay lies (I had to fix this typo that hurt my eyes) in delivering services over the internet, not selling shrink-wrapped CDs containing code that customers could load on their own machines…

[...]

But the internet’s impact on the software business continues to spread, and the idea of software-as-a-service is back in fashion in Microsoft’s Redmond HQ — this time under the new rubric of ‘Live Software’.

Microsoft’s CEO therefore admits that Microsoft’s weakest point is in fact where future IT is headed. Can the Internet become safe haven for the troubled and perplexed Windows code? Will Microsoft’s Singularity (a new O/S) become a reliable replacement/successor instead? It it all as realistic as edible manour?

OR several years I have retained one spreadsheet on my Palm handheld. This was, in fact, a crude timesheet which was needed for work. Several months ago I decided to migrate everything to OpenOffice and access that spreadsheet using SSH from virtually any connected Linux box. This sounded reasonable at first, but frequent updates made this rather impractical and cumbersome.

Later on, I decided to export all data from OpenOffice as plain HTML tables and then repeatedly modify the HTML files on my Web server. This was rather time-consuming, so I sought alternatives which I knew existed.

I wound up using a Web-based spreadsheet application that is very light and retains all data as comma-separated values (thus no database needed). That powerful tool was Open Source, as always.

phpWebSheet has powerful and advanced (from a Web-based point-of-view) features such as tabular copy-and-paste, Wiki-styled formatting, and support for formulas/functions. In my perception, it is yet another winning application for PHP. There are many similar free applications at freshmeat.net, but I only investigated two which appeared better-suited for the purpose and rather mature too.

Spreadsheets are of course password-protected, but can still be accessed rapidly from everywhere at any time. All in all, the transition was a rewarding one. I sometimes wonder if I should have just stuck to the Palm PDA rather than make a progressive 3-step transition (as outlined above).

Spreadsheets have been on my Palm for years, virtually seconds away at pocket’s distance. Nonetheless, Being a Web technologies fanatic, I am always enthusiastic about ‘Webward’ transitions. On that same batch of installations, I set up phpshell which enables me to obtain shell access to my shared Web server. I can even see what the administrators are up to. This does not require a cron job hack as I once described.

Access to so many free packages (roughly a dozen of them on my domain already) is why I love Linux and the GNU ideaology.

Bill is still determined to win

The following item was published just half an hour ago. It speaks of a memo from Bill Gates, which reflects on fear from the Web giants.

SEATTLE - The technology industry shift’s to Internet-based software and services represents a massive and disruptive “sea change,” Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates wrote to top-level executives in a memo aimed at rallying his troops against the new competitive threats the company faces.

Gates compares the push toward such services — which range from online business software offerings to free Web-based e-mail — to the changes he saw nearly a decade ago. Then, he wrote a now-famous memo, called “The Internet Tidal Wave,” the (sic.) prompted a massive shift at Microsoft toward Internet-based technology.

This is closely related to an article from CNN on AJAX and its effect on Windows. A few days ago Gates announced the creation of Internet-based Office and prematurely unveiled live.com.

Yesterday I discovered a user-friendly AJAX development environment called Morfik. It resembles Visual Basic in terms of productivity, I’m informed. Will Web applications soon be constructed as easily and rapidly as desktop-based applications. If so, will Morfik, the sponsor of the recent Web 2.0 conference, take a strong lead? Let us remember that Web applications require no installation, to name just one among the distinguishable traits. This makes them easy to market and promote.

The Google cookie

AST week, amidst discussion in an SEO forum, I raised the prospect of tailoring content based on browser cookies. Cookies may contain a person’s full search history, but potentially much beyond that. As I shall explain in the remainder of this item, it was only short time later that my predication became a reality. This development is bad news, as well as good news.

…People are described by their cookie and Google (can) builds a profile, i.e. history of all searches that an individual runs (and potentially link s/he follows). Sooner or later, for competitive advantage, the SERP we all see may differ.

Example:

Google can tell that you like a lot of pop music. Search for ‘Aqua’ and get the Danish band at number 1. If you are a scientist, you may have a page on the chemical element at number 1.

I hadn’t realised something when I made the above statement. This was bound to become a patent, courtesy of Google.

4. A method of personalizing placed content associated with a search query, comprising: receiving a search query from a user; accessing a user profile associated with the user; identifying a set of placed content that matches the search query; and ordering the set of placed content in accordance with the user profile.

This seems too fundamental to be patentable, which is probably what controversy over software patents is all about. Not in the EU though. Has anyone yet pondered the implications it has on privacy? Might this be as tactless as book scanning, which is damaging to public opinion?