There is a nice comparison of music download services like eMusic, iTunes, MSN, Napster and others at ExtremeTech. A table shows important facts like pricing, number of songs DRM, burn options and Linux compatibility.
The Auto-Illustrator by Philipp Lenssen is a nice demonstration of what can be done with a powerful API. It adds images to any website by querying Yahoo’s search API. Beware that the images that come up are not allways safe for work though.
Google Sightseeing is a new blog that is about interesting places found with Google Maps new Satellite images. Current postings include Alcatraz, Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch and the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant.
The blog search engine Technorati now knows about relations between tags. Using the Related Tags feature, one can now jump from tag to tag. For example, Gadgets has the related tags Web/Tech, Cell Phones/PDAs, Business & Technology and Portable Audio.
The PSP will soon be launched in South Korea, and along comes a unique online service by the name of PSP NESPOT, available by the provider KT. It is said to be a content distribution service that offers some interesting features like video/music/movies on demand for the PSP. Even a Manga and Anime channel is said to be part of the service, which sounds reasonable, as Manga is extremely popular in Asia. More on that service at PSP 411.
Worldwind is a service run by NASA, that offers satellite images of many places around the world, similar to Google’s Keyhole. Interstingly, NASA makes use of the Bittorrent filesharing protocol to distribute updates to their software, thus maybe being the first government site using P2P applications.
[via Boing Boing]
I have built quite a number of websites over the years (you can check out some of them on Fruetel.net, most of them are in German though), and recently I am heading more and more towards using blog software as a backbone for the sites. With XyroX, it was a natural choice, as this site was intended to be magazine style, and software like WordPress works very well for that kind of sites. Then I have built hybrid sites, for example my German Insurance Site, which consists of a selfmade skeleton of pages and WordPress for the news section. (more…)
Google just added high-resolution satellite images to their maps service. Obviously, the image data is provided by Keyhole, a company that specializes in sattelite images that has been acquired by Google in October 2004. To see these, just do a search on Google Maps. If there is an image for the location, you can click Satellite in the upper right corner. The satellite image offers the same kind of scrolling that surprised the web crowd when Google first introduced the maps.
It is all over bloggerland today: The wordpress site has been featuring around 168.000 articles, that were linked from the main page with invisible (negative divs) links. The articles were obviously designed to target high paying adsense keywords. Google reacted rather quick after this has been published on Waxy.org: Right now, the articles in question seem to have disappeared from the index, while Yahoo still shows some of them. While there is nothing wrong to cash in on an open source project doing advertising, such practises do decrease the value of Adsense and similar services for the advertisers. In the long run, such behaviour will hurt everyone in the serious web content business.
This was quick. Thanks to Azeem Azhar I now have my own Yahoo 360 page. So far I have to share Azeem’s thoughts on the platform, it is still very beta and needs quite some improvements. It might become interesting once there is wide support for outside RSS sources.