Archives for the month of: November, 2007

I was contacted recently by a guy looking for search engines that specialized in searches of cell phone-optimized sites. Aside from pointing him to a list and the forums at Search Engine Watch, I wasn’t sure what to tell him.

But it’s obvious that as people become more reliant on cell phones for news, information and entertainment, companies are going to have to move quickly to become the dominant sites for users.

Today, Google launched My Locator, which will probably be a boon to metro area residents and travelers who get lost easily. Though there’ve been early reports of dropouts and signal no-shows, I have a feeling plenty of people will come to rely on the free service rather than relying on a fee-based like TeleNav.

I wonder if Yahoo will have an answer product?

By the way, the Google Mappers have also produced a very basic coverage database that shows which map aspects of what countries are loaded into their system.

Meanwhile, Cyber University in Japan is offering a mobile class (or at least the PowerPoint slides and audio lecture) about Egypt’s pyramids.

Have you recently launched a mobile site or application that pushes the envelope? Lemme know.

My hater relationship with The Onion conflicts with my love of maps. It’s a complicated feeling beyond words, so I’m keeping this post short.

Check out their take on the Google map mashup, Our Dumb World Atlas.

First there was concern over Beacon.

Then came the launch that Faced a thousand users.

What followed was the public and predicted invasion of privacy outcry, Facebook’s claim of implied consent, and Moveon.org’s petition.

It seems people either weren’t seeing the social ads that showed just what they’d bought and where they made their purchase, or they didn’t understand that they only had 20 seconds to opt-out of having the ad posted on their Facebook feed.

Now comes news that Facebook announced a change to its social ads, but as Wendy Davis points out:

When pressed about how the statement distributed to the media yesterday reflected any changes, the spokesman said, “We fixed a technical issue to be sure the first notification fully displayed since some users were missing it.”

Well, if that’s the case — if Facebook’s “fixed” something so that the notifications it intended to launch with actually work — it’s hardly worth bragging about.

A few days before the crush of Thanksgiving travel began, CBS station KCNC-TV released an investigative report that showed the nation’s largest airplane deicing contractor cheating on worker certification tests.

It was a pretty big story for the station, and unusual enough that Al Tompkins of the Poynter Institute interviewed the reporter, Brian Maass

about the ethical issues raised by doing this kind of undercover piece.

Full disclosure: KCNC is part of the CBS division I work for.

According to an AP article, the Vermont State Archives are putting their historical maps online.

I haven’t had a chance to look through the site to find the deep link, but I’m wondering who’s going to be first to do a map mashup, and what kind of map they’ll produce….

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