Google

Geotagging photo’s made very easy

I’ve been trying to use Microsoft’s WWMX application to geotag some of the photos that we took on holiday ready to upload to zooomr, but the level of mapping detail for Jamaica and Grand Cayman Islands was pretty awful However I have found that by using Garmin’s mapsource to load the track data from the gps and then saving the tracks to a gpx I can then use wwmx to automatically tag the photos if I had the gps on at the time the photos were taken.

However, for the rest of the photos that were taken without the gps I needed a better way of marking where they are taken. A combination of picassa and google earth makes the job very easy. First the photo’s need to be loaded into Picassa – this will probably be done automatically (although for some reason Picassa doesn’t like to find my cruise photos and they disappear from the folder view even though I can see them being scanned). Anyway, once the photos have been loaded, select the photos that need to be geotagged and then go to the tools menu, geotag, geotag with google earth. Then use Google Earth to navigate to the spot that the photos were taken -the satellite view does an outstanding job for this. Then just hit geotag, select the next picture and repeat (or do geotag all if they are all in the same place. At this point, the locations are written to the picture (exif data I presume) and can then be uploaded to flickr or zooomr already geotagged for you.

As it will take some time to load the cruise photo’s, I took some pictures of the Pumpkin Festival at Oakland Nursery including the Worlds Fastest Pumpkin Carver and entries for the Worlds biggest pumpkin.

Google Analytics

I’ve signed up and installed Google Analytics to get some more log/traffic analysis of visits to this site. This may give me an easier (read quicker) method of looking at the stats, search entries and stuff like that. I’m not quite sure what it gives me – I will find out when I get some data in the next couple of days. The one thing I’ve worked out, is that I wish I had a custom header or footer included on all my pages so that i’d only have to make the change to a couple of files and have it updated on all pages rather than edit the multiple templates and then rebuild all the files.

Google chat in gmail

You can now chat from within the gmail interface (so no need to open another program) – or at least you can if your contacts also have had this feature enabled in their gmail account. My first gmail account has had this option enabled but my main google account that I use on a day to day basis (as it contains all helsby.net emails) does not have it activated yet. The strange thing is that you can initiate a chat invite from a working account (and I was hoping that would activate my secondary account for chatting) but the secondary account does not receive the invite in the mail box – I’m guessing it probably goes to the chat client – if it has been downloaded.
It will be interesting to see how this progresses. At the moment I’m guessing it is text only IM similar to the web interfaces to MSN and ICQ.
In related news I’ve been setting up a Live Communication Server for a client and the Communicator program looks pretty good. The annoying thing is that I can’t see any documentation on how to get hold of the non-trial version of the client – it apparently is free with licences for the server so you would expect to get the media for the client with the server – but nooooooo…….

Google pays to refer firefox….




In a surprising move, google are now paying adsense people to push the installation of firefox with the google toolbar – $1 for each new installation of firefox with the google toolbar….now if only I could persuade all my clients to install it 🙂
I must admit that there only seems to be a couple of reasons for using the google toolbar with firefox (as most of the functionality seems to be there already). The one thing I do like is the automapping that it can do (clicking on an address to get a map – but I’m sure there is an extension or greasemonkey script to do this already.

Google Blog Search

It’s taken them long enough, but google now have a dedicated blog search which seems to be pretty uptodate. It didn’t take them long to index the content of Absoblogginlutely at all. It will be interesting to see how long it takes before this gets added to the main google site (shame this isn’t an option for it to be added with their personalisation features) and also to see if they add other features similar to feedster. If they keep it like it is at present then they will do well – Feedster seems to be bogged down with all the features they keep adding but (in my experience) are very slow to fix problems with claiming feeds etc.
Thanks to John Hesch for the headsup

Google Desktop and Microsoft Spyware Updates

It looks like the Google Desktop software has been updated recently as now the index status does not show how much of the index has been completed (or it has finally indexed the computer). The status on this computer is normally stuck at about 20% complete but this information no longer appears on the status page. However the cpu usage of the desktop search does seem to be often pegged around the 50% mark so something is still not quite right there.
The Antispyware software also seems to have been updated as the nightly scan that ran last night picked up Ultravnc as potential spyware even though it has been installed on the pc for about 2 months and I had previously flagged it as ignore.