Links of Note: June 27, 2007
Google Updates Docs and SpreadsheetsGoogle Docs & Spreadsheets just got a facelift that mixes the convenience of Web-based applications with the organizational structures of computer file systems.
I was initially skeptical of Google Docs because my previous experiences with Web-based apps were marked by sluggish performance (by the apps ... not by me) and the unshakeable fear that my data would one day disappear without notice.
But over the last six months, Google Docs & Spreadsheets has won me over and now I use it in a variety of ways (archiving, revisions). The collaborative features have been particularly useful for the editorial calendars we rely on at ElectronicHouse.com. Folks can access and edit the centralized lineup as necessary.
And in other Google developments ...
New visual version of Google News
(Press Gazette)
Martin Stabe notes that Google News has a new Image Version tool that sorta-kinda crosslinks photos and news stories:
"Confronted with row upon row of (credited but uncaptioned) images, a user has to hover over them with the mouse and wait for the headline associated with that image to appear on a scrolling list of stories in a right-hand column."The concept reminds me of 10 x 10 in that it seeks to bring visual cues to the latest news. Unfortunately, the Google News functionality is just as clunky as 10 x 10 -- both are interesting in theory but lack the utility needed for widespread adoption.
What I find odd about the Google News Image Version is that it doesn't take a cue from Google Maps. Rather than mouseover and wait for a headline scroll to appear, I'd much prefer to mouseover an image and see an AJAXy headline box hover over the photo.
For Certain Tasks, the Cortex Still Beats the CPU
(Wired)
Wired's profile of Luis von Ahn hints at a more efficient future.
Von Ahn is the man behind Captcha -- that squiggly, image-based login mechanism that thwarts spambots (and thwarts folks with depth perception issues). Turns out, von Ahn is hellbent on putting "human computation" to work on a massive scale, and Captcha's latest version -- reCaptcha -- is a small step toward that goal:
"[ReCaptcha's] words are pulled from the book-scanning project of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit project in San Francisco that aims to digitize millions of public-domain books and put them online for free. One of the two words in the test is the control word: The gatekeeper computer knows what it should be, so it's there to make sure the puzzle-solver is indeed human. But the other word is there for a different reason. The Archive's scanners are good, but some of the words are too smudgy for the software to decipher. The game takes the image of each smudgy word and puts it into reCaptcha. Each time someone completes a reCaptcha puzzle, they'll be doing a tiny bit of work — translating that difficult image into text, which von Ahn eventually feeds back into the Archive."
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