The Heatline of a Story

Google, apparently prodded by the ground covered by twitter news, has introduced a feature on its Google News search results that indicates what one might call the ‘heat’ of a story—how many sources are covering it over time: As with Google Search Trends, the stories below the chart are linked to the graph via letters … Read more

Telling the Story in the Third Dimension

Technorati Tags: journalism,media,newspapers,infoviz,visualization,google earth,kml The bitter end of the Tamil Tigers has been fought away from the news crews, but not the satellites. But did we make the most of this technology to tell the story of human suffering and the end of a 35-year guerrilla movement? A month ago the U.S. government released satellite … Read more

The Big Chill Hits Google

So is Google, like, the new Yahoo? Google is closing some of its services, or at least no longer supporting them. Which for me is a tad sad, since I’ve always loved prodding around inside the Googleplex, convinced that one day all these disparate services would come together in the same way Google Docs, Calendar … Read more

The Lost World of Yahoo

This piece was written for a commentary on the BBC World Service Business Daily about Jerry Yang’s decision to resign as CEO. Back in the early days of the World Wide Web there was really only one name. Yahoo. You could tell it was big because it was what you’d type in your browser to … Read more

Video Chat in Gmail

I’m a big fan of Google Talk (Gtalk) but hadn’t come across this before: Videochat inside the Google Talk widget inside Gmail. Does it get any better than this? (Probably, but this works pretty well. Great for those guys not using Windows, and therefore unable to use the great Gtalk client.)