Hair

The Beauty Department: Your Daily Dose of Pretty. - page 20

I know class is over, but...

who says the blog has to be?

For those of you who were interested in Google Sketch-Up, there is a competition being held by the Guggenheim Museum in honor of Frank Lloyd Wright's 142nd birthday. It seems simple enough, and the prizes include a trip to New York and a behind the scenes tour of the Guggenheim.

If you're interested, check it out on Google's blog or at the official competition website.

Anyways, good luck with finals and I wish everyone a happy summer!

a new google product--very cool e-mail innovation--the wave preview

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ

very long but if you skip around you can get an idea of the product. i think it's very cool, you can use it to communicate, e-mail, IM, and it's so easy!! you can edit, blog, collaborate, the possibilities are literally endless. just thought i'd share but i'm sure most of you have probably already heard about it!

Cool Feature in Google Earth

I was totally unaware of this feature that can be found in Google Earth...a flight simulator!!!

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/08/31/google-earths-easter-egg-a-flight-simulator/

You can also embed your maps by copying the embed code and posting to the blog site

View Best Cheesesteaks in Philadelphia in a larger map

Thurs, May 28th and June 4th

Hi class,

We are continuing our discussion of geo-browsers and mapping for the next two sessions.

For this Thursday, I want you to create a map using Google My Maps. To do this, go to Google Maps (login) and click on "my maps". There, you can create a map. You should make a map of something relevant about your life (ie, favorite restaurants, bike trails you like, where you grew up, etc). It can be anywhere in the world.

When you are done, right click on the "View in Google Earth" icon and COPY LINK LOCATION. Post the link on our blog as a comment, which will essentially allow others to see your map.

Also, for Thursday, spend some time going over HyperCities: www.hypercities.com

Think about what you like and don't like about the site as well as what you'd like to be able to do in a geo-temporal environment.

----

FINAL CLASS PRESENTATIONS: (June 4th)

In groups of 3, you will present either:

1. A group mapping project using Google Maps/Earth or HyperCities. If you opt for this, you need to talk about the particular google tool you are using (how it works, what it does) and your project that you created in Google Maps.
2. A new Google Tool that we haven't talked about in class, but showcases some aspects of Web 2.0. If you do this, you will actually need to create something (not just discuss what it does). You need to USE IT.

Presentations will last about 10 minutes (each person must speak about 3 minutes), followed by a brief Q+A session.

Some issues you may want to address:

1. Issues around privacy and publicness
2. Web 2.0
3. How Google tools extend knowledge or limit knowledge
4. Content creation
5. Authorship and collaboration

Thurs, May 21: Geo-Browswers: Earth, Maps, HyperCities

Install the latest version of Google Earth and spend some time getting to know the basic features. Google Earth is a sophisticated "geo-browser", comprised of satellite imagery of the whole earth and innovative navigation features for contributing and viewing geo-data.

You should watch some of the tutorials to learn about the functionality of Google Earth. Click here.

Take some time to "tour" the earth and make a list of interesting places that you would like to share with the class. You can share these as 'tours' for the class.

We will spend the next three sessions learning about three Geo-browsers:
1. Google Earth
2. Google Maps / Google My Maps
3. HyperCities: A Google Maps/Earth Mash-up (a UCLA project directed by me)

For the last day of class, students will work together in teams to create and present projects in either maps, earth, or HyperCities. These will be KML based, user-created maps, with 2D and potentially 3D objects. You can create 3D objects using Google's Sketch-up program.

Google Outages

So we had talked in class about the network that google has, in terms of many epicenter-esque locations of their databases and whatnot. The idea is that if one computer network fails, there is a bunch of backup places that Google has to make sure that the whole system doesn't fail. That plan sounds foolproof, but I guess today something else went wrong. Google isn't being too specific about what EXACTLY went wrong, but this seems to describe it generally. I like the fact that the company actually took to Twitter to apologize to everyone that was inconvenienced. Its amazing that there are plenty of other search engines, yet people don't think to resort elsewhere when such an event occurs.

For Thurs, May 14th -- Google and Web 2.0

For this week:

1. If you haven't already, please read carefully the Tim O'Reilly article defining Web 2.0 (note, it's five pages long). In addition to this article, please articulate how the suite of Google products are "Web 2.0-like" (not just search or the company as a whole) but individual products and software applications. What do you imagine will constitute Web 3.0? Here, you might look at the blog about the semantic web (posted below).

2. Orient yourself in SivaVaidhyanathan's blog, "The Googlization of Everything." In particular, I'm interested in his most recent post on the user/Google transaction. If you recall, both Kiesha (of Google Advertising Sales team) and David and Scott (on Android) talked a lot about "user experiences."