InsideGoogle

Bruce Clay Blog Adds Comments, Other Stuff

Happy stuff for me: The Bruce Clay Inc. blog has added comments, after much prodding from me (and maybe other people, but who cares?). The Bruce Clay blog has been one of my favorites the last few months, with really good articles (mostly written by Lisa Barone) plus a fun “Friday recap” every week. There were so many times I itched to leave my own thoughts (and sometimes I actually posted here, just since I knew they were reading), and now I can.

For those that say a “real blog” needs comments, now the Lisa can say she writes a “real blog”. Also, I’ve never liked reading the Bruce Clay blog as an abridged excerpt feed, so Lisa set me straight: Turns out the RSS feed is an excerpt feed, but the Atom feed is a full content feed. Again, just another thing to make me happy. Now, when I see a forty-person strong legion of Bruce Clay Inc employees at the next SES New York (seriously, they’re everywhere), I’ll have a few good things to say.

Lets see what else I can cram in here, Friday recap-style…

Findory has expanded its API. Greg Linden explains that the expanded Findory API contains almost every bit of data Findory has, so powerful that you could use it to create your own Findory. A Findyoury. Ech. Anyway, Findory outputs all sorts of data as RSS feeds, including personalized history and favorites of any user, articles related to a specific blog, or even articles related to a specific article.

There are a lot of powerful things you can do with this, like articles related to this blog, or even better, someone could use this feed to create a Findory just of the Blog News Channel blogs. Greg says that “there is enough here in the new Findory API that, with a database for caching data and for remembering reader’s histories, you pretty much could build your own version of Findory with it”, so if someone wants to help show me how to, you’d be doing me a huge favor.

I was set straight today by a member of the Google Reader team, who pointed out my biggest Reader pet peeve was actually Bloglines fault. See, when I read Scoble’s link blog in Bloglines, Bloglines grabs the wrong title name and link, resulting in permalinks that are impossible to follow. The reason: Reader’s RSS has a < source > tag, a part of the Atom spec which lets a feed know where an item came from, and Bloglines identifies that instead of correctly using the < entry > tag. Here’s the code:

< entry gr:crawl-timestamp-msec="1167900890546" >
< id >tag:google.com,2005:reader/item/f029e1c3ced132b8< /id >
< title type="html" >USuggest - Social Shopping That Pays< /title >
< published >2007-01-04T05:18:37Z< /published >
< updated >2007-01-04T05:18:37Z< /updated >
< link rel="alternate" href=" http://mashable.com/2007/01/03/usuggest/" type="text/html" / >
< summary xml:base="http://mashable.com" type="html" >…< /summary >
< content xml:base="http://mashable.com" type="html" >…< /content >
< author >
< name >Pete Cashmore< /name >
< /author >
< source gr:stream-id="feed/http://feeds.feedburner.com/Mashable" >
< id > tag:google.com,2005:reader/feed/http://feeds.feedburner.com/Mashable< /id >
< title type="html" >Mashable!< /title >
< link rel="alternate" href="http://mashable.com" type="text/html" / >
< /source >
< /entry >

See what went wrong? My apologies to the Reader team, for assuming this was their fault, and I am now officially giving Reader a shot at being my full-time feed reader, especially with those juicy stats. I’m throwing this bug at Gary Price, to see if he can get the Bloglines folks to fix it.

Also, check out Gooogie.co.uk (note the spelling), which lets you create a goof Google search page with a funny “Did you mean” result. Check out mine:

(via Digg)

Plus some crazy stuff is showing up on Google Maps, like an underground nuclear testing facility.

There was a Gmail hack that allowed any other site pull your Gmail contact list by making a Javascript call, so long as you were signed into Gmail, but Google fixed it pronto.

Some patents were found in Google Patents relating to celebrities, including one by Eddie Van Halen of a method for supporting a guitar, Penn Jillette’s Hydro-therapeutic stimulator (for sexual purposes, obviously), and Michael Jackson’s moonwalking patent.

That’s all, folks! Check out Bruce Clay’s Friday recap, coming tomorrow.

January 4th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Blogs, iGoogle, Services, Search, Gmail, Humor, General | 5 comments