Tag Archives: google

Buzzword alert: AJAX

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It’s impossible to keep up with the acronyms that appear on the Web these days. One of the latest to show up on my radar screen is AJAX which stands for “Asynchronous Javascript and XML.” In a nutshell, AJAX describes a technique for building web applications that don’t necessarily act like web applications. If you’ve used the keyboard navigation in Gmail or the smooth map scrolling at Google Maps then you know what I’m talking about. Instead of continually loading entire Web pages like traditional Web-based applications (e.g., most online stores), AJAX apps usually fetch information in the background and respond more like desktop applications. If you’d like more geeky details, you might find the Wikipedia entry interesting.

So the next time a software vendor comes calling and advertises his application’s AJAX-compliance, you can be suitably unimpressed by his buzzword-compliance.

Update: Kottke’s got a post about how he’s using AJAX on the main page of his blog. More details about the technology if you’re interested.

I’ve been Tigerized

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I have now emerged from the geek cave. Actually, my Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger) installation went smoothly and I’ve been chugging along quite successfully since I finished the install last Saturday. There are a ton of new features, but my favorite so far is Spotlight, Apple’s system search tool. It’s lightening fast and very cool.

One interesting feature in Tiger server is the built-in blog tool based on blojsom. System administrators can enable a blog for a user with a click of the mouse. On the browser side, the newest version of Safari has some great RSS features built in. I’m still exploring the new goodies, but I won’t go into detail because Tiger reviews are a dime a dozen.

Google Maps in the social studies classroom

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One of the best parts of my job is the opportunity to get into our district’s schools and see what’s going on in the classrooms. I see something really cool nearly every time. Earlier this week I was in a 4th grade class at Glen Lake Elementary watching a teacher do a social studies lesson about the Southwest and its climate using her laptop, an LCD projector, and some of the online resources that our new social studies curriculum provides.

She let me jump in and show her students the new satellite mapping feature of the Google Maps site. I opened a couple browser tabs and loaded a view of the Twin Cities metro area on one and the Phoenix area on the other. After switching to the satellite view and doing some zooming in and out, the differences in landforms were obvious and I think it really made sense for the students. They also really got a kick out of zooming in on a satellite view of their school and finding their homes in the surrounding neighborhoods.

That quick lesson was just the latest example of how “always on” access to technology can change the way teachers and students operate. No one would march their students down to the computer lab for a 10-minute Google Maps experience. Having the technology in the classroom, ready to use at a moment’s notice, makes it possible to blur the line between learning about technology and learning with technology. I get excited when I consider the kinds of questions that these students can ask and answer on their own with the Google Maps site alone.

Google does Q&A

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Lots of people have posted today about Google’s new Q&A service. SearchEngineWatch, for example, has a useful summary.

Let’s try some sample Q’s and check Google’s A’s:

Not bad. Google is getting to be a better crossword puzzle helper all the time. The value of factual knowledge continues to approach $0.00 and we keep asking students to memorize this stuff.

Update: Google Weblog is making a list of other kinds of questions that Google Q&A can answer.

Hacking Google Maps

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Saw this today on Jon Udell’s weblog. It seems that with enough knowledge of javascripting, Flash, and access to a handheld GPS unit, it’s possible to create semi-animated walking or driving tour using the new Google Maps service. Jon, inspired by Matt’s work, has created a five-minute guided tour of an area near his home complete with voiceover narration, zooming in and out of the map, still images, and short video clips. Amazing!

My first thought is that this could be a great addition to the “soundseeing tours” that have become pretty popular in the podcasting world. I haven’t investigated far enough to know how complicated it is to make one of these Google Maps animations, but wouldn’t it be a great multimedia project idea for students? The project ideas are endless:

  • Tours of the kids’ hometown with local landmarks and points of local history highlighted
  • Virtual tours of places the kids have visited or would like to visit
  • Recreations of historic trips

Jon’s blog appears to be thoroughly slashdotted at the moment. I’ll post an update as soon as I can get back to it.

Google may come to Wikipedia’s aid

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Just saw this on Slashot. Google is interested in hosting some of the Wikimedia projects. This will be a great boon for Wikipedia, the largest wiki in the world and a frequent victim of its own success. I talk to educators often about wikis and have been frustrated many times by the obvious overloading of the Wikipedia servers. What a great way for Google to give back to the community.

Fighting comment spam with rel=”nofollow”

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Comment spam is much more annoying than standard email spam because it’s splattered all over a public Web site. I can deal with the occasional offer for a low interest mortgages, online gambling, and assorted male “enhancements,” but neither I nor any teachers in my district want to put up with that garbage on a public blog. Like regular email spam, comment spam proliferates because it’s effective. In the case of comment spam the chief aim of the spammers seems to be to elevate their Web sites’ listings in the various search engines by littering blog comments with links to their sites.

The folks at Google have come up with what appeas to be a pretty clever solution to the problem. Instead of continuing the comment spam arms race, the Google team suggests adding the attribute (rel="nofollow") on all hyperlinks that are including in blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists. The “nofollow” will tell Google’s Web indexing spider to disregard the link when it calculates the target site’s Page Rank. This solution seeks to take away the comment spammers’ incentive to create comment spam in the first place without harming the innocent bloggers.

To their credit, MSN Search and Yahoo! immediately agreed to follow Google’s lead and stop crediting sites that are linked with the “nofollow” attribute. The key to making this work is the support of the blogging software creators. Six Apart immediately announced that they would implement “nofollow” in MovableType and at TypePad and LiveJournal. The “nofollow” will be added automatically by the blogging software. I expect every piece of blogging software to support this feature in their next release.

So what are the downsides? Not every link in blog comments are spam, and automatically adding “nofollow” to those links will effectively punish the linked site. (Sort of punishment by omission, I guess.) Here’s a quote by PantherMachina on the WordPress support forum:

When I post on other people’s blogs I’m not creating spam, I’m posting my viewpoint to be shared with people, and if people like it they click through for other things that I’ve said on other subjects. If all goes well, then the incestous [sic] blog community works and my blog gets more popular while the people whose blogs I comment on also get more popular, everybody wins and when I search for my name, I get ranked higher.

Of course, this really doesn’t affect my site much. I make it a habit of closing comments a week or so after each post. Some basic text filtering has stopped 95% of the comment spam from ever getting posted in the first place. But for the millions of bloggers who don’t exercise that level of supervision, “nofollow” sounds like a winner to me.

City-wide wireless

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A couple articles have surfaced in the last week or so about large scale wireless deployments in Seattle and Taipei. These cities may be on the cutting edge, but the wireless revolution is coming to a city or town near you within a few years.

According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer article, Speakeasy is planning a WiMAX system that will cover the downtown area using only four basestations with speeds up to 3 Mbps. WiMAX, which stands for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access and carries the IEEE 802.16 label, has much greater range than the more common 802.11 systems. WiMAX is getting quite a lot of buzz these days as the up and coming standard that could finally put a wireless network cloud over huge areas.

The Taipei project will use already common 802.11 technology and will require an extensive network of 20,000 basestations. The Yahoo! News article reports the cost of the network will be $70M, but could be profitable in five years.

Whatever the technology, the important message for educators is that universal broadband is coming and we’d better get ready. One of the teachers in my district related a story to me recently about a lesson she was teaching. At one point during the lesson she asked her 4th grade students how fast they could answer two questions: who was the fourth president of the U.S., and how much does a blue whale weigh? The winning times thanks to Google and good keyboarding skills? Four seconds and seven seconds respectively. Do you think these kids relate to information differently than their parents and most of their teachers? Digital immigrant teachers beware, the digital natives aren’t waiting for you to catch up.