Just for yucks, I integrated Google Latitude into the sidebar in my blog section. Google latitude, for those that don't know, allows people with GPS-enabled devices to share their locations with their friends (I think it can do it based on geo-IP as well, but that's not super exciting IMO). I'm not entirely sure showing a map with all my friends on it is particularly useful to be honest, but I thought I'd toss my location up on there for something to do. Far better, in my opinion, would be integration with services such as IM, such that I can see my friend's list sorted by distance to me. That ...

Hey, that sounds like a great idea. What brilliant strategist came up with that new plan, and who's the guy from before who thought they should make things without user input? ...

One of my major criticisms of Google over the last few years has been the state of most of their products. While many of them are initially innovative and useful, they usually fall by the way side and seemingly get abandoned. The "beta" moniker seems to be ever-present on most of their services, leading one to almost believe that there is no such thing as a finish product within the walls of Google. I just read this article where someone took the time to figure out just how many of Google's products are in beta. The verdict? Nearly half of them, including the four year old gmail product ...

So, it's 30 minutes past midnight, and we just got back from another long day at Google. I'm sitting in Scott's 82 degree fahrenheit hotel room with Derek and twelve beers. Last night we realized that a 14 hour day would be a lot better if we had a few beers to finish it off, so we basically started the midnight-gas-station-beer-run tradition. For those of you who don't really know what Silicon Valley is like, I'll give you a little heads up. Most of Silicon Valley is centered around a city south of San Francisco called San Jose (affectionately called "Man Jose" by the locals, since ...

I feel like writing a blog entry right now about as much as I feel like putting a spinning drill-bit into my temple. But I really wanted to jot down some of my thoughts from today before I passed out. There's a group of seven of us down in Mountain View right now. The purpose of this trip is to try and hash out a complete peer-to-peer communications protocol based on open-standards. When it's complete, it will essentially be an open source framework that will allow functionality similar to Skype, including encryption between nodes, even in an adhoc configuration. This trip marks the first time ...

Ok, ok. I'll take a break from writing about the iPhone. But business has been great lately - my traffic has nearly doubled in the last few days. Not like I really pay attention to those things, but it's pretty clear when there's a big prolonged spike -- clearly people are excited about the iPhone. To be honest, while talking about web traffic, I'm actually surprised mine has stayed up. I used to host all my plugins here and sort of assumed when I finally moved them over to BraveNewCode that alot of my traffic would disappear. But for whatever reason, my traffic has actually increased quite a ...

I've been using Google Reader as my main RSS reader for some time. For the most part, I'm pretty happy with it. They've recently added the ability to share items, which makes it far more interesting. The one thing I'd love to see though is the ability to add local comments on those shared items, comments that only my friends could see. So many times I've read items in my friends' shared feeds and really wanted to say something, or get clarification. Going to the real site and posting a comment sort of implies a certain level of knowledge on my part (especially if it's a technical discussion). ...

Ok, I'm going to go into rant mode. Why is everyone so enamored with Google these days? I read yesterday about their recent Google App Engine, and didn't really see anything that particularly turned my crank. I've been bouncing around the web today reading what people are saying, and for the most part, everyone is down in the People's Temple drinking the Kool-Aid. I don't think the App Engine is a bad idea, I just don't really get why you'd even consider it, especially considering AWS is around and has a much more flexible offering. First, I'm going to start by saying that 99% of web companies ...

I've decided to do a multipart series on how to take your Wordpress installation to the next level. Most people seem to have an out-of-the-box Wordpress installation, and I think they are really missing out on a few things that can really improve the quality of their blog. The first topic I'd like to cover is search engines. Most of you know how a search engine works, but for those who don't, here's a really quick primer. Search engines employ little agents called "Bots" that basically roam around the internet taking snapshots of the content. Google's little guy is called "GoogleBot", ...

So here's some food for thought for the blogosphere. Lately I've been pondering a few of the legal aspects of the Internet, namely what it is we are all allowed to do, and what it is some companies think we shouldn't be allowed to. Let me give you a use-case to demonstrate what I'm talking about. Photo by Ben Sheldon on Flickr Let's say I set up a blog, and I'm checking out Flickr and I see a photo I like. Let's say for a second that the CC license is set in such a way that I can use the photo on my blog. So, I right click on the image, say "copy image address", and slap it into a blog ...

Wow, what can I say. That is a pretty impressive sum of money. I read this before going to bed last night on Digg, but I thought it was fake. Turns out that Microsoft has just extended a 44 billion dollar offer for Yahoo! To be honest, Google has really handed Yahoo! their hand in search. I personally don't know anyone that uses Yahoo to do search, although I've been told it's still fairly popular in Asia. I have friends over at Yahoo!, and I once showed them my web logs from my blog indicating that something like 98% of all searches originate from Google. They refused to believe they were true, ...

I'm not entirely sure if this is a new feature or not, but I use analytics all the time (and if you don't, you should promptly head over and sign up for an account), and I don't remember seeing it until just a few minutes ago. It appears Google now has a new analytics section where you can track internal searches on your blog. So while Google Analytics already shows you how other people are reaching your site from Google, you can now see how people are navigating within your site based on searches within your blogging platform. To configure it, you have to go edit your website profile from the ...

One of the changes I made on the site the other day was the inclusion of wordpress related entries plugin when viewing single posts. Unfortunately wordpress has completely overhauled their folksonomy system in the 2.3 version, and not all my posts are tagged properly. In fact, I'd say only about 20% of them really are. I'm going to try and do about 10 of my old posts a day or something like that to try and get them up to snuff, but it's a fairly boring process, only made possible by this bottle of pinot beside me. In other fairly exciting news, Boris Mann, everyone's favourite Vancouver Janitor, ...

Well, well. Lookie what we have here.. Somehow, Google is in a state of flux. My top #1 position has indeed been usurped, but thankfully I still have a few weeks to get it back. I'm not going to get too excited about daily changes, but I definitely don't want to lose out, especially after all my trash talking. So, I'll see if I can pull a few aces out of my sleeve in the next week or so. At the very least, this is a pretty neat exercise in the realm of search engine optimization. You can read about my last post about the Vancouver Blogger War here, and more about the Vancouver Blogger challenge ...

I went through my google analytics this morning for a few minutes. The one thing that surprised me was those of you who somehow get to my site by typing "duanestorey.com" into a google search. If you are part of the 219 people who did that last month, here's a little tip for you. Up top in your browser is a little white thing we like to call the "Address Bar". You can simply go up there and type in either "duanestorey.com" or "www.duanestorey.com" into it and press enter, which should immediately take you to my website. You're more than welcome to use the ...

Yesterday, partly by chance, and later by design, I found that I didn't log into an IM client for nearly the entire day. No Jabber, no Yahoo, no Windows Live or whatever they are calling it now -- just me, alone with my machine. And it was everything that I thought it would be. Now let me just tell you what a typical day is like for me on IM. I have, quite easily, well over 100 people on my IM client. A small percentage of these are personal (friends and family), but without a doubt, the majority are business related. During a typical work day, I'd say 70 of them or so are online and working in ...