Recently, I had a number of my photographs published in the July photography issue of Shufflegazine. Now that the August edition is off to the printers, the July edition is available online for free. To cut to the chase – my photos are on pages 36, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69 and 74. Shortly after the July issue was printed, a friend of mine mailed me a physical copy of the issue. It’s so weird to see my photos in print. I love it.

At some point, I really need to start working on selling and marketing my photography skills.

Ever since I realized that the Google’s ‘cached’ pages in search results were essentially a user-browsable backup of the Internet, I’ve been very impressed with them, and willing to allow them a lot of wiggle room. This wiggle room extends to a virtual blindness of their faults, most notably their campaign to gather and mine all the world’s electronic data. I understand that the payment for having Google spend the time and money to hire very smart people to organize, correlate and present all that data is to give them free reign to mine the data for patterns and trends to sell to their advertisers. Much like the news media of yesteryear, Google lives off the payments of advertisers, and that funding is how they are able to innovate on new products.

Looking back, part of what made them so great in the arena of search was that their search didn’t feel cluttered. Unlike Yahoo!’s main page, Google’s search page wasn’t crammed with useless bits of trivia, news, and advertisers. Search results were relevant, and the ads were displayed in a non-obtrusive manner. Their presence online projected the sense that they really and truly got it – they were able to make a product that was so far and above their competitors that we went from using a dozen search engines to only using two.

Gmail was another outstanding success story. Before Gmail, webmail was a horrible way to use email – the interface was lousy, the SPAM filtering was useless, and the quotas were anemic. People used it, though, because it was everywhere they went. Gmail brought features, such as keyboard shortcuts and useable SPAM filtering that was more than simple blacklists/whitelists. They added onto Gmail with Gtalk – a jabber client/server that finally brought an open chat protocol to the masses. Webmail changed from being what you had to use if you didn’t have email provided by work or school to being what everyone used.

Recently though, things have been less rosy. There was the kerfuffle recently about Google user-testing 41 shades of the color blue instead of using and trusting designers to do their job. Google Latitude, released recently for the iPhone, is pretty much useless (though this may be due to AT&T, not Google). Orkut, Google’s social networking site, is little used outside Brazil and India. Even miniMSFT, who is usually somewhat envious of the Google machine, thinks that Google’s announcement of the Chrome OS and other recent products is akin to Microsoft in the bad days.

In short, it looks like Google has gotten big enough that it can afford to fail at times. It also has enough market penetration to allow it to do the classic Microsoft move of “build it now, and we can ride out the competition from our insane profits” mentality. I don’t like it. It’s not the Google we know and love.

I was really excited to see and use Google Latitude. I had dreams of location-aware social networking and the ability to locate my phone, al la MobileMe’s ‘Find My iPhone’. Last night, Google announced Latitude was available for the iPhone – and it was a webapp, not a native application. I dutifully loaded the website and Safari asked my permission to use location services. I agreed. Then the website asked to use location services. I again agreed.

This is where it gets bad.

The webapp is pretty much a web version of the Maps application, with the added benefit of showing your friends where you are. There is even an overlay when you hit the ‘Menu’ button with the same kinds of things you can do in the Maps application – “Search”, “Show Traffic”, “Satellite View”, etc. The same gestures work in the web app as do in the Maps application. Pinch to zoom, etc. However, it’s a web app, so there’s a nasty unrefined feeling about it that you don’t have in the native client. Page elements don’t update smoothly or look nearly as nice.

Putting that aside, however, there’s something else that’s really bad about the application. It’s how you select who can see your location status.

To let people see where you are, you need to invite them individually. I have no problem with that. It’s much better than letting the whole world know where I am at any given moment. The problem is with the address book system. It ties into your Gmail account, and if you’re not signed into Gmail, it can’t load the address book. No descriptive warnings, just an error that says “Can’t load address book data”. You just have to go log in yourself. Once you’re logged in, you can see the groups of addresses you have saved/setup in Gmail Contacts. Which is great, unless like me, almost all of your friends have more than one email address. My brother comes up 8 times, and it only shows his name over and over again, not his various email addresses. This is much less than useful.

So, here’s my verdict on Google Latitude for the iPhone – avoid until they really overhaul the interface and the address book. Or, better yet, simply incorporate the features of sharing your location into the Maps application directly.

When I first started using Google Reader, I was amazed by the accuracy of the recommended feeds. Most of the feeds I had imported were tech news feeds, web comics and photoblogs. Consistently I would get suggestions via Google Reader of new stuff to read, or new photoblogs to look at, and most of them would be interesting. I think I was subscribing to %90+ of the suggestions for the first 6 month.

Then, slowly, the accuracy started to taper off. My personal hit rate recently has dropped to less than %5 of the suggested sites being of interest. Either I’m running out of the intarawebs, or Google is starting to fall down on it’s job of organizing the world’s information. And while I am subscribed to 257 photoblogs, I’m sure there are more out there that are worthwhile.

Last week, Reader suggested the New York Times photoblog “Lens” for the 4th time. I declined it yet again.

Today, Google Reader suggested that I subscribe to a Hebrew-language news site that averages over 500 posts a week, and 4 German language sites, two which appear to be tech blogs and two that are news outlets. My German is very rusty (“Ich bin ein Berliner”), and I have no idea how to read Hebrew.

I needed an SVN repository at home to be able to store configs and make sure I knew what I had changed months ago. Looking everything up online, I realized this was much simpler than I was prepared for it to be. On the server hosting the repository:

svnadmin create /path/to/repo/name

Then, edit /path/to/repo/name/conf/password, and give it a list of users and password you want to have access. And… that’s it. You now have an SVN repository that you can use to track changes made – as long as you remember to check them in again.

Checking out the repository is as simple as:

svn checkout svn+ssh://<hostname>/path/to/repo/name /local/location</hostname>

This is great if you’re using a public IP or NAT, as you can get to your repository securely from anywhere in the world.

Usually, people want to be #1. I’m happy at #5.

I of course found this out in a roundabout way. I was trying to get a sense of overall traffic to my photoblog site – and as Google Analytics doesn’t handle RSS feeds, I was going for image views in the apache logs. While looking at the logs, I noticed there’s a lot of hits with a source URL other than my own site. Many were for images.google.com or the googlebot, but there were a also lot of blog and forum posts and other things that looked like someone was hot linking my images. Needless to say, it’s without my permission. The only people I’ve given explicit permission to publish my images was Shufflegazine for their July Photography issue.

Long story short – I noticed that time and again it was this water glass image being linked to. So, I threw ‘water glass’ as a search term into Google Images – and I’m #5! I’m not sure what to think of this yet. I mean, I like having my work recognized, but I’d also like to be consulted… or at least given credit. So I got a little hot-tempered, and started leaving comments. I keep forgetting that this is the internet, and text is forever. Thanks to a gracious response by Mr Beagly, I’ve calmed down and started to take stock of the situation.

I’m just amazed by what little internet-fame I have. It may be fleeting, and it may not mean much to others, but it means something to me.

Freedom from Vonage, that is. Nine minutes on the phone, and no less than 5 offers to downgrade my service instead of canceling, until I was finally put on hold so they could disconnect the number. And they would have tried more than 5 times to offer me the 100-minute-a-month plan, but I had angrily started saying “No. NO. NO! I do not want service. Cancel my account.” I know they’ve got a script and all, but damn. I should have recorded the call with Google Voice… but too late for that. From now on, I think I will record the calls I make to customer service representatives – and whenever I get caught in those horrible loops, I’ll post them here.